Massively Multiplayer: Gaming In The New Millennium

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Deleted member 100251

What was Warner Brothers thinking when they made ITTL's Batman And Robin? Were they going for a more sexual and overall shittier remake of the Adam West Batman series? Even the more Ace Ventura-esque performance Jim Carrey gave as the Riddler in TTL's Batman Forever has more dignity than Arnie as Mister Freeze. So. Many. Shitty. Ice. Puns. Between this and the shitty Captain America movie where he steals a goddamn car, it seems like Cryo has a vendetta against superhero movies. And the less we say about Shaq as Steel the better.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, seems like it'd be amazing. Hopefully they can follow it up with an equally amazing sequel.
While Cyro's Spider-Man is cool, what I really like is that Teen Titans TV series. That sounds awesome.
 
I wonder how TTL's posters would react to the protracted Clone Saga (that ended in the death of Ben Reilly) and One More Day, given that Ben stayed on Spider-Man while Peter retired.

That also made me realize the venerable Spider-Girl from MC2 probably got butterflied out of existence. :eek:
 
All the original quotes are from OTL newscasts, and one rather infamous hand-written note...

I think that's the first time I've ever seen the entire text of the note; if I have, it's been long enough that "the pit of my burning nauseous stomach" was the only phrase I recognized.

VariationsUnlimited said:
In the words of a great Florinese author, my eyes did not remain precisely dry. If it's wrong to feel like crying after reading that note, then I don't want to be right.

(For head-canonical reasons wildly tangential to this discussion, I've decided that'd be *my Player-verse username. Aberrant may or may not be butterflied according to this bit of headcanon, but the Trinity Universe probably is, so *I go with a name inspired by GURPS' Infinity Unlimited, and probably have the tagline "Intervention Service, Morale Division".)
 
GreatEmancipator1865 said:
What was Warner Brothers thinking when they made ITTL's Batman And Robin? Were they going for a more sexual and overall shittier remake of the Adam West Batman series? Even the more Ace Ventura-esque performance Jim Carrey gave as the Riddler in TTL's Batman Forever has more dignity than Arnie as Mister Freeze. So. Many. Shitty. Ice. Puns. Between this and the shitty Captain America movie where he steals a goddamn car, it seems like Cryo has a vendetta against superhero movies. And the less we say about Shaq as Steel the better.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, seems like it'd be amazing. Hopefully they can follow it up with an equally amazing sequel.
Wait wut? ...was that the early '90s one? Because I don't think I've ever actually seen that one the whole way through, just bits & pieces on TV.
Alpha.001 said:
While Cyro's Spider-Man is cool, what I really like is that Teen Titans TV series. That sounds awesome.
Roger Renegade said:
Agreed on both counts. It's really a shame, because I could imagine Arnie doing a pretty decent Freeze if he played him more like the Terminator. That having been said, Patrick Stewart is, and will always be Mr. Freeze to me.
Uma Thurman is actually an interesting choice for Ivy though, too bad the "movie" was little more than a 2-hour toy commercial with blockbuster special effects.
 
Wait wut? ...was that the early '90s one? Because I don't think I've ever actually seen that one the whole way through, just bits & pieces on TV.
I have to check wikipedia but yeah that did happened, that Sinbad genie movies is more real than that bomb...
 
How do you one of the Player-verse quotes with out ATL usernames? I am currently tinkering with it, but not doing it well.
The icon to the right of the video is an 'insert' menu, the very first option is Quote and the cursor is automatically inside it.
If that was a typo and you meant "our" ATL usernames, then you go inside the [QUOTE ] right between the E and ] you type =<alt username>. Example: [ QUOTE=Roger Renegade ] (just without the spaces).
 
How do you one of the Player-verse quotes with out ATL usernames? I am currently tinkering with it, but not doing it well.
You do it by taking a normal quote and by replacing the post and member data with the TTL username. You can then write whatever your TTL self would be saying about the TTL alternate history timeline Game Over in the quote.
 
TerrenceEast said:
I would hate trying to survive in bloody Columbine this time around, especially since Eric went absolutely nuts and gunned down a bunch of people.

On the other hand, the Manchester shooter (goddamned psycho) is just some sad idiot on the internet in this TL. Yay!
 
