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I was mistakenly referring to this preview, specifically the part about how half of the Japanese script was cut for its original localization and that most of that will be coming back. So not they're not really doing a retranslation so much as bringing back previously unseen dialogue.

Games For Windows Magazine's latest podcast is covering this story -- interesting and in-depth commentary. 1UP Coverage: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155898 Actual Podcast Download: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3148397

Games For Windows Magazine's latest podcast is covering this story -- interesting and in-depth commentary. 1UP Coverage: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155898 Actual Podcast Download: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3148397

"This game seems to be, quite literally, preaching hatred."

I don't know much about the game content but I do have some insight on the motivation behind it. A few months ago I read (and blogged about) an article on religion and gaming. I found one of the quotes by Troy Lyndon, CEO of Left Behind Games, very hateful and disturbing:

"The world is set in the End Times, and in the single-player game you're fighting the forces of the Antichrist. But in multiplayer mode, you can play the other side; thus, we really have something for everyone."

You can play as a Christian or you can play as someone who is the very embodiment of evil. Apparently mankind can be split cleanly into these two groups. How diplomatic.

I agree with you entirely, mwvdlee. From concept to fruition this is a game that acknowledges one specific point of view and preaches hatred toward those who do not share it.

These sort of ads are making me cynical. I sent the following email to a mate of mine:


http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=5809893

Does a chick this hot really have a blog on a games site or is this some bullshit viral marketing ploy.


To which he replied:


NO SHIT, this is quite funny that you send me this today! quinn just showed me this girls photos on a dating stie yesterday and said that no one ever gets a reply from her. Shes probably dead and so lost all rights to her images, well thats a bit dark. Man she's hot other wise.....might send into her add lol


IANAL but isn't it illegal intentionally mislead people with advertising?

A year ago, I would have agreed completely with your assessment that Bloggers != Consumers.

Nowadays, I'm not so sure.

When you have a random 13-year-old kid blogging how much he loves the Wii on a site like 1UP.com, you know that blogging isn't just something done by educated adults with Internet connections anymore. If we were to go to a random classroom of middle-school students, and asked how many of them read or posted in blogs/forums/etc. on the Internet, I have a feeling the percentage would be rather shocking.

That said, whether or not this study has any merit is still hard to say. What sites were they looking at? What kind of demographics are on those sites? I'd associate bloggers/posters on 1UP.com and GameFAQs to be a lot closer to the average consumer than, say, the posters here on Slashdot.

A year ago, I would have agreed completely with your assessment that Bloggers != Consumers.

Nowadays, I'm not so sure.

When you have a random 13-year-old kid blogging how much he loves the Wii on a site like 1UP.com, you know that blogging isn't just something done by educated adults with Internet connections anymore. If we were to go to a random classroom of middle-school students, and asked how many of them read or posted in blogs/forums/etc. on the Internet, I have a feeling the percentage would be rather shocking.

That said, whether or not this study has any merit is still hard to say. What sites were they looking at? What kind of demographics are on those sites? I'd associate bloggers/posters on 1UP.com and GameFAQs to be a lot closer to the average consumer than, say, the posters here on Slashdot.

1up did: http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3155665

1up doesn't have its GameCube review up yet, but there is a fairly extensive preview of the game on that system.

I honestly can't imagine playing it without the Wiimote, though. Slashy slashy!

According to 1up.com counting first party sales and accessories, Nintendo's Wii became a $190M business in just one week. Sadly, I do not think that accounts for costs of production and who knows what kind of development costs. Although I can't find any official numbers elsewhere, 2006 revenue for Nintendo was $4.6 Billion dollars, an increase. That doesn't say much about net income or loss, but it does give an interesting prespective on the 190M.

Interesting aside, Zelda sold over 454,000 copies. I wonder how many people want to buy the game and got (or are trying to get) as sort-of an afterthought, something to play it on. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the gamecube version comes out.

