Commercial Games

[Mithrildor]

www.Interplay.com
has many different Games that could work on the Pandora.

Jens

+1 for a port of Fallout 1 and 2

But they might be to big to do this job.

 

[(naw)mcx]

Please, use a smaller image for your signature and at least try to make your posts readable. No need for more then 1 "?", you regularly switch letters inside of words and your spaces don't distinct the words...

I no h3 waz todally nt takin thee pisssw!!!@!!!

 

[conso]

I no h3 waz todally nt takin thee pisssw!!!@!!!



You think that's funny? I'll tell you something funny:
An elephant meets a mouse.
The mouse says: "Whee, you are very big"
The elephant says: "No, you are very very small."
The mouse says: "True. But that's because I was ill for a long time."

 

[PoisonedV]

Please, use a smaller image for your signature and at least try to make your posts readable. No need for more then 1 "?", you regularly switch letters inside of words and your spaces don't distinct the words...

I no h3 waz todally nt takin thee pisssw!!!@!!!

doesn't mean it isn't obnoxiously large, or that its funny
js brah

 

[CandidStan]

- World of Goo

-Half Life 2

 

[MDave]

Having Half-Life or Half-Life 2 ported to the Pandora doesn't mean all the mods for them will work. They need to be ported too. Games as they are would be nice though I think it would make more sense if they were open source and under the GPL, like with ID's engines.

 

[(naw)mcx]

Please, use a smaller image for your signature and at least try to make your posts readable. No need for more then 1 "?", you regularly switch letters inside of words and your spaces don't distinct the words...

I no h3 waz todally nt takin thee pisssw!!!@!!!

doesn't mean it isn't obnoxiously large, or that its funny
js brah

I was going for obnoxiously large there.

 

[PoisonedV]

Please, use a smaller image for your signature and at least try to make your posts readable. No need for more then 1 "?", you regularly switch letters inside of words and your spaces don''t distinct the words...

I no h3 waz todally nt takin thee pisssw!!!@!!!

doesn't mean it isn't obnoxiously large, or that its funny
js brah

I was going for obnoxiously large there.

yes but youre missing the point. we all know its supposed to be humorous but when its just as annoying as the real thing it really isn't funny and just annoying

 

[garethofthedead]

Midway are going uder so you may get some there games cheap but you will have to find some to port them.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
An OK figthing game but the wii one has wifi.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
Great game.

The Suffering
Very good horror game.

 

[psychodegu]

Midway are going uder so you may get some there games cheap but you will have to find some to port them.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
An OK figthing game but the wii one has wifi.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
Great game.

The Suffering
Very good horror game.

They also have unreal championship 2
Fun, but only if there was a network/Internet play option in the game, and the Pandora could handle the graphics and running umpteen bots. Maybe that a little unrealistic tho.

 

[elwing]

Midway are going uder so you may get some there games cheap but you will have to find some to port them.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
An OK figthing game but the wii one has wifi.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
Great game.

The Suffering
Very good horror game.

hum your name contain gareth and you do not support the dark engine and the thief series?

 

[Svartalf]

Midway are going uder so you may get some there games cheap but you will have to find some to port them.

IF they get the rights, I'll be more than happy to help port them for Linux in general and you'd have a publisher's attention at that point (along with all of their back catalog if you handed them THOSE titles... ).

You'll note that I said "IF". The reason I say this is that while Midway's going under, it's a Chapter 11 filing right at the moment, which means little if they get the plan they're going with approved. Moreover, even if they don't get it approved or fail to be able to keep up with the plan and end up with a Chapter 7 conversion, it's not a foregone conclusion you're going to get fire sale prices from the Trustee on the rights to produce content. As long as they're an 11 Bankruptcy, they're going probably want every bit as much money as if they weren't- IF they give you the time of day. For them in this state, they can't be doing anything that won't make them real money to get out of the insolvency- and a piddling 4k units for Pandora won't get their attention there.

 

[Grench]

Neverwinter Nights. The radial menus on NWN would fit perfectly with the Pandora.

Atari actually worked with Tapwave to do this for the Zodiac but it was never released. So, they do have at least some history of trying to port it to a starting small audience device.

Added plus - there are compiled X86 linux binaries already done. They would only need to re-compile it and set the interface to it for our controllers.

Do this game with full networking support, all expansions built in and updates to the v1.69 that the game ended with and you have your killer application done.

Make it work right, networking, able to play on the hundreds of existing persistent worlds, etc and I'd pay $100 for it, but then it's my favorite game of all time. Get it down to $50 and I know people who would buy a Pandora just to be able to play this game on it.

I was just playing NWN on Aventia last night. Get this game and you instantly have a stand alone RPG AND multi-player fantasy RPG AND social scene AND... the list goes on.

The big catch is getting Bioware &/or Atari's attention to do it.

 

[Svartalf]

Neverwinter Nights. The radial menus on NWN would fit perfectly with the Pandora.

Heh... The only problem with this is that Atari's not being nice to Linux right at the moment- and they KNOW that NWN's numbers for Linux roughly equalled 30-40% of their total sales. With that knowledge, they explicitly ignored that userbase for NWN2 for no apparent good reason other than they made a bid at trying to make an Oblivion competitor with a failed out of the gate X-Box 360 version that they attempted with the move of the engine from OpenGL to Direct3D. The requests for the Witcher fall on deaf ears (Though CD Projeckt, the studio, also the parent of Good Old Games, isn't against Linux stuff in general...).

I suppose you could wave enough cash under their noses and get NWN and maybe The Witcher. That's liable to be six figures from what I personally know of that situation from start to finish.

 

[MachRider]

Pandora team really needs a smarter money management.... since they apparently are doing it all wrong on this front...

