2007's Ten Biggest Gaming Letdowns

Game|Life offers up an anti-top-ten list, noting the three blog authors' biggest disappointments from 2007. Chris Kohler's biggest letdown echoes my own feelings on this topic: "No LittleBigPlanet. PlayStation 3's software library got significantly better this holiday, but there's no killer app. I honestly don't know if LittleBigPlanet would have been one. But I think it's going to be mine. It's going to be the thing that glues me to PlayStation 3... when it ships. I was all ready to start building worlds and sharing them with my friends and generally start being a jackass by now, but it won't happen until next year -- late next year, if you believe the rumors. I hope they're not true. And I do hope LittleBigPlanet sets the planet on fire when it releases." Any gaming 'event' this year an epic fail for you?

Comments

Re:This is no new issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 redundant

My biggest let down of 2007

[Pojut]

Hands down, without a doubt, would have to be Two Worlds. I mean, the setup was genious. On paper, it appeared to be Oblivion on steroids...I mean come on, a massive, open-ended RPG that you make your own spells and can play co-op over system link on a couple of 360's? My buddy and I were waiting for this one with huge anticipation...only to feel like we had gotten a kick in the nuts. Horrendous menu systems, terrible gameplay, and textures so muddy you couldn't tell what was going on half the time (and this on an HDTV)

Without compare, the biggest gaming letdown of 2007.

Re:My biggest let down of 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be lost. Penthouse is in the office building across the street.

Re:My biggest let down of 2007

[eyeye]

Mine was Unreal Tournament III - the textures and graphics are noisy and the interface clumsy.

Re:My biggest let down of 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

Still sounds like Oblivion on steroids to me...

Re:My biggest let down of 2007

[Voltageaav]

I have to agree, Two Worlds had a ton of potenial. What makes it soo bad was where they did a lot of really good things with the game, the things they screwed up are things that pretty much everyone else nails down and they were really bad. To the point that I doubt most people would bother playing after 20 minutes. The voice acting, textures, and some of the controls are just so bad it seems like they didn't even try. The menues could use some work, but I can live with them. I did end up finishing the game and I feel that if they had put some effort into those three areas, it would have been a really amazing game.

Another big let down

[FredFredrickson]

I couldn't get enough people to click myminicity links! What a dumb game.

Re:Another big let down

[AKAImBatman]

With all the animosity surrounding those stupid links, I don't think joking about MyMiniCity non-anonymously is such a good idea...

*AKAImBatman envisions FredFredrickson's Freak list growing at hundreds of links per second, while hackers trace back his IP address and "put him out of business".

Re:Another big let down

[FredFredrickson]

Eh, it was a risk, but I felt it added true value to this discussion.

Plus I wouldn't really be taking hits from the official Slashdot City, presented in the other game thread. I am not a traitor. I will deliver the cause!

***
May you all enjoy the feast of a thousand clicks!

Re:Another big let down

[FredFredrickson]

The other thread

Personally?

[JK_the_Slacker]

I still haven't managed to beat VI. You know, that console game where the object of the game is to edit a file and then quit? That's a really hard one, and I'm so disappointed that I got so close, but didn't finish it this year. Ah well, there's always 2008.

Re:Personally?

[rk]

You know there's a cheat code that lets you save your progress before you quit, right? Press escape, then type ":wq" and press enter.

Re:Personally?

[Sciros]

It's a PC game rather than a console game I think. Maybe that's the problem.

Re:Personally?

[Anonymous Coward]

System console, not video game console.

Re:Personally?

[SLot]

You think VI is bad, you should try the multiplayer option - IRC!

Re:Personally?

[IrquiM]

Sure? I just finished it on my PS3 (whith the cheat codes though...)

Maybe it's a multiplatform game

Re:Personally?

[oatworm]

Wow! It works! It says "recording" at the bottom now! Neat. I guess that means it's saving. It still won't let me leave, though. Very disappointing.

Re:Personally?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pffft, savescumming is just so lame...

Re:Personally?

[Anonymous Coward]

fail. Console as in "open a console and type vi level1 to start your game!"

Re:Personally?

[Al Dimond]

Ah, you're using a hacked-up version called VIM with even more cheats added, and you're stuck in turbo-button record mode (which lets you record attack sequences so you can unleash them with inhuman speed on your opponent... it's totally cheap, only lamers do it). To get out of that hit q, and *then* do the :wq thing (or :q! if you're not a cheater).

When I say, "even more cheats," what I mean is relative to ed, the true original version. vi is like wallhacking.

Re:Personally?

[Some_Llama]

as long as you don't save the file as the filename / you should be fine, and if you do name a file / rename it FIRST before trying to delete it (from prior bad experience).

Some disappointments

[Sciros]

To begin, I'll echo the biggest disappointment as being the Wii's lack of anything good from companies not named Nintendo. A number of my friends are regretting the purchase of the Wii because of this reason, wishing they'd bought a 360 instead. Surely having both is best but I certainly haven't felt so much of the same sentiment from 360 owners I know.

Anyway, my disappointments:
1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.

2) Lack of availability of the Wii. I'm not used to having to put so much work into acquiring a $250 piece of technology one year after its initial release; my mornings are usually quite busy. As a result I still don't have one.

3) FFXII: Revenant Wings (DS). I expected much better than what it turned out to be. Even looking at videos of the game on IGN didn't quite get across the abysmal pacing and unbelievable lack of variety in this game. Its supposed depth doesn't amount to anything in practice.

4) Mario 3v3 Hoops (DS). I think this came out in 2007. If not then nevermind. Anyway this game is a giant turd.

5) ArenaNet slowly turning Guild Wars into a grindfest. The one MMORPG that let me play PVE at my leisure and not "fall behind" decided that it's a much better idea to just go into WoW me-too mode rather than stick with the original tenet of skill over time played. The Eye of the North expansion released this year completed the transformation.

6) Bioware going to EA, Blizzard merging with Activision. Let's just say that these *cannot possibly be good things* considering Bioware and Blizzard haven't exactly been in need of an improvement in any way. (Well, Blizzard graphically perhaps but Activision doesn't help there.)

7) Forza Motorsport 2. Great racing engine, cool graphics, good customization, good online mode. But... what is with no music during races? Or having to play your ass off to unlock even the ability to *purchase* a lot of the cars? This isn't supposed to be a 100-hour RPG, it's a freaking racing game. Nobody wants to spend days driving cars they don't like to get at cars they do; there's no storyline or change in gameplay to keep you interested in the meantime. Seems the developers forgot they were making a *game* rather than a training sim for racing teams to study tracks.

Re:Some disappointments

[Applekid]

3) FFXII: Revenant Wings (DS). I expected much better than what it turned out to be. Even looking at videos of the game on IGN didn't quite get across the abysmal pacing and unbelievable lack of variety in this game. Its supposed depth doesn't amount to anything in practice. When Square followed up to FFX with FFX-2, they set the par for all other main Final Fantasy game spinoffs. I don't think it was much of a surprise, personally.

It's a damn good thing they start fresh with each sequel of the main franchise, is all I'm saying. :)

Re:Some disappointments

[techpawn]

5) ArenaNet slowly turning Guild Wars into a grindfest. The one MMORPG that let me play PVE at my leisure and not "fall behind" decided that it's a much better idea to just go into WoW me-too mode rather than stick with the original tenet of skill over time played. The Eye of the North expansion released this year completed the transformation.

THANK YOU! Finally, someone else that saw that they turned down that path and because of it lost quite a few players. I gave up on it when I came to the realization that the people who just ran from mission to mission where doing much better than the casual players. It's now a subscription free version of WoW. I've gone back of PnP games. Yeah, it's a hassle to get everyone into someones basement for a few hours each week, but it's all in all a far better experience.

Re:Some disappointments

[tieTYT]

1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.

I'd rather have a great game late than a shitty game early. Every game you mentioned after this point could have been better if it was delayed longer. Delays are a good thing. They translate to, "We would rather make this game better than release it in its crappy state."

Re:Some disappointments

[spectro]

To begin, I'll echo the biggest disappointment as being the Wii's lack of anything good from companies not named Nintendo. A number of my friends are regretting the purchase of the Wii because of this reason, wishing they'd bought a 360 instead. Surely having both is best but I certainly haven't felt so much of the same sentiment from 360 owners I know.

I sold my wii for that reason after almost a year waiting for decent games that would exploit wii's controls to their full potential.

Re:Some disappointments

[Anonymous Coward]

It's now a subscription free version of WoW. Not quite. They keep adding in the bad parts of WoW, and none of the good parts. (Still no auction house or mail system after all this time??) Other than that, I agree with you 100%.

I hope GW2 doesn't qualify for a list like this a year from now, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

But not all delays are admirable in this sense. They can be due to poor resource management, they can be due to not enough work being spent on the game earlier on, etc. Unless Smash Bros Brawl, when released, turns out to match Oblivion or FFXII in scope and polish, the wait time by fans will hardly be justified.

Re:Some disappointments

[edwdig]

1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.

The problem with SSB Brawl is Iwata made a promise he couldn't possibly deliver. Iwata publicly announced a SSB game as a Wii launch title in late '05, THEN went to the designer of the previous games in the series and asked him to make the game. The guy had left Nintendo a few years prior. So, Nintendo had 1 year to get the guy to agree to make the game, get a dev team for him to work with, and create the game. Once this became public knowledge, it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be a launch game. In the end, it took them a little over two years to put it together, assuming no further delays.

Re:Some disappointments

[peterpi]

You make Forza Motorsport sound like exactly the sort of racing game I've been after for so long ;)

Re:Some disappointments

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 7

Er what? Is there any racing game on the planet where you *don't* have to play for hours to gain access to the good cars?

The big Forza 2 letdown (in my book anyway) was the addition of the auction house and the way drama over people copying each others OMGSOARTISTIC creations completely dictated the content of subsequent patches rather than fixes to exploits which became so rife that they had to wipe the scoreboards for a very large number of players. It's a racing game FFS not Photoshop Car SUPER-DRM edition. It's amazing how anti-DRM people are until something they create is getting passed around. And Turn 10 just encourage it by awarding prizes for photos rather than tournaments or good lap times.

And Turn 10, really, why are you surpised people chose to "express" themselves by having naked chicks and racist language on their cars? You guys have seen the internet, right?

Biggest letdown of the year though was Need for Speed Pro Street. It's the first game I've ever played where I'm prompted repeatedly to buy upgrades not with in-game cash, but with Microsoft points. That and EA's total internal confusion (incredibly complicated upgrade and tuning system plugged into an awful arcade engine) over what they want the game to be basically killed it. At least the previous incarnations were trying to be silly rather than serious.

Re:Some disappointments

[magical_mystery_meat]

FM2 is fantastic, don't let this guy's impatience get to you. They could have balanced the career mode a little better so that you don't need to repeat races for cash to level up, but there's so much to do that it almost rivals WoW in replayability.

Re:Some disappointments

[Anonymous Coward]

So it somehow takes SIX years to NOT fuck up the following formula: Take the last Brawl game, update the graphics a bit, add a few moves, then release it as a full priced game. Do they have monkeys working on these games, or what?

Christ... and the herd will still gobble it up and claim it's "innovative". It's the Apple syndrome all over again.

Re:Some disappointments

[Anonymous Coward]

Then forget forza, and go get GT3, or GT4.

Better graphics on 4(on an inferior system), you can turn the music off, and you have to play a ton to get cars you actually want to race.

Re:Some disappointments

[tieTYT]

But not all delays are admirable in this sense. They can be due to poor resource management, they can be due to not enough work being spent on the game earlier on, etc. Unless Smash Bros Brawl, when released, turns out to match Oblivion or FFXII in scope and polish, the wait time by fans will hardly be justified.

Admirable has nothing to do with it. Other games have nothing to do with it. Game X will be less polished if it's released early; period. It may not be as good as Oblivion or FFXII, but it'll be better than it would have been if it was released early. That's the point, and that's why I feel a game's delay should inspire hope more than disappointment (duke nukem forever excluded).

Re:Some disappointments

[mqduck]

Bioware and Blizzard haven't exactly been in need of an improvement in any way. (Well, Blizzard graphically perhaps but Activision doesn't help there.) Blizzard chooses to make games that can run well on your average PC that's been around for a few years. Blizzard has "our games are fucking fun" going for it, they don't need to also have the "give your fancy new hardware a workout!" selling point. And WoW STILL looks beautiful. They don't need a change a thing there either.

Re:Some disappointments

[Osty]

Then forget forza, and go get GT3, or GT4.

Better graphics on 4(on an inferior system), you can turn the music off, and you have to play a ton to get cars you actually want to race.

I'd actually recommend against getting GT3 or GT4, or at least get them along with FM2.

• Graphics: You're comparing PS2 games to an Xbox 360 game. GT4 launched a few months before the original Forza, back in 2005. Forza 2 launched this year on Xbox 360. That in itself means it has better graphics, but Forza 2 also has per-track lighting effects (a desert track like Laguna Seca has much more harsh lighting than the fictional Maple Valley track, for example), collision damage which actually affects driving (If your wing comes off, you lose your downforce, for example), much better track depictions (compare the Nurburgring Nordschleife in GT4 against the same in FM2), and more detailed cars. There are only two little issues I have with FM2 graphics: Cars with movable parts like retractable spoilers (Porsches, Lamborghinis, etc) don't move, and there's no in-cockpit view. Neither of those are in the GT3/4 games either.
• Gameplay: Forza 1 had a much better/more realistic physics engine than GT3/4, and Forza 2 takes that even further. The Gran Turismo series uses a modified version of Pacejka's Magic Formula, which is decent but not entirely realistic and suffers at the limit. Forza uses a more expensive model based on actually modelling the suspension and tires (across three separate points on the tire contact patch), which leads to a much more realistic physics model. FM1 ran input and physics at 60fps with graphics locked to 30fps. FM2 runs input and physics at 360fps with graphics locked to 60fps. Collisions are realistic, compared to GT's bumper car/billiard ball collision model (no wall-riding in FM, using other cars as movable ARMCOs risks damaging your own car). Real-world tracks are the most realistic yet, with a real sense of elevation changes, traction surface changes, etc. There are PC games that have better physics simulations than FM, but FM is leaps and bounds beyond GT.
• Control: Assuming you're using a controller rather than a wheel, the analog triggers on the Xbox and Xbox 360 are much better for throttle and brake control than trying to use a PS2's analog buttons. There are a few third-party PS2 controllers with triggers, but they're few and far between and suffer from typical third-party controller problems (fragile, sloppy, etc). GT3/4 may play better on a PS3 with its fully-analog L2/R2 buttons, but if you're trying to play on a PS2 you pretty much have to have a wheel. And that's the only place that GT beats FM in my opinion -- the Logitech wheels are the gold standard, and they simply don't exist for 360 (yet?).
• Cars: I don't know about you, but GT's car selection has never really done it for me. While it's great that you can choose from 15 different models of Skylines or 12 different Civics, the cars I want to drive aren't available in GT. I want to drive Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis, and those aren't in GT3/4 (GT5 is supposed to have Ferraris and maybe Lamborghinis, but I don't believe they'll have Porsche this time around). And no, RUF cars don't cut it.
• Sound: Who cares about in-game music? When I'm driving, I want to hear the engine so I can know when to shift without having my eyes glued to the tach. And when it comes to engine sounds, Forza has always been better than GT (this video pretty much says it all. That's FM1 vs. GT4, but FM2's engine sounds are even better. It's pretty obvious when you hear the Corvette comparison). If you must have in-game music, use the 360's custom soundtrack feature and play your own music. I'll guarantee that any music you choose to play will be better than the built-in soundtracks for either series.
• AI: GT's AI is comp

Re:Some disappointments

[Rhone]

A number of my friends are regretting the purchase of the Wii because of this reason, wishing they'd bought a 360 instead.

...

2) Lack of availability of the Wii. I'm not used to having to put so much work into acquiring a $250 piece of technology one year after its initial release; my mornings are usually quite busy. As a result I still don't have one.

Okay, so why not just buy a Wii from one of your friends who apparently doesn't want one anymore and would love the $250 to put toward a 360?

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

Meh, sometimes "polish" can take a backseat to more titles and more content, depending on the kind of game it is. Something like a Final Fantasy or Elder Scrolls game, I'm cool with having it take as long as it "needs to." Games like a Gears sequel using the same engine, or a racing game, and for that matter a Smash game, I just want something "new" to play soon enough. And 7 years later is just not "soon enough" for me.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

Absolutely. Compared to Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo is a joke in just about every way. FM does what GT does, only much better. I still have beef with the "no music" thing, because I can hear engines just fine in racers that *do* have music, and 10+ lap races on tracks I've seen a million times, well, I start to zone out on those if there's no music. And then I forget to turn, and then I smash into a wall, etc. ^^

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

It's called *scaling to hardware.* Make it run on old stuff, and look decent on newer stuff. Simple formula, and some dev houses are good at it. Others simply keep the requirements just as low as Blizzard does yet still manage far better graphics (Guild Wars, for instance).