Nintendo's site lists Dance Factory as an upcoming title for the Wii.

http://wii.nintendo.com/software_index.jsp

Hopefully it is more than just a port of the poor PS2 title: http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3153434&did=1

Then again Microsoft's numbers are picking up in preperation for Blue Dragon, only a couple monthes ago they were barely breaking 1K units. However now it's much more.

not the slashdot blurb but still what i was looking for clicky

I am the submitter and I must apologise. I had actually submitted an article from 1up.com which said

"it's become apparent that 1080i is currently unsupported, at least by the machine's many launch games, as 1080i-only HDTV sets are forced to experience the visuals at 480p, rather than scaling to an HD resolution of 720p."

I had missed the IGN link in the text and thus missed the chance to get the correct information from the original story. I must be more careful in the future and fact-check as well as preview before I submit...

Remember a while back all the hubbub around a couple of the OPM editors revealing in their blogs that they likely will get an xbox 360 instead of a playstation? I wonder if this had anything to do with the decision to end OPM.

So ultimately, I can't justify it. $600 is a lot of money, especially when I can get what--for me at least--will be a very similar experience for $400. I would like to own a PS3, and I hope that the price drops soon so I can consider it. But until then, this Official PlayStation Magazine editor will have to join the dark side.

This article is utterly useless, like pretty much anything 1up does.

However - the Wii and PS3 dinosaur renders, like http://www.1up.com/media?id=3087879 are awesomely cute and well worth your time to view. Kudos to the artist.

I'm interested, how big is Japan in the big picture? First or Second? We all know (if even just by how the companies treat them) that Europe is third most important. Anywhere other than North America, Japan, or Europe is rarely even heard in the news. But is Japan the bigger battlefield than the US? If we look at the launch numbers, Sony and Nintendo are both putting more emphasis on the US. Sony's US Launch day is scheduled to have 400,000 PS3 units, about 4x the number of their Japanese launch. Nintendo is planning a US launch day of 1,000,000 Wii units. Meanwhile I can't even find Nintendo's Japan launch day units; they don't even release in Japan until December, after the November US launch. So, the companies seem to indicate that in the big picture, the US is the bigger prize. Launching two days apart, with more units (assumed for Wii Japan) will make a much more useful comparison than a 23-day apart Japan launch with relativly fewer units.

It may also be interesting to see how Sony's launch titles did, since they need games and accessories to pull up the difference. Some of the games present on Sony's Japan launch list also appear on the Wii's. Depending on quantities of these sold compared to the number of units sold in proportion to other games per unit sold may tell us if there are customers prepared to buy the Wii as well and plan on buying those games for the Wii instead. While it would have to be a large difference to overcome the large margin of error such a comparison welcomes, it may still provide some insite into the minds of the buyers and give us a rough idea how the big US launch will go for Sony or Nintendo.

Some day, some day...The Nintendo ON - so hottttttttttt.... better quality copies here.

I think the second page of the article is definitely the more interesting of the two: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3 155102. Here they give the reasons why this launch's similarities aren't all positives. The PS2 may have been on ebay for $600, but the PS3 is coming from retail stores at MSRP of $600. That's a big difference.

Dude, apparently 1up completely agrees with me. http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3155102 It's on the front page now...

For me it's all about the price

On top of that, it's clocked at somewhere between 800 MHz and 1 Ghz...so saying it's 3-4x more powerful than Gekko is about right, and probably conservative. I'm sure the GPU is better than the GC's by about that amount.

Moore's Law called, and it wants its vague 10x improvement over five years back. Ignoring the massive, law-confounding improvements in processor and GPU designs over those years, obviously.

In a predictable manner, I'll get modded down for this - but if you buy a Wii, you have to realise your money's going towards a rather spendidly interesting new controller. And Nintendo's profits - this ain't a loss-leader. The console itself is seriously downgraded, and frankly a bit naff compared with what could have been possible if the budget was aimed solely at it.

