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Now another thing about consoles. Try playing a realistic flight or space sim on them. You'll run out of buttons real quick. Consoles are USELESS when it comes to realistic sims. Especially something like IL2 Sturmovik.

Of course they're useless for that, because no one's ever done a Falcon/Jane's/bearded sim grognard with a full cockpit setup type games for them. Doesn't mean they couldn't be done though. In fact, a version of IL2 is going to be released for the PS3, Xbox 360, DS and PSP with two modes, a "simulation mode" (which plays like the PC version) and an "Arcade mode". I'd lay odds that the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions will support USB joystick and throttle setups since that was traditional for such games on the PS2.

Consoles are neat but with the limited controllers and little room for expansion when it comes to things like flightsticks and rudder pedals and such they just don't interest me much.

The PS2/PS3/Xbox 360/Wii have USB ports for a reason. In fact, pick yourself up a cheap PS2 and a copy of Ace Combat 4 or later. Plug your USB joystick+throttle setup in, enjoy. The Ace Combat games are arcade style, but at least you can use the joystick+throttle setup.

http://www.netjak.com/review.php/746 Yeah it's pretty much the same as the Saitek ones.

Multihead gaming.... also cool for sims.

It's possible to do this, there are two ways (and two games) that do it:

First method requires multiple older model PS2's with the Firewire ports, a firewire hub, the necessary cables, multiple copies of Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec, and three TV's.

Gran Turismo 4 does it using ethernet, which means you can do it with either PS2's or PS3's with backwards compatibility, or a mixture of the two.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25bWtiHuNiU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InbpwE3fnQs&NR=1

While the average 12 yr old may not be interested, mommy can't afford it or they can't fit 3 displays in their living room, these technologies interest ME.
I don't want my game experience dumbed down so they can make a few more sales to 12 year old kids. THAT is the problem with consoles.

It isn't 1985 anymore. The consoles aren't just for kids or being used by kids. The average age is about 30 now or a bit older now.

The concept seems elementary, but after testing the game for easily over 20-hours, I still am confused by the play. There is no rhyme or reason for a knockout, and delivering that "final blow" can be done in 10-seconds or 10-minutes. Probably the biggest flaw within SSBM is the complexity in simplicity.

Many times I have started off the game, and in a few seconds the game is over. Sometimes the screen is nothing short of a cluster bomb, and was clueless on what happened. On the other side of the ball, the complete opposite has happened. I've beaten my opponent into the red with over 200% damage, and still sometimes can't pull the Mortal Kombat and "finish him". There are a handful of moves that deliver this "final" blow, and many times I'll knock the guy a mile but he still reappears.

I find that Netjak is a good site to read reviews from; if nothing else, they're not afraid to hand out the sub-5/10 ratings when they're deserved.

Dissecting the Fanboy Mind

"Game released on console to require that console's controller"

It's different when a system has backward compatibility. You'd be surprised at how few PS2 games need the pressure sensitive buttons; most work fine with a PS1 digital controller or a PS1 Dual Shock controller. Heck, the Sonic the Hedgehog games for Sega Genesis can reportedly be played with an Atari 2600 controller, as the Sega protocol is just a compatible embrace-and-extension of the Atari parallel joystick protocol.

...but game movie games are by far the worst.

Yep. I know a lot people started playing and learning chess with Battle Chess.
They just wanted to see the peaces ripping each other appart.

Even without knowing how to play they learned by try.

Later it came Battle Chess 3000 and then Star Wars Battle Chess or something like this.

Today there is Chessmaster 10 which has a kid module that teachs a kid how to play with full 3D animations.

And there is Majestic Chess. That was created by the original author of Chessmaster and has a really interesting adventure game to teach how to play chess. Really interesting even for advanced players. here is a Review.

Seriously. More people need to tak your advice, and the advice that I've been giving. Just start renting games if you need to play ASAP.

I'm also one of the people guilty of a certain degree of snobishness, when it comes to defining the adventure genre. In addition to the usual "story- and character-driven" requirements, my definition also includes interface and game mechanics-related things, such as an absolute lack of action or timed sequences in adventure games. Why? Because when I go to the store and approach the adventure section, I want to be sure that I'll enjoy the game I pick. I don't enjoy any real-time games, and only two genres can guarantee that I'll be spared of those: turn-based strategies and adventures. Please note that turn-based strategies already have a qualifier in their name; the entire strategy genre split into real-time and turn-based, precisely to offer a guarantee to people like me. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening with adventures.

That said, I acknowledge that there are adventure games that don't fit my definition. As the article said, I recognize an adventure game when I see it. However, instead of calling some games action/adventures, as I should, I tend to severly downrate them in my reviews for their violations of my definition. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is a prime example. As good as the character development, writing and the majority of puzzles were, I gave it only 75%, courtesy of the action sequences.

