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Citation please? because I thought we were all given the reason for MSFT pushing the POS Kinect when the patent came out showing they had filed a patent on charging by the head for PPV movies. Of course we have all seen how well it works with gameplay and its pretty much universally hated for anything other than dancing games.

To me the Kinect is the perfect example of why Ballmer should have been axed half a decade ago, come up with a DUMB idea to make money, refuse to accept its a dumb idea, and spend a shitload of money trying to push said dumb idea even when everyone has told you how fucking dumb it is.

Uhhh it'll be a flop anyhow not because of the DRM, but because they are releasing a console with shittier specs than the other guy for $500 in a down economy. I'm sorry but that is fucking RETARDED, and if the reports are true that a LOT of that extra cost is forcing everyone to take the fucking Kinect, which NOBODY liked the God damned Kinect so you have saddled your console with a higher price tag to push shit your customers never liked? Well i'm sorry but you deserve to lose for being stupid.

Hell the Kinect is so damned bad the fans of Angry Joe keeping voting for Kinect games for him to play just because they know they'll be fucking awful and love to see Joe flip his shit trying to fight the damned Kinect. If you haven't seen Joe play Steel Battalion you really need to watch, he just fights and struggles against the kinect until he is just a ball of pissed off fury.

Mark my words Kinect will go down like the NES glove or the Sega bazooka in the "man that was stupid" pile, but not until MSFT keeps flogging the dead horse long past anyone caring, like how they cranked out Zunes long after people gave a shit.

The above is False. Hold your words until you use the Kinect 2.0. It's a long shot from the 1st version. Motion and voice controls are the peak of the casual gaming market and I think you'll see soon enough what will happen.

Uhhh it'll be a flop anyhow not because of the DRM, but because they are releasing a console with shittier specs than the other guy for $500 in a down economy. I'm sorry but that is fucking RETARDED, and if the reports are true that a LOT of that extra cost is forcing everyone to take the fucking Kinect, which NOBODY liked the God damned Kinect so you have saddled your console with a higher price tag to push shit your customers never liked? Well i'm sorry but you deserve to lose for being stupid.

Hell the Kinect is so damned bad the fans of Angry Joe keeping voting for Kinect games for him to play just because they know they'll be fucking awful and love to see Joe flip his shit trying to fight the damned Kinect. If you haven't seen Joe play Steel Battalion you really need to watch, he just fights and struggles against the kinect until he is just a ball of pissed off fury.

Mark my words Kinect will go down like the NES glove or the Sega bazooka in the "man that was stupid" pile, but not until MSFT keeps flogging the dead horse long past anyone caring, like how they cranked out Zunes long after people gave a shit.

If you are over scrolling then blame the GUI friend, because they should have set the scroll sensitivity correctly. Personally I use this as one of the gauges of whether a title is good or not, a good GUI should easily allow you to do the actions you are required to perform in the heat of battle while a bad interface design will leave your frustrated and pissed.

For an example of a bad user interface design please watch this Angry Joe review and watch how many times he says things like "WTF? Stop...stop it!" because he can't get the UI to perform the action he requires to play the game.

In the end if you want more buttons? That's fine and dandy, plenty of gamer mice out there with up to a dozen buttons on them. But these basic actions like switching weapons have been done correctly in so many games over the years that frankly there is no excuse for getting it wrong. If you want to try a game that will frustrate the shit out of you try Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty which is a damned shame because the premise (Churchill dies in a 29 and America's isolationism lets the Nazis take Russia and then come after the USA in the 50s) is interesting and the graphics are good, but the game is totally broken by a truly horrible interface that will have you struggling to climb ladders and perform other basic actions. The fact that its an X360 port with hard coded buttons just makes it worse but the unresponsive UI took what could have been a great game and shat all over it, because from the reviews the X360 had the same interface issues.

Actually the problem is the director of Avatar said 3D is fucking pointless and we should go to 60FPS instead. When the ONE director who everyone claims "got it right" says its shit? you are in serious trouble. look up Cameron on 3D and you'll find the interview, he wasn't nice at all about it.

Oh and I've found talking to my customers that around 40% of them can't watch 3D at all because it gives them headaches. in my own family 3 out of 5 can't watch 3D because of headaches. that means 1.-If there is only the 3D version playing we don't go and 2.-No 3D TV since the whole point of TV is to be able to enjoy it as a family which you can't if 3 out of 5 can't watch it.

So until we get Leia style holograms they can just give it up, it'll just be a fad. Its just not a nice experience for way too many people, as Angry Joe points out, we are just sick of it, just as we got sick of it in the 50s, 70s, and 90s.

First of all, you might as well drop the sports games as I know sports nuts and they wouldn't give a shit if you put out the same game every year just as long as you have the updated rosters. hell i know one with a standing order at gamestop, they charge his CC and have the latest Madden and MLB games delivered to his door on release day, he never even bothers with reviews because ALL he cares about are the rosters.

The same could probably said for the Call of Honor: Gears of Killzone as again that is a niche that doesn't care about anything but the latest MP maps, again you can just crank out the same product as long as it has new MP maps they'd be just as happy. try logging into any of the older versions when a new one comes out and they quickly become ghost towns, its strictly about new MP maps.