And Nintendo? Yes, I know you're (quite sensibly) avoiding the minuscule HDTV market, but some anti-aliasing would have been nice? Running at a low resolution means the jaggies become painfully obvious.

(To the moderators, again - the game might be wonderful, but if you're spending 70 blissful hours marred only by the digital equivalent of Vaseline smeared over the screen, wouldn't you have preferred it if Nintendo had reduced their profit on the console by, say, $20 - and gave you much clearer graphics in the process? The art looks great, the GPU ... doesn't.)

It looks like Link got himself a weird sort of Light Cycle!

But yeah, the 360 is doomed in Japan. Sure MS was touting the Blue Dragon 360 package sellout, but they only made a thousand of them.

Last week they sold 22,380 PS2's in Japan to Xbox 360s 1,287. (source)

So while selling an extra thousand 360s is impressive for Microsoft, it's garbage for the market. Hell, most weeks there are more GBA new releases than Xbox in Japan.

Blue Dragon Bundle? PFfffffffffft No one is ever going to buy a 360 in Japan. The PS3 will be outselling the 360 in Japan as soon as Sony ships enough of them there. I don't have any hard numbers for figures, but the 360 will certainly be behind the Wii in Japan at the moment of the Wii's launch, and the same might be true for the PS3 if Sony releases enough of them. I would be willing to bet that the PS2 continues to outsell the 360 in Japan for another 2 years.

Looks like the reviews are giving it pretty good marks. Though the screenshots look pretty pedestrian compared to most games. Maybe the Sims crowd will like it.

Fight over virtual sword from Legend of Mir 3 ends in jail time.

So you have 4 Japanese RPGs. Congratulations. Also, I like how you sneak some extra companies in at the end to try and strengthen your argument. You almost had me. Except oh wait we're talking about RPGs.

My original subject was "RPG support on 360 steadily getting better". I was comparing it to the last Xbox generation. Go to GameSpot and browse for all the Xbox RPGs and sort them by release date. You'll see that support was pitiful. First RPG for the system was Morrowind, which came out over 6 months since the Xbox first came out. The next notable RPG for the system, which was Knights of the Old Republic, didn't come out till a YEAR LATER. You'll also see a distinct lack of J-RPGs of any kind. Phantasy Star Online only sort of counts, since it was a port (came out for the Dreamcast and GameCube). There are a couple of notable RPGs that came on the scene later, such as Fable and Jade Empire, but they didn't come out till far later (2004, even 2005). And they're western-style RPGs. So, if I had to summarize, Japanese RPG support on the Xbox was pretty much close to zero.

The 4 Japanese RPGs I mentioned for the 360 is a huge increase percentage-wise, obviously. And I didn't mention the western-style RPGs coming out for the system, since that wasn't my point (you can Google if you want to read more about them). (I also forgot to mention FFXI, but that shouldn't count since it's also a port, much like PSO was) Maybe you got confused, I'm not trying to compare J-RPG support from the 360 to the PS2, and say that's even remotely close. That'd be obviously stupid.

My gut feel (sic) is that there will be a lot of disgruntled wanna-be PS3 owners, (sic) who didn't get a chance to buy the console. (Remember, it is in EXTREMELY short supply, especially in Japan) Many of them will opt for a Wii, although there are probably a number of Sakaguchi fans that will opt for a 360 just to check out his latest creation. (FYI, Sakaguchi = creator of Final Fantasy, head of Mistwalker Studios)

My gut feeling is that you're full of crap. Speculation is great, but it helps to have some evidence to back up your assertions. You have none.

Well, I was just speculating. I assumed that you did some research on the topic, or had some more knowledge of the industry, but apparently you haven't. So here I go.

Sakaguchi is a big deal. Here's the Wikipedia link for Sakaguchi-san. He's got a pretty impressive list of games there. Now, his latest creation, Blue Dragon, sports a couple of other big names. Ever heard of Akira Toriyama? He was responsible for developing the mega-popular Dragon Ball manga and anime. He's also the character designer for the extremely popular Dragon Quest series, as well as the cult-classic Chrono Trigger. Now, if that weren't enough, doing the music for the game is the ever popular Nobuo Uematsu. He did the music for many of the Final Fantasy games, as well as Chrono Trigger.