I'm not planing to change my approach, though. There are so many good adventure games being released every month, thanks to a very strong and dedicated independent fan community, that I can afford to remain stubborn.

If you're still hungry for some nostalgia, you can always head over the Netjak. We do have an entire section devoted to good, bad, and hideous vintage titles.

Netjak's got their Best of Show, Worst of Show, and Biggest Surprises up, too.

Netjak's got their Best of Show, Worst of Show, and Biggest Surprises up, too.

Netjak's got their Best of Show, Worst of Show, and Biggest Surprises up, too.

Netjak.com is running an interview with the aforementioned spouse today.

I would LOVE to see some evidence to back that up. I am not attacking your statement here, just saying that if true, its one of the most interesting things I have heard of in a long time.

Googling for more using the terms "Squaresoft release Final Fantasy weekends" gave me only the following link.

http://www.netjak.com/Reviews/ps2/ffx.htm

For a request like that to come down would indicate that someone in authority thought that a workday release of the software would actually have a serious impact on the attendance.

I would be very curious to learn if that was based on facts, or hype and knee jerk reactions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single other thing (excluding weather) that could cause that kind of widespread absenteeism.

It would be kind of cool if it was true.

systems like GameRankings are ludicrous. Comparing the reviews from EGM, GameSpot, 1up.com, and other reputable, professional sources against GameSpy, GamePro, or IGN is like averaging out the opinions between a group of college professors and the judging panel for a wet T-shirt contest.

I don't think that's fair at all. While granted, GamePro is not exactly a bastion of gaming insight, they put out a decent product.

And those so called amateur sites can do just as well. Netjak consistently impresses me with what an "amateur" site can do.

No they don't. They never existed. So, wouldn't it be cool if they made a Generation 1 Transformers game?

Um...if by "games" you include this in the discusssion. This was a game outsourced to Russia. And that's why everyone hates the idea.

When I worked for Squaresoft, it was a pain enough to get bugs translated for the US versions of the game, send them over to Japan, and hopefully have Japan type the English in properly, because all the dev was done there. We at least had the benefit of having the game done already. Try explaining that your truck has to have an opponent to race against in Russian to someone who may not have ever coded a game before.

"On top of that there was the daily 2 hour lunch, that we usually took at a strip club."

I KNEW IT!

Here's the relevant quote from the review:

"Animations are very nice. (the guys at SOE must have logged countless hours in exotic dance clubs...all under the guise of doing research for the Entertainer class.)"

I was SOOOO onto you guys...

You know what's even funnier. Someone at Netjak reviewed the game, so it was fresh in my mind. I went over to my friend's house, and his wife was playing a bunch of episodes of Daria on tape from back when they were on MTV and during the commercial breaks there it was...EA's Shaq-Fu commercials. It was crazy.

The commercials are almost as bad as the game. I have to find some way to digitize them so we don't let EA forget that they made this game.

absolutely. go read lucky wander boy by d.b. weiss. all about a surrealistic nonsensical game. or try dada: stagnation in blue via netjack

1) Their Live series DOES still suck today. Watch the video link 3/4 of the way down the article.

2) YES! You are correct, sir! HA HA HA! I have a friend who was TOTALLY into the Sims and all expansions...waiting for TSO for at least a year. We thought he would basically disappear after the game was released.

He quit after 6 weeks. Said it felt too much like a chatroom...you NEEDED to have masses of people around you to progress, and when you were progressing, it was just sitting around.

3) BF1942 looked like fun when Desert Combat was out...I had friends playing it nonstop for a while. They've all since gotten bored and left.

I agree with your final point as well. There was a quote from some company a whlie back that said, "We're doing all right, but we're not like EA where they can afford to make mistakes, and yet they're so big it doesn't affect them at all."

They still put out good/decent games. SSX3 was pretty enjoyable for 3-4 days, and so was NBA Street, Vol. 2.

For the most part though, bloat, hype, and empty promises.

On one hand, with a single dominant company we are likely to get more visitors who are disenchanted with them. Before, manly people (not all, of course) went to IGN if they disliked GameSpy and vice versa; now they'll spread out over the smaller sites, and we are likely to get a piece of the pie. In addition, publishers will most likely catter to smaller sites more, as they won't stand idle while a marketing channel is getting monopolized.

On the other hand, this merger does have some negative effects on me as a reviewer and a gamer. First, the new company would have enough leverage to try to push us out of the gaming field or acquire us, mainly by signing exclusive deals with publishers. Second, they'll have much more resources to overhype a game, which will result into high-quality titles (adventures, wargames, turn-based strategies) being pushed even further into background, killing of their developers and offering a smaller choice of games for me.

