Video gaming coincidences
There are some strange video gaming coincidences, when you think about it. For example:
1. Half-Life 2/Breakdown
In 2004 Half-Life 2 came out on the PC (later the XBox 1, and later still the XBox 360 and PS3). It's a first person shooter where you never leave the point of view of the main character (still very unusual, even today), has no cutscenes, has an alien and governmental conspiracy storyline, and has vehicle sections. And you start the game knowing nothing of the world around you, or what is going on.
Also in 2004, Breakdown came out on the XBox (never ported to other machines, sadly). Like Half-Life 2, it's a first person shooter where you never leave the point of view of the main character (still very unusual, even today), has no cutscenes, has an alien and governmental conspiracy storyline, and has vehicle sections. And you start the game knowing nothing of the world around you, or what is going on.
Alright, so you might think this is just general coincidence, and so far you'd be right. But both games have a female sidekick who is very capable indeed in a firefight (and how many game sidekicks are good in a firefight, even today?) and seems to know more about what's going on in the world than you do. And in Half-Life 2 your companion's name is Alyx, whereas in Breakdown her name is... Alex.
Seriously. Is that just a pure coincidence or what? Aside from that there isn't too much in common between the games. I won't describe Half-Life 2 as everyone has played it several times already and knows it well, but Breakdown differs from Half-Life 2 in that it:
+ has far less weapons, but rather advanced melee combat (it has a lot of different punches and kicks, controlled by different combinations on the joypad, it really is pretty comprehensive),
+ You see your hands and feet in the game, such as when you climb a ladder you put your weapon away and see your hands in front of you,
+ Largely not as pretty as Half-Life 2, a lot of the game is set in bleak corridors and office or laboratory rooms, especially towards the beginning of the game,
+ Breakdown has one of the worst difficulty curves ever. It frequently approaches unfairly hard, even on the normal skill level setting.
It's a really good game though, but sadly very few people seem to have played it. And I don't doubt that a lot of people who did gave it up due to the very harsh difficulty spikes. A real shame, as if they'd have kept on then they'd have found a great game with a lot to offer.
But it can't be a coincidence about Alyx/Alex, can it?
2. Deus Ex
Most (PC) gamers know this, but in the game Deus Ex (PC, 2000) the New York skyline has no twin towers. This was because there wasn't enough memory to render them, according to Warren Spector (the lead designer of the game), though they compensated for this omission in the game (which is set in the year 2052) by saying in game that the World Trade Centre had been destroyed in a terrorist attack some years before (no actual date is given). And tragically, as we all know, both towers were destroyed in an unbelievably evil act of terrorism, just a year later.
3. Second Sight/Psi Ops
As with the Alyx/Alex thing, I don't know how much of this is down to coincidence, and how much is down to copying a competitors idea when both games are still in development (or creative borrowing, as the lawyers might say), but these two games, released within a couple of months of each other in 2004, so closely in fact that some magazines reviewed them both in the same issue), but these games are surprisingly close in idea and execution. Both games have you playing in third person, as a male amnesiac who rediscovers various mental powers he possesses throughout the game, such as telekinesis and mind control, and has a story involving government conspiracy.
They are rather different in gameplay, though, with Psi Ops being more action orientated, whilst Second Sight is more stealth based (though not nearly to the level of pure stealth games like Splinter Cell or Thief). Both are really good games, and it's a shame that neither of them ever received a sequel.
I'm sure I know of more, but I can't think of any at the moment, so I'll post this and get back to work. Please add any you can think of, be they Spectrum based or any other machine.
1. Half-Life 2/Breakdown
In 2004 Half-Life 2 came out on the PC (later the XBox 1, and later still the XBox 360 and PS3). It's a first person shooter where you never leave the point of view of the main character (still very unusual, even today), has no cutscenes, has an alien and governmental conspiracy storyline, and has vehicle sections. And you start the game knowing nothing of the world around you, or what is going on.
Also in 2004, Breakdown came out on the XBox (never ported to other machines, sadly). Like Half-Life 2, it's a first person shooter where you never leave the point of view of the main character (still very unusual, even today), has no cutscenes, has an alien and governmental conspiracy storyline, and has vehicle sections. And you start the game knowing nothing of the world around you, or what is going on.
Alright, so you might think this is just general coincidence, and so far you'd be right. But both games have a female sidekick who is very capable indeed in a firefight (and how many game sidekicks are good in a firefight, even today?) and seems to know more about what's going on in the world than you do. And in Half-Life 2 your companion's name is Alyx, whereas in Breakdown her name is... Alex.