As you can imagine, all these guys have lots of fans. At the recent Tokyo Game Show, there were long lines for 360 RPGs. That actually surprised me at first, seeing how Japanese support for the 360 is currently so pitiful. But it makes sense. Why would Japanese gamers buy a console that doesn't have the type of games that they like? But once you bring in those titles, then that changes things.

Now, obviously big

It sure sounds like fud. Games editors are starting to rave about the thing now they're getting to play around with it.

The thing that struck me as most interesting about this is that Achievements (and the Gamerscore associated with them) have become a currency... one just as valuable as virtual currency in MMOs, and one some people might be willing to pay real dollars for.

I know "old news" posts are annoying...but I think 3 weeks is enough to warrant pointing out. Snail mail puts that kind of travel time to shame.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3153593
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1099177

Subjective reports from the Tokyo Game Show say yes it is. I watched a feature produced by the 1up.com site about the TGS and they were raving about the graphical performance of titles like Motorstorm & Virtua Fighter, bandying words around like 60fps, "arcade perfect" etc. The long and short of it was in their opinion the PS3 was graphically far more impressive than the 360.

Whether Oblivion is will be another matter. Somehow I doubt it will look much different from the existing versions.

The Slashdot summary forgot to mention that Marvel Universe Online is PC and 360 both.

Here's a 1up article about it.

And I'm going to repeat a question I asked earlier on, do you have a source for that info? The only info I have so far comes from 1up.com and it says :

The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.

If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?

The availability of all cars by winning races is as much a rumor as the need to buy them all so far.

Do you have a source for that? The only source so far that I have for this case comes from 1up.com and says :

The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.

If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?

Wii to be region-free

This thing is starting to look like it has all the ingredients to be a big success.

I'm watching the semi-live blog at Joystiq.com, and it seems that what has been announced in Japan negates what this article states. They are saying a launch date of December 2nd, price of 25,000 yen (includes tax), and no Wii Sports pack-in. Is this the same Nintendo event that 1UP.com was talking about a few weeks ago?

Actually, the dev kits currently out don't even have full hardware support. There's minimal networking support, the controllers are nowhere near final (no tilt, no final design...) It's been rumored that the GPU on the most recent dev kits are at only 80% the speed the final PS3 (which has been dropped again)...
I want to see EVERY console do well, for the greater good (in innovation, consumer costs, FUN!) that competition brings, so the fact that SONY is bunging this up as badly as they are is only depressing.......I mean come on, who wouldn't want to play Madden with 6 of your buds by your side?!?!?

Red Steel has implemented full "real" sword fighting on the latest builds and managing the screen has been greatly improved; you can not judge an early build of a game on the polish of the control mechanism because they will continue to improve in any good game, this is something that bloggers (and fanboys) don't seem to get.

Red Steel was the first official Wii titel that we got to see, so I would have expected that they've shown us the best they have, if however *that* was the best they have, poor Nintendo. Now of course they can polish and improve the titel and maybe they will end up with something good, but so far I prefer to judge the games but what they are, not by what they might have been and so far Wii just couldn't deliever much of the initial hype.

Can I get a link to at least 10 articles (you did say most didn't you?) complaining about the Wii controller?

You can basically pick whatever hands on review you want, most of them have quite some negatives in it, some examples Heise, 1up and Kikizo. Some quotes "Using the controller with the bow & arrow for example doesn't make things much easier than using a standard controller,", "For a system whose agenda is to be more accessible, Wii sure makes Zelda complicated.". Now of course that doesn't mean that Wii will flop, but it means that programming for the Wiimote is hard if even Nintendo can't get it right for its most prominent launch title, for third party titles that could mean that the results are devestating.