Don't make excuses when there really aren't any to make. You can cater to a broad range of hardware if you put in the effort. Blizzard doesn't *need* to from a business perspective, but I wouldn't be bothered if they tried.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

Well they do want to hold on to it, just less than a 360. Also I prefer to buy new stuff like this, and I hate buying things from friends :-/ Meh, it's really not something I considered an option because of the way I am.

Re:Some disappointments

[tieTYT]

Meh, sometimes "polish" can take a backseat to more titles and more content, depending on the kind of game it is. Something like a Final Fantasy or Elder Scrolls game, I'm cool with having it take as long as it "needs to." Games like a Gears sequel using the same engine, or a racing game, and for that matter a Smash game, I just want something "new" to play soon enough. And 7 years later is just not "soon enough" for me.

So... quantity over quality then? I guess we're just two different types of gamers. I am a huge Sim fan. I bought SimSociety but then I read the reviews for it. They weren't flattering. I returned the game unopened and purchased Call of Duty 4 instead. Enjoy the next Madden.

Re:Some disappointments

[Ash-Fox]

Blizzard has "our games are fucking fun" going for it

Unfortunately I can't get into any of Blizzard's games.

Re:Some disappointments

[iainl]

Forza 2 is comfortably my Game Of The Year, and I think it's easily superior to the Gran Turismo series after many a year playing those. So I'd agree with much of what you said, particularly about the handling on controllers - it's just so much more natural to deal with a car too far past the limit in FM2 than it is GT4, because it reacts just like I expect it to.

To the point where I have an old Jaguar E-Type set up with a big engine and practically no grip, that stays within the class limit giving me insane straight-line speed at the expense of four-wheel drifting every other corner. Doing the same in GT4 feels either comedically poor or just undriveable. The points system is also amazing online, because I can take that thing out and have a tough but fair race against the VWs and the like that most drive at that class, instead of there being one 'best' car like many games suffer from (hello PGR3!)

However, I'm up to around Level 30 in the game without once coming close to running out of cash or ever repeating a race for a reason other than failing to win it the first time. So I've yet to see any sign of the grinding that others are complaining about - there are absolutely tonnes of different races to work through without doing the same one twice, and the game hands out free cars like candy that are perfectly fine for most situations.

Re:Some disappointments

[RogueyWon]

Interesting post, and if I had mod points, I would mod you up even though I don't agree with some of what you've written. However, I don't, so I'll do a reply instead.

On Super Smash Brothers... well... I can't claim to have be bouncing off the walls in anticipation of this game. That said, it highlights the biggest weakness of the Wii and, ultimately, the reason why I think its momentum is now going to ebb away.

The games just aren't there.

Nintendo are doing their usual trick of putting out one or two of their big franchise games per year, while nothing else of value (besides the Resident Evil titles) comes out for their console. The franchise games appeal to some people, send a small minority into paroxysms of joy, but leave a lot of others neutral or even decidedly bored. Meanwhile, the 360 continues to get all the interesting stuff and even the PS3 is (at last) starting to pick up a bit. Nintendo had a good start with the Wii, largely on the base of novely, hype and disaffection with the other two console developers; however, I think people are now starting to wake up to the fact that nothing's really changed since the dismal failure of the Gamecube.

On lack of availability... it was never that bad here in the UK until about 2 months before Christmas 07. Certainly, I had no problems picking one a year ago today - not long after launch - and I've seen them in the shops solidly since then. More evidence, if this were needed, that the Christmas shortage might not be entirely a product of demand.

On 3v3 hoops... yes. I played this for about an hour over at a friend's place. To be honest, I can't say I had particularly high hopes for it anyway, but it was pretty bad.

Don't play Guild Wars, so won't comment on that one.

I'm less worried about the EA/Bioware thing than some people seem to be. Yes, EA are the "big bad" and yes, they do have a habit of pumping out boring annually-revised sports games. However, I've noticed real signs of change from them over the last year or so; Command & Conquer 3 was frankly better than anything that Westwood ever did with the license and Crysis was very solid indeed. Maybe it's starting to sink in that poor games don't sell as well. I admit that this *could* be bad news for Bioware, but I'd take a more "wait and see" approach for the moment.

As for Forza 2... well... that was one of my favorite games of the year, arguably for some of the reasons you don't like it. I've always been a big fan of the more realistic sort of console racing game - particularly the Gran Turismo series - and Forza 2 blew everything else in the area out of the water, as far as I was concerned. The physics and AI are certainly better than anything I've seen elsewhere. I've tried my hand at driving on circuits or dirt a few times now - just about enough to realise how much I suck at it - and you can feel that Forza 2 is much, much closer to the real thing than Gran Turismo 4.

As for the career mode - I liked this a lot. You can actually jump into some of the higher end cars straight away in arcade mode. However, the benefit of starting out in basic road cars and working your way up in career mode is that this is actually a good way to develop your driving skill. The slower cars are generally more forgiving, meaning that you can try to take more challenging lines in them without necessarily spinning off and losing the race. Moreover, when you do get something wrong in one of the low end cars and find yourself choking on dust, it's much easier to tell *why* you went wrong than it is in something that's putting out over 500bhp. In career mode, by the time you can afford a car that's a significant advance on your current one, chances are that you are now ready to make better use of it.

As for the music, the ability to add custom sound-tracks is one of my favorite things about the 360. Rather than being stuck with the same few tracks over and over, as I was in Gran Turismo 4, I can set up my own custom play-list from my collection and tweak it as I want for each session. As far as I'm concerned, this is the *perfect* way to do music for driving games.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

If I liked football games I'm sure I would. Some games need to be well-made, others just need to be well-designed.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

Forza 2 kicks the crap out of Gran Turismo games, that much is for sure. I'm all for a good racing sim with smart driver AI and a strong physics model. But that has nothing to do with the pacing of the game (I can certainly rip music to the HD, you're right about that). I'm not particularly bad at racing games, and I don't have that much free time on my hands so I don't like having to race enough to reach level 30+ or whatever just so I can pick up a Murcielago.

It's a setup that clearly works ok for some people and not for others, and it has jack to do with it being a fantastic racing sim. I kind of wish they'd done something different altogether, maybe, in terms of gameplay or pacing because I just don't enjoy a lot of the cars that I'm stuck with during the first 20+ XP levels.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

Yes, yes. Thanks for the informative post, as it illustrates a point of mine that some have not been agreeing with. The 6.5-year wait time for a new Smash is hardly justified. People say they rather have a good game than a quickly made one. Fair enough, but Brawl has not been in development since the release of Melee. If it takes a little over 2 years to put a Smash game together, then we could have been playing a 4th or even 5th iteration by now. And liking it. It's not as if anyone would not buy a Smash game if he/she enjoyed the previous one.

I was always a bit confused about that. SSBM outsold every other game on Gamecube by a HUGE margin. Why Nintendo didn't pump out a couple more Smash games in the meantime just doesn't make sense to me from even a business perspective. The Smash franchise is a license to print money as far as Nintendo is concerned, but it seems everyone knows it but them.

Re:Some disappointments

[RogueyWon]

Yeah, part of me wonders if it wouldn't be worth them taking the Forza 2 engine and using it to build a rather less hardcore game, focussed more around the high-end racing side of things and with a bit more attention to the front-end (which is admittedly nasty and can feel a bit spreadsheet-line on occasion). Of course, I'd stick to playing the more hardcore version, but as you say, different people want different things - although decent graphics and physics are pretty much a universal plus point.

I did have two gripes with Forza 2 actually. The first was the number and variety of tracks. I've not done a count, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't actually have as many tracks as GT4, which was itself pretty light in this respect. Given the length of the career mode, this is a fairly major gripe. A friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who might possibly know somebody who shared a room with somebody who knew the cousin of somebody who was remotely involved in the game tells me that the major factor here was storage space on the DVD (tracks apparently eat lots of this). Frankly, I don't see much of a way around this, besides going multi-DVD (harder for a driving game than for a linear RPG like Blue Dragon), or jumping over to the PS3 with its Blu-Ray drive.

The other gripe I have is the relative lack of low-end cars, particularly the slightly older ones. This may sound an odd gripe, but I do have a point here. We're both agreed, I think, that GT4 left quite a bit to be desired. However, I took it and my PS2 with me when I went to visit the parents at Christmas, two years ago. We had about a dozen people from my dad's side of the family over on boxing-day, almost all of whom had driven. After a while, we switched the PS2 on and without exception, every single one of the cars they had driven there in was represented in the game (even if there were slight variations in the year/model). This led to one of the most amusing (and ridiculously over-competative) bouts of gaming/oneupmanship I've ever witnessed, as people suddenly got to find out who had the fastest car in a way that they'd never quite dared on the road. Forza 2 has a fairly limited selection of "family" cars and while expanding this probably isn't a priority for the developers, a better range is something I'd love to see from the sequel.

Re:Some disappointments

[Sciros]

Yeah the lack of tracks is definitely the game's biggest problem for me as well. Even playing the game for a relatively short amount of time had me getting a bit bored of seeing the same few tracks over and over and over.

I have a friend that works across the hall from the Forza guys, actually. He can probably confirm what you said if I ask him when it comes to tracks, but I'm not really sure why tracks take up quite so much space when there are plenty of single-DVD games out there that seemingly have a LOT more assets on the DVD than Forza does. I suppose some developers may be better at utilizing disk space than others.

I can understand your issue about lack of older low-end cars, especially given your anecdote with the family. I would like a Forza 3 to have a bigger selection of low-end cars certainly, as well as a different reward system that doesn't lock you out of cars you might want to use in career mode for a long time. I guess the whole thing of career mode having you use many different cars but not necessarily the ones you want just doesn't appeal to me. I like to pick one thing I like and stick to it. I do it in fighting games, racing games (if I can -- Bowser is my man in Mario Kart even though he's really bad hehe), and so forth. I would very much like a racing sim with Forza's engine that let me build a team, have a set of 2-4 cars to maintain and enter into races, etc. Having cars be out of reach financially at the beginning is ok, it's like that in Forza even without cars being wholly "unavailable," but at least it's not arbitrary and unrealistic. I don't need to be a "level 30 driver" in real life to hop into a Saleen, after all. ^^

Re:Some disappointments

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, the video says it all. The link you provided for comparing FM1 and GT4 is actually a fake. It was GT3. Unless you are somehow related to the person who posted the bogus YouTube video, you wouldn't have provided the link.

Re:Some disappointments

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do Sony fanboys always cry "conspiracy" these days? It's not our fault that your system has no good games.

Re:Some disappointments

[eison]

Rayman's Raving Rabbids 2 is tons of fun. It's from ubisoft.
Beyond that one game, though, I agree with you.

Re:Some disappointments

[trdrstv]

The guy had left Nintendo a few years prior. So, Nintendo had 1 year to get the guy to agree to make the game, get a dev team for him to work with, and create the game.

If I remember correctly, they also opened new offices for the development studio to work in. Given the depth that's already been revealed about Brawl, it's amazing it'll come out this early*

*Assuming no further delays.

Re:Some disappointments

[Arcanis the Rogue]

I wouldn't say so, they must have realized how much money this game could make for them and therefore put a good amount of effort into it. Not only that, but if this game is handled properly they could instantly shut up all of those "Wii isn't for hardcore gamers" and "Nintendo hates online play" people.

There is a lot riding on SSBB and I doubt Nintendo hasn't been breaking their backs over this.

Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when Halo 3 was hyped like it was going to decimate Microsoft's competitors and they were powerless to stop it and everyone better just deal with the fact.

Remember when Halo 3 was going to have 1080p next gen graphics?

Remember when Halo 3 was going to be the standard which all online games try, and fail, to live up to?

And then reality hit...

Bungie could only manage to get Halo 3 to run at 640p resolution and not the minimum standard 720p for real next gen games.
Side by side screenshots of Halo 2 and Halo 3 had gamers scratching their heads as to which one was supposed to be the next gen game.
Bungie didn't bother to bring Halo 3 out of the dark ages of online gaming and implement dedicated servers.
And Bungie because of the lack of dedicated servers Halo 3 could only handle 16 players at a time for online games. There are pc shareware games with better online setups.
And because of the lack of dedicated servers Halo 3 games end up being low player count matches that are plagued by lag.

Ok, so even if the online part of Halo 3 is a disaster at least the single player lived up to the hype...

Nope, single player also runs only at 640p with the same last gen looking graphics.
The campaign is incredibly short and linear
The Halo 3 story is easily one of the lamest even by the incredibly low fps genre standard

It was learned the extent recently how Microsoft used their mountains of cash to secure high reviews for the game with 'gift bags' that were sent out to reviewers that were worth some 7-800 dollars or so. You have to imagine that Bungie just didn't see any reason to put any effort into the game at all when they knew Microsoft's marketing types were going to be out in full force buying off reviewers.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Drakin020]

Did someone get his feelings hurt?

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Pojut]

Not at all, the Halo series has never really done much for me...people can rip on it all they like, I don't care...but if shills are posting on boards to try to get people to turn away from a competitor's products, they should be doing it by talking shit about a game that hasn't been out for a couple of months (nor should it be about a game that, as of right now, is sitting at the top of Live in terms of people that play it. In fact, Halo 3 pisses me off because of this...it's not that it's a shitty game, but it sucked away many people that were playing OTHER games on Live.)

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

640p huh? I didn't even realize that Bungie used a resolution that doesn't even exist.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not own Halo 3 and I have no intention of buying it or a 360 but I'm going to defend it anyway. The whole "640p" thing was because it renders to two 640 row framebuffers which are then composited and slightly scaled vertically to achieve some cool lighting effects. People were only able to notice the slight reduction in vertical resolution by counting pixels on framegrabs. Until I see a study showing that people are even capable of distinguishing 720p and 1080p video sources (not still images), I will continue to believe that all of this fretting over resolution is nothing but fanboy wankery.

That's a challenge to all of the resolution whores out there. I'm sure someone out there can put together a simple double-blind study to test this. Get some volunteers and set up a game to play a demo in 720p or 1080p. Don't let them pause the demo, or get close enough to count pixels, just have them sit an appropriate distance from the screen and ask them which sample was higher resolution. Call it a hunch, but I predict that less than 60% of the volunteers will get it right. If you somehow manage to test "640p" versus 720p I don't see how it could be significantly higher than 50% for a sufficiently large sample.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony of that post couldn't be any better for any other game than Halo 3.

Halo 3 had a marketing budget that dwarfed the amount of money most game companies have spent in the entire time they've been in business for their entire library of games. The number of people Microsoft had working on getting every media outlet on the planet to writing Halo 3 fluff and hype pieces was staggering. I'm sure we all remember a few months ago with people begging for editors to stop with the Halo 3 SPAM stories that were hitting at up to twice a day just here on Slashdot?

"Inteview with Bungie's janitor about Halo 3 - He loves it!"

"Could Halo 3 be bigger than Jesus?"

and on and on and on.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[SengirV]

Talking shit about a game 4 months old? I've seen people on here who haven't RTFA, but you didn't even read the fucking title of the article - 2007's Ten Biggest Gaming Letdowns.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[bigstrat2003]

Halo bashing in a games topic? This is new and unheard-of.

Bungie could only manage to get Halo 3 to run at 640p resolution and not the minimum standard 720p for real next gen games. No one with a lick of sense gives a flying fuck. Unless you're counting the lines, rather than playing the game, you can't tell if there are 640 lines or 720. Give me a break.

Side by side screenshots of Halo 2 and Halo 3 had gamers scratching their heads as to which one was supposed to be the next gen game. BULLSHIT. This was true for the beta only. Playing the finished Halo 3, there's a clear improvement in graphical quality. You might want to get with the times on this one.

Bungie didn't bother to bring Halo 3 out of the dark ages of online gaming and implement dedicated servers. And Bungie because of the lack of dedicated servers Halo 3 could only handle 16 players at a time for online games. There are pc shareware games with better online setups. Agreed 100%, but consoles aren't the place to be looking for good FPS multiplayer gaming anyways.

Nope, single player also runs only at 640p with the same last gen looking graphics. See above responses. No one cares, and the graphics look just fine.

The campaign is incredibly short and linear It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy.

The Halo 3 story is easily one of the lamest even by the incredibly low fps genre standard I beg to differ. Halo 3's story was excellent.

