Mmhmm. It's one of the things we were concerned about from the beginning. It seems doing 'laps' is out of the question now.
I think they'll base the score on how quickly you can do a level WHILE getting those high links in. I guess it's just a different way to challenge old fans without reusing the old method of laps. I still loved doing laps though.

I can see how restricting it to one lap could make the game more immediately accessible: people who dismissed the original as "too short" often did so because they missed the fact that you had the option of extending your time on each level by flying over the Ideya Palace rather than into it.

But this lack of laps does seem to be a simplification that will affect the game's long-term appeal. If there's a limited number of items in each "mare" (not sure what the equivalent will be called in JoD), and each level is shorter than the 120 seconds you were given in the original game, and you lose the tension of deciding whether to finish now or risk another lap... well, that reduces the number of elements and variables involved. So it's possible that the "perfect score" will be much easier to obtain than in the original.

Oh well. As long as the core elements of the gameplay are fun, and as long as the game saves records at all, there will definitely be some fun to be had from whatever high score features are in the game.

But I'm still hoping there's a dedicated score attack mode to unlock.

Okay, I want to know why everyone's so obsessed with the score attack stuff. It doesn't seem that great to me...

Depends on what you want out of a game I suppose. Games like GoldenEye, Crazy Taxi and the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series are fun, but I wouldn't have played them anywhere near as much as I did if they hadn't tracked best times or scores.

For me, the quality of the first playthrough of a game's "story" mode is sometimes less relevant than whether I can return to it to try and beat my own records. (Hence why I like the two Sonic Adventure games... for the last few years, I've only returned to them to time/score attack the Sonic/Shadow levels, so thoughts of the shooting/hunting stages have been banished from my mind.)

The first I heard about NiGHTS were the reports on the game in Sonic the Comic (yay!) and in a random one-off issue of Mean Machines Sega (the Atlanta '96 Olympics one).

A couple of years later, in 1998, I wanted a Saturn for Christmas. Yes, by that time it was clear that Sony were completely dominant, but a Saturn was what I still wanted! There were only four games I initially wanted for it: Sega Rally*, Sonic R**, Marvel Super Heroes***... and NiGHTS Into Dreams.**** I got all those, and luckily, the second-hand Saturn my mum bought for me also had a copy of Christmas NiGHTS, which I wasn't expecting!

* Still one of my favourite racing games.
** I was obsessed with time attacking it when I first got it... but I haven't had any desire to play it for several years now.
*** It was great in the arcades, but the Saturn version became redundant when I got Marvel vs Capcom 2 for the Dreamcast.
**** Oh, it's fairly good.

Given the presence of the Dolphin Persona Mask, it'd be nice to replay Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future with a NiGHTS skin.

Well, I say "replay", but I didn't actually complete it in the first place .



As for bad puns... what would you get if you crossed NiGHTS with more than one copy of a product that lets you run PlayStation games on a PC or Dreamcast?

...NiGHTS Into Bleems of course!

(Groan)

I don't' think Sonic R was designed like NiGHTS. They pushed the Saturn to it's limits almost with NiGHTS... unlike Sonic R... so Sonic R probably wasn't coded the same way, thus being easier.

That's what I thought. Sonic R was not designed completely around the Saturn's hardware. That must have been why it was easier to port. Such was also the case with Rayman, Pandemonium and Silhouette Mirage.

I don't think the above posts are right. Sonic R made extremely good use of the Saturn hardware. Perhaps it wasn't quite as ambitious as NiGHTS or Burning Rangers, but Traveller's Tales definitely got a lot more out of the machine than most developers did, so it must have been tailored to the system to a certain extent.

Although having said that, the relative speed with which it was ported (with extras) to the PC, with the system requirements kept fairly low (although I don't have copies of the PC versions of VF, Sega Rally or Panzer Dragoon to compare the specs to), would indicate that they didn't have to make a vast number of changes in order to get the port working.

(As an aside, I remember one quote in Sega Saturn Magazine when Sonic R came out referring to the fog effects and saying "the PlayStation cannot do this". Looking back, that may have been an exaggeration!)

