By April 2008, Sony should be releasing the Dualshock3 controller with rumble in the US, going live with HOME, their new online service for the PS3, not to mention there's a good 5 or 6 games that were already delayed from 2007 to 2008 including UT, MGS4, etc.
Whether or not this will finally get Sony into the console race remains to be seen.
Personally, I'm rather confused by reviews that heavily reference other games.
It's almost as if the reviews are written for other reviewers, or people who have equal amounts of game time under their belts. Sure, I may have been playing games for over 30 years now, but then, I really don't need much in terms of a review now, do I? I see very few reviews that don't make references to other games, making it very difficult for someone who doesn't have those experiences to figure out if it's any good or not.
It'd be like me trying to read a review of a wine (a subject I know nothing about) in Snooty Wine Magazine, and then trying to go to BevMo and finding a good wine for a friend, when all I know is "yeah...they drink wine sometimes...I think it's the purple type." After all, how many times have you overheard a confused adult trying to ask about Mario as a gift for someone's Sony Xbox? There need to be reviews written for that crowd moreso than for folks like us.
As with anything else, being able to apply your own spin to the review is going to help.
For instance, I read that one game got lowish scores for "being more of the same". However, I liked the previous game, and "more of the same" was exactly what I wanted. I bought the game and was happy with it even though it only got mediocre scores from reviewers who were just bored with it.
All reviews are completely subjective - that's going to be case whether you're talking about games, movies, restaurants, or even ice skating.
Really, about the only thing I think these sites should do is throw out the top and bottom scores, to try and counterbalance any sort of bias due to advertising, having a bad day, etc.
Say you go by a traditional grade-school system: F, D, C, B, A - that's a 5/5 system, so a C would be a 3/5, or 60/100. Say you decide to be ultra-complete: F, D-, D, D+, C-, C, C+, B-, B, B+, A-, A, A+ - that's a 13/13 scale, so a B+ would be a 10/13 or approximately 77/100.
Also, they ONLY go by the final or overall score - not the component scores, like what IGN does.
Lots of review sites already use 4 or 5 star/thumb/joystick rating systems.
The meta-review sites, like Metacritic.com or Gamerankings.com, then normalize all the reviews into a 100 point scale, and average them. There's never going to be a "perfect" reviewing system. Even if you see a "5/5" you should still read a couple of reviews with a grain of salt. After all, I don't care if it DID get a 5/5, I'm not interested in playing a racing title.
Well, that's nice. However, if you are a serious FPS fan, you probably have a decent PC, so why would you buy UT for your game console? The PC version will have better graphics, not to mention an active user community generating tons of mods and new maps. I don't think either the PS3 or 360 version will have this sort of open access to user-created material (not to mention, the tools to create them).
I don't think Microsoft, or anyone else, seriously expected the 360 to do well in Japan - not after the Xbox, anyways.
However, even in Japan, the PS3 is still struggling because of the Wii. The Wii's been going strong worldwide, but in Japan, it's burying the PS3 (and the 360) by a huge margin. This makes me wonder what the fate of all those JRPGs that were looking to the PS3 as their chosen platform. Will the 360 get more JRPGs this time around? Or will we see them all migrate to the Wii? The 360 already has more RPGs than the PS3 - which is pretty pathetic in my opinion.
Sure, gamers will buy multiple consoles, but that's what, maybe 10% of the total market? That also doesn't mean you have to buy all the consoles when they're brand new.
Last generation, I bought a PS2 less than 6 months after its US launch. When the Game Cube's price dropped, and there were some nice bundles available, I bought one of those - about 2 years later. The Xbox, on the other hand, wasn't purchased until about a year before the 360 launched. At that point, I'd pretty much finished with the Game Cube, and was finally able to justify buying a Xbox due to its low price and cheap games.
Right now, the order is looking like 360 now, Wii in a year or two, PS3 sometime after that - maybe. There just aren't the exclusives on the PS3 to make it worth buying right now - especially at its high price. Drop it to $300, and show me a good 4 or 5 solid exclusives that I'm interested in, and then I'll consider it. The first solid compelling reason to get a 360 is coming later this month with Ratchet & Clank. Final Fantasy XIII could be another one, but realistically won't come out in the States until 2009.
Agreed. I think with this latest move his, it's quite clear that Jack Thomson is nothing more than a clandestine marketing tool. Just think about all the thousands of people who will now learn about Halo3 who would normally have been ignorant of the game.