Google game me this review on Savage: Battle for Newerth, which paints a pretty positive picture of the game.

Maybe the limited success comes from the fact that there is no single-player mode where one can practice as a commander or grunt? In Natural Selection you can at least hook up some bots on a local server for practicing.

This isn't really like any other FF in almost any sense. I've had a review of this up since, oh, JULY, but apparently, if you're not named Gamespy or 1UP, Slashdot doesn't care.

If you don't have time to the read the full review, the only comparison to an FF I can make is that it's going to be the most divisive in the FF camp of fans since FF8. It does look very nice, though.

>> Does Neo have a link to "The Source"?

No, Valve sent Neo a cease and desist regarding the leaked source.

I cancelled, too. Also wrote a review. Pretty damn pissed off about the whole thing.

To make matters worse, Gamerankings shows that the games for N-Gage are simply disastrous. Who would want to buy a $300 console when the games suck so much?

Lest we not forget Cool Spot.

It was one of the most overlooked games of last year in my opinion. No magic and monsters, in the FF:Tactics sense (save for some man-eating tigers) you'll just be fighting other armies on a game board.

If you're interested, here's my review of the first incarnation. I have the second ready to review.

Worst...Idea...Ever. (Score:2)
by Alkaiser (114022) on Mon Jul 07, '03 01:02 PM (#6384166)

Worst Peripheral of E3. #5 one one of the Worst of Show Lists, and #2 on the other. The two guest reviewers rated it as the worst thing there.

I think if more people started taking him to task, me might at least be disbarred. Here's some guy who emailed newspapers who bought Jack's crock of shit and chewed them out for it.

Every game site in the world bags on this guy, but it doesn't do a damn thing if people aren't actually yelling at the people publishing his crap as if it were newsworthy.

Is it just me or do the pile-ons just end up being a lot of people expressing the exact same opinion.

As for my opinion on SC2, I played the import version. I was bummed, not because it didn't revolutionize the genre, but because it stripped out the coolest feature in the arcade, the Conquest Mode.

I played it in some arcades in the US, and I read here about how it was the same in the Japanese arcades...but they stripped it out of the console versions!

If you're unfamiliar with the Arcade version, Conquest Mode was a mode that stored characters on the Arcade Machine. You picked an army faction to join up with and created your character with a password on it. Then you'd fight against the AI versions of other people's characters to gain land for your country.

The AI of the opponents would be based off of scripts generated from your actual fights. Plus, your fighter would have stats based on your fights as well. It was awesome. The best feature of the arcade game, in my opinion.

But there's no multiplayer in the home version. I'd give the console version an 8, and the Arcade a 9.5. If you only had a chance to play it as it was...you understand how much cooler this game could have been.

Is it just me or do the pile-ons just end up being a lot of people expressing the exact same opinion.

As for my opinion on SC2, I played the import version. I was bummed, not because it didn't revolutionize the genre, but because it stripped out the coolest feature in the arcade, the Conquest Mode.

I played it in some arcades in the US, and I read here about how it was the same in the Japanese arcades...but they stripped it out of the console versions!

If you're unfamiliar with the Arcade version, Conquest Mode was a mode that stored characters on the Arcade Machine. You picked an army faction to join up with and created your character with a password on it. Then you'd fight against the AI versions of other people's characters to gain land for your country.

The AI of the opponents would be based off of scripts generated from your actual fights. Plus, your fighter would have stats based on your fights as well. It was awesome. The best feature of the arcade game, in my opinion.

But there's no multiplayer in the home version. I'd give the console version an 8, and the Arcade a 9.5. If you only had a chance to play it as it was...you understand how much cooler this game could have been.

My response to this article has been published two weeks before this article appeared. Time travel on my part, or did those guys reply to my accusations?

I'm sorry, but I think you are generalising too much. There are plenty of sites who post unbiased reviews, without demanding any payments. True, they are smaller and don't pay their reviewers, but they don't suck up to publishers, either. I write reviews for Netjak, and have yet to hear about a company successfully forcing us to improve a rating for a review. The same goes for plenty of other sites I know, such as The Adrenaline Vault (they made it all the way to the top of the Lucasarts black list), Four Fat Chicks, Zen Gamer, Quarter to Three and others. Your comment is unfair to those sites and not really addressing my main argument that Digiworld can't possibly hope to collect enough revenues to survive if the competition is free.

(Personally, I'd like to see a sample review or two before signing up. After all, if I pay it's because of the content and not the design.)