As far as I'm concerned they need not worry about where to SPEND money, but how to GET MORE money, how to EARN, and make everybody else EARN money too. And play some good games in the meantime.


And the answer is..... trumpets.... drums...... T H E A P P S T O R E !!!


YES! Instead of spending money on one game port, spend it on a game maker tool, which allows people to make and upload their games to the official online store, which sells games for $5, $10, $15, which earns 20% of each transaction to the Pandora team and 80% to the developer.
And then sit and watch the money/users/gamers/developers roll in!

For any additional information google under "iPhone".

So port the RPG Maker, Game Maker, Torque Game Builder, Unity3D engine, Irrlicht engine, god knows what not, but make game development easy for everybody and make it widely known.

And I expect 0.5% of each transaction to be diverted to my Swiss account, for giving free financial advice.

 

[Spirit]

Yeah, being able to run Gamemaker games would rock!

I have not followed Cave Story further, but wasn't it that he did not allow more porting? It would be great if Cave Story was ported.

(...)NWN's numbers for Linux roughly equalled 30-40% of their total sales. (...)

Woah! Any linkable sources for that?

 

[ldesnogu]

Added plus - there are compiled X86 linux binaries already done. They would only need to re-compile it and set the interface to it for our controllers.

Yes and the move from OpenGL to OpenGL ES is just so trivial

 

[Grench]

Neverwinter Nights. The radial menus on NWN would fit perfectly with the Pandora.

Heh... The only problem with this is that Atari's not being nice to Linux right at the moment- and they KNOW that NWN's numbers for Linux roughly equalled 30-40% of their total sales. With that knowledge, they explicitly ignored that userbase for NWN2 for no apparent good reason other than they made a bid at trying to make an Oblivion competitor with a failed out of the gate X-Box 360 version that they attempted with the move of the engine from OpenGL to Direct3D. The requests for the Witcher fall on deaf ears (Though CD Projeckt, the studio, also the parent of Good Old Games, isn't against Linux stuff in general...).

I suppose you could wave enough cash under their noses and get NWN and maybe The Witcher. That's liable to be six figures from what I personally know of that situation from start to finish.


IMHO the key isn't necessarily Atari. Bioware made the actual game and the Linux port and supported the community making their own persistent worlds. Atari owns the franchise, Bioware did the actual work. When Atari was set to make the sequal NWN2, they went to another development house. NWN2 was bad, had an annoying interface, graphics that looked washed out and colored-pencil drawn... that list goes on.

But Bioware... they did it right with Baldur's Gate and NWN and it's expansions. They are working on a new one, Dragon Age that looks a lot like NWN 1 updated. If you want NWN, start the talk with Bioware. They're the ones that made it what it is.

This brings me to another idea... Maybe we should be looking at getting new games on the verge of release rather than classic games? Dragon Age (Bioware) or Diablo III maybe?

We wouldn't have the hardware to emulate them on another platform, but if the code were compiled native... maybe?

 

[kmob]

Of the options presented the idea of putting together an appstore and/or an in-depth reference site/SDK to promote development seems like it would have the most long term benefit. However having a commercial application available that showcased the system early(ish)on in the life span of the system would be really good PR and could possibly sway people who are on the fence about buying one.

If it was to be a commercial game, it should really be a something that shows off the Pandora's unique combination of features, touch screen, power, sound, gaming controls, full QWERTY keyboard, and portability etc. A standard PC port won't do that. Also, porting something that's widely available already is not going to make much impact (i.e. World of Goo).

I never owned a Dreamcast, but a licensed dreamcast port would seem like a good starting point (older system, tile based rendering, controllers etc). A game in a genre that isn't widely available in the open source space would also be fantastic. Two DC games that meet that criteria would be Shenmue and Soul Calibur.

Going against something I'd said earlier, a Pandora optimised port of FreeSpace2 (i.e. using the massive amount of work already done via FS2_Open to provide Linux/OpenGL/OpenAL support should make this achievable) that included the licensed game files (FS2 is on GoG cheap so it shouldn't be too expensive to secure the data files) would be amazing.

No other portable system could do this as well due to the controls and connectivity of the Pandora. You'd then be able to have compelling single and multiplayer gaming as well as access to mods etc. Hopefully a FS2_Open port will happen eventually anyway, but a Pandora optimised version produced reasonably early on in the Pandora's lifespan would be compelling. FS2_Open also can look amazing and would make for a great demo.

The fact that an open source project exists for this already make it entirely feasible to do, and the fact that the Pandora has fixed hardware (sound, graphics, control, networking) should make it possible to optimise the port significantly. It also fits into the open nature of the system in that it gives back something to the community and will stand as a good set of example code for others to use as well as providing value to people who already have purchased the game elsewhere (they can still use the Pandora client). Lastly it should be possible to achieve results a bit faster than starting from scratch which is important for a system that is ramping up support

 

[hedwards]

YES! Instead of spending money on one game port, spend it on a game maker tool, which allows people to make and upload their games to the official online store, which sells games for $5, $10, $15, which earns 20% of each transaction to the Pandora team and 80% to the developer.
And then sit and watch the money/users/gamers/developers roll in!

That's not realistic. Well at least for devs likely to be influenced by this. 80% of $10 is only $8 and even if everybody in the first batch purchased it, that would only be 32k, take away the taxes and the cost of doing the work and you get some profit. But that's being incredibly generous with the assumptions and I'd be shocked if it were enough for most small studios. Possibly enough to port a game from elsewhere, definitely not enough to create something new.

I'd be surprised if any game were to capture 80% of the Pandora market, probably even free games are going to have a difficult time doing it.