All he has to do is take Microsoft to court, then suddenly announce an "out of court" settlement, in which Microsoft pays for his services, and then this troll is off to attack his next "client".
Microsoft, meanwhile, will have received millions of dollars in free advertising around the world.
It may not have been as quick as many of the other awardees' deaths, but let's think about this:
This guy basically didn't move for 3 days while he played a game or otherwise used a computer.
Sure, I've played games for long periods of time too. The longest I went was 14 hours straight, with only a couple of bathroom breaks. No food or water. Eventually, I realized I had a massive headache from dehydration, and felt really naueous due to lack of food. I stumbled into the kitchen to make some food and drink some water. After that, I made a point to get up and move around every 2-3 hours, and always make sure I have water available.
Back in college, I used to work at the campus computing centers. During spring break one year, this one girl came in, and...didn't...leave... Yes, she spent the whole break - 9 days - playing some online game, only leaving her computer to go to the bathroom or get something out of the vending machine (which she would quickly scarf down before coming back in - at least she followed the rules about no food/drink in the lab.)
Afterwards, we had to throw out that chair, keyboard and mouse. Some stains and smells never come out...
There wasn't any rule against what she did, and it wasn't as though the center was busy or anything so we had no reason to kick her out. I think afterwards, however, there were some policy changes.
Will they start stocking more copies of things like Peggles, Diner Dash and other Popcap-like games in the PC section?
Will they finally organize their shelves so that games are arranged in - gasp - alphabetical order?
Or will they not do anything at all? I mean, think about it. Casual gamers are the folks who are going to be shopping in malls, where Gamestops exist mainly, or at places like Best Buy, Walmart, etc. So, the customers will already be there. What more do the stores have to do?
But no, it sounds like they're going to make things even MORE chaotic by lumping games together by genre, mixing games from different consoles into a large chaotic lump.
Yeah, that's going to work well for casual gamers, who still ask for "Nintendo Playstation" or the "Sony Xbox" version of a game, not realizing that there are other console out there, and yes, it makes a difference which version you buy.
What's being stolen here? If I don't click on ads, then not displaying them will have the same net effect from the point of view of the site owner and advertiser.
No, Tivo does not remove ads. You can FF through them, you can enable a backdoor giving you a 30-sec skip button, but Tivo does not automatically skip over ads like the Replay did. Perhaps you're thinking of MythTV?
As for press releases and ads thinly disguised as content, we already have that NOW - AND they still use ADS. Have you looked at many magazines lately? Most of them are owned by the company whose products they write about - glowingly I might add. Why take out an ad when you can pretend to be "legitimate" media and pay someone to toot your own horn? And as a bonus, you now have a quote from a "real" journalist to use in your other advertising collateral! It's win-win!
Meanwhile, other sources of information, such as blogs, usenet and other boards are still good sources for information that's relatively free of bias and ads (spammers, trolls and fanboys, on the other hand...well, they're easily filtered.)
Then there's Consumer Reports, which is supported solely by its supporters, and accepts ZERO ads or money from any company.
You miss the point. People who are blocking ads don't click on them anyways. So, NOT displaying the ads yields the same results for both the site owner and the advertiser. After all, all they care about are impressions and click-thrus. Not blocking the ad yields 1 impression, and 0 click-thrus. Blocking the ad yields...1 impression, 0 click-thrus, and 1 user who's happy he doesn't have to see the ad.
Neither the site owner nor the advertiser are losing anything here. Virtually no one clicks on ads anyways.
You forget one thing, troll. Once those bits hit the computer (that is - MY COMPUTER) I'll do with them what I please.
If the ad people were so worried about their kids, maybe they'd create ads that DON'T annoy, deceive, track, cover up the page you're trying to view, contain annoying animations you can't shut off, or cause seizures (you know the ads...stupid flashing monstrosities)
Unblockable ads? Yeah, good luck with that. Any site stupid enough to sign up for such a thing will find itself blocked. Still, if someone created them, they'd make a bit of money off the stupid and gullible before the public lashback sent a website or two into bankruptcy.
"There are thousands of children in foster homes waiting for adoption, but nobody wants them."
That's not entirely true... A know a couple who wanted to adopt, yet the application paperwork alone took them 2 years - with a lawyer - to complete. Only then, were they even allowed to start looking.
At one point, they seriously considered just joining one of those "baby-express" tours to China. It would have cost them about the same amount, but would have only taken 6 months, as opposed to the 3 years they eventually spent finding a child.