Seriously. Is that just a pure coincidence or what? Aside from that there isn't too much in common between the games. I won't describe Half-Life 2 as everyone has played it several times already and knows it well, but Breakdown differs from Half-Life 2 in that it:
+ has far less weapons, but rather advanced melee combat (it has a lot of different punches and kicks, controlled by different combinations on the joypad, it really is pretty comprehensive),
+ You see your hands and feet in the game, such as when you climb a ladder you put your weapon away and see your hands in front of you,
+ Largely not as pretty as Half-Life 2, a lot of the game is set in bleak corridors and office or laboratory rooms, especially towards the beginning of the game,
+ Breakdown has one of the worst difficulty curves ever. It frequently approaches unfairly hard, even on the normal skill level setting.
It's a really good game though, but sadly very few people seem to have played it. And I don't doubt that a lot of people who did gave it up due to the very harsh difficulty spikes. A real shame, as if they'd have kept on then they'd have found a great game with a lot to offer.
But it can't be a coincidence about Alyx/Alex, can it?
2. Deus Ex
Most (PC) gamers know this, but in the game Deus Ex (PC, 2000) the New York skyline has no twin towers. This was because there wasn't enough memory to render them, according to Warren Spector (the lead designer of the game), though they compensated for this omission in the game (which is set in the year 2052) by saying in game that the World Trade Centre had been destroyed in a terrorist attack some years before (no actual date is given). And tragically, as we all know, both towers were destroyed in an unbelievably evil act of terrorism, just a year later.
3. Second Sight/Psi Ops
As with the Alyx/Alex thing, I don't know how much of this is down to coincidence, and how much is down to copying a competitors idea when both games are still in development (or creative borrowing, as the lawyers might say), but these two games, released within a couple of months of each other in 2004, so closely in fact that some magazines reviewed them both in the same issue), but these games are surprisingly close in idea and execution. Both games have you playing in third person, as a male amnesiac who rediscovers various mental powers he possesses throughout the game, such as telekinesis and mind control, and has a story involving government conspiracy.
They are rather different in gameplay, though, with Psi Ops being more action orientated, whilst Second Sight is more stealth based (though not nearly to the level of pure stealth games like Splinter Cell or Thief). Both are really good games, and it's a shame that neither of them ever received a sequel.
I'm sure I know of more, but I can't think of any at the moment, so I'll post this and get back to work. Please add any you can think of, be they Spectrum based or any other machine.
Post edited by ewgf on
Comments
Assuming approximately 10,000 Spectrum games\programs have been released then if we compared each one of those with every other one we'd have done almost 50 million comparisons:
n! / r!(n-r)! where n=10000 , r=2
Result = 49,995,000
Even if you limit it to one particular year, say 1985, that's approximately 2700 games\programs - or 3.6 million combinations of one against one.
The amazing thing would be if you COULDN'T find a strange video gaming coincidence somewhere amongst all this.
Spectrum data from WOS Advanced Search option
Combination\Permutation calculations courtesy of http://www.mathsisfun.com/combinatorics/combinations-permutations-calculator.html
You aint on your own mate, FPS games as a rule I find very repetitive
I didn't think the original was anything special when I played it, but then I did play it years after it had come out and probably would've loved it had I played it on release. The sequel, however, I did play when it was released, and I loved it. Still do. Great game, still stands tall in the face of todays FPSs, in my opinion.
How interesting to hear that. I remember the sunday afternoon I discovered Half-life on a CD... erm... loaned to me by a friend. I was in college then and had little money but plenty of free time. So imagine my surprise on starting this game to be greeted by a far out intro sequence the likes of which I hadn't seen before (I had never heard of the game before this so all the hype had passed me by). And then just like that I was Gordon Freeman, an ordinary scientist facing extraordinary circumstances and I couldn't stop playing. I played it for a marathon 12 hours straight, sleeping only at 4AM the next morning because of exhaustion. I bunked college that day to play some more of half-life till I had finished the game.
I hadn't played a game on the PC like that since my speccy days! Bored I was definitely not. Only a few games have had my attention like that since, including Thief, Oblivion, BioShock and Warcraft.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Half Life 2 was brilliant, played that from start to finish and didnt give up, completed it in the end and really enjoyed the huge long levels throughout the game. Both are classic games.
As for the video gaming coincidences, nahhhh.