Thanks for all the positive feedback, everyone! Hopefully there's more where all those came from. :)

...who the hell is Eazy-E?

One of the founders of the rap group N.W.A., along with Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Arabian Prince. He died of AIDS-related causes IOTL and TTL on March 26, 1995.
 
BONUS - World Series 2003
(Author's Note: Here's a quick weekend bonus update summarizing the 2002 baseball playoff results. It's basically just the results of each series with a few notes on the more interesting series.)

AL:

(4) Boston Red Sox beat (1) Cleveland Indians, 3 to 1
(This was a major upset, as the Indians, at 106-56, were the best team in baseball going into the playoffs. However, the Red Sox had won 22 out of their last 30 games and had run away with the AL wild card, so they weren't exactly terrible.)

(2) New York Yankees beat (3) Seattle Mariners, 3 to 2

(This was probably the most exciting series of the entire playoffs. The Mariners were heavy underdogs against the defending World Series champions, but due to the play of Ken Griffey Jr., who stayed with the Mariners and hasn't gotten hurt ITTL, they hung in there. Game 5 went to 14 innings before Derek Jeter batted in the winning run.)

NL:

(1) Atlanta Braves beat (4) San Francisco Giants, 3 to 0
(Despite the increased scrutiny on steroids ITTL, Barry Bonds is still playing quite well and led the Giants to the playoffs, however, they were no match for the 98-win Braves.)

(2) Chicago Cubs beat (3) New York Mets, 3 to 1

ALCS:

(2) New York Yankees beat (4) Boston Red Sox, 4 to 0
(Despite the fierce rivalry between these two teams, there was no drama here: the Yankees won easily. However, the Red Sox have a young and improving team, and they'll only get better in the coming years.)

NLCS:

(1) Atlanta Braves beat (2) Chicago Cubs, 4 to 2
(The Braves' pitching enabled them to win Games 5 and 6 after the Cubs took Games 3 and 4 at Wrigley. A strong effort for the Cubs, but they wouldn't be winning the World Series this year.

World Series:

Atlanta Braves beat New York Yankees, 4 to 3
(In what was considered somewhat of an upset, the 98-win Braves beat the 104-win Yankees, with Greg Maddux pitching a three-hit shutout in Game 7 at Yankee Stadium to clinch the Series for the Braves.)
 
BTW, I forgot to ask, does Magic Johnson still do his talk show The Magic Hour in Player Two Start?
 
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Winter 2003 (Part 4) - Resident Evil Is Still Very Scary
Resident Evil: Outbreak

Resident Evil: Outbreak is the first game in the series to be developed with sixth-generation consoles in mind. Like OTL's game, it has a focus on multiplayer, with up to four characters able to be controlled at one time. Outbreak can be played with up to four players either locally or online. The game is a more action oriented, faster paced title, based on the earlier Operation Stormwind, with more weapons and combat and less of a horror focus (though there is still a survival horror element to the game). Unlike OTL's game, which featured five different scenarios, TTL's Outbreak features one long scenario with multiple levels and bosses. The game takes place during the events of Resident Evil 2, and follows a group of operatives consisting of scientists and members of the Raccoon City SWAT team. The game features eight different playable characters, with players able to choose between them. Like OTL's Operation Raccoon City, the characters have different roles, with some specializing in combat, others specializing in weapon crafting, others specializing in healing, etc. If playing with less than four people, human players can choose which characters the CPU uses, though there can't be more than one of the same character in play at a time. The game incorporates many of the locales from OTL Outbreak, including a hotel, a hospital, and finally, Raccoon City University. The characters are initially simply working together to survive, but they eventually discover a new mutation of the T-Virus that could cause the disease to spread outside the city, and must work together to stop it, possibly coming up against malevolent agents of Umbrella in the process. There are numerous enemies from classic Resident Evil titles in the game, including zombies and lickers, with a boss fight against a gigantic licker appearing later into the game. In the final segment of the game, the university, the characters discover that a mutation of the virus has been developed that could cause it to spread into the Earth's atmosphere, and must find and destroy the sample before it can infect the entire world. In a twist, after defeating the final boss and finding the sample, one of the players must choose to sacrifice themselves to stop the virus (if playing alone with three computer characters, the player automatically becomes the sacrifice, basically, it HAS to be one of the human players who makes the sacrifice, and if no one is chosen, the game chooses randomly). There are eight different endings, depending on which of the game's eight characters makes the sacrifice, though the basic ending is the same: the survivors escape Raccoon City, though someone is seen gathering a small remaining sample of the airborne virus (a setup for Resident Evil 4, which as of the release of Outbreak, has only recently begun development).

