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No, this is probably not what you're thinking about. I'm not going to talk about the death of games consoles and how they can be resurrected when you clear the dust from the shelf (could be my next topic!) - I'm going to talk about dying in a game, and then taking control of the ghost of the deceased. What if when you're at the last level against Liquid Snake, you get a bullet to the head, fall to the floor dead, but you can still be a ghost and kill Liquid, or at the least, fly around like a little Casper. What if when the gangster beats you to death with your own shoes, you can ressurrect and give him a wedgy. That would be a decent feature and I would buy more games, had this feature been available. LAD (Life After Death) would open up an intirely new realm of gaming, which would be revolutionary in it's own right. I have an idea that you should be able to toggle whether you want "Ghost Mode" enabled or not, so no type of gamer is annoyed. LAD has been partially achieved already.
Unreal Tournament is a classic game, probably the best online shooter ever on the PC, heck, on any console or computer. When you are killed in UT, you simply see your figure on the ground, but you can zoom out slightly. Since the days of UT, Infogrammes have released "Tactical Ops", the add-on to UT. TO is intended for online play, but you can pit off against bots offline. When you die on this game, you switch to the "ghost cam", where you can move around and survey the carnage - TO is now on my "to get" list in terms of games. Quake 3 has incorporated the "When you are killed, you simply see your figure on the ground, but you can zoom out slightly" theory with their latest titles, and even before UT was released. However, what problems would LAD present?
LAD would bore a lot of gamers, as, unless you're a purist, you won't be whizzing around the snowfield or Castlekeep for 20 minutes will you? It's more likely that you'd have a 2 minute look and then re-load or restart the game or turn it off. The younger gamers would be bored by it, unless they're 2 or 3, where they'd be occupied for hours by it. I think that older gamers would appreciate it more than the younger gamer. Older gamers tend to recognise the effort that actually went into the games, where younger games just never really think about how many man-hours of programming were poured into it. God created the world in 7 days you know! "Ghost Mode" would also eat up a lot of memory of CD's (currently), either making the games shorter, or expandint to a 2-disc set, which puts a lot of people off, for no apparent reason. The consoles will kick this in the rear, as they will be high-density discs. In retrospect, LAD may not be a good idea at all, when all of the technicalities are balanced out.
To me, LAD is an exciting prospect, but everything has a price and LAD may not be worth the almighty price that developers would have to pay. Every minute of every hour of every day, there is something new being though up. As the clock ticks, new ideas will be though of to battle all of the aforementioned problems, so it's possibly that LAD may come one day, but I can't see it in the foreseeable future.
> Hmm, life after death. Well on most games it seems to exist- mulitplayer on
> Goldeneye. You die you, come back!!
Well, that's true, but it's not LAD, it's simply known as "Respawn", a tactic used in many online games and became famous after Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 became mainstream. There are games such as Rainbox Six and Swat 3 that bear a "No-Respawn" policy, to make it more realistic - one gunshot and you're dead, permanently.
LAD hasn't been done in many games, but the elite few have had the LAD treatment. As I said before, it's an exciting prospect but would take a hell of a lot of committment.
Thanks for all the replies!
I can just about imagine meating Greg from CBFD in real life after dying of old age!