The thing you have to give valve credit for is they are one of the few developers where their games actually have legs. Just for shits and giggles i logged into HL 1 DM and was dodging rockets in a fully loaded server in seconds, whereas I did the same thing with Bioshock II which isn't even half as old and gave up after 20 minutes because there were only 2 people in the entire game.

So to me a lot of that list is like fast food, sure it sells but how many will even remember it in a year? off that list i'd say Skyrim, Batman aaaand...that's about it. Ubisoft has gotten so nasty with the DRM that after the buzz wears off they have a hard time selling them while the dancing games, at least from what I've seen, are only played until the next new thing comes out. i have to wonder if like the music games that it won't be a fad that suddenly dies hard. Valve can sell there games year after year because they have real legs so I have to wonder who makes more money overall. Personally I'd love to see the figures on how many copies of HL1 and 2 they have sold since release, i bet the money they are getting on them even now is just crazy for older games.

As far as Kinect goes I don't own an X360 so i can't say for sure but the one thing i hear4 reviewers bitching about over and over is how inconsistent it is, that one time a move works perfectly and the next time the same move fails horribly. For an example of what i'm talking about check out these reviews from Angry Joe where it pretty much comes down to Kinect problems ruining the games. Personally other than the dancing games i really don't see what the problem with controllers was that the Kinect was supposed to solve, other than "We need something like the Wii!" which is ironic because most folks i know with a Wii break it out a couple of times a year when a big Nintendo release hits and then back into the closet it goes.

First of all, you might as well drop the sports games as I know sports nuts and they wouldn't give a shit if you put out the same game every year just as long as you have the updated rosters. hell i know one with a standing order at gamestop, they charge his CC and have the latest Madden and MLB games delivered to his door on release day, he never even bothers with reviews because ALL he cares about are the rosters.

The same could probably said for the Call of Honor: Gears of Killzone as again that is a niche that doesn't care about anything but the latest MP maps, again you can just crank out the same product as long as it has new MP maps they'd be just as happy. try logging into any of the older versions when a new one comes out and they quickly become ghost towns, its strictly about new MP maps.

The thing you have to give valve credit for is they are one of the few developers where their games actually have legs. Just for shits and giggles i logged into HL 1 DM and was dodging rockets in a fully loaded server in seconds, whereas I did the same thing with Bioshock II which isn't even half as old and gave up after 20 minutes because there were only 2 people in the entire game.

So to me a lot of that list is like fast food, sure it sells but how many will even remember it in a year? off that list i'd say Skyrim, Batman aaaand...that's about it. Ubisoft has gotten so nasty with the DRM that after the buzz wears off they have a hard time selling them while the dancing games, at least from what I've seen, are only played until the next new thing comes out. i have to wonder if like the music games that it won't be a fad that suddenly dies hard. Valve can sell there games year after year because they have real legs so I have to wonder who makes more money overall. Personally I'd love to see the figures on how many copies of HL1 and 2 they have sold since release, i bet the money they are getting on them even now is just crazy for older games.

As far as Kinect goes I don't own an X360 so i can't say for sure but the one thing i hear4 reviewers bitching about over and over is how inconsistent it is, that one time a move works perfectly and the next time the same move fails horribly. For an example of what i'm talking about check out these reviews from Angry Joe where it pretty much comes down to Kinect problems ruining the games. Personally other than the dancing games i really don't see what the problem with controllers was that the Kinect was supposed to solve, other than "We need something like the Wii!" which is ironic because most folks i know with a Wii break it out a couple of times a year when a big Nintendo release hits and then back into the closet it goes.

To quote Angry Joe in his review of Sacred II its all about the loot. The fun thing about hack and slash is being a total loot whore and trying to find the best loot. Since drops are random for the most part in most games it can take some work to get the loot but once you have some killer loot it can kick some ass.

Oh yeah, also, historically speaking, we're paying much less for a new game than we used to be. Ditto consoles.

According to The Inflation Calculator:

Atari 2600 - $199 in 1977 - $707 today (in 2010 dollars, anyway)
Intellivision - $299 in 1979 - $886 today
NES - $199 in 1985 (US release) - $398 today
PC Engine/TG-16 - $249 in 1989 - $432 today

Games were also pretty expensive. I didn't actually buy my own games until the NES-era (and I'm having a hard time finding historical retail prices on video game cartridges), but even then, a new game was somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 back then, which would translate to $100 today. And look at how little you got for it in the case of a lot of games! I paid the equivalent of $100 for Mario Bros. 2 and beat it in a day. Ditto Mega Man 2 and 3. Ditto a lot of games.

I think many of us are more cognizant of how much were paying for games today because we're not using birthday money and allowance to buy them anymore, coupled with the fact that it's harder and harder to justify the expense with the economy being rough like it is. But in truth, we used to get charged a hell of a lot more.

That's not to say that I don't have my own misgivings, particularly related to the abuse of DLC as a concept. It seems like more and more games are coming out with 2/3 of the content they used to, with the intention of selling the remaining 1/3 in a few $10 increments down the road. The DLC on disc bullshit is even more ridiculous and unforgivable in my opinion.

"Angry Joe" from the infamous review site "That Guy with the Glasses" probably put it best (at least sums up most of my thoughts pretty well): http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/10/star-wars-3d-rerelease/ Not quite suitable for work... LOT of F-bombs... understandably. George... seriously man, just stop.