Resident Evil: Outbreak is initially released for the Sega Katana in Japan in January 2003, and for the Katana and Xbox in North America on February 17, 2003. It would be released for the Nintendo Wave in April 2003. The game sells quite well on the Katana, about twice as much as it does on the Xbox. The game's development cycle for the Xbox was littered with numerous problems, and the Xbox port itself, while a good port, features some minor glitches and slowdown, despite looking slightly better graphically than the Katana version. Though the Wave port is the best of the three, it's overshadowed by numerous other titles released for the Wave at the time, and so the Katana version of the game becomes both the best selling and most memorable.

-

Ted Crosley: Okay, this is really cool. Jim from Capcom USA and Shinji Mikami have hooked us up with the first North American preview of Resident Evil: Infiltration.

Bill Sindelar: So, tell us a bit about Infiltration.

Shinji Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* This is the first Resident Evil title made exclusively for a handheld system. It plays like classic Resident Evil, but with a focus on stealth gameplay.

*The game looks a lot like the original Resident Evil, it's in 3-D, though the graphics are somewhat primitive, it's a tad worse than on OTL PSX, which is still really good for the Nova, looking like a more pixely, slightly less FPS Deadly Silence.*

Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* You are a special agent infiltrating an old Umbrella lab, in order to get evidence of the company's wrongdoings. However, this lab has been abandoned because of an experiment gone very wrong, and you'll encounter dangerous things as you sneak about.

Bill: So this kind of plays like Resident Evil meets Metal Gear, sort of.

Ted: Well, you already have to sneak around in Resident Evil... but here I can see there's a stealth meter and there's more options to move around.

*A male agent is walking around a corner, where two guards stand in a hallway.*

Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* Early on you'll just be contending with Umbrella security, but once you get into the inner parts of the lab to where the monsters are...

Ted: Things get REALLY scary, huh?

*Bill takes out two of the guards and keeps on going, he enters a room where there's a dead guard lying on the ground, as he turns to leave the guard's arm lifts up and shoots a tentacle into his back*

Bill: Whoa!

Mikami: *laughs*

Ted: *laughing*

Bill: That spooked me!

Ted: So are these guys with STARS?

Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* We're actually introducing a new group of heroes in this game. We'll see STARS, but the two groups have a contentious relationship. I can't say any more without spoiling. There's also a girl agent you can control in this game, but we're not showing her today.

Bill: This looks like a really cool, really fun game and I can't wait to get my hands on it. When's it coming out?

Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* It's coming out in Japan next month, and..... *looks at Jim*

Jim: It'll be at E3 and Capcom will announce a North American release date then. Probably this summer.

Ted: Can't wait! That's Resident Evil: Infiltration, coming soon to the Game Boy Nova.

-from the February 18, 2003 episode of G4's Blister

-

"After a contentious development cycle that saw numerous rejected scripts and directorial changes, Resident Evil is finally hitting the big screen. The film entered production in early 2002 and will release on April 25th of this year. It'll be based on the first game of the series, that sees a group of STARS agents making their way into a mansion in order to investigate a series of gruesome incidents, only to become trapped with a horde of fiendish undead. Paul Walker stars as Chris Redfield, while Rose McGowan plays his partner Jill Valentine. Resident Evil is hoping to duplicate the box office success of video game adaptations such as Tomb Raider, Ballistic Limit, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and is one of the spring's most anticipated films."
-from an article on Yahoo! News, posted on March 18, 2003

-

February 24, 2003

After a trip to America to meet with North American Capcom officials and talk with some of the gaming press about Resident Evil: Outbreak, Shinji Mikami was back in Japan and back to work on Resident Evil 4, a game that had quickly come to consume most of his time. Initially, the game was meant to be a more faster-paced, action packed title, but the template for that had ultimately morphed into Devil May Cry. However, Mikami didn't want the game to be slower like the first three games, and he also didn't want the negative reception that Operation Stormwind had garnered. A more combat-oriented third person shooter seemed to be the way to go.