But all in all, Pojut is 100% right. If you're going to bash a game for no reason, bash a game that isn't 4 months old. Hell, there are far more worthy targets out there if you're going to sit and unjustly bash old games. Bioshock (an excellent game, I might add) didn't live up to 1/4 of the hype heaped upon it (no game could have), so from a certain perspective, it's by far the most disappointing game of the year. Why don't you pick on that one while you're at it? I'll tell you why, because you're another idiotic anti-Halo fanboy. I've seen very reasonable arguments put forth as to why Halo isn't good, but yours isn't one of them.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

Bungie could only manage to get Halo 3 to run at 640p resolution and not the minimum standard 720p for real next gen games.

Wait, what? How is that a "minimum standard" for "real next gen games"? You know that the Wii's maximum is 480p, right? If you consider Halo 3 to be even borderline "next gen," then you can't say Metroid Prime 3 isn't, as its single player mode blows Halo 3's away.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Drakin020]

Yeah that's how World of Warcraft worked. So many teams were shattered because of it. Our BF2 clan was destroyed by that POS game.

I know how you feel.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Pojut]

And you apparently haven't read Slashdot since Halo 3 was announced...nearly the exact same cut and paste troll post has been posted in nearly every single story dealing with video games. Changing the first sentence so that it seems to be on-topic with the discussion doesn't make it any less of a shill/troll post.

And no, I won't block AC posts because sometimes ACs do in fact make insightful comments...when they aren't pasting in responses that were written months ago, that is.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to bash a game for no reason, bash a game that isn't 4 months old. Wow, tell me you didn't actually say that, when the title of the article is "2007's Ten Biggest Gaming Letdowns" and his post title (which is also reflected in your Re: response title is a direct derivative.

Are you in the same article that the rest of us are in? Or are you just a little too emotional about HALO for some reason?

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Pojut]

Notice how most of the cut and paste post (which has appeared almost verbatim in nearly every video game story on Slashdot for the past 6 months, I might add) focuses mainly on the game, while devoting only a couple of sentences to the hype machine.

If it were purely about the hype machine, I would have modded it underrated (if it haden't been an AC, of course). But it was the same cut and paste crap that has been tossed at Slashdot readers for months, and as such, I posted a comment stating that it's pointless to continue posting that months after the release of it.

WTF, are people supporting shill/trolls on here now?

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[d3l33t]

I care. I bought a 1080p TV so i could play 720/1080 games.

640 is not HD, sorry.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[enderjsv]

While we're conducting studies lets also grab a group of random individuals, show them a thirty second gameplay clip from Halo 2 and Halo 3, and see if they can't tell the difference in graphics and distinguish one game from the other. I'm no Halo fanboy, but I even take offense to the argument that people couldn't tell the difference between H2 and H3 screenshots. First, I believe that was an issue with the beta, not the final product. Second, a "screenshot" isn't exactly the best way to determine if a game has good graphics or not. Hell, you think a screenshot of Crysis is gonna do that game justice? I don't think so.

In the end, I can name 3 or 4 other games that I enjoyed more than Halo 3 this year, but Halo 3 is still a good game and isn't worthy of all this hateboy nit-picking.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[coaxial]

It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy.

Umm... Eight hours is incredibly short. If you can beat a game in a single day, it's too short. Eight hours is shorter than Gears of War, and I consider GoW to be very short.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[edwdig]

No one with a lick of sense gives a flying fuck. Unless you're counting the lines, rather than playing the game, you can't tell if there are 640 lines or 720. Give me a break.

Realistically, no, it doesn't matter much. At this point, graphics increases don't mean much, as we're well past the point where adding graphics power lets you create game play you couldn't do before. But the Xbox 360 and PS3 are sold on the premise of HD resolution graphics. To the people who bought the systems for that reason, anything less than 720p isn't what they were led to believe they would get.

It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy.

Well, 90% of games (or anything) is crap. That doesn't mean we shouldn't bash a bad game. Obviously every game is linear at some level, but some a lot more so than others. Halo games are far over on the linear side of things. Whether that's a good thing or bad depends on your tastes, but singling out Halo 3 for it after Halo and Halo 2 set the bar for it is silly.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's more likely that you bought an HDTV for the sake of being able to say you have an HDTV and so you fret over things like the resolution of games because admitting that it matters little threatens the rationalization of your purchase and makes you feel like a fool.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[revengebomber]

It's a letdown in itself that 8 hours is now an acceptable single player campaign.

(I still haven't beaten Nightmare Xaero.)

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[enderjsv]

I'd say you're both a little right. I bought an HDTV after seeing my friend play a game on his. The picture was so clear and nice I couldn't help but be impressed. So it's not entirely unreasonable that there IS a difference between HD and standard and that difference is noticeable. But on the other hand, we're talking about a difference between 80P of resolution. Honestly, while I can tell the difference between 420P and 720P fairly easily, I struggle sometimes to tell the difference between 720P and 1080P. So crying over 80P seems pretty dumb to me.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

No one with a lick of sense gives a flying fuck. Unless you're counting the lines, rather than playing the game, you can't tell if there are 640 lines or 720. Give me a break. Some people care even if they can't see the difference, and some people actually can see the difference.

Agreed 100%, but consoles aren't the place to be looking for good FPS gaming anyways. There, fixed that for you.

It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy. Wow. I'd hate to see your idea of "incredibly short" then. Even the HL2 episodes are more than 8 hours for the average player. Maybe you're used to Minesweeper? Me, when I pay $50+ for a game, I expect either some damn good multiplayer (Seriously, no dedicated servers and 16 player limits? Please. Quake2 was better than that.) that's going to hold me around for hundreds of hours, or a fun single-player campaign good for at least 50 hours of gaming goodness. As for being linear, you're the one full of bullshit. I've not played Halo 3 (and never will, based on my experience with its predecessors) so I don't know how it ranks on the linear scale, but there's plenty of games out there that aren't linear. Far more than 10%. If you'd said "90% of all single-player FPS games" are linear you'd be pretty close. But that's not what you said. And FPS's, while numerous, don't make up even 25% of all video games. And being linear, even for a FPS is a drawback in most cases, and Halo 3 can indeed be bashed for being too linear, if in fact it is. If a game is going to be too linear, it needs to make up for it in other ways. Apparently in the GP's opinion Halo 3 does not.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[enderjsv]

Wow, lots of points to make. I'm lazy so I'm not gonna quote or anything, but here goes.

The people who can't see the difference but still care are idiots. I know that's not the most logical response, but it's the only way I can seem to rationalize a stance like that. In my opinion, elitism like that is nauseating. As for the 5 or 6 people who CAN see the difference, good for you. That's quite an impressive skill. However, if a lapse of 80P is enough to ruin a game for you, maybe it's more of a curse than a skill. Or maybe you're just being ridiculous.

The Half-life episodes weren't 8 hours each. I don't know if you were drunk and thought you were playing when you were really watching Ben Hur, but I can assure you that I beat both episodes in under 6 hours. Episode 1 was 2 ½ hours, Episode 2 was 3 ½. They were great games, but they were short, plain and simple. If you add in Portal, the original single player content of the Orange Box added up to about 7 ½ hours of gameplay.

As for 50+ hours, show me a FPS game that's taken you fifty hours to beat. Hell, show me a "good" one that's taken you 20 hours to beat. I've played a lot of FPS games, and it's rare to find one that lasts more than 12 hours.

Yes, no dedicated servers and a 16 player limit is a bummer, which is simply a testament to how much fun the multiplayer portion of Halo is that it can be remarkably fun and exciting even without these features.

Lastly, I don't even know why I bothered replying to you, since I just read that you have never played Halo 3 and never will. You know, one time my brother and my brother-in-law were having a heated debate about a certain type of automobile. I know very little about automobiles and hadn't driven it. So you know what I did? I went and watched TV. Then next time you feel like participating in a discussion about a game you've never played and know very little about, go watch TV instead.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[posterlogo]

Fair enough, though opinions are not as valuable as facts. Over half of all 360 owners have and play Halo3. Sorry you don't like it, but the masses have voted with their wallets.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who can't see the difference but still care are idiots. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Does it matter? They're not getting the resolution they're supposed to get.

As for the 5 or 6 people who CAN see the difference, good for you. That's quite an impressive skill. However, if a lapse of 80P is enough to ruin a game for you, maybe it's more of a curse than a skill. Or maybe you're just being ridiculous. It's not a matter of it ruining the game. It's a matter of it being as good as it should be. Playstation or XBox levels of graphics don't ruin the game. But if you're paying for HD, that's what you should get.

The Half-life episodes weren't 8 hours each. I don't know if you were drunk and thought you were playing when you were really watching Ben Hur, but I can assure you that I beat both episodes in under 6 hours. Episode 1 was 2 ½ hours, Episode 2 was 3 ½. They were great games, but they were short, plain and simple. Not all people take the same amount of time in all games. I said the average player got more than 8 hours out of HL2 episodes. I may have been incorrect on that; I've not seen any hard data. But just because one person (you) finished them in ~3 hours doesn't mean everyone will.

If you add in Portal, the original single player content of the Orange Box added up to about 7 ½ hours of gameplay. Which is moot, because the Orange Box also includes excellent multiplayer options.

As for 50+ hours, show me a FPS game that's taken you fifty hours to beat. Hell, show me a "good" one that's taken you 20 hours to beat. I've played a lot of FPS games, and it's rare to find one that lasts more than 12 hours. I never said it has to take 50 hours to beat. What I said is, if the multiplayer isn't good enough (or nonexistant) then I expect at least 50 hours of fun single-player from a game that costs $50 or more. Some games are short, but well worth replaying. If I'm not going to get more than 8 hours of fun from a game, I'm not paying $50 for it, end of story. Thank goodness I borrowed Halo instead of buying it. And nothing I saw in Halo 2 or heard about 3 has even come close to changing my mind. And for what it's worth, good single-player only FPS's are hard to find. Really hard to find. I can think of about 3 I've played that were really worth the money. And even those weren't worth full retail price for me. Basically the moral of the story is, if your FPS is going to have multiplayer options as limited as those in Halo, don't bother.

Yes, no dedicated servers and a 16 player limit is a bummer, which is simply a testament to how much fun the multiplayer portion of Halo is that it can be remarkably fun and exciting even without these features. No, it's more of a testament to the dearth of good FPS's on consoles. Which is really not surprising given how poorly console controllers lend themselves to FPS's. So far even the innovative Wiimote has failed to make any real improvements in this area.

Lastly, I don't even know why I bothered replying to you, since I just read that you have never played Halo 3 and never will. You know, one time my brother and my brother-in-law were having a heated debate about a certain type of automobile. I know very little about automobiles and hadn't driven it. So you know what I did? I went and watched TV. Then next time you feel like participating in a discussion about a game you've never played and know very little about, go watch TV instead. The gist of my post was about what amount of gameplay is sufficient to warrant a $50 pricetag. Which has nothing to do with whether or not I'll ever play Halo 3. So why aren't you watching TV instead of posting here?

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry you don't like it, but the masses have voted with their wallets.

By that logic, Shania Twain was the greatest musical artist of the 1990s. Sorry you don't like it, but you are a huge gayz0r.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[fistfullast33l]

I'm going to agree with you on the 640p whatever comments. I really don't care that Halo did some weird resolution tricks - I saw the game for the first time this week and it looks pretty good for a next gen game. Not Crysis good, but better than say Resistance did on the PS3.

However, I don't agree with this comment:

but consoles aren't the place to be looking for good FPS multiplayer gaming anyways.

I think that Xbox Live really set the bar in this last gen and you can see games like Warhawk (split screen multiplayer on a dedicated server) set the bar this gen. Matchmaking and dedicated servers really are going to become a staple this time around, and I don't think that the PC can claim this as much anymore. Especially now that UT3 supports mouse and keyboard on PS3 and most likely will do so for 360 as well.

The original Halo really kind of pushed things ahead when it was originally released for multiplayer on a console. I expect that it should do so in this gen as well.

Oh, and I'm sick and tired of the 8 hour FPS games. I want 20 hours minimum. That's a game. 8 hours is too short for entertainment value.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[khellendros1984]

640 Progressive scan doesn't exist? Wow, I'd better tell Win/Lin to stop having it as a resolution option...

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[d3l33t]

fair enough, so don't market the game as HD. HD denotes a minimum resolution of 720, there is no disputing that.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

The best Halo 3 review of 2007

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[antek9]

WTF, are people supporting shill/trolls on here now?

As long as they are posting insightful or interesting stuff, yes we do. In fact, if I had mod points available right now, I would tend to mod you at least flamebait, like I prefer to handle the majority of posts calling people with a different opinion shills.

Just because it's been copied and pasted before doesn't mean it must be wrong.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, learn how to quote, shithead!

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Pojut]

You're correct, it doesn't mean it must be wrong...but that doesn't mean it's right, either.

As far as "people with different opinions" go, reread the post a bit. The entire post is constructed in a way that smacks of paid badmouthing. If you think it is an opinion of some random person, you are far too trusting.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[enderjsv]

I hate it when people dissect posts into quotes, but whatever, I'll respond.

Stating that the average player took 8 hours to beat each of the HL episodes to give the unfair impression that the Halo 3 campaign is as short as an episode of HL without actually having research to back it up is unfair. Maybe citing my own anecdotal evidence wasn't the best way to counter such an argument, so I'll use some real stats.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/1739223

According to these stats, the average person took 5 hours to beat HL:E2. That's not quite 8. Unless you would like to claim that Portal runs an average over 4 hours (go on, I dare ya) that brings the grand total to 9 hours. Hardly a far cry from Halo's single player offerings.

As for the fact that the Orange Box contains an excellent multi player game to make up for its somewhat short single player experience, you're absolutely right. It does, which is why the Orange Box is a great purchase and is, in my humble opinion, the best game of the year.

But who are you to declare that Halo's multiplayer aspect doesn't do the same for Halo 3 when you haven't even played the game? I love that you simply can't imagine a world in which peer-to-peer and a 16 player limit can still produce a good (if not great) experience. Hell, compared to the Orange Box, Halo's multi-player is enormous, despite your uninformed opinion to the contrary, including 4 player online co-op in the campaign, about 2-3 times more maps than team fortress, an easy built in tool for map customization and a seemingly endless amount of game options. Halo 3's multiplayer, despite its shortcomings, is still good-to-great and more than supplies the 50+ hour quota you have placed on a game worthy of your almighty dollar.

And as for the whole consoles-controller-fps thing, that is such an old, tired argument. I'm really tempted to play the "idiot" card again, since I fail to see how anyone with opposable thumbs would find it so detrimental to play a fps on a console. I've been doing it since I was a child and it's never caused me any irrefutable harm. I know playing a FPS with a mouse and a keyboard is easier, but so is driving an automatic transmission. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy a race if I'm driving with a stick, does it?

Then again, it took you 8 hours to beat HL2:E2 with a mouse and a keyboard and it took me 3 1/2 with a controller. Maybe you really are thumbless.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Kjella]

Wii is last-gen graphics with next-gen gameplay. While I love my Wii, the graphics suck compared to the 1080p graphics coming from my PC. I also know what I paid for it and understand perfectly why Nintendo wouldn't make that the default. For now I'm happy they're reclaiming ground so there'll be a next generation, and I do expect it to be at least 720p (though since it's some years away I hope they go directly to 1080p). Maybe they should make two versions, since I'm sure we're talking a $100 price difference on the graphic chip.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[grahamwest]

I can totally tell it's at a lower resolution than other games. I think they're also not using the antialiasing in the same way as most games, or something else is amiss, because I can definitely see the hard edges of walls and doors and so on. Mind you I have a 1080p Full-HD television.

It's not like it's a big deal, they made their choice so they could run at framerate and get the lighting they wanted, but at least some of us could tell immediately. By the way, the reason they do this reduced framebuffer size (and it has to be horizontal as well as vertical) is so the whole thing fits in the GPU's embedded memory and they don't need to resolve to main memory during the rendering process.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Ash-Fox]

If you're going to bash a game for no reason, bash a game that isn't 4 months old.

What? Is there a valid from/expiry date to review a game?

I don't understand this logic.

Hell, there are far more worthy targets out there if you're going to sit and unjustly bash old games.

You're calling a '4 months old game' old? What the hell?

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[JonathanBoyd]

HD denotes a minimum resolution of 720, there is no disputing that.

Actually, 480p is the minimum for HD. Because it's not massively different to 480i though, people usually mean 720p and up when they refer to HD resolutions. 640p is a lot closer than 480p to 720p anyway.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[TheNinjaroach]

Ever play Halo 3 on your HDTV? Pixels are found at almost every edge in the game. I was very unimpressed last night when my friend brought it over to play on my 1080P set, yes it is the first time I've seen Halo 3. Bioshock, on the other hand, looked fantastic on the 360 and really blew Halo 3 out of the water as far as visuals go.

