nintendowiifanboy.com/2008/0 … goon-orta/
Haven’t read it yet myself.
I don’t see the point of making articles out of this. Might as well keep it to forum discussions like we’ve doing, heh. It’s basically a feature review of PDOrta and a mention of “it would be cool to have this on Wii” with a generic controls conversion concept via the edited controller image.
Yes, it would be cool (but not that much cooler than on other systems, though I’d love Sega if they did this). No I don’t need articles of this sort unless they offer something unique. His ideas could have been more elaborate like tilting the remote left/right could let you do rolls and such, while the view switching could be mapped to the analogue stick since you control the dragon with just aiming anyway, as in PD games the dragon simply follows the crosshair. Semi-pushes could slowly turn your view while hard presses to a direction would act like the L/R buttons of the Saturn. Etc.
But really I just want sega to make a free flight Panzer now, show the Lair dudes how it’s meant to be done. It wouldn’t be the perfected experience of a rail shooter with all its scoring bonus details and such, but it’d make for a damn good game imho.
I’d make the controls very similar to the above, except when you brought the cursor to the edges of the screen, your dragon would actually turn to that direction, sort of like FPS use mouselook but more “loose”. If they weren’t near the edges then you’d basically be aiming in the same way as in any PD game and moving the dragon a bit up/down/left/right as normal.
Action could be kept @ similar high rates by having tons of enemies actually appear to come toward you regardless of your flight direction. They’d just spawn far away and swoop with shmup style patterns even if you were basically going “backwards” in terms of level progress. After a certain progression % either by killing a certain number of them, exploring a lot of the available area, encountering some NPC, or by accomplishing other quest-ish goals, some mini boss would blink on your radar and you’d have to travel toward there to encounter it before triggering the appearance of a boss battle you have to search for or it comes down at you or, whatever depending on the level. Obviously that’s left to the imagination of the designer much like the PDZwei and Saga encounters.
Bigger enemies could allow you to “lock on” (I don’t mean the laser attack here, that’d be possible on most every enemy) to them or parts of them to enable that positioning maneuver as seen in Saga and Orta. Controls would adapt to that during lock on mode but you’d still be able to move closer/further away with the accelerate/decelerate functions of the free flight controls. Going too far away would break the lock on. Bosses could be traveling along the level during the fight with you following them during lock on mode to give that rail shooter feel, with the boss leading the battle through spectacular vistas and mini cut scenes etc as usual.
So the emphasis would not be on some perfect flight sim or something, just in keeping as intact as possible the feel of standard PD while allowing you to explore wide open worlds at your own pace, and provide some extra RPG or adventure elements (perhaps going off the dragon as in Saga etc).
/babbling.