Worst Peripheral of E3. #5 one one of the Worst of Show Lists, and #2 on the other. The two guest reviewers rated it as the worst thing there.

Here's a link that's had this reviewed since the 27th of May. On top of that, no charge to view stuff there.

Game Boy Player Review. They give it a 9.2.

Are you f*cking serious?!

It was roundly given "Worst Peripheral of Show" by us.

What the hell are these guys thinking? They're obviously just trying to suck up to Sony. The Karaoke machine for the XBox was a far better idea. The stupid Eye-Toy had games where you were supposed to kill ninjas before they hit your head...however, you could just shuffle left and right, and KILL THEM WITH YOUR HEAD.

Well, you should probably look to some different sites:

Netjak has FF Crystal Chronicles at #10 for their best of show, and FF Tactics Advance was #1.

Sword of Mana and Zelda: Four Swords made their Best Surprises list, and both of their reviewers have the GBA in the top spot for the best console.

There's the link for their full coverage.

Well, you should probably look to some different sites:

Netjak has FF Crystal Chronicles at #10 for their best of show, and FF Tactics Advance was #1.

Sword of Mana and Zelda: Four Swords made their Best Surprises list, and both of their reviewers have the GBA in the top spot for the best console.

There's the link for their full coverage.

Check out Netjak's coverage here. Never hurts to have more coverage.

However, I was expecting a review more in the spirit of "I's unfair to compare games that were 20-30kB big with complex games that are over 1GB big when installed." I had a witty answer ready, along the lines of "yet those small games offered more replay value and fun," and I'm disappointed I couldn't use it. Maybe next time ;)

We have a feedback/comments section at the bottom of every review at . We do get a lot of trolls (hence the comment of the week/weak that gets added.) some people don't understand that when we give out an 8.2 it means we think it's good...it's not like when GamePro gives out an 8.2 and it's way lower than their average score.

I've been writing game reviews on and off for 5 years now. I try to be as fair as I can, and I tell you for sure that freebies don't really influence my review.

I used to work for the now defunct Gameplayer.com, and I reviewed a title from Take 2 Entertainment called "Reah". I gave it a -3 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was Myst/Riven clone, only it was exceedingly lame with weak graphics, and the controls very nearly made me vomit.

I called up by Take 2, who complained about it. I didn't give a crap. I kept the score at -3. The other two times I got called were for slamming Titus' 1-button fighting game, "Evil Zone", and for ripping on Medieval: Total War, because I gave it the lowest score of all reviewers on Gamerankings.com.

If you're going to pick up a game, do this first. Go to GameRankings.com, a site which will give you an instant look at all the main reviews/scores for a particular product, as well as their user's rating for the game. Read a couple of the reviews from there. Then make your decision.

I'm honestly shocked at these people who are saying they were all up on some company's nuts just for a free game. Do you realize how much it costs them to send you a copy of the game? 50 cents for the disc and packaging and $4.50 for shipping. I appreciate not having to buy or rent your game, but if your game sucks, I probably wasn't going to buy it anyway.

I'm not selling my soul for $5, so I can get some poor kid in high school or college, who probably doesn't have so much disposable income, to dump $50 on a game I honestly think is mediocre just so I can get more mediocre games for free.

There are some people who praise game because they like the free stuff. There are others who rip games because they think it's fun or a power trip.

Then there are others, like me, who remember what it was like to finally have scrounged up $40 and walking into Fry's to see that there 10 new games that sounded interesting and knowing they could only buy one. We've been burned more than enough times by companies who release software that doesn't work without a patch, promises to have features that got stripped out just before launch, or just simply sucks. I don't want a company getting rich off of misleading the customer. If that sounds good to you...check out our site as one of the two or three you use to get an idea of what a game's all about. And, as always...rent before buying if you have your doubts. When you do buy, use Ebay. The testers on the game are always trying to unload their free copies.

Currently, I'm helping out as a game reviewer at Netjak. However, I've been reviewing games since the late 1980s, and I have gotten my share of nasty e-mails, but very rarely have I seen a well-formed argument against my review. Most of the responses are from people who read only my review and trusted my word, without cross-checking with other reviews. While I am trying not to be influenced by the freebies I'm getting (yes, even such a small site as ours is a target of marketing campaigns, and yes, it is very hard to resist), I am the first person to admit that no single person can be objective. Thus, whenever one wants to make an informed purchase, he or she should consult various sources. Especially here, where the items cost up to $50 and most of the time cannot be returned to the store, relying on any single game reviewer is stupid and irresponsible.

As a rule of thumb, I visit third-party sites for product reviews. These sites do have links to the given products and earn a little on comissions, but in general strive to provide an objective and balanced service.