Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.
This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?
To add to this: “level design” typically covers things like the design of paths through the level (both physically and plot/objectives) and visibility of paths affecting player thinking and choices (ie making it clear to the player how to progress, not get lost). These are “big scale” things, not fine detail.
“Gameplay design” typically covers things like movement, interaction and item/skill progression mechanics. The are “small scale” (or for inventories & skill trees: “no physical scale”) things.
In practice the two terms do often overlap quite a bit, so you can argue basically anything to be in either category.
I just finished the last level of Perfect Dark (released in 2000 for N64). The hardest part was right at the end (boss fight with rockets being fired at you, one hit and you’re dead) and there are no checkpoints. I repeated this same level so many times and had to read a walkthrough in the end – it turns out I was stuck at a red herring.
Finally did this a week or so back, I had one of the original accounts (username login, not email). Made me feel like shit and manipulated, all to make Microsoft happier.
This would be a good demoscene category. Sadly it looks like pouet.net doesn’t have a “platform” category for raw x86 (I think some of the DOS entries will be this, but not all) and I only saw one entry for x86.
At the end of the day: I think MS-DOS is a more attractive target than raw x86. It does a few things for you, but then mostly gets out of the way if you don’t want to use its features, and has better accessibility (thanks to DOSBOX) for most users.
A few years back I tried playing the original Halo 1. It gave me headaches and my brain simply couldn’t enjoy it.
On a similar note: a lot of modern games using Unity or Unreal seem to be magnets for mouse delay and filtering; which makes me very uncomfortable when playing. Those that have bought Killer Frequency: does it have any of this?