No, the main thing that Nintendo has going with the Wii is that it is a unique product in a market full of generic products;

Uniqueness doesn't sell consoles, good games do. If Wiimote helps Nintendo to create better games, so be it, but there is still huge risk that plenty of games on Wii will turn out to look much worse and control much worse then on PS3 or XBox360, since they are just so many ways to use the Wiimote in a shitty way (see Tony Hawk...).

You apparently missed where Microsoft lied to everyone... http://1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3153167

It sounds like our experiences in PC gaming differ. To be honest I haven't played a PC game in the last two or three years. However all of the issues I mentioned were problems I did actually face that turned me away from PCs as a gaming platform. Being that I haven't gamed on a PC in years the rig I have NOW is about that old and would only be good for my day to day non-gaming tasks... that 2nd rig that I would buy would have to be my gaming machine.

I do frequently buy games the day they come out. I've been anticipating a games release, picked them up at EB or wherever when they first came out only to get through the install and find that there was some bug that made the game not run on my machine due to a hardware incompatability. The store wont take it back because it's open software and I basically have to sit on my hands until the developer gets around to patching it. (it's happened to me more then once) The real kick in the nuts is if the price drops or a sale happens before the patch comes out.

As for tweaking the controls, I loath playing games with a keyboard and mouse, using a gamepad or other controller for PC gaming is no big deal but in my experience games rarely have default controls for gamepads and sometimes you'll have to do some digging to find the right ini to edit which can be even more painful if you're trying to use analog controls. If you do it a lot you get better at it, if you only play one or two games you don't have to set things up that often. but I play A LOT of games, I rarely watch TV or Movies, I game. The hardest part of "installing" a console game is removing the plastic wrapper from the case.

Call me lazy but the added cost and hassle just wasn't worth it to me. IMO PCs offer 2 distinct advantages 1.Better graphics (this gab narrows and widens all the time and depends on hardware) and 2. user mods.
Graphically: PCs will almost always have the edge when compairing a console to bleeding edge PC hardware, however compairing cross platoform with moderatly priced PC I find the difference to be more then forgivable considering the difference in price. For instance Oblivion on a mid-high range PC is only moderatly superior then the Xbox 360 counterpart, even the Xbox 1 version of Spliter Cell Chaos Theory looked as good as the PC version (abeit lower res). As someone who typically plays through a game and then shelves it and plays something new stuff like user mods don't really interest me. I get bored with games too fast, probably why I never got into MMOs and why graphical increases down the road don't do much for me since I've already finished with the game and moved on to new games.

I should add that i got this from the 1up boards.

Before Lionhead was bought by Microsoft

GSUK: There seems to be a backlash mounting against the PlayStation 3, while the Wii seems to be going from strength to strength. How do you think the next-gen console war is going to stack up?

PM: Well, I have been through console wars before, but this one strikes me as particularly interesting. Nintendo has done a great job of convincing us that next gen is about game play rather than high-tech specs. Microsoft has done an incredible job of expanding games online and making them more mass market. Sony, in my view, seems it has been rather more lazy with their message. How all this pans out really depends on one thing and that is the brilliance of the titles that appear on each platform over the next two to three years. Marketing the hardware is nothing compared to the games that run on it, so I expect the system with the greatest games on it to end up on top.

GSUK: Black & White was hugely innovative on its release, and its gestured command system has ironically been matched by the Wii. How important is innovation in interface design to you?