I'm not "crying over 80P" here, I'm pointing out the fact that Halo 3 looks a lot more like "Halo 2.5" and that other games on the same system look much nicer.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[JonathanBoyd]

Obviously every game is linear at some level, but some a lot more so than others. Halo games are far over on the linear side of things. Whether that's a good thing or bad depends on your tastes, but singling out Halo 3 for it after Halo and Halo 2 set the bar for it is silly.

In what way is Halo 3 far over on the linear side of things? What would be the vast swathe of FPSes that you would give as counter-examples? Are you talking about the way you work your way through a level?

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[SengirV]

I'm guessing you have lots of Microsoft stock, because the post was perfectly on topic. All of which tells me you have been slighted in some way and can't let it go. Might I suggest that you skip this topic as Halo 3 is a perfect legitimate target for criticism in the context of a "Year in Review", and you obviously can't handle this fact. Cut&Paste criticism or not.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Pojut]

Nope, no Microsoft stock. You are right though, I can't let it go. Like I said, changing the first couple of sentences of a copy-paste troll post that people otherwise almost ALWAYS mod flamebait doesn't suddenly make it an insightful post...it makes it flamebait, same as it always is.

Ironically, I actually agree with a lot of what is in the post...I personally have never liked the Halo series, 3 included...just because I agree with an opinion doesn't mean I have to agree with its origin.

This is insane...it's like a serial killer taping a printed out picture of someone else over his face, and suddenly no one sees the knife in his hand.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[SengirV]

Don't get me wrong, I see your point. It's just that it does not apply in a "Year in review" thread where Halo 3 is more than fair game.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Stevecrox]

I can and most people I know can see the difference. I bought a cheap 32" HD LCD for my PS3, excusing 1080p and 1080i you can see the difference in games as you increased the resolution. If you take Motorstorm, Orange box, Resistance FOM and start on a 576p resolution, move up to 720 and then lastly to 1080i/p you'll notice the text becoming crisper the model edges becoming smoother, and increase an graphical detail (Motorstorm really suffers at low resolutions.)

Every game I own (except Pirates of the Carribean) looks far better on a 1080p tv then on a 720/576p tv. If you don't believe me, next time your in a store goto into display settings and reset the PS3's resolution then play the game and then run it at a higher resolution, ask a friend to judge if you believe its psychosematic.

I can't see the difference between a standard PAL DVD and a Blu-Ray film (and I've really tried to find some.) But when it comes to games there is a noticable difference.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[enderjsv]

I love Yahtzee, he's hilarious. But truthfully, reviewing Halo 3 and stating "I don't care about multiplayer" is like reviewing Bioshock and saying "I only care about the hacking mini-game." Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad, but it's still pretty bad.

Re:Halo 3 Easily Biggest Gaming Letdown In 2007

[Reservoir Penguin]

Really, it depends on your style of playing. I've just started playing OB of Xbox360 and it takes me about 5 hours to clear a level. Of course I like to stop to look at textures and architecture and find secrets and not just run from start to finish. How does EP1 and Ep2 compare to an average HL2 episode, like Waterhazard or Highway 17? Valve says Ep1-3 are about the same size as a full HL game.

Death of the CRPG

[Anonymous Coward]

Troika's dead, an Xbox FPS developer has the Fallout IP, and Bioware was eaten by EA before they could squeeze out an uncorrupted Dragon Age.

RIP CRPG.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[Pojut]

Bethesda, an Xbox FPS company? WTF?

According to Wikipedia, out of the 68 games that Bethesda has played some part in developing, publishing, or producing, only 14 of them actually appeared on an Xbox console...those 14 games include BOTH Xbox AND Xbox 360...on top of that, on just a quick skim through the list, only a handful of those games are actually FPS (and no, Oblivion was NOT an FPS. If the previous Elder Scrolls games were not considered an FPS, neither was Oblivion)

What the hell are you talking about?

Re:Death of the CRPG

[jombeewoof]

Bethesda having the rights to Fallout can only be a good thing.
The only complaint I've ever had about them is that they beta test on paying customers. But it seems that everyone is doing that these days.
For what it's worth, I never really got into the fallout games. I loved the idea, but the gameplay just didn't do it for me.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[Sciros]

If you consider Bethesda Softworks an "XBox FPS developer" then you never had an idea of what a CRPG was to begin with. So don't worry, you won't notice a thing.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[LarsWestergren]

Troika's dead, an Xbox FPS developer has the Fallout IP, and Bioware was eaten by EA before they could squeeze out an uncorrupted Dragon Age.

On the other hand, we have the Witcher, and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, which makes it one of the best CRPG years in a long time. Which brings us to my disappointment, mirrored nicely by this article: This was a great year for PC games, the best in a long time, but online media seems only to care about consoles.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[klingens]

Anyone that played Morrowind before and then Oblivion saw the huge difference.

Morrowind was a PC game that got ported to console. Oblivion was was a Console game ported to PC. A "port" as commonly known with PC players. And as most "Ports" it sucked in the same ways like them. The RPG part dumbed down overall with more emphasis on fights, made more lowest common denominator accessible for the "casual gamers", had simplified controls due to the lack of keyboard and mouse, horrible user interface, again due due bad res of the typical console "monitor" (NTSC TV) and controls.

It might have helped Bethesda's pocketbook (bigger market, easier to sell the bonus quests due to missing moddability on consoles, etc) but it made the game itself worse in the eyes of (PC)gamers and especially long time ElderScrolls players.

No it's not a full FPS (yet) but it certaily is a lot less of a RPG like it was.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[Pojut]

True, the interface was definately geared more towards consoles...but, with the help of the (excellent) oblivion modding community, the interface was helped out substantially. What you said about long time elder scrolls gamers is rather funny to me...I've been playing since the first one, and I personally thought Oblivion was the best one yet.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[brkello]

Oblivion, and I am speaking as a PC gamer here, was far superior to Morrowind. Yeah, things were less customizable in the sense that you couldn't do little tricks to make yourself completely invincible by using alchemy and spell casting. I think it was less about being dumbed down and more about having more control on what a player was able to do so that they couldn't get stupidly powerful. But Oblivion was just much more fun to play and much more engrossing in its quests. I couldn't play through all of Morrowind because it just got boring after awhile...while Oblivion I played all the way through and had over 100 hours of game play. I didn't have a problem with the interface...but that's a good thing about being a PC gamer. There are plenty of people out there who were like you and made mods to make oblivion more morrowindy.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, we have the Witcher, and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, which makes it one of the best CRPG years in a long time.

Yeah, an isometric beat-'em-up and an expansion pack... what an incredible year for fans of the genre.

Re:Death of the CRPG

[LarsWestergren]

Yeah, an isometric beat-'em-up

A beat em up? Yeah, you've obviously tried the game...

and an expansion pack...

But WHAT an expansion!

I'd try to convince you to try them, but you are obviously satisfied with being a prejudiced, bitter and disappointed gamer, so I doubt anything I'd say would change it.

The Biggest Disappointment

[MonkeyCookie]

...was that Duke Nukem Forever wasn't released in 2007. I was sure that this year was the year!

Re:The Biggest Disappointment

[cmburns69]

Personally I was disappointed that progress was made! What will we joke about when it's finally released?!

more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[arsheive]

Does anyone know the specific incidents the article is talking about here? I found nothing on the wikipedia pages for her and Assassin's Creed, and I'm lazy...

Re:more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

This NSFW

Re:more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[Fx.Dr]

I can't access TFA (damn work filters), but if it's what I think it is, here's the scoop:

Ubisoft and Jade had a fit after UK artist 'scribblekid' had penned a "racy" (major understatement) parody about how Jade was being made spokesperson for the game - essentially being thrust into the spotlight because she's a major babe. Said parody features her going down a few geeky gamers enjoying her "game".

Re:more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[NexFlamma]

Yeah, that comic would be the controversial bit I was talking about.

While they let me speak on it, I couldn't convince the higher ups to let me post that image on the homepage.

Re:more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[donscarletti]

Before passing judgement on the fairness of that comic I'd have to find out whether she was involved in coming up with that stupid sci-fi "genetic memory" thing that ruined the immersion of the otherwise awesome game. If it merely got past her as part of a groupthink effect, I'd be outraged that they insulted the virtue of one of the great visionaries of our time, if she was at all involved in the original idea then I'd be outraged that it didn't show her and anyone else involved with it snacking on some babies with their friend Hitler. Those cutscenes were worse than anything Pol Pot ever did and I demand that whoever suggested them be dragged to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.

Re:more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the 'Something Awful'-spawned nude photoshop of her.

Re:more about "The Internet and Jade Raymond"?

[nuzak]

The "genetic memory" thing is woven throughout the story, and affects the design and tone from start to finish. Everyone was most certainly on the same page about it, and it wasn't something "thrown in". Did I like it? Not particularly. It's an artistic element I happened to disagree with, but it's still a well-crafted one.

What did more to ruin the immersion was the constant impingement of the "techie" HUD interface -- even when all the interface elements were turned off -- by constant tutorial popups and "game" elements, like a running count of towers climbed, generic citizens saved (largely to shut off the annoying looping dialog), and so forth. Most of all, the overall disconnected feeling of it all. Kill some guards, do a pickpocket mission, kill some more guards, do an eavesdrop, kill even more guards, do another generic pickpocket. Rack up a body count of a hundred and huh, still no one notices you as long as you sit on a bench for ten seconds?

Bah. The fighting's kind of fun, but frankly Prince of Persia did that better.

Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

After two years on the market Microsoft still hasn't been able to find a way for even the latest model 360s to stop failing. Even in recent interviews Microsoft execs are only talking about what a great replacement service they have. I don't think anyone would have thought that after two years the 360 would still be plagued by the insanely high failure rate.

On the software front Microsoft's first party or exclusive developers are in shambles. Bioware and Bizarre turned their backs on Microsoft and headed off to multiplatform publishers. All three major first party titles for Microsoft in 2007 turned out to be graphical disasters with Forza 2 being the worst, closely followed by Halo 3, and Mass Effect pretty only looks decent in the dialog portions with the rest of the game looking very much like a glitchy/buggy per-beta last gen game.

The 360 was supposed to be the console where Microsoft finally got it right. But with poor sales everywhere but the US, unprecedented hardware failures, the loss of most of the 360's first party development array, and the awful first party game's graphics Microsoft and the 360 easily are the biggest disappointment of 2007.

Going back two years I don't think anyone would have believed what a mess the 360 turned out to be.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't think anyone would have thought that after two years the 360 would still be plagued by the insanely high failure rate."

It's not plagued by an insanely high failure rate and it never was.

You've been reading too many fanboy newsletters.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[enderjsv]

Wow. You said a mouthful. A lot of your claims are fairly harsh, as well. It'd be nice if you could back them up by citing your sources.

First, what study have you read indicating that Xboxs released in the past year still suffer the same number of hardware malfunctions as their predecessors? I play close attention to gaming news and I haven't seen a study like this anywhere. Please tell me where you get this information so that I can be as informed as you are.

Second, Bioware was bought out. It's not as though they "left". If fact, Bioware was never an exclusive developer, they simply made a few exclusive games, which I'm sure many developers have done at one time or another for one console or another. It's entirely possible that future games developed by Bioware could also be Xbox exclusive. Also, Bungie may be wholly independent now, but they've stated they have no intention of developing for other consoles. Your statements that developers "are in shambles" and have "turned their backs" on Microsoft seem to be considerably exaggerated. Let's not forget that 3rd party exclusiveness isn't exactly Nintendo's or Sony's strong points.

Third... graphical disasters? Really? Let's check some review quotes for Mass Effect, shall we.

• " All in all, Mass Effect is every bit a great as we were promised. The story is fantastic, the graphics are unbelievable, sound is fairly good and the music is wonderful..." Gamer's Temple
• " The cinematic design is nothing short of masterful. This is a game that takes the aspects of film that make cinema so compelling and crosses it with the interactivity of games with unprecedented success." IGN
• "Graphics: 9/10" Gamespot

Basically, I find it hard to believe that anyone could really claim that they were "graphical disasters". Even if you had said they were "graphically subpar", I would probably take issue. But "graphical disaster" makes it sound as though you have some kind of vendetta against these games? I'd call you a Nintendo or a Sony fanboy, but I'm not that petty (wait, maybe I just did).

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

I hate responding to trolls.... but.

They took a billion dollar hit to their bottom line to STOP the bleeding of consoles... they admitted (in no uncertain terms) that EVERY console they sold (up to that point) was potentially destined to fail... and fail for the SAME FLAW.

20% not high? 30%? How many consoles have to go back to Microsoft (and how many times), before you admit there's a flaw in the 360 that is VERY troubling and VERY problematic for their goodwill and future as a gaming company.

The failure rate of the PS3 is infinitesimal. Google is your friend. The Wii's also a solid performer. Compared to the 360 the PS2 launch console is more reliable.

You've been nursing Bill Gates' ballsack too long to notice the facts DO support his statement... and it's NOT fanboy rhetoric when the VERY company extends the warranty for a _SPECIFIC_ failure to 3 YEARS, for FREE. That had "class action dodge" written ALL over it, chum.

AC, indeed. Sometimes your asinine insinuations really get to me.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

As for this first claim, I cannot back the new consoles vs. original design because Microsoft is _hiding_ that information. You can't even tell which ones on the shelf have the flaw and which do not without a pad and paper (where it was made, when, what "team" put it together....etc.) So we'll never get anywhere trying to decide if the flaw was fixed or not until this generation is over, I suspect (if ever.) And without a screwdriver or a flashlight, you can't tell if your console on the shelf is "flawed" or "fixed".... so that's moot, but a good point that it's probably anecdotal.

As for Bioware being bought, yes... they were a Microsoft "partner" (read: got big bags of money to make a few MS exclusive games)... but Bungie WAS microsoft's pride and joy and they LEFT. Bioshock and Mass Effect should be heading for the PS3 next year (I'd wager... and the Bioware PR guy basically hinted that the PS3 was getting Mass Effect in the next year). IIRC, Bungie has never publicly stated they were not going to develop for other consoles, and neither did they say they were... it's someone reading between the lines, I suspect... because their PR-like statement made it sound like all was wonderful in MS-land, and they hated to leave the big nest... ;) If you have a more specific quote, I'd appreciate the link...

From someone who played Mass Effect, the slowdown and popup can be unbearably bad... particularly during the oft-overdone battle sequences. It is _NOT_ "cinema quality", unless you count the grain filter addition (which you can turn off) as an "aspect of compelling cinema"... When you're looking at stills and statics, the game is superb. It's when you move around too much or have too many things on the screen that we see the flaws. It was a good effort by Bioware, but I think it fell short... combat was too problematic, the rover was a pitiful thing to _attempt_ to drive... and the story was, in effect, a bit too linear to be such an "open" game. Some people liked it though.

Let's talk Halo 3. It's not even 720p. Good? Sure, but not great... certainly not the 2nd coming (as the article mentions). But why was it not up to the hype MS marketing had for it? I'd consider that little gem to be a bit of a PR disaster, rather than a graphics disaster (but when you couple that with the hyperbole from Redmond regarding their console, it really does seem like a gfx disaster.) Does it make for an un-fun game? I don't think so... but then again, I never liked Halo... Sure it sold millions... MS counted on that. But if it represents the epitome of "next gen" gaming... they should really stop and take a deep breath... and maybe play Bioshock or Gears of War... (the latter being not an FPS, but very graphically impressive, IMO.)

Third party exclusiveness isn't ANYONE's strong point this generation, if you hadn't noticed. And Sony still has a lock on MANY developers that won't do an XBox title... or if they do, it'll be long after the PS3 title has moved to the bargain bin... Nintendo never has had a lock on third party anything (that's for another post, though).... but this generation has seen the death knell of 'third party exclusives'. If you want to play a Sony game, you have to buy a Sony... if you want to play a MS game, you have to buy an Xbox, and so on... but for Namco, Capcom, Bioware, etc etc... you can pick any of the offerings. ;)

As you may have guessed.. I own a 360 and a PS3. So, I'm neither one's fanboy... I just want to balance both ends of the anecdotal spectrum with a bit of my own. ;) And a few additional factoids to make the process all the more complicated. :)

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[enderjsv]

Here's a link to a Gamespot news article.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6183773.html?tag=result;title;1

Here's a quote from the article - "With Bungie no longer tied to Microsoft, many speculated on whether the developer would lend projects to consoles other than the Xbox 360. While the option remains, Bungie lead writer Frank O'Connor has said that the developer isn't going to make the move any time soon."

