Best things gaming companies have done?

We talked about the worst things how about the best? Sony making Region Locking (for the most part) a thing of the past, Working Designs for simply existing, PS1 that SCEA forbade us from seeing showing up on US PSN 20 years later. Atari making it's platforms open source after the Jaguar's death, Sega............uh erh uhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh errrrrrm...........finally releasing Yakuza 5 after fan demand?

Might be hard to pick the good from the dick moves, especially on a cynical board like this one But we can sure try.

 

Activision for shutting down the studio for Call of Duty.


Fuck, it was all a dream.

 

SCE having a change of heart, allowing PS3 users to use their own generic SATA HDD. The PS2 (And the PSX DVR) both had proprietary HDD units, which were rare and small in capacity.

Also, thank goodness for region-free consoles.

Backward-compatibility support in consoles is awesome too, and so are games that have unlockables for players of their prequels.

 

Phil Spencer becoming the head of Xbox and not making the Kinect as a mandatory purchase and a waste of 100$.

 

Rare making Perfect Dark on the N64!

Also, Rare re-releasing it on the XBox 360, which not only gave it a solid frame-rate, but also let you play it on-line! But on the minus side, the re-release was contracted out to 4J Studios, who released it in a bugged state that also had bad controls, and by the time they'd patched it, lots of people had given up, so Rare deserve criticism for that.

TC, If I can't say the release of a game as the best thing a video game company has ever done (even if it's the best game, IMHO!), then I'd say id Software for all but creating the first person shooter genre. I never liked Wolfenstein 3D, but Doom did so much, so very well, and was amazing at the time. Maybe if I'd played W3D before Doom then I'd like it too, but as it is, W3D doesn't interest me at all.

 

PS3 being region free. Sony was the first one to realize region lock was pointless, since it eventually made people look for modchips and the jump to bootleg / burned games.

It's sad that they only realized that after going after some great online stores like lik-sang, but still. Glad Microsoft followed them. Nintendo on the other hand...

 

Sega for being cool with homebrew Dreamcast games (which they could kill, but don't).

 

What are you talking about? The PS2 uses standard IDE HDDs. They just need to be formatted when inserted into the PS2. Any IDE HDD would work.

 

Bethesda for buying rights on the Fallout series. Fallout New Vegas in a masterpiece - we would still be waiting for a nice Fallout title from Interplay today.

InXile and all Kickstarter backers for Wasteland 2 - a game i waited more than 25 years for.

Capcom for Steel Battalion. Best Mech-Action out there and the controller is absolutely awesome.

Microsoft for DirectX - PC-gaming (configuration of hardware, drivers and compatibility issues) was a mess before.

 

Bubble Bobble

Pretty much everything PCE related from Hudson Soft and NEC.

Perhaps more in line with OP's intentions...Doom

 

I forgot to mention that Valve is doing great things all the time ( Except for their poor customer service )
Valve is one of the few big companies that isn't super greedy. Look how much discounts they have and games are on sale very often.
Digital distribution on the PC is the way to go, but I'm not so sure about consoles.

 

There aren't too many, but the remakes that kept true to the original while adding content and substance is a big one for me. Final Fantasy Legend (aka SaGa) got remade on the WonderSwan, and I'd never tried it until the translation patch came out. I was genuinely surprised by it, as it took the game I remembered and loved, fixed a few problems, but kept the fights direct and to the point still while adding just a touch more meat to the story itself.

I wish this had been the case for SaGa 2 and 3...while 3's remake is alright, both added in tediously long animations and other silliness that just make the game drag and feel less fun and more chore.

 

Going to further the Bethesda love...

- Putting a lot of Interplay's Fallout 3 into New Vegas was indeed awesome. Making something from potentially nothing I guess?
- Taking id Software under its belt and pushing DOOM(4) through its paces so we can finally see an end product before 2020.
- Continuing to support Quake Con.
- Using id Tech 5 and ex-Starbreeze member-driven Machine Games to give us a proper Wolfenstein reboot.

 

Too bad Steam's chat system is broken.

You can't send a message while someone is offline EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE ONLINE BUT STEAM SAYS THEY AREN'T!!!!! You can't even call someone when they are "offline" when they are in fact online. The only way to fix this is for the person you are trying to talk to restart their steam client. It is really annoying, especially when you can't get a hold of the person you are wanting to play Garry's Mod with because their phone is off and they are not on Facebook.

WHY DON'T YOU FIX THESE ISSUES VALVE???? YOU ARE CAUSING ME A LOT OF HEADACHES BECAUSE YOU SUCK AT PROGRAMMING STEAM!!!!!!!!!!!

<End Rant>

 

If you use a "non sony" harddrive The harddrive will not be seen in the browser and games that use the hard drive feature (aka, copy parts off the dvd to increase load times) will not use the drive.

Programs that play backups (opl & hdloader) will use a non sony hard drive.

 

Oh ok. Why has nobody mentioned this to me before?

Everywhere I read said to use a standard IDE HDD. Why must people give misinformation on the Internet?

 

Honestly I think Valve has a bit of a manpower issue. I mean think about what all they're doing: making new games, supporting older releases well after other companies would stop (TF2 is over 7 years old and Valve is still adding content and patches, very very few games from 2007 are still supported with anything more than "well, the server is still up!"), as well as creating and supporting the de facto PC game marketplace. And they're doing all that with less than 500 employees (the estimate of 330 from Wikipedia is from 2013, so maybe they've hired more since then, but still). Ubisoft has 10 times that much manpower and just continuously releases mediocre games.

 

Technically, the hardware itself (including the boot ROM) does not need a SCE disk. The softeare sold (including the browser update and PSBBN) require a SCE disk.

They failed to make a proper worldwide release of the HDD and network adaptor peripherals, so that probably explains why people seem to be not so well-versed about what the PS2 could really do with a HDD unit... in Japan.

 

Is finding network adapters hard? I seem to see them relatively often for pretty cheap. Unfortunately I don't have a PS2 fat so I have no use for them.

 

They were officially released in Japan and in the US. If you reside in either territories, they should't be too hard to find.

On the other hand, I could never walk to a physical shop to buy one. Even back in 2010, one shop didn't know that there was even such a thing.

Personally, I have not seen the remote control sold here either. The multitap is rare too.

My own network adaptor was purchased as a used set, from a man who originally got it from the US.

That being said, there are no models of network adaptors for regions outside of Japan (00, hence SCPH-10190 and SCPH-10350), US (SCPH-10281) and Europe (SCPH-10350 EE).