PM: Without any doubt the biggest revolution we will see in games will be to do with what the player holds and how they control a game. I can see the joypad continuing to evolve over the next generation, and this will result in completely new games concepts.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6155521.html/

After Microsoft bought Lionhead
LGC 2006: Molyneux Not Sold on Wii-type Controls
Motion-sensing needs to be used in not-so-obvious ways.
by Luke Smith, 08/22/2006

11 of 15 users recommend this story.
Without specifically taking aim at Nintendo's Wii, designer Peter Molyneux was critical of motion-sensing control schemes at his Combat in Games speech in Leipzig, Germany. Molyneux, excited at first by the prospect of motion-sensing controls mimicking in-game action, has since seemed to sour on the idea: "I realized, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I actually looked really stupid." Molyneux continued, concerned with the controls causing fatigue, "Even with nothing in my hand, I get tired very, very quickly."
Still, the Fable 2 architect isn't dismissing the control scheme: "I think motion-sensitivity is very, very useful, but I think the obvious way of doing it -- unless you're dealing with a 15 to 20 minute experience at most of actually being hugely physical -- is not where the opportunity lies here."

Where does the opportunity rest in motion-sensing controls? Not with obvious implementations, Molyneux maintains. He points at the way the Nintendo DS uses the stylus: "What I've found really fascinating is not using it to scribble with, but using it in a very clever, innovational way." Molyneux suggested that innovation in motion-sensing will have to stretch beyond the replication of sword-swinging motions to break new ground.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3153037/

1up.com had a week long look (like the Okami story also posted today) at Q Entertainment earlier this summer: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3152290&did=3

If you live in Japan, that one will hit this year.

FUD, FUD, FUD. I'm not a Mac user and even I found it trivially easy to find info on this.

• http://forum.onmac.net/archive/index.php/t-875.htm l: "Just bought the game today, runs great! I've got it running in the higher range for graphics ect. also. MacBook Pro 2.16GHz 100GB 7200rpm 1GB RAM ATI x1600 Overclocked to 430/470"; "With the exception of any shadowing effects, all effects maxed, resolution set to 1280 720, x1600 OC'd to 470/470, Bloom Lighting I am able to acheive 40 FPS out in the world and 60 SOLID FPS when inside a dungeon or building."
• http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3149424
• http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=21912 4
• http://digg.com/gaming_news/Video_of_Elder_Scrolls _IV:_Oblivion_running_on_a_Macbook_Pro

Sony made this distinction, to a large extent, not so much through original design or perspective or technology as through psychology. Their message: videogames are childish, uncool garbage. What we have to offer, it's barely even videogames. It's more like movies, or some other kind of entertainment. They reinforced the premise by generally refusing "old fashioned" 2D games on their systems, unless explicitly labeled as a retro package; through putting a heavy emphasis on "mature"-themed games, and by funneling Sony's limitless funds into years of blanket advertising - rarely showing actual game footage if CG was available, emphasizing the cinematic and familiar. The implication was, the less videogames in any sense resembled what you and I think of as videogames, the better. -- What's Wrong With Console Design?

Well, this is something that goes along with another quote I read recently:

Are you still dicking around with lovingly detailed 2D sprites? Enormous Gouraud shaded triangles are the wave of the future! Glazed, emotionless eyes! Hair that's been hacked out of stone! Giant 3D booger men in diapers are what today's gamers want, and we'll give you the tools to craft those horrendously ugly damn creatures. Someone perfect time travel already so we can just bomb 1994. -- Worst Video Game Ads comments

This is why I get irritated whenever anyone says Nintendo censors (oh they do, and in very irritating ways) and Sony doesn't. Sony loves to censor, and they have from the beginning, but they are good at projecting an image, I'll give them that. You suck, Sony!

Here's the first part of the feature:

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3149992/

For: Graphics Software
From: Wavefront GameWare
Appeared in: EGM, December 1994

Are you still dicking around with lovingly detailed 2D sprites? Enormous Gouraud shaded triangles are the wave of the future! Glazed, emotionless eyes! Hair that's been hacked out of stone! Giant 3D booger men in diapers are what today's gamers want, and we'll give you the tools to craft those horrendously ugly damn creatures.

Someone perfect time travel already so we can just bomb 1994. -- from More Worst Videogame Ads, Actual Ad

It's only a passing mention in the article, but Atari Jaguar enclosures are now used for dental camera systems?! That (PDF) is awesome.