As for the rest of your comments, I might not agree with you 100% but I recognize that Halo, Mass Effect and Forza have their issues. I also recognize that Bungie not being owned outright by Microsoft is a bad thing for Microsoft. And losing any type of exclusivity is probably bad for the Xbox 360. I do not contest any of that. But the AC's tone was what I took issue with. He seems to think that the Xbox 360 is doomed, and that impressions of the system so far are overwhelmingly negative. This seems to be very opposite to the tone of the gaming industry as a whole, or at least what I have seen of it (which is a lot). Very few would argue that the 360 didn't have the best lineup of games for this holiday season. The Xbox Live system is often touted as the most robust online console service. And all three of those games he touted as "graphical disasters" have received very positive overall reviews (check metacritic) and have sold quite well. Terms like "shambles" and "graphical disasters" seem so ridiculous to me. I don't see any reason to believe, as the AC so elegantly put it, that the 360 turned out to be a "mess."

I also forgot to mention in my previous post that the AC's claim that the Xbox is only selling well in the U.S. is a flat out lie. In fact, the only market I know of where the Xbox is NOT doing well is the Asian market, primarily because of lackluster sales in Japan. But in Europe, Canada and Australia, the system is selling very well. I'm not gonna look up the stats to back this up cause I'm lazy, but I'm sure one wouldn't have too look far.

One last thing, you stated third party exclusivity hasn't been anyones strong point so far, but I disagree. The Orange Box (Valve), Bioshock (2k) and Mass Affect (Bioware) were all 3rd party exclusives to the Xbox during the holiday season, (yes, I know this will change but the damage has already been done). I believe last year that Oblivion was exclusive during the holiday season. The Xbox might not retain these exclusivities forever, but they know how to time it right.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

I suspect we'll see Bungie jumping onto either the Wii or the PS3 sooner rather than later... they can't let revenue slip away because of brand loyalty..... I'm just speculating. ;) It was still a bit vague, although more negative towards other consoles than some of the summaries I read.

While I agree the tone of the original response was a overtly harsh, and the person's obviously frustrated with the 360 (perhaps his/her unit died on them right at Christmas time).... I still think that MS is potentially losing future goodwill and mindshare with how the console has been even less reliable than their first attempt... (the only console I've had fail since my 2600 has been my first gen XBox... even my launch PS2 is still working, beating the odds there I suspect..) Still, their attempt to avoid a recall was at least a positive step (something Sony never did...) If their redesign helps, and their new 65nm systems come around to mass quantities, the goodwill lost might not be permanent... but I'm not sure how to know, without seeing the sales for the XBox 720.. ;)

Ace Combat 6 sold well in Japan... for a week... bringing up 360 system sales to a respectable level... but the next week, the blip was off... and I suspect that might've had something to do with the eventual PS3 port of the game coming next year... (That's Japan... Microsoft might as well abandon trying there... it's hopeless...) But with the exception of the US, the PS3 has seen much better overall sales in Europe and Japan, which is nice but still behind the 360 with its head of steam. We're seeing the Wii break all records, but not having the attach rate the 360/Ps3 has in terms of software sales (more important to Sony and MS who lose on the hardware, but still...) So I think the 360 will do fine, but it's not all rosy. ;) It's much better than the AC's painting of it, to be sure... and that we can agree on. I just don't have as positive a picture as some do... probably because I'm old. :)

If you distill AC's focus down to the failure rate... I would agree that the 360's a mess because of it. (It creates bad press at the least, but pissed-off customers are harder to let slide into obscurity than an article decrying the QA at Redmond.) The billion dollar slice out of the pie for repairing a particular flaw is really cutting their overall success (since they've not really made a hefty Nintendo-esque profit on their VG venture since they started), but they have made up for it with at least great games (so far... albeit FPS heavy this generation for some reason...) I still suspect that things will be stinging over there for a while in the division that handles the 360.

The Orange Box did finally come out for Christmas on the PS3... but the sales lead for the 360 was substantial (not to mention Valve's asinine port handoff to some no-name company). I think the PS3 had a great lineup too... Folklore (a bit older, but a good game) Heavenly Sword (short, but VERY good), Ratchet & Clank (everyone owes it to themselves to try that one... superb), and Uncharted were all top notch releases the PS3 didn't have last year... and with a $400 console in the pipeline, we're finally going to see some decent competition for Microsoft's lead... (competition's great for the gamer...) Devil May Cry 4 is on the horizon... along with some other neat titles... should be a good year for both systems... (I don't own a Wii, so I cannot speculate on how the library stacks up...)

As for exclusivity... I think the AC was harsh about that, but considering everyone in the press and online gave Sony so much shit for not having any exclusives, or timed exclusives, saying they were doomed because of it has finally come back full circle to Microsoft... But the tune's not the same anymore for some reason. Losing some 3rd party supporter exclusivity (at least in the short term) will look bad more than actually _be_ bad, but if the games keep coming for both systems, we can see

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Ash-Fox]

But in Europe

I know for certain it isn't doing well in Poland (which is a part of Europe). I don't know about other European countries though.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

"20% not high? 30%? How many consoles have to go back to Microsoft (and how many times), before you admit there's a flaw in the 360 that is VERY troubling and VERY problematic for their goodwill and future as a gaming company."

That'd be a great response... if I had said there aren't flaws. The failure rate is ~5%.

"You've been nursing Bill Gates' ballsack too long to notice the facts DO support his statement... and it's NOT fanboy rhetoric when the VERY company extends the warranty for a _SPECIFIC_ failure to 3 YEARS, for FREE. That had "class action dodge" written ALL over it, chum."

Actually, it just has "Too many noisy people" like YOU written all over it. Until you've got 3 million individuals bitching on the net about XBOX failures, you don't really know. The 30% number came from a poll.

"You've been nursing Bill Gates' ballsack too long to notice the facts DO support his statement... "

Heh. I don't even own an XBOX. You should be careful about crying 'fanboy' whilst claiming you're not blathering fanboyisms.

"AC, indeed. Sometimes your asinine insinuations really get to me."

That's amazing considering I've never replied to you before. Care to take another shot in the dark?

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[enderjsv]

Actually, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune was developed by Naughty Dog, which is a first party developer owned by Sony, so that doesn't really fall under the category of third-party exclusivity. Also, Insomniac Games (Ratchet and Clank, Resistance: Fall of man), while technically an independent developer, has been developing solely for Sony since 1996 and all of their games have been published by Sony. So its no surprise that they continue to do so.

Still, all that is beside the point and I've steered this thread a little off-topic. I guess if I had to sum up my position, I'd simply state that, perhaps, if one wanted to be cruel, I could abide them to refer to certain aspects of the 360 as "a mess" (such as hardware reliability), but referring to the entire console as "a mess" is just fanboy flamebait. But don't misunderstand my intentions. If anyone was to call the PS3 or the Wii a mess in the same tone as the AC, I'd be defending them just as vigorously. Competition IS good, that I agree with, and I think the market today is finally able to truly support three independent consoles as well as a move toward 3rd party development dominance, both good things.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

Good point.... I really didn't want to imply that I was thinking the OP was correct in his assumptions, just that tempered with a bit of pragmatism, we're seeing less of a "doom and gloom" scenario than we saw for any console at any point in its lifecycle (Dreamcast included). We're both on the same page, and I've enjoyed the discussion...

Yeah, I forgot N.D. was a Sony owned developer... explains why the game is fairly flawless... it's their own house. ;) Insomniac I would assume had the same arrangement (for longer) that we saw with Bioware (if I had to guess.)

What MS and Sony need to do is court more situations like Insomniac and the pre-Christmas Bioware so that they can gain an edge... but I'm no mogul. ;)

I really should be playing the new DLC for Bioshock... ;) heh. Or maybe Folklore. ;)

It was a great Christmas.. :-)

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[NanoGator]

I would just like to point out that the 20 percent number is a guess. It originated from a website that ran a poll and they came up with that number after they received the results. It wasn't scientific, and it wasn't based on anything like retail reports. Some people were given a chance to bitch and they did. The warranty is definitely compelling and definitely says there is a problem, but it is also worth noting that Sony has been deluged with so much bad press that it is not surprising they are trying to nip it as quickly as possible. The internet has gotten very noisy in the last couple of years, especially with regards to Sony. All bad news about any system has to be taken with a grain of salt. It is possible that is an admission of a nasty defect, but it is also possible it is MS making a PR move that helps deal with the noisy backlash and makes them look more customer friendly than Sony. Neither you nor I know. There are a lot of people with a chip on their shoulder out there, just waiting to strike. You should keep that in mind when you're presented with a sensationalist number like that.

As for the AC posting, do you really blame the guy for posting anonymously and going against popular opinion? Slashdot's moderation system is not friendly towards those with a different view.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[enderjsv]

Great Christmas nothin'. It was a great YEAR! It started for me with God of War 2, ended for me with Assassin's Creed, and had a whole crapload of great in between. Hard to imagine what it would have been like if Smash Bros. and GTA4 hadn't been delayed, along with a few others. Incidentitally, I'd name the BioShock DLC amongst my disappointments of the year. Great game, but the DLC was kinda weak. The patch that fixed the widescreen issue was cool, but in all fairness it should have been like that to begin with. Go with Folklore.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

AC... you're all the same to me. You underestimate the flaw as much as most people overestimate it. Fanboy? No, but if it walks like a duck....

My 360 is fine. It's not a launch system, but it still works. Sounds like _you_ need to lighten up.

Only a fanboy would defend the flaw of a system as not as bad as it was, when the warranty _for_ the specific flaw cost MS $1 billion. Quite a big hit for a "small" flaw....

Post with your real name if you're so certain of your opinion... if not... blather on... no one's listening.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

You've got a point (actual values are a mystery...)

I don't think MS would have taken the hit and extended the warranty for the flaw in the 360 if it were _only_ 5%. Sony never acknowledged the flaw in the PS2 launch unit's laser, yet they fixed them within a normal warranty (and charged for outside of it)... and I'd say that was a good % of units (my launch unit was unaffected.) Microsoft (in spite of being a publicly held company) does not disclose their failure rate, so we're all left to speculate the number of units. But when it's on television, not to mention newspapers... it's not a bunch of vocal bloggers and people on enthusiast websites making the news. I've always said it was to avoid a full-scale recall of the affected systems.... but only Bill Gates knows for sure. ;)

I've been moderated harshly for having contrary opinions, but mostly I get a load of morons replying to my posts with mostly nonsense. ;)

Additionally, while I take most failure issues with a grain of salt, including the PS2's laser issue, the fact that Microsoft is extending the warranty for a specific failure in the 360 lends credence to the fact that this flaw isn't simply something we take with a healthy dose of skepticism. (A little is good.. considering the actual % of failures... but the issue still exists..)

I try to avoid the fanboys (on both sides).... I still enjoy my 360... no dispute there... so it's not like I have a personal vendetta against the system.... I just feel MS is misleading the public to prevent slumps in sales (it appears to be working... well, with the game stable they have these days, it's hard to avoid it.)

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

"AC... you're all the same to me. You underestimate the flaw as much as most people overestimate it."

Hey, mabye that's true. Maybe it's ~10%. But 30%? Okay, let's break it down. Microsoft has 12 million consoles out there, and their goal is to double that next year. Their warrantee will extend to those units, too. But for the sake of simplicity, let's pretend it ONLY applies to those that were shipped before the end of 07. Then let's say that 360s are sold at cost, as opposed to being sold at a loss. (That's a possibility today, a year or two ago that would have been a much rougher assumption to make.) $400 to replace a unit. $400 * $12mil into $1B is about 20%. That's still pretty darned high. I'll grant you that. But that doesn't take into account the people paid to deal with the problem, facilities, shipping, blah blah blah. It starts at 20% and only goes down if you factor in new machines being sold and additional costs with handling a warrantee repair. Meanwhile, $1bil is a number that makes it seem like they're actively fixing the problem. Good PR, blah blah blah.

"No, but if it walks like a duck...."

Very astute, Mr. Kettle.

"Only a fanboy would defend the flaw of a system as not as bad as it was, when the warranty _for_ the specific flaw cost MS $1 billion. Quite a big hit for a "small" flaw...."

Welp, sorry, I'm not a fanboy. I'm also not parroting an exaggerated number brought to you by an inflammatory news story.

"Post with your real name if you're so certain of your opinion... if not... blather on... no one's listening."

Am I so threatening to the righteous? Heh. Grow up. Like I'm going to spend the time to register an account so you can blather with imaginary numbers brought to us by fan-sites, then get called names like 'fanboy' simply because I don't subscribe to your version of reality. If you want to actually discuss this instead of argue, then please, I'll be happy to adjust accordingly. If not, then fuck off. Respect is earned. You'll be much happier talking to AC's when you realize that.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

woohoo... glad you could spend some maturity points, AC. I really don't know why I'm still responding... but here goes.. ;0

$1 billion hit was to prevent a class-action recall... simple as that. They're not benevolent. Maybe in your world... but not the real one.

You admitted it was pretty darned high... that's all I asked. It's not a small problem, an "isolated" problem, nor is it a problem that will go away if you post enough AC fanboyisms to stem the tide of reality. It's as simple as that.

I don't know the actual percentage (thanks for harping on that like some OCD sufferer), but anything over 5% is a systemic flaw that can lead to a recall... simply put, if you've got 10% of the cars shorting out on the freeway from a particular line or manufacturer, there's a substantial recall process that they go through to fix the _DESIGN_ flaw (that's key here... it's not misuse, it's not humidity, gremlins, or the Pope). If Microsoft made cars, we'd have already seen a recall and replacement/fix for each and every console they sold up to the point that they updated their heatsinks. Does it fix the problem? Who knows?)

So, my friend, you can spend your mommy's college fund arguing nebulous percentages (and whether or not I'm psychic and guessed the right one)... If you recall, I asked you how high was too high? (I didn't quote 30% as gospel... I was asking rhetorically, since you're some AC nut, if it would take 20% or 30% to make it seem like a really big deal... in so many words...) If it came from Sony's PR firm, I don't give two monkeys... the facts remain... Microsoft has a flawed console... they take a hit to extend EVERYONE's warranty _for a particular flaw_ to 3 years... they have massive PR flak for not admitting the flaw or even admitting it (even if you think it was a gesture of good faith or actively fixing a problem... more like to me actively covering their asses), with the exception of the now-probably-fired employee who mentioned 100% of the consoles in the wild _at that time_ suffered from the particular weakness and will most likely fail. They _have_ updated the console's GPU heatsink... and they are actively reducing the mfgr. size of the chips to avoid heat related issues in the future... (and to bring costs down... but you get the idea...)

Grow up? Wise words you could possibly heed yourself.... Do have a pleasant day, though....

You're worth a giggle or two... but that's about it. Back to mom's basement you go! I kid... I kid... lighten up AC... this is the internet... no one's civil here.

Surprise! I have a 360 Elite. Got it in August... sold my original Premium... and I have a PS3... that must make me schizophrenic! Or a fanboy torn between two loyalties! It'd make for a good Lifetime movie, though....

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

"$1 billion hit was to prevent a class-action recall... simple as that. They're not benevolent. Maybe in your world... but not the real one."

Never said they were benevolent. You should take another peek at what I actually said. ;)

Class-action dodge? MMMMmmmmmm yeah, okay, I can see that. Personally, I think it's more complex than that. Sony has a reputation for sweeping problems under the rug. Dipshits like you take fictional numbers that sound official, then chant them every chance they get. Sony's taken a beating on the net. Microsoft sees this. They do something seemingly proactive. They throw a billion dollars at the problem, get a lil PR, and move on. Suggestive? Sure. Evidence? Hardly. 2007 will probably be known as the year of the great video game flame war. Everybody bitches. Some guy's XBOX burns up? He bitches. People hear about him bitch, they bitch. Before you know it, everybody's bitching, but there's no real way to pin down just how many people are actually stuck with something to bitch about. (And NOBODY will admit that their product died because they misused it.)

"I don't know the actual percentage (thanks for harping on that like some OCD sufferer), but anything over 5% is a systemic flaw that can lead to a recall..."

Gee, that's an interesting point... But ignoring the recall for a sec, is Microsoft reaaallly going to accept a high defect rate like that? It's fun to imagine Billy McDuck sitting on top of his Money Bin shouting orders to just keep shipping them. But would reality support such a strange tale? Hardly. First, there's dealing with the broken machines. These things are already sold at cost. That's money that just flies away. It's fun to imagine an Indiana Jones'ish warehouse filled with three million machines waiting for repair, though. Heh.

Second, there's backlash on the internet and with the media. Thanks to how heated this generation of console fanboydom has gotten, there's little any of the big three can do but do something proactive. Take Nintendo, for example. They release the Wii, and before long, lots of photos of busted TVs start popping up all over the place. (To the point that it spawned a number of copycatters.) Now, this is really silly. A Wiimote busting a CRT?! There's just no way somebody using that controller under normal circumstances is going to break a tube like that. So what does Nintendo do? They thicken the strap, the story goes away. And MS isn't paying attention to this?