Couldn't even get into the first one, so I didn't even try the second one while my mates were stroking themselves over it. I went and chilled in the back kitchen with me best mates sister, her neighbour, and my mate who was a stoner so spent most of the night on the back stairs smoking weed instead of playing games in the living room.
author of some speccy and c64 books.. ian sinclair
40 educational games for speccy.. vince apps
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
the later had an extra bonus section where 4 of you could fight zombies.
they both came out at pretty much the same time.
THERE - Right there! That's the EXACT point I fell in love with that answer.
And I've never played Half Life. Apart from CoD and Oblivion, I find most FPS games a bit cack...very repetitive IMHO. Give me a good strategy game like any of the Total Wars, Age of Empires and suchlike.
I think if you look hard enough you can see parallels between things of many different media. I hear plenty of cross-over listening to music, Ill listen to something and think "this riff is exactly the same as the one on such-and-such".
In literature, for Harry Potter I see a more developed story of The Worst Witch. (I'm not a fan of Harry Potter, what can I say...it's called taste, you wouldn't understand!)
Only the vehicle section you mention here is new to HL2, as the rest was already in place in HL1, which dates back to 1998, some 6 years earlier.
(subtle hint there, hope it's not too subtle for him to pick up on:-)).
Blimey, I hope you never worked in a computer shop when you were younger. I mean, if someone had asked "What good games do you have for the Spectrum?", you'd probably have said "Well, we've got around two hundred or so Spectrum titles in at the moment, minus the Dizzy ones and Sabre Wulf, as you specified 'good', and minus strategy games as they're more like hard work than 'games'. Actually, if you measure the volume of our Spectrum games, and divide it by the volume of the average Spectrum game case, allowing for the gaps between cases, and the occasional occurance of - hey come back!
Bloody customers, why do they keep buggering off when I'm helping them?"
Oh yes, and I wasn't accusing Half-Life 2 of copying Breakdown in any way anyway (er, if you see what I mean). If there was any copying going on, and I don't know that there was*, then it wouldn't have been Valve copying Breakdown, as Breakdown received so little press both before and after release that it's doubtful Valve even knew it existed.
And yes HL1 did most of the things I mention, long before Breakdown did, but the one thing that does seem to me to be too close to be coincidental is a female sidekick who (shock!) is more than capapable of defending herself, and who is called Alyx (or Alex). It's either a very unlikely co-incidence, or one games' designers were 'influenced' by another. And if so, I'd put money on it being Breakdown's designers who 'borrowed' the idea, maybe as a subtle nod to Valve, or maybe just to be cheeky, as Half-Life 2 had a *lot* of publicity pre-release.
What's new, eh. :razz:
Hur hur hur!
Funnily enough I did - had customers like you in all the time <sigh>
Sorry I didn't tell you what you wanted to hear, please be a bit louder and more up front about what you want the people who reply to your posts to tell you next time. If I'd known you only wanted us to agree with you I'd have posted something different. Mea Culpa. The truth is all us coders get together to plan and scheme and put one over on the people who buy our games. You want proof.............
Matt Smith wrote Manic Miner and Bill Hogue wrote Miner 2049er.
Both have 4 letters in their first name and 5 letters in their second.
What's more both the long forms of their first names - Matthew and William - have 7 letters in them.
Mere coincidence? I THINK NOT!
I'm not sure, but did you take my second post (where I answered your post) literally? I didn't mean it that way, it was a joke, although I see I neglected to add a smiley, so it's probably my fault if you misunderstood, so sorry about that.
:p
there are a couple of other foreboding WTC incidents in music around the time,( not game related) but just for e.g. the album cover of Party Music by The Coup which was due to be released in October that year:
and the album by I Am The World Trade Center released two months before
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Loop-World-Trade-Center/dp/B00005LN4Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308618988&sr=1-1 < look at track 11
sorry to go off on a tangent
The ill fated X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen had an episode where they had to stop a passenger plane being remotely piloted from crashing into the WTC and it aired a few months before 9/11.
I don’t think I have the stomach for it.
--Raziel (Legend of Kain: Soul Reaver 2)
https://www.youtube.com/user/VincentTSFP
Was that a pun? ;)
It was also the truth.
I don’t think I have the stomach for it.
--Raziel (Legend of Kain: Soul Reaver 2)
https://www.youtube.com/user/VincentTSFP
So ... the truth is a joke???
:p
:D
I don’t think I have the stomach for it.
--Raziel (Legend of Kain: Soul Reaver 2)
https://www.youtube.com/user/VincentTSFP
:-o
What are next week's lotto numbers?
I don’t think I have the stomach for it.
--Raziel (Legend of Kain: Soul Reaver 2)
https://www.youtube.com/user/VincentTSFP
4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.
But don't use them...
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.