My biggest problem here is that the Governator already tried to pass this law, only to get slapped down by the courts. Instead of trying to address their concerns, he just turned around and submitted the same stupid bill with its same blatant unconstitutional writings.
This wasn't "...but think of the children!" this was clearly something the Governator did to try to soothe his hurt pride, which resulted in nothing more than a big waste of EVERYONE's time and money. I only hope that the court forces Arnold to personally pay the fees - as opposed to passing the cost onto the people of CA, most of whom are sick of paying for the government's screwups.
Analyst is the only job I know of where you're literally paid to pull things out of your rear, with little or NO understanding of the field you're discussing. And if you're wrong 90% of the time - who cares!
Losing a generation has more repercussions than just big numbers in red ink. If Sony starts losing the confidence of the 3rd party developers, how exactly do you expect them to win they back with the PS4? Arguably, this has already begun with a handful of previously Playstation-exclusive titles becoming multi-platform with simulataneous releases this time around. Every exclusive that the PS3 loses becomes just one more reason to NOT buy a PS3. If the games you want to play are multi-platform, and feature nearly identical graphics as the cheaper alternative, why not save some cash by going with a 360?
You can ask Sega about how difficult it is to bring 3rd party developers back to your console line after scaring them away.
Excellent PS3 exclusives? Praytell, what would these be? Warhawk, perhaps, but every other exclusive on the PS3 has only managed to "mediocre" to "OK" reviews at best. Most of the PS3's best titles are also available on the 360, with many reviewers giving the 360 version the slightest of edges over the PS3 version. At least with the PS2 vs. Xbox, even the PS2 ports that made up a large chunk of the Xbox's total library at least had better graphics, and sometimes, additional content so there was an argument for choosing one over the other. That's not true with the PS3 vs. 360, and the price difference doesn't help things either.
BTW, buying any console in anticipation of an unreleased title is a very bad idea. Anyone who follows the game industry will tell you that release plans get changed all the time. There's no guarantee that the game you're waiting for won't get delayed, canceled or even changed to a multi-platform release - not to mention that unreleased game is impossible to properly review - and who hasn't been burned by an over hyped game in their younger years?
Also, as much as I love Ratchet&Clank, they were never system selling games. Good games - yes, but not systems sellers. Also, with the PS3 costing $500, and games costing $60, you're looking at over $700 just get the PS3, 1 game, and accessories. What game could possibly be worth $700? I don't even think most games are worth $40-50, much less $60, especially when those same games will drop to $20-30 within a year.
Slashdot Mirror
By April 2008, Sony should be releasing the Dualshock3 controller with rumble in the US, going live with HOME, their new online service for the PS3, not to mention there's a good 5 or 6 games that were already delayed from 2007 to 2008 including UT, MGS4, etc.
Whether or not this will finally get Sony into the console race remains to be seen.
So...what would you go with instead? Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down? A 2 value system, meaning every game gets a 0 or a 100?
Personally, I'm rather confused by reviews that heavily reference other games.
It's almost as if the reviews are written for other reviewers, or people who have equal amounts of game time under their belts. Sure, I may have been playing games for over 30 years now, but then, I really don't need much in terms of a review now, do I? I see very few reviews that don't make references to other games, making it very difficult for someone who doesn't have those experiences to figure out if it's any good or not.
It'd be like me trying to read a review of a wine (a subject I know nothing about) in Snooty Wine Magazine, and then trying to go to BevMo and finding a good wine for a friend, when all I know is "yeah...they drink wine sometimes...I think it's the purple type." After all, how many times have you overheard a confused adult trying to ask about Mario as a gift for someone's Sony Xbox? There need to be reviews written for that crowd moreso than for folks like us.
As with anything else, being able to apply your own spin to the review is going to help.
For instance, I read that one game got lowish scores for "being more of the same". However, I liked the previous game, and "more of the same" was exactly what I wanted. I bought the game and was happy with it even though it only got mediocre scores from reviewers who were just bored with it.
All reviews are completely subjective - that's going to be case whether you're talking about games, movies, restaurants, or even ice skating.
Really, about the only thing I think these sites should do is throw out the top and bottom scores, to try and counterbalance any sort of bias due to advertising, having a bad day, etc.
Why are these sites part of the problem?
Say you go by a traditional grade-school system: F, D, C, B, A - that's a 5/5 system, so a C would be a 3/5, or 60/100. Say you decide to be ultra-complete: F, D-, D, D+, C-, C, C+, B-, B, B+, A-, A, A+ - that's a 13/13 scale, so a B+ would be a 10/13 or approximately 77/100.