Third, broken machines mean people no longer buying games for the system. A defect rate of 10%, for example, would mean that something like 1.2 million people are no longer buying games for the next 3 years. That's the sort of thing that gets executives fired. Possible? Mathematically, yes. Plausible? No. Even if the defect rate was only 5%, they could get more than that billion dollars back over the lifetime of the console. We would have seen a revision to address the problem sooner.

"(I didn't quote 30% as gospel... I was asking rhetorically, since you're some AC nut, if it would take 20% or 30% to make it seem like a really big deal... in so many words...) "

Mmm right. Interesting numbers you just randomly plucked out of the air that you're just now starting to get defensive about. In any event, you were claiming 20%. If you're going to correct me on that, you need to correct the other guy in this thread that read the same thing.

"Grow up? Wise words you could possibly heed yourself...."

Perhaps. I've never claimed my behaviour here has been exemplary. :)

Have a good weekend, man.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

While I agree (even if you did call me a dipshit... even though if you'll take your own advice and read the thread, I didn't claim any percentage, but hey... what's facts these days? I asked specificially "what is a big deal? 20% not high? 30%? Where exactly did I say "published reports have the failure rate a x%" I used the original AC's number as a jumping off point to question the hyperbole of "high" in terms of failure. Because I got the impression that you were intent on minimizing the issue with the 3RR. If we are on the same page (and for the most part, I think we are), I apologize for misconstruing your post as a defense of the Big Redmond Monster. I did not, will not, and do not, take that percentage as gospel. Since MS is the only one who knows for sure, no one has a % handy.) So, I put this up at the top so your ADHD doesn't miss it. *grin*

I do agree that certain causes of the 360's problems can be attributed to misuse (and misuse could get the 3 RRoD)... the fact that you seem to keep ignoring is the "PR" (or because as you so eloquently put it "monkey see monkey do") stunt that cost MS $1 billion in warranty work stems from the thing I've said it was (and I'm not the only one) all along. a _design_ flaw, or a flaw introduced to cut corners. It's a flaw. It affects 100% of the consoles designed before the heatsink change (that we know of... because we don't know if the redesigned heatsink will fix the problem), and it will not go away this generation, even if they _do_ fix it, because there are so many out there produced in the first two years of the console's life that are just waiting to fail on them. Sorry, Indiana Jones warehouse or not, the consoles are not all fixed by any means... that'd be TONS of sold worldwide... after two years, how many had they sold? And I can safely say that March-April 2006 was the first time anyone had seen any design changes to the heatsinks. So up to that point, there were _quite_ a few flawed ones still on the shelf. Any specific number is all speculation. I might be missing where you're going with your argument. I do say this is FAR more damaging a flaw than some idiot who tosses his Wiimote at the TV. That is user idiocy, coupled with a strap that didn't plan for the morons using the console. Applying the reasonable man test exonerates the Nintendo people, and any suits brought are just silly. The PS2's problem, which had a PR meltdown (but didn't affect sales of the PS2 for some reason, overall) because it refused to admit there's a problem. Guess what? Microsoft has _never_ admitted officially that there's a problem. They won't confirm or deny a flaw exists, nor will they commit to how many have been fixed under warranty for the 3 Red rings, and they will not tell you which ones have the "new" solution to the problem that they refuse to admit exists. It's all very secret hush-hush with them, because of what I stated in a previous post w/r/t recalls.

So, in terms of PR... simply throwing money out the window is the same as Sony... the only difference is, there are far too many people who don't pay attention (not as astute as you or I) sending their Xboxes back in a vacuum. Because like the PS2 flaw, many people will deny it existed because their console's fine. And as many 360 owners unwrapped their bundle of off-white joy recently will attest... theirs is fine too... So in come the deny-o-trons, scoping out threads like this and crapping them with their anecdotal "MS rulez" nonsense, and we're back at the original PS2 issue... with a bit more press. ;) We can agree on one thing (or more, if you squint a little)... there are FAR too many fanboys this generation. WAY more vocal than before... attesting to the democratization of the internet and the proliferation of cheap access for morons who can't spell. :)

Ah, you have a good one too... I'm going to enjoy New Year's. ;)

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

"I didn't claim any percentage, but hey... what's facts these days? I asked specificially "what is a big deal? 20% not high? 30%? Where exactly did I say "published reports have the failure rate a x%" I used the original AC's number as a jumping off point to question the hyperbole of "high" in terms of failure. Because I got the impression that you were intent on minimizing the issue with the 3RR. If we are on the same page (and for the most part, I think we are), I apologize for misconstruing your post as a defense of the Big Redmond Monster. I did not, will not, and do not, take that percentage as gospel. Since MS is the only one who knows for sure, no one has a % handy.) So, I put this up at the top so your ADHD doesn't miss it. *grin*"

Hehe. Nah, when you started with "20% is not high?", I read that as "The current rate of defect isn't high enough, you want it to be 30%?" Assuming that my trust in your statement isn't being misplaced, I apologize for hammering you with that. (I realize that's not the best phrased apology in the world, but there is poorly expressed respect behind it.)

And no, I am not interested in defending Microsoft, the 360, or anything like that. To give you an idea, I have the means to purchase one and a bunch of games for it, but it hasn't quite risen that high on my radar. I'm really more of a Nintendo fanboy. I like to think I'm at least semi-objective with other consoles, but I usually quite openly accept Nintendo's spin on things. That's my failing, I suppose, but I haven't been too active on the Nintendo news lately. I'll never forget Mr. "Nobody wants a pointer duct-taped to a controller" guy, though. Hehe. Besides that, though, I am a gaming news junkie. (Or at least I am when enough time in my life permits.) I've sifted through a bunch of crap over the years, and this one (while it is still technically 2007 where I live...) has been quite ... well I'm at a loss for a suitable word, really. Noisy? Meh, I dunno. The news stories this year remind me of all the flashing lights in Las Vegas. Whereas, before, it was more like... sitting through a bunch of movies, but then you have the flashy movie trailers in between. Heh. Okay, I've drifted a bit. The point I'm trying to convey to you is that, no, I'm not here to troll... make your life miserable, or whatever. I've had to learn a great deal about avoiding mis-information in this latest generation of gaming consoles. That has made me a bit zealous about correcting people with extreme views. I suppose, in a sense, that is a form of trolling. My only reply to that is that I've invested a great deal of energy here to make my point, I don't think that's really a trait of modern trolls.

Okay, rambling aside: I think the point of this discussion/debate/meelee has been lost. I don't think that the defect rate is as high as has been reported. (Note: I just want to be clear that I said reported, not 'you said'.) Now, the neat thing about this is that we can agree to disagree for the simple reason that we don't actually know the numbers. Now, for fun, we could still talk about this academically. I could use anecdotal experience, for example. I know 9... maybe 10 people that I work with every day that have a 360, (Note: This is not an exaggeration. I work in a big room with about 20 people in it and guess what a good half of them talk about, especially on Mondays...) and they play the heck out of it. Between 1 and 3 of them, based on the reported numbers, should have had SOME problem. But, they haven't. There's a nice little mix there of launch systems and some purchased more recently, so perhaps (for reasons besides the obvious) that can hardly be taken into serious consideration. I could go farther, but I've already explained where my thoughts have taken me to reach that conclusion in previous posts. Instead, I think the perceived number is much higher because of how polarized the internet got on this topic between 2006 and 2007. Worse, the 3 blinkie lights are sooo e

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Doctor_Jest]

I really didn't clarify that percentage statement well... I should've left off the percentages and asked what would be considered high... which is what drove my original reply... (I misconstrued all around, of course.)

You have made some excellent points... don't worry about "dickhead" mode... we're all guilty of that from time to time. :-) Your point about parts and pieces is very insightful... and with the "dead" console threads floating around the net, you'd think the root cause was the same. I have no way of knowing that. (And by the way, the only console in the last 3 generations that have failed on me was my original XBox... not the hard drive, but the DRE issue that caused it to stop reading anything, including movies and CDs.) That doesn't make me hate MS any more, and I don't want others to consider that a thorn in my side that I'm trying to lash out in forums to alleviate. (I hate them for their OS more than their games... and I used to love their original Natural Keyboards...)

I did a recent scan of youtube, and there's a bunch of clips on how to fix a magnetic piece that flies off the DVD drive on the 360... Another third party item that had a bad batch, I assume. (the infamous "scratched disc" threads... at least those who didn't turn or nudge their xboxes while running)

I think after two tries MS is learning. They will not stop trying, of course (even in Japan)... and I think Sony's fumbles early on have caught them off guard (not really feeling the original XBox a threat) and they are learning too. Next gen ought to be fun to watch... in spite of Sony's "10 year plan" for their PS3... (the Ps2 is still around, so I tend to believe them...)

I really love the new consoles (I can't say about the Wii, since I've never seen a box for sale around here since launch) and I hope they both succeed... that means more games for me. ;) Until I get too old and feeble to use the controllers (when the dualshock 3 gets over here, I might have to stick with the Sixaxis.... heheh.)

I tend to use defect and flaw interchangeably. I really should just pick one.... "design flaw" in the heat sinks is what I think the biggest weakness (and the only thing I have any empirical evidence of with the redesigned heatsinks). I don't think it's the cause of all the warranty repairs... just a larger than normal percentage. (There are some real idiots fiddling with electronics these days). I really shouldn't imply that is the only reason for warranty work. That's my fault... The "defect rate" as it specifically relates to the consoles sent to McAllen TX, is something we'll probably never get a handle on... unless it hits the courts for some reason (there are a couple of class-action suits in California, iirc, flowing through the system... dunno their outcomes or progress... I hate class-action suits personally... they only make lawyers rich.)

Thanks for clarifying... and now we're on the same page (relatively speaking... miniscule details aside)... it's good to end 2007 officially with a great exchange. Thanks for the point of view. It is worth all the chest-thumping sometimes... :)

Now if only the fanboys could learn that.... ;)

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware And Software

[Anonymous Coward]

You too man, take care. :)

huh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised this guy can type so well, what with Sony's cock in his mouth and all. Part of the wonders of spellcheck, I guess.

Assassin's Creed

[nuzak]

Boy is it pretty. And smooth. And climbing things is fun for the first half-hour or so.

The voice acting is ... okay. Actually everyone's good except for Altair himself, but I have heard worse.

But seriously, I was looking forward to being immersed in the role of an assassin stalking his target patiently, taking just the right moment to strike, then blazing a bloody trail out of town. But nope, I get to listen to "Thief! I'll have your hand for that!" over and over and over and over and over again until I get sick of it and decide to have my two-dozenth very high-profile swordfight in the middle of the street -- which the guards will mercifully forget all about when I walk away for a couple minutes to climb the next Generic View Point Tower.

Talk about a wasted opportunity.

Re:Assassin's Creed

[ashridah]

Tell me about it. Once i realised how little impact the socially-unacceptable behavior has most of the time, i spent a crapload of time just killing random guards for the hell of it.

It'd be nice if doing that kind of thing had an impact on the difficulty of the game over time (ie, you got rewarded with easier sneaking and blending because you weren't going on a rampage).

Instead, I got to spend 3 days honing my counter-kill timing (btw, those are really challenging if you limit yourself to using the hidden blade while counter-killing, you basically get no block at all, so if you get hit, you get hit BAD, actually makes it more challenging.)

Still, running around on rooftops and climbing around on stuff was fun, and the game looks awesome, but it's just a bit too easy to bludgeon your way out of every situation, even after you've just assassinated your target, since it's mostly just a timing game. I force myself to watch for when guards take their eyes off me for a minute during a fight and strike at them just to keep things interesting.

Also, unskippable cutscenes!? wtf?! I only care about the chatty stuff the first time through, k?

Wish they'd patch in a 'skip cutscene' button.

ash

Re:Assassin's Creed

[enderjsv]

Actually, while I agree Assassin's Creed was a little disappointing (but not terrible), I actually appreciated that it was more forgiving than some other "assassin" themed games. I love me some Hitman, but you have to admit Hitmen is a very unforgiving game. If you botch up once, the entire level falls apart quickly. Now, I don't mind that about Hitmen, it's what makes Hitman great. But sometimes I had the urge to just assassinate as many guards as I could and see how long I could get away with it... which was never long. But in Assassin's Creed, I had a lot of fun running on top of roofs assassinating guards as they looked down on the city with little disregard to the consequences. And if I messed up an assassination it was not a big deal and only required a quick run and hide mini-game to make things right again. By the end of the game I got so good with the assassination mechanics that in the middle of a group fight I could knock someone over with a grab, grab-break or non-lethal counter and finish them off with a quick switch to my hidden blade and pounce. It was very fun.

Re:Assassin's Creed

[ashridah]

Well, I wasn't suggesting "go left instead of right, and it's death valley" so much as "guards are more aware of you, respond quicker, etc" if you're excessively violent. IE, the guards on rooftops increase in number and decrease in tolerance significantly if you keep killing them, and guards notice you quicker if you go around killing them all the time, and they start killing vigilantes if you rely on them too much.

More of a feedback system. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced, and should be communicated to the player reasonably well, ie, people start saying "hey, doesn't that look like that killer the guards are talking about?!" and other telltale signs.

ah well. :)

Re:Assassin's Creed

[quest(answer)ion]

More of a feedback system. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced, and should be communicated to the player reasonably well, ie, people start saying "hey, doesn't that look like that killer the guards are talking about?!" and other telltale signs. yeah, out of everything that was overhyped in this game, the "crowd" gameplay got blown the farthest out of proportion. i mean, that the crowds even semi-realistically react to you having murdered someone in front of them adds an interesting element to the gameplay, but there are so many ways that it could be improved.

take escaping from guards, for example. one of the most interesting observations that came out of conversations my friends and i had about the game was that altair would be covered head to toe in blood after every single fight. now i dunno about you, but most guards and pedestrians who see a hooded dude covered head to toe in blood tend to react in fairly predictable ways. this in turn suggests a simple game mechanic for escaping: find some new effing clothes. the rooftop hideouts could serve as stashes with clean digs stored away, providing a mildly believable way to shake recognition of your character--instead, they are "base" in some bloody, crusader-era version of tag.

i'm all for suspending my disbelief, and the game provides some fantastically entertaining and--at times--innovative gameplay, but there's nothing really groundbreaking about what the game did. here's hoping the sequels take this ball and run with it.

Wii

[Tailsfan]

What about all the games SEGA churns out.

Re:Wii

[marvelouspatric]

you know, that's a great point. i was looking at my wii (the only next-gen system i own) and i realized that my favorite games for it come from either nintendo or sega. how crazy is that? if you would have told me 20 years ago, when i was playing my 8-bit master system that i'd being playing sega games on a nintendo and love it, i'd have told you you were a doo-doo head, because i was 8.

(my favorite wii games, right now, are wii sports, wii play, sonic, mario, and nights. just got mario and nights, and they are probably the best two wii-exclusive titles 2007 provided.)

Re:Wii

[Tailsfan]

Same. Although I am a lot younger. I am a Sonic fan, but MArio galaxy is fun.

Re:Wii

[Eli Gottlieb]

With "Nights: Journey of Dreams" making a 75/100 on Metacritic, I'm going to have it the overlooked gaming disappointment of 2007.

Re:Wii

[SailorSpork]

Technically, it's only a disappointment if you expect it to be better than it turned out. In Sega's case, rarely are there high expectations anymore.

However, one would be safe to call NiGHTs for Wii a disappointing title because a lot of people has high hopes for the game based on the fact that the first NiGHTs game was spectacular. Previews for the new one even looked pretty good. However, as good as the game could have been, deadlines (namely meeting the Christmas season) prevented Sega from tweaking the control and load times. It honestly is an okayish game once you get past some of the annoying flaws, but having played the original and followed the hype, I would have been much happier if Sega had just made the original game a Virtual Console download instead of putting out this... half-finished unpolished game.

Re:Wii

[Tailsfan]

I thought it was not out yet.

Re:Wii

[SailorSpork]

It's been out in the US since the 18th, and is coming to Japan at the end of the month, and Europe the end of next month. Kinda slipped under the radar, didn't it? Here's a link to more information, including a more detailed review.

Re:Wii

[Tailsfan]

Too busy paying attention to European delays. And Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity comes out the eight. Get out fro,m under that radar dish, will ya.

Re:This is no new issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't find it a letdown at all. Quite enjoyed it, actually.

Bethesda's Fallout 3

[Huntr]

At least, the parts we've seen so far. /sadface

Re:Bethesda's Fallout 3

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so disappointing in what we've seen so far? From what I've seen it looks like Bethesda has done their Fallout homework extremely well.

