Various Things

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.