Also, they ONLY go by the final or overall score - not the component scores, like what IGN does.
Lots of review sites already use 4 or 5 star/thumb/joystick rating systems.
The meta-review sites, like Metacritic.com or Gamerankings.com, then normalize all the reviews into a 100 point scale, and average them. There's never going to be a "perfect" reviewing system. Even if you see a "5/5" you should still read a couple of reviews with a grain of salt. After all, I don't care if it DID get a 5/5, I'm not interested in playing a racing title.
Well, that's nice. However, if you are a serious FPS fan, you probably have a decent PC, so why would you buy UT for your game console? The PC version will have better graphics, not to mention an active user community generating tons of mods and new maps. I don't think either the PS3 or 360 version will have this sort of open access to user-created material (not to mention, the tools to create them).
I don't think Microsoft, or anyone else, seriously expected the 360 to do well in Japan - not after the Xbox, anyways.
However, even in Japan, the PS3 is still struggling because of the Wii. The Wii's been going strong worldwide, but in Japan, it's burying the PS3 (and the 360) by a huge margin. This makes me wonder what the fate of all those JRPGs that were looking to the PS3 as their chosen platform. Will the 360 get more JRPGs this time around? Or will we see them all migrate to the Wii? The 360 already has more RPGs than the PS3 - which is pretty pathetic in my opinion.
Sure, gamers will buy multiple consoles, but that's what, maybe 10% of the total market? That also doesn't mean you have to buy all the consoles when they're brand new.
Last generation, I bought a PS2 less than 6 months after its US launch. When the Game Cube's price dropped, and there were some nice bundles available, I bought one of those - about 2 years later. The Xbox, on the other hand, wasn't purchased until about a year before the 360 launched. At that point, I'd pretty much finished with the Game Cube, and was finally able to justify buying a Xbox due to its low price and cheap games.
Right now, the order is looking like 360 now, Wii in a year or two, PS3 sometime after that - maybe. There just aren't the exclusives on the PS3 to make it worth buying right now - especially at its high price. Drop it to $300, and show me a good 4 or 5 solid exclusives that I'm interested in, and then I'll consider it. The first solid compelling reason to get a 360 is coming later this month with Ratchet & Clank. Final Fantasy XIII could be another one, but realistically won't come out in the States until 2009.
Microsoft doesn't even need its legal department.
Simply announce that until they have resolved Jack's complaint, they are disabling the 360 from playing Halo3 until further notice.
There's gotta be at least ONE crazy person out there who will track Jack down, and "finish the fight".
Agreed. I think with this latest move his, it's quite clear that Jack Thomson is nothing more than a clandestine marketing tool. Just think about all the thousands of people who will now learn about Halo3 who would normally have been ignorant of the game.
All he has to do is take Microsoft to court, then suddenly announce an "out of court" settlement, in which Microsoft pays for his services, and then this troll is off to attack his next "client".
Microsoft, meanwhile, will have received millions of dollars in free advertising around the world.
I'd say it's darwinaward-worthy.
It may not have been as quick as many of the other awardees' deaths, but let's think about this:
This guy basically didn't move for 3 days while he played a game or otherwise used a computer.
Sure, I've played games for long periods of time too. The longest I went was 14 hours straight, with only a couple of bathroom breaks. No food or water. Eventually, I realized I had a massive headache from dehydration, and felt really naueous due to lack of food. I stumbled into the kitchen to make some food and drink some water. After that, I made a point to get up and move around every 2-3 hours, and always make sure I have water available.
Back in college, I used to work at the campus computing centers. During spring break one year, this one girl came in, and...didn't...leave... Yes, she spent the whole break - 9 days - playing some online game, only leaving her computer to go to the bathroom or get something out of the vending machine (which she would quickly scarf down before coming back in - at least she followed the rules about no food/drink in the lab.)
Afterwards, we had to throw out that chair, keyboard and mouse. Some stains and smells never come out...
There wasn't any rule against what she did, and it wasn't as though the center was busy or anything so we had no reason to kick her out. I think afterwards, however, there were some policy changes.
More likely it shocked them into realizing the same thing could happen to them, and they left to get something to eat, stretch, etc.
I'll bet some never return, having been "scared straight" as it were.
Will they start stocking more copies of things like Peggles, Diner Dash and other Popcap-like games in the PC section?
Will they finally organize their shelves so that games are arranged in - gasp - alphabetical order?