Re:Bethesda's Fallout 3

[Huntr]

To me it seems like a Fallout veneer instead of actual "Fallout." Like they have these rudimentary ideas of what Fallout is and are trying their best approximation of them.
For example, the BoS. They have repeatedly referred to the BoS as "knights of the wasteland," as if they run around saving humans from evil. The original BoS were nothing like that. From the Fallout wiki: Unlike the chivalrous knights of old, members of the Brotherhood are not interested in justice for the obviously weaker and less fortunate around them, but instead in keeping their secrecy and preserving and developing technology. Their motives are often unclear, and Brotherhood members are not people to be trifled with. It is safe to say, however, that if a group of Brotherhood knights appears to be helping some less fortunate people, their motives are not altruistic. I think people get confused by their ranks as Paladins and assume that's how they operate.

I don't really like how they have incorporated humor, either. Fallout was more irony, a darker sense of humor (e.g., save the vault - get kicked out because you were outside too much. world torn apart by nuke war - save the world by detonating a nuke). What we've seen so far from Bethesda is more slapstick-type humor. Of course that was present a little bit before, but it wasn't the prevailing type.

I think they have really, really missed the boat with their characterization of nuke technology as being sort of just scattered around. Cars did not all run on fusion cells in the FO universe - that one in FO2 was specially modified. So, shooting cars in their nuke fuel cell to make them explode and kill enemies is, well, I don't know what that is besides dumb on a lot of levels. I also think the nuclear catapult is a joke - really, this nuke device can be launched as a weapon at an enemy that's about 10 yards away and the user WON'T get fried, too?

The original 2 FO games were fantastic for presenting the player with tough choices, the consequences of which weren't always clear. That is, you didn't always know which was the "good" choice and which was the "bad" choice. You could easily choose what you thought was a "good" response and have half a town want to shoot you on sight. Bethesda has said many times they do not want to follow this path. There will always be a "good guy" choice/response and a "bad guy" choice/response and both will be easily distinguished from the other. That dumbs-down a bit of the game, IMO.

All of that is to say nothing of the cosmetic stuff that I don't like, either. a) The movement away from turn-based, isometric to 1st person, real-time (TB & iso was a deliberate choice back in '97, not a limitation of technology. That similarity to tabletop RPGs is part of what makes Fallout Fallout.). b) The re-skinning of the supermutants (which are gonna need a hell of a story to even exist in Washington D.C. and "oh, there was another lab" ain't cutting it). c) V.A.T.S. - pointless, as it doesn't actually affect your chance to hit- its an excuse for a "cool" bullet-time animation of your enemy getting blown apart. There are other things I have issues with, but these come to mind.

HOWEVER, this doesn't mean it will be some horrible, non-fun game. Truthfully, it will probably be somewhere along the lines of Oblivion - highly popular, some people swearing by it, others at it. If it was just some generic RPG in a post-apoc setting that uses a tweaked-up version of the Oblivion engine, it would probably be fine. I just don't think it will be a great Fallout game.

JMO, of course. Also, I realize the game isn't out yet, but we are kinda far along in the development cycle for Beth to do a 180 on most of these issues.

Halo 3? Disappointing?

[filterban]

Okay, so I can understand someone thinking Portal and BioShock are better games than Halo 3. I don't understand TFA calling Halo 3 a disappointment simply because they liked two other shooters more. From TFA:

The sales of Halo 3. It wasn't surprising that Halo 3 would sell like something that sells really fast, but I was saddened by how many people were exposed only to the world of the Master Chief while missing out on the amazing BioShock or my new pick for greatest game of all time, Portal. Sure, both games sold reasonably well, but when compared to the sales of Halo 3, you begin to realize that gaming accurately reflects the rest of society's entertainment; high-brow, revolutionary fare is ignored by the masses in favor of "wicked awesome explosions."

Please. Saying Halo 3 is only "wicked awesome explosions" would be like saying Star Wars is only "explosions and laser beams." Give me a break.

All of the Halo games have had wicked awesome explosions, sure. But they also have a deeply engrossing storyline, fantastic multiplayer, good AI, and unsurpassed world physics. Halo 3 is the best game in the series and was my favorite shooter (and many other people's) of the year. By no stretch of the imagination was it a bad game. Star Wars is full of light sabers and lasers - but obviously, if you look at it more closely, there's an intricate storyline with fantastic characters (in Episodes 4-6).

Sure, BioShock and Portal are arguably better games than Halo 3 but they didn't sell nearly as well. The reason? Exposure. Most people haven't even heard of Portal. There certainly aren't Portal trading cards, helmets, action figures, and TV commercials.

For christ's sake, you can't even BUY Portal on a console -- at most, an hour long game -- without buying a $60 package that includes another game I've already beaten (Half Life 2) and two expansion packs I don't want. If Joey asks for Portal for Christmas, his mom won't be able to find it in a store.

Sales figures are a result of many other forces besides the quality of the game itself, and that's reality. Microsoft went to bat for Halo 3 with their pocketbook, executed very well, and they reaped the rewards from it. BioShock and Portal did not pony up, and since most people don't know what they are, they aren't purchased at nearly the same rate. It has nothing to do with the average American only liking "wicked awesome explosions."

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Sasquatch6]

I agree fully. To say that Halo 3 sales figures indicates that more would rather see big explosions that play the 'intellectually superior' Bioshock or Portal is just naive. The important distinction to make in this case is that Halo 3 is the culmination of a *trilogy*. Halo 1 and 2 sold huge numbers and people were hugely invested in the series. If you owned Halo 1 and/or 2, and owned an XBox 360, then it was pretty much a no-brainer that you were going to buy Halo 3. Compare this to Bioshock and Portal, and you should be able to see the difference. Both are original properties, which means that the consumers have no previous attachment. They have to make a choice about whether or not they want to buy this game, whereas with Halo 3, it was, as I said, a no-brainer for a lot of people. Include into this calculation that Portal on the 360 was part of a *bundle*, and you further muddy the waters, since who can say how many bought the Orange Box *for* HL2:Ep2, or TF2, or Portal. Please, if you're going to make a comparison of games based on sales numbers, at least make sure they're comparable coming out of the gate

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't noticed it's because there's a strong hint of PS3 fanboyism in TFA.

When PS3 fanboyism infects a story, don't expect any amount of sense from it.

Halo 3 was nothing groundbreaking, but that didn't stop it being one of the greatest releases of 2007, if it was a dissapointment to anyone then they're simply expecting the impossible. The very fact it wasn't groundbreaking is because it was simply the best that can be done right now alongside releases like The Orange Box, Bioshock and Timeshift.

Compared to games like Assassins Creed, which frankly I thought was going to become my favourite game ever thanks to the trailers Halo 3 etc. did fantastic at meeting my expectations. AC was my biggest let down simply because it turned out to be "Repetitive Tasks and Wall Climbing Simulator 2007" rather than an interesting, deep game centred around assassinating targets using cunning and skill.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[heinousjay]

The problem, from a purist's point of view, is that the best marketing in the world doesn't make a shiny turd any less shitty.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Das Modell]

What puzzles me about TFA is the complaint about Live Arcade not providing enough "quirky" independent games. There are too many people who believe that a quirky indie game is good simply because it's being quirky and indie, whereas polished and professional games are oppressive capitalist dogshit. These people are, of course, no different from their movie and music counterparts.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Mongoose Disciple]

It's also worth mentioning that Halo 3 had some single-player appeal plus a ton of multi-player appeal, whereas Bioshock only appealed to the single-player crowd. Portal, same thing, although the Orange Box as a whole appealed to both. You can't really call that anything like cross-genre appeal, but... it's clear that a lot of people buy games mostly to play with other people. Of course a game that can appeal to either is going to generate bigger sales numbers.

Multiplayer games also tend to generate bigger sales numbers because you're never really 'done' with them, whereas I know a lot of people who played Portal, loved the hell out of it, but were done with it in a couple hours and probably will never go back. It stands to reason that console-side, that amounted to a lot of people renting but not buying it.

Basically, I agree that TFA looks at a subset of the data and draws the unsupported conclusion that unwashed philistine masses love teh Haloz because they don't appreciate good games.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[el gordo de tultse]

filterban, I know this has nothing to do with Portal, but you forgot to examine Team Fortress 2 in your argument. It's a fantastic multiplayer FPS. Now, I've been playing it on a 2005ish gaming PC for a couple months and I must say it's worthy as ust as much praise as Halo 3 multiplayer. TF2 also has impressive physics, possibly better because the actors actually explode when hit with a rocket (into satisfying bits). I would be cool if it had vehicles like in Halo, but it has a strong team-oriented aspect that kind of makes up for it. Again, nothing to do with pPortalIf think the fact that Orange

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[HalAtWork]

I don't know about you, but Halo 3 was a letdown to me because I felt like I was just playing Halo 2.5. The single player campaign was kind of short and not very exciting.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Anonymous Coward]

" But they also have a deeply engrossing storyline "

WTF? Haven't you ever read a fucking BOOK?

Halo storyline is about as stupid as it comes, and is a DIRECT ripoff of half a dozen GOOD sci-fi books.

Engrossing my ass. It's right up there with Quake in terms of engrossing. Blah.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant it didn't live up to the amount of hype, and there are better, lesser known games available. Jesus, I hope you all realize that before Halo 4 is announced, damned gullible fools.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo is crap in every way. It's a combination of an amateurish story, detached characters and poor gameplay mechanics with mediocre visuals. Every Halo game has been this way.

The only reason the franchise even became popular is because it was the first FPS game that many people (console gamers) were exposed to. PC gamers already had far better FPS games for years.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[Reservoir Penguin]

I understand why he is disappointed, he is an Intellectual and being a fellow Intellectual I'm also disappointed when Independence Day or Transformers bring in several orders of magnitude more cash then classy European films that actually make you think, or when some crappy Hollywood clown makes 25 million when the Nobel prize for some amazing achievement in Physics is only 1 mil. It's just a sad thing to watch how pathetic our civilization has become, and how most people squander their potential.

Re:Halo 3? Disappointing?

[filterban]

Note to self: never, under any circumstances, capitalize an adjective when describing yourself. It would make you sound like a conceited asshole.

What About The Wii Lineup?

[GaryPatterson]

The article's biggest letdown of 2007 was the poor third-party lineup for the Wii.

The Wii's the only next-gen console my wife and I own, and while we've played a lot of the tennis game, some Zelda, some of the first Rabbids game but no other titles have really grabbed our interest. I bought one of those 'maze in the air' games that came out early on, lent it to a friend and haven't cared to ask for it back.

The lineup (outside Nintendo) seems pretty weak, but I've not paid a lot of attention lately.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[buffer-overflowed]

The third party library has really begun to turn around. I'll go through it real quick.
Zack & Wiki is great, if you can get past the style/title. Very, very solid puzzle/adventure game. Joins Ico, Okami, and a bunch of other titles in selling abysmally but being really damn good.
Trauma Center: New Blood, surgery sim. Remarkably fun for what it is and the co-op is a blast.
Guitar Hero 3. The Wii guitar is the best guitar. No one seems to stock the thing though(not that I would've bought it, since I already have two guitars for the PS2).
Some light-gun shooters. RE:UC, Ghost Squad, etc. Nothing special there, but if you like those, they're available.
RE4. Best version of the game if you never played it.
Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core. Decent 2D fighter, if you're interested in those and guilty gear in particular you probably already own the PS2 version[s].
NiGHTs is.... ok.

In Febuary we get:
No More Heroes. Suda51 is fucking insane. Hyper-stylized cell-shaded graphics, very adult content, and full of internet culture.
Brawl. Meh, Nintendo title, but can't not list it.
Okami. I believe the Okami port is slated for Febuary. Should be the best version, and I hear it's going to be budget priced.

And sometime next year is:
FF:CC. The trailer looks interesting and I really liked the first one.
DQ: Swords. DQ Kenshin.
Tales of Symphonia sequel. Has Namco ever directly sequeled a Tales game before? I forget.

And probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not remembering/hasn't been announced.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[Liquidrage]

There's never been a better first impression that turns out to be mostly hollow then the Wii console. The controller, as revolutionary as it is, only works good for certain games types. And even when it works great, there's often a novelty feel to it. Certain games after 10 minutes it's back to wanting just a typical old controller. The Wii has became the ultimate dust collector in many homes. There's just very little out for it worth playing. But since that first ten minutes playing Golf or Bowling is just spectacular it keeps on selling.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[blendo75.5]

Strange, everyone I know who has a Wii, including myself, has a library of over ten games for it and plays it all the time, while their PS3's collect dust. Could it be, Liquidrage, that since you dont actually have a Wii that you have to idea what you're fucking talking about?

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[blendo75.5]

No console's first year is fantastic, but the Wii should be held to a higher standard because...? And you're right, you havent paid a lot of attention lately.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[smash]

but the Wii should be held to a higher standard because...?

Because hardware-wise, it's shit, and the unique and superior software line-up was supposedly (and traditionally has been for every nintendo system) the whole selling point of the system?

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[Gravatron]

Actualy, his experience is pretty typical. I bought a wii and launch, and owned it till just after e3. It's got little to nothing really worth playing thats not a gimick, or better on one of the other platforms. Galaxy and Metriod are amazing, but thats about it. It was a doorstop for so long, that I just decided to cut my loses and traded it in for money twords my ps3. The ps3 has proven it's worth, as it's library just has more to play than the wii, and metacritic backs that up, with 12 wii titles above 80% comapired to the ps3's 38.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[Liquidrage]

No, actually that wouldn't be true. And I love your, "everyone I know who has a Wii, including myself". That's funny. I don't know a single person with a Wii, including myself, that has anywhere near ten games. I'd ask you to name the games and the people, but of course you'd just be making that up too. And wow, you'd really have to include some craptastic games.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, keep grasping at those straws, you might catch some yet.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[GaryPatterson]

Are no consoles great in their first year? I'm not so sure, but I'll accept that at face value.

Should the Wii be held to some higher standard? I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that the article's biggest disappointment was the Wii's lineup. My experience, as someone who's got lots of stuff going on, is that they may be right. But hey, I'm just one person and as I said, I've not paid a lot of attention.

And you're right, you havent paid a lot of attention lately.

Yes. That's why I said it. That sort of statement by me is meant to open up conversation by people who have paid attention. Since you've paid more attention than me, why don't you outline some of the great Wii moments of 2007?

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[trdrstv]

That's funny. I don't know a single person with a Wii, including myself, that has anywhere near ten games. I'd ask you to name the games and the people, but of course you'd just be making that up too. And wow, you'd really have to include some craptastic games.

Ok, I'll bite. I'll list at least 10 I own off the top of my head and I won't throw in the "gotcha games" of WiiSports, WiiPlay, and Link's Crossbow training, but I own them too.

Rayman Raving Rabbits

Elebits

WarioWare

Mario Galaxy (A Game of the Year contender)

Metroid Prime 3 Corruption (Should be a Game of the Year contender, IMO)

Medal of Honor Heroes 2

TigerWoods Golf 08

Madden 08

The Godfather

Super Paper Mario.

Metal Slug Collection.

RE4

Zack & Wiki

ExciteTruck

Zelda: Twilight Princess (A Game of the Year contender)

Whoops, I said 10 off the bat, but there's apparently 15. I'll stop there.

I also have over 10 VC titles I'll gladly excluded to not make it look like "Filler".

I count myself as an exception, but most people I know have at least 3 games beyond the "WiiSports, and WiiPlay" that most people start out with, so I don't find it difficult to believe his group might have 10 more more.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[Liquidrage]

If his *group* are all hardcore video game junkies sure. I sincerely doubt it's everyone he knows though. And more to the point there was still no reason to take exception to what I wrote. Like you said, you're the exception. I never actually doubted anyone out there had at least 10 titles. But I think most people with Wii's realize that overall the library of titles for the Wii isn't that great compared to other systems, and that it's the initial impression that sells it.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[trdrstv]

there was still no reason to take exception to what I wrote.

Sorry, I didn't feel I was doing that, mearly responding. Hope it didn't come off too "catty".

That's funny. I don't know a single person with a Wii, including myself, that has anywhere near ten games. I'd ask you to name the games and the people.

I responded in part due to this. Now you know 1 person with over 10 Wii games and which ones.

And wow, you'd really have to include some craptastic games.

Though none of the games I listed are perfect, I would not call any "craptastic".

If his *group* are all hardcore video game junkies sure. I sincerely doubt it's everyone he knows though.

It depends on how they came across the Wii. If they were able to get the system by itself in stock somewhere then it would take a more serious gamer to get 10 in a year, but the afore mentioned WiiSports, WiiPlay, and WiiZapper Zelda skew these numbers up. Also there's the other thing happening due to the Wii's Scarecity.