It's great news and I don't really see much of a downside to it, to be honest. It should bring the franchise to a wider audience (and the PS2 audience is about as wide as you can get) - people who heard about the original via the announcement of Journey of Dreams, but don't want to go so far as to buy for a Saturn just for that one game. As long as the core original gameplay is there, I don't see much of a downside.

As for the decision to go to the PS2, I've never minded the hardware of the DualShock analogue sticks; I've rarely noticed the infamous "dead zones" as long as the game has calibrated their sensitivity appropriately (the TimeSplitters series has done well at this). And it might be sacrilege to say this here, but I think they're better than the analogue Saturn pad.

Oh, people can always ask for more: "If they've made some effort to enhance the original with new graphics and incorporate the Christmas NiGHTS presents (in some form), why not go all the way and put it on the 360/PS3 and make even more enhancements?" But I don't think it's fair to comment on that until we hear more news about what's been changed, and see some higher-resolution screenshots of the altered graphics. Although having said that, NiGHTS with Achievements, online leaderboards, and the latest graphics would be quite pleasant.

Also, a good thing about this from Sega's point of view is that the game has been doing pretty healthy business on eBay and in second-hand game shops over the years, but Sega won't have seen a penny of that. I have bought two copies of the game over the years (the second to get the analogue pad), as well as Burning Rangers and a lot of other Saturn and Dreamcast titles. And yet because those were mostly purchased second-hand, I've always felt slightly guilty about the fact that even though I appreciate those games, my support for them has never registered as increased sales, any more than if I'd just pirated them. So in this way, if it's ever released in the UK, if I buy a new copy it'll be the first time Sega will actually get something out of my appreciation of the NiGHTS franchise. OK, +1 sale isn't much, but it would make me feel better.

Not to shatter the emotional reception already, but I thought I'd be first to jump the gun and point out a few things. Number one of my list being: No 'Pians? It could be a bit quick to judge, but from this, it would seem that there is no A-Life system. If that's so, it could be a huge let down for me and, I'm sure, a lot of the other fans.

The preview in this month's issue of Edge states, "The breeding side of the game, combining Mepians and Nightopians (and eventually raising a Superpian), will also feature, though there are no indications of the level of complexity."
I'm not sure if the names they're using there refer specifically to the new game, or if the terminology is just being used to quickly recap of what was available in the original.

For me, the footage looks very promising. The trailer placed a lot of emphasis on the Sega Superstars-style "in your face" sections viewed from behind, but the gameplay footage video gives the two views a bit more balance. I'd have to play it to comment on the new 3/4 view camera angle, but I agree with the statement that it seems slower than before, especially in those behind-the-back sections.

There's obviously no HUD at the moment, so we'll have to wait a bit longer to see how the score attack system will work. But you CAN hear that the sound effects increasing in pitch as NiGHTS flies through the rings, so hopefully that implies that links are in there to some extent... the question is whether the levels will be well-designed enough to allow for the scope for improvement as the original's infinite links.

Is it just me, or are all the screenshots new and taken using Cassini? I've never seen NiGHTS that smooth before...

In Edge's recent "File" reprint compilations, they reprinted the original Super Mario 64 review, and they mentioned that at the time its bright colours tested their aging image capture facilities. So perhaps it's just because the capabilities of screen capture systems have improved since 1996, so new screenshots are better than the ones released at the time? After all, look at how many people run their games consoles or VCRs into their PCs to capture videos for YouTube - you'd need a high-end PC to do that in 1996! So it's no surprise that still image capture abilities should have improved a bit too.

So I think it's more likely that they were grabbing the image from a Saturn rather than using an emulator.

Then again, I could just be spouting rubbish.

You should at least have waited until the next issue of the magazine was out before posting those scans. Diverting legitimate sales, and all that! I hope all of you who live in the UK and liked the article are actually going to buy it now.