The problem was, The Covenant on the Xbox had broken a lot of ground in that regard. Many of its ideas had already been recycled into that generation's other shooters, and Mikami wanted to do something more innovative. Still, he kept coming back to his vision: a third-person shooter that featured a behind-the-player camera focus. The Covenant HAD done something similar, but with the camera further back and with more dynamic camera angles, a sort of in-between at the halfway point between Squad Four: Rebellion, another genre groundbreaker, and Mikami's vision for Resident Evil 4.

Mikami sat down at his desk and started to generate more ideas. Many of them focused on the supernatural: if Resident Evil 4 was going to be different from its predecessors, he wanted the game to have a more otherworldly type of feel, with his protagonist, which he'd decided was going to be Resident Evil 2's Leon Kennedy, confronting spirits and demons, perhaps because of a hallucination brought on by a new variant of the T-Virus (the airborne version from Outbreak). As he was brainstorming, Noboru Sugimura entered the room. After Hideki Kamiya's vision for the game had become Devil May Cry, Sugimura was brought on as a scenario writer, and had given Mikami many of the supernatural inspirations he had for Resident Evil 4's plot.

"Is everything all right?" asked Sugimura, noticing that Mikami was deep in thought.

"It's just troubling, how I can't focus on a clear vision for this game," replied Mikami. "I have so many ideas that it's difficult to choose only one, and I'm expected to come up with something shortly. We've already begun work but there's no real direction, we may have to scrap everything and start over."

"Well, are we still going with the supernatural focus for the game?"

Mikami didn't know what they were going with, but Sugimura's idea of a virus that gave Leon special powers was definitely intriguing. The problem was was that he was having trouble reconciling it with the more grounded mood of the series. However, he didn't want the game to be too much like The Covenant. He wanted something different than what Resident Evil had been before, but also different from what anyone else was doing.

"Let's go back to the girl," said Mikami, looking back at Sugimura. "What was your idea for the girl?"

"Well, the girl would be an Umbrella experiment... a girl who could control the T-Virus' influence on her body. A secret Umbrella bioweapon. A girl whose DNA they could replicate... propagate....so they could wipe out everyone else with the T-Virus but use the girl's DNA to create a race of new humans who they could then control."

"......"

Mikami began writing something down furiously on one of the papers on his desk. He drew up a sketch of the girl. He showed it to Sugimura, who saw it and recoiled.

"....what's she doing?!" asked Sugimura.

"She's using her power," said Mikami. The picture showed the girl, one half of her body was normal, while the other half was hideously mutated into a monstrous form, sending a massive arm spike through the mouth of an Umbrella soldier. He drew another sketch and showed it to Sugimura, in this one she was tearing Leon in two. "Leon doesn't have the power, this girl does, and in order to save the world, Leon has to convince her of her own humanity. Otherwise, she'll become the monster that helps Umbrella destroy the planet."

"Ohooooo!" Sugimura said, nodding. "I like that idea!"

"Well, most of it was your idea," replied Mikami, turning back to his desk and writing some more notes. "...let's come up with some more ideas together."
 

Deleted member 100251

Ooh... Very interesting. TTL's RE: Outbreak sounds very interesting.

Resident Evil also getting a movie adaptation sounds awesome.

As for RE4, I can't wait to see how it turns out. I'm crossing my fingers that its a success.
 
Holy fucking shit.

So, you control the girl and, if Leon doesn't convince you to not be too much of an Umbrella-engineered mutant, you become Cthulhu? I'm getting shades of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Saya no Uta here: it'd be nice if the more you use your mutant powers, the more inhuman you become.
 
Holy fucking shit.

So, you control the girl and, if Leon doesn't convince you to not be too much of an Umbrella-engineered mutant, you become Cthulhu? I'm getting shades of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Saya no Uta here: it'd be nice if the more you use your mutant powers, the more inhuman you become.

I didn't say you control the girl :p
 
I didn't say you control the girl :p

Aw.

I suppose the game could've become too Devil May Cry-ish if you did. Anyway, check out the game I've sent you guys via PM, there is another one coming - the trading card game I hinted at before, that would be a staple of Sega's video arcades - I forgot how did they call them in ATL. Yeah, I kind of want Sega to go all out and try to avoid their OTL fate I guess. :p
 
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