Since the Wii have been relatively scarce since launch many people have been buying up bundles, just to get the system. My best friend finally got a Wii by paying for a bundle from Wallmart. You got the Wii and some accessories and you had to chose 6 games to buy with it. He didn't mind it so much because he got to pick the games, and specific titles weren't forced, but he had to buy 6 $50 games with it. So counting WiiSports Day 1 he has 7 games.

If the parent poster lives in an area with little to no system availability, I can believe people would rather buy up these $500-$600 bundles rather than the $350-$400 ebay prices on the system alone because they would get more value for their money. Maybe that's what happened, and maybe it's not, but I know a few people who got the Wii with bundles so depending on their area, it's certainly possible.

I think most people with Wii's realize that overall the library of titles for the Wii isn't that great compared to other systems, and that it's the initial impression that sells it.

I'd say it's more than a first impression, I think people are buying it for an experiance they can't get on another system. That however is another conversation entirely.

Cheers.

Re:What About The Wii Lineup?

[Liquidrage]

I think you're spot on. I meant his original reply to me where he took exception to what I wrote wasn't needed. Sorry for the confusion.

As for the first impression, I think that is what sells it. When my CIO bought her's into the office for a "office party" and set it up on the projector, that sold a few more Wii's in 10 minutes because 40 people just got to see it and play with it. Bowling, Golf, Cow tossing, etc... Those sell it and they sell it fast. But it's also true what you wrote that it's an experience you can't get on any other console. It's very unique and amazing and it's the first impression of that unique experience as you wrote combined that sell it.

Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[Wooky_linuxer]

So I won't get into the thick of the discussion. but "8ish" hours isn't incredible short, for a full blown game??? Man, what have marketing people done to us gamers that we accept a game that lasts only 8 hours! These are sad times indeed. I wouldn't expect even an episode or expansion to last that little. A good FPS for me should have some 40-30 hours of gameplay, period.

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[bigstrat2003]

Uh... I have yet to play the FPS which was more than ~10-12 hours long (some are longer, some shorter, but it seems to fall in that range most of the time). 8 hours isn't a whole lot shorter than that. I've NEVER seen an FPS which has 30-40 hours of gameplay.

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[dctoastman]

I remember when games could be beaten in under two hours total.
Then we'd play them again. Because they were fun. I don't remember where this whole "games must be 40 hours minimum" idea came into everyone's head.

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[doxology]

Deus Ex?

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[bigstrat2003]

a) I've never played Deus Ex, nor seen it played, really (I had a roommate who played, but I didn't pay much attention).
b) Isn't Deus Ex generally considered an RPG, not an FPS?

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[nomadic]

a) I've never played Deus Ex, nor seen it played, really (I had a roommate who played, but I didn't pay much attention).

I would highly recommend getting a copy and playing it.

Isn't Deus Ex generally considered an RPG, not an FPS?

Nah, genre-wise it's a stealth FPS. Like Thief with implants and skills, and both work more like FPS "items" gameplay-wise than RPG skills/abilities.

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[ichigo 2.0]

I think games becoming this short is a recent phenomena. I remember that games like Duke3D, Quake2, Half-life etc took very long to complete. The HL1 demo was over an hour, that's an eight of a modern game! Compare that to new games like Crysis, which not only feels incredibly short, but is in fact only the first episode of a three-parter. I'm okay with episodic games, but charging full price for one episode? Woah.

I blame it on the increase in the cost of developing games. No one can afford to make lots of levels with huge amounts of art assets anymore, yet everyone tries to one-up each other by having "The Latest Lens Flare Effect®"! Lets hope that procedural content generation comes to the rescue, and fast.

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[Wooky_linuxer]

Where is the part where we get off your lawn? ;) But I really think story driven FPSs such as Halo don't have that kind of replayability. Not only FPSs have become shorter, adventure games as well. Most PS3s games are said to last only a few hours. I know increasing developing costs may be blamed for that, but for a certain type of game, just a few hours of gameplay won't cut it for me. I'd rather play longer, less detailed but more immersive games, where I can relate to the story and characters, than a short burst of super photorealistic graphics galore. This may be good enough to "Serious Sam" games, where you just shoot everything in sight. But heck, even the original Quake was way longer than what we get today and you can't call it exactly a story driven FPS.

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[JonathanBoyd]

I think games becoming this short is a recent phenomena. I remember that games like Duke3D, Quake2, Half-life etc took very long to complete.

Go back and play them again today. You'll find they're not quite as long as you remember and as a more experienced FPS-player, you'll blow through them even quicker now than you did in the past.

People throw this 8 hour number about way too much. IIRC, that came from a playthrough on normal. Playing on Heroic will take longer (though not much longer for an experienced FPS player). Legendary will take longer still and really, it's these two difficulties the game is supposed to be played at. Then there's finding all the skulls, playing the meta-game and getting the achievements. That's without even having started on the multiplayer. There's a lot more than 8 hours gameplay there. I'll wager there's several times the gameplay in Halo 3 as there is in Bioshock (which is fine because Bioshock is still a great game).

Re:Disclaimer: never played any Halo game

[dctoastman]

I'm just saying the "epic quest" style of game used to be one of many. Now even platformers are trying to meet the "minimum 20 hours gameplay".

Shit, I work for a living. I play games to specifically not work. Really, a good video game should be like a puzzle, book, movie, or board/card game. Something that you can come back to time and time again. I think developers and publishers are pushing too much content just for the sake of giving us something so we don't complain about lackluster gameplay.

Wither Spore?

[GaryPatterson]

I remember when Spore was the next huge thing to hit gaming, and every game show had breathless gamers watching previews. Then we waited. And waited. And waited.

Years passed.

Still no Spore! It's an ambitious game, yes, but once you hit the third or fourth year of development, it starts seeming like it'll never get here. Games with extremely long dev times have a history of disappointing. I reckon "No Spore This Year" should be on the list as a disappointment of 2007.

Wither Spore?

Re:Wither Spore?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sims was such a MAJOR cash cow for EA. They want another one. 'nuff said.

Re:Wither Spore?

[LingNoi]

That's why the games industry should only market games that are already almost complete, they're such amateurs. The movie industry doesn't show adverts for a movie that still has three more years of production time. Doing so in the games industry leads to what you just said.

Re:Wither Spore?

[Jearil]

Games with extremely long dev times have a history of disappointing.

I present to you: Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. Granted both games were made by Blizzard. However both of them, especially Warcraft 3, were delayed quite a while and still turned out to be blockbusters.

Sometimes it's good to let the developer release a game "When it's done". I'm surprised EA, the unoriginal, limited-risk cash-raker that it is is even letting Will Wright take is time with it rather than just pushing it out at a time and condition that a marketing and sales team dictates.

Now I just hope he uses that time to good effect.

Re:Wither Spore?

[GaryPatterson]

I hope that the delay means the product will be as close to Will Wright's vision as humanly possible. That's the upside of delayed games, and the examples you cite are good ones as well.

The downside is that we can always point to other delayed games that have turned out less than great, or sometimes turned out to be nothing more than vapourware.

Re:All those great FOSS games!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, there are actually DirectX fanboys. What a sad sad world...

Re:All those great FOSS games!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't this supposed to be the year Teh Lunix put the final nail in the coffin of Teh MiKKKr0$$$l0th's evil monopolistic DirectX?

Um, no, actually. Nobody with any knowledge or understanding of the subject ever thought any such thing. Rational minds all recognise that the best hope for Linux gaming at present is Cedega.

Nice strawman, though.

ZERO disappointments

[ichbineinneuben]

I must be lucky. I started the year loving Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty 2, and ended it loving Orange Box (once I got over hating the idea of re-buying), Bioshock, and now the topping on the cake - Call of Duty 4 demo runs great on my AGPed 3.2P4!!! Disappointments? None. Well... I remember being disappointed about how Bioshock's Securom made my AVG antivirus panic... but I got over it.

Command and Conquer 3

[ezwip]

When C&C 3 was about to be released as Tiberium Wars I was very excited. Finally, EA games would address my issues with their last versions, Generals and Zero Hour. So when it released there I was one of the first with my limited edition Kane version, an extra 10 bucks for Kane on the cover. I get home and start to play. The first thing I notice is that Kane is on the box, and totally sucks. By far this is the weakest faction. I get online to find that not only is the maphack, money hack, invincibility, and basically every problem that ever existed still there but a ton of new ones. They just changed the units to new graphics, made the maps retarded and small, then sold it all over again as a new version. I played through two patches which never addressed any of the major exploits from the first version they released. By far the biggest disappointment I've ever had because I told myself not to fall for this. I just couldn't believe they would leave them untouched, but they did.

Talk about a bad Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

My biggest holiday disappointment is that my Wii broke just before Thanksgiving, and Ninty hasn't got around to fixing it yet. :(

Re:Talk about a bad Christmas

[Ash-Fox]

My biggest holiday disappointment is that my Wii broke just before Thanksgiving, and Ninty hasn't got around to fixing it yet. :(

Why/how did it break? I thought those things were indestructible.

Re:Talk about a bad Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

Indestructible?

Is that why Nintendo added condoms and new strings to it's post-launch consoles?

Re:Talk about a bad Christmas

[Ash-Fox]

Is that why Nintendo added condoms and new strings to it's post-launch consoles?

Apparently people kept throwing the Wiimote into the walls and breaking them (no, not the Wiimote, the walls).

Re:Talk about a bad Christmas

[ShadowsHawk]

Agreed. I had one launched full force into a concrete wall. The battery cover popped off and the batteries scattered. Still no issues. :)

The public's apathetic attitude toward SecuROM

[Anonymous Coward]

The release of Bioshock and the generally apathetic "so what?" response people gave to the way that game and its accompanying SecuROM rootkit treat paying, legitimate customers. That was the biggest gaming disappointment of 2007.

I don't intend on buying this game, or any other game that mimics this sinister behavior, until they change this.

Oh, this also applies to the indifference many people have had about ingame advertising, spoiling the atmosphere of games they already paid a full $50 for. Fuck you.

My biggest letdown: Halo 3

[Anonymous Coward]

I just can't believe that, despite Microsoft's pathetic $ over quality or consumers buisness model, Halo 3 has over a million players. It's the perfect scam! Get little kids in the 10-17 demographic to buy Halo 3, pay for Xbox Live (m$ are the ONLY ONES who feel the consumer should have to pay for EVERYTHING), and play a crappy game that requires no skill to hook the kids on the capitalist world, so they don't realize there are much better games and a major open-source community. (I would say this on bungie.net, but the idiot trigger-happy admins "blacklisted" me for talking about this on their forums. I guess they hate the truth). Everyone I sit near in my C++ programming class at high school talks about Halo 3. They go on and on about the latest updates, who is better, who "owns" better, etc. When I ask why they like the game and how its a scam, one kid says "It's a fun game, just because m$ makes it, that doesn't make it bad". The rest say "epic failure!" "n00b alert", etc. It's a complete joke that is hurting the industry by making sure the little kids play Halo 3 all the time so they don't get any other game systems.

Oh please

[FoamingToad]

"Those cutscenes were worse than anything Pol Pot ever did and I demand that whoever suggested them be dragged to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity."

From the obligatory hivemind.

"The combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions had an estimated death toll of 750,000 to 1.7 million."

Come on. A little perspective please. It's only a video game, for chrissakes.

In case my irony detector's broken, let me at least throw Ben Cresslaw's take on Assassin's Creed. Amusing.

Re:Oh please

[donscarletti]

"The combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions had an estimated death toll of 750,000 to 1.7 million."

Come on. A little perspective please. It's only a video game, for chrissakes.

Yes, Pol Pot committed more atrocities than the computer game industry ever will and that's even when you look at Jack Thompson's estimates. However if this didn't set you off as deliberate ironic hyperbole maybe the phrase "snacking on some babies with their friend Hitler" should flag me as someone who does not expect every word he says to be taken seriously.

Anyway, that link you posted had to be the best review for this game I've encountered. I would phrase my personal opinion as "a brilliant game with more devastating problems than most bad games out there", I'm very glad I bought it despite it being terrible in ways I could never have imagined, mind you if the game didn't have such great technical merits then some of its problems in other areas might not have stood out so much.

Re:This is no new issue.

[Goaway]

The Internet and Jade Raymond. Yeah, it's obvious she's quite an attractive woman, and when I realized she would be attached at the hip to one of the most high-profile releases of the year, I assumed there would be the usual sexist comments on the Internet, but nothing could have prepared me for the ridiculous amount of cruelty, sexism and misogyny displayed during the launch of Assassin's Creed.
I'd like to think the Internet isn't comprised almost entirely of 14-year-old misanthropes, but based on the unmentionable events surrounding that game, I could be wrong.

No Bioshock for me

[sherriw]

My biggest disappointment was how much of a graphics hog bioshock is. Can't run it on my PC whereas Orange Box runs fine. Plus Bioshock isn't out for Wii as far as I know, so no Bioshock for me until I fork out for a new graphics card, or break down and buy an Xbox. *cry*

Re:Wii- NiGHTS

[marvelouspatric]

i never got to play the original NiGHTS, because i, like most people, didn't own a saturn. which is surprising because i owned every single other sega machine, way back to SMS. that said, i had no real expectations for NiGHTS other than for it to be fun and look kinda cool. Obviously, if the only next-gen console i own is a Wii, graphics aren't a huge deal to me. I do think, however, that NiGHTS does look pretty and, aside from Galaxy, is probably the best looking wii game i own.

i think sega was smart in not tacking on motion controls that _have_ to be used. i see no reason for motion controls for this game. Right now it is rare, especially for a third party developer, not to force players to use some sort of motion control that ruins the game.

I'm not sure how this game can really be a disappointment for most people. the two-player game is fun, if short. the graphics do seem to be some of the best i've seen on wii. the controls are obvious and simple. ( i would recommend using a classic control if you have one.)

i would love to play the original, which was revolutionary when it came out (from what i understand), but I can't. at least, i can't easily play it (i'd need to buy a saturn, the special controller, and the game... which would be spendy according to my last check on ebay.)

I think NiGHTS Journey of Dreams is a good reintroduction to (what I hope) is a continuing franchise. it's not perfect, but it's an excellent game and a great (re)entry into a new world.

Wrong-Headed

[hidannik]

I think the entire article, and perhaps the motivation behind it, is misplaced.

For those who are not snobs, more-hardcore-than-thou, fanboys, bitter, or bilious, 2007 has been one of the best years for video gaming - ever. I say this as someone who's been gaming since Pong.

Why raise your blood pressure gnashing your teeth over the things that were less than perfect or less than promised, when there is so much out there to enjoy?

Let's take one example: the Halo 3 complaint. Was the disappointment that Halo 3 was buggy, or unfun, or far less than promised? No. It was the snobbish whine that other people bought it instead of Earnest's more highbrow favorites; and then they had the effrontery to actually enjoy it. Clearly they are the unwashed masses who prefer wicked awesome explosions to the refined pleasures of agonizing moral choices and black humor. And that disappoints him.

Not that I haven't played Earnest's favorites, and enjoyed them immensely (multiple playthroughs of BioShock, and Portal was amazing); but I also enjoyed Halo 3 as a polished gameplay experience with a solid sci-fi plot riffing on myth and legend. At least there weren't any Ewoks.

I could produce a long list of games released in 2007, which, if you ignore the hype, were quite enjoyable. And I think it's possibly the longest list in the history of video gaming. But I think I've made my point.

Hans

Hellgate London was only disappointing to me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing.

It was such a letdown I don't even know where to start.

Is Tetris too short?

[tepples]

If you can beat a game in a single day, it's too short. You can watch the screen and hands of someone who beats Tetris in six minutes, and someone else has beaten hard mode in five. Is Tetris too short?

Re:Is Tetris too short?

[coaxial]

Don't be an idiot. No one gives a shit about some loser playing a speed game.

Hellgate

[igorthefiend]

Why not actually finish making the game before releasing it? It's a mess.

You think Halo's short? Take out the Multiplayer.

[trdrstv]

So I won't get into the thick of the discussion. but "8ish" hours isn't incredible short, for a full blown game??? Man, what have marketing people done to us gamers that we accept a game that lasts only 8 hours! These are sad times indeed.

Think that's bad? Imagine that with no multiplayer and little to no replayability, and you have Heavenly Sword. Seriously, the game is fine as a rental, but getting to King Rohan takes about 5 hours and then can take Maaaaaaaaybe an hour or 2 to beat him all 3 times, and end the game.

Halo having a short/ lackluster single player campaign isn't all that unexpected. When was the last time you heard someone complain about the Single player campaign in Mario Kart? People have been buying it for the multiplayer and the rest is gravy.

A good FPS for me should have some 40-30 hours of gameplay, period.

Halo 3 has that, it's just not limited to the single player campaign.