Anyway, I liked the article. Not one of the very best Time Extends, in that it didn't give a lot of insightful new ways of looking at the game, but much more in-depth and welcome than NiGHTS' usual brief mentions in "top 10 overlooked games" lists. I liked the description of the "leap of faith" bit of Twin Seeds, too, and the description of "teasing" the game timer - although I was surprised that they didn't make the connection to Crazy Taxi (a game whose mechanics I think have a fair amount in common with NiGHTS). I always think that a good Time Extend will make you interested enough to check out an obscure game, or revisit something you haven't played for a while.

Also, I noticed that in this Time Extend and their mentions of JOD, they refer to it as "NiGHTS". But the issue also features a big article about Sega since they stopped making the Dreamcast[1], in which they refer to "NiGHTS". Stick to one of them, please!


[1] That's one of the things I love about Edge... as a print magazine, they can never be first with the news. But when they do publish an article on a news item (say, a console launch), they put it in context and go into much more depth than websites and other magazines. The Sega article this issue might not exactly be "news", but I haven't read many summaries of Sega's post-Dreamcast fortunes that were as interesting as this one.

I don't have the issue yet (it's officially out Thursday) but according to this post , issue 176 of UK games magazine Edge features a retrospective article on NiGHTS.

Now, anyone who reads Edge will know that the Time Extends are the most consistently interesting/most consistently pretentious (delete as applicable) part of the magazine. They're essentially retrospective articles on games - they usually go for the more overlooked titles in a series (the first one was on Zelda: Majora's Mask, rather than say Ocarina of Time or ALTTP), or ones which were obviously flawed but which nevertheless had insteresting and innovative features (like The Nomad Soul). Usually they focus on storytelling, but there have been some on more abstract "pure gameplay" games like Frequency.

There aren't many of them online, but for examples, here's one on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time:
http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2005...ce_of_persi.php

...and one on P.N.03:
http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2006/05/pn03.php

...and one on Beyond Good and Evil:
http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2005...nd_good_evi.php


So basically, one on NiGHTS Into Dreams should be very interesting to read!

Hi everybody! I registered for the original forum a couple of years ago, but I don't think I ever really posted... hopefully the new game will get me a bit more active in the community!

Had NiGHTS and Christmas NiGHTS since I got my Saturn for Christmas '98 (though I first heard about it in Sonic the Comic in '96 - first saw TRiPPY's art in STC, too!), and I've been playing it fairly regularly ever since. I like it mainly because of its score attack gameplay - I'm on Scoreattack.net under the highly imaginative username of Nick R. I wrote a review of the game several years ago, and though I think my writing has improved a bit since then, it still basically reflects what I think of it.

My thoughts on the sequel? Based on what we know so far, I'm in favour. Things are looking pretty positive - certainly more positive than our first looks at, say, Shadow the Hedgehog. And whatever happens, I'll always be able to go back to the original - I mean, The Matrix Revolutions didn't ruin the first one did it?

As I'm into score and time attacking, I'm on Cyberscore as Sonic Singularity, which is also my GameFAQs username. Some of you might know me from the Mobius Forum or the Sonic the Comic Yahoo Group, where I got by my real name, Nick Rollins. I also frequent Rllmukforum. I have a DeviantArt page too.

I have a Wikipedia user page - I've contributed a lot to the NiGHTS article, and recently I've been trying to organise the flood of new additions to the articles on both that and its sequel, adding references to news items for example. At the moment I'm also involved with a discussion... about whether Wikipedia should use NiGHTS (yay!) or NiGHTS (boo!) in its articles.

There was an issue of Edge that was a retrospect of games from years ago, and they touched in on the original game, but that's all I've seen of NiGHTS anywhere so far, other than internet.

The Edge special ("File") reprinted the game's original review, with a couple of retrospective sentences in the margin (nothing much). They'd reprinted that review before, in their "100 Most Significant Reviews from the first 100 issues" special from 2001, though that version was condensed a bit and the layout was changed to fit Edge's design at the time (the reprints in "File" are just direct scans of the original issues).

Hi everyone, by the way.