Or will they not do anything at all? I mean, think about it. Casual gamers are the folks who are going to be shopping in malls, where Gamestops exist mainly, or at places like Best Buy, Walmart, etc. So, the customers will already be there. What more do the stores have to do?
But no, it sounds like they're going to make things even MORE chaotic by lumping games together by genre, mixing games from different consoles into a large chaotic lump.
Yeah, that's going to work well for casual gamers, who still ask for "Nintendo Playstation" or the "Sony Xbox" version of a game, not realizing that there are other console out there, and yes, it makes a difference which version you buy.
I'm not so sure it is theft.
It's not.
What's being stolen here? If I don't click on ads, then not displaying them will have the same net effect from the point of view of the site owner and advertiser.
No, Tivo does not remove ads. You can FF through them, you can enable a backdoor giving you a 30-sec skip button, but Tivo does not automatically skip over ads like the Replay did. Perhaps you're thinking of MythTV?
As for press releases and ads thinly disguised as content, we already have that NOW - AND they still use ADS. Have you looked at many magazines lately? Most of them are owned by the company whose products they write about - glowingly I might add. Why take out an ad when you can pretend to be "legitimate" media and pay someone to toot your own horn? And as a bonus, you now have a quote from a "real" journalist to use in your other advertising collateral! It's win-win!
Meanwhile, other sources of information, such as blogs, usenet and other boards are still good sources for information that's relatively free of bias and ads (spammers, trolls and fanboys, on the other hand...well, they're easily filtered.)
Then there's Consumer Reports, which is supported solely by its supporters, and accepts ZERO ads or money from any company.
So, no, we don't have to compromise on anything.
You miss the point. People who are blocking ads don't click on them anyways. So, NOT displaying the ads yields the same results for both the site owner and the advertiser. After all, all they care about are impressions and click-thrus. Not blocking the ad yields 1 impression, and 0 click-thrus. Blocking the ad yields...1 impression, 0 click-thrus, and 1 user who's happy he doesn't have to see the ad.
Neither the site owner nor the advertiser are losing anything here. Virtually no one clicks on ads anyways.
You forget one thing, troll. Once those bits hit the computer (that is - MY COMPUTER) I'll do with them what I please.
If the ad people were so worried about their kids, maybe they'd create ads that DON'T annoy, deceive, track, cover up the page you're trying to view, contain annoying animations you can't shut off, or cause seizures (you know the ads...stupid flashing monstrosities)
Unblockable ads? Yeah, good luck with that. Any site stupid enough to sign up for such a thing will find itself blocked. Still, if someone created them, they'd make a bit of money off the stupid and gullible before the public lashback sent a website or two into bankruptcy.
That's Japanese work ethic. The Chinese work ethic is "cut as many corners as possible, then apologize when caught."
"There are thousands of children in foster homes waiting for adoption, but nobody wants them."
That's not entirely true... A know a couple who wanted to adopt, yet the application paperwork alone took them 2 years - with a lawyer - to complete. Only then, were they even allowed to start looking.
At one point, they seriously considered just joining one of those "baby-express" tours to China. It would have cost them about the same amount, but would have only taken 6 months, as opposed to the 3 years they eventually spent finding a child.
My biggest problem here is that the Governator already tried to pass this law, only to get slapped down by the courts. Instead of trying to address their concerns, he just turned around and submitted the same stupid bill with its same blatant unconstitutional writings.
This wasn't "...but think of the children!" this was clearly something the Governator did to try to soothe his hurt pride, which resulted in nothing more than a big waste of EVERYONE's time and money. I only hope that the court forces Arnold to personally pay the fees - as opposed to passing the cost onto the people of CA, most of whom are sick of paying for the government's screwups.
Analyst is the only job I know of where you're literally paid to pull things out of your rear, with little or NO understanding of the field you're discussing. And if you're wrong 90% of the time - who cares!
Losing a generation has more repercussions than just big numbers in red ink. If Sony starts losing the confidence of the 3rd party developers, how exactly do you expect them to win they back with the PS4? Arguably, this has already begun with a handful of previously Playstation-exclusive titles becoming multi-platform with simulataneous releases this time around. Every exclusive that the PS3 loses becomes just one more reason to NOT buy a PS3. If the games you want to play are multi-platform, and feature nearly identical graphics as the cheaper alternative, why not save some cash by going with a 360?
You can ask Sega about how difficult it is to bring 3rd party developers back to your console line after scaring them away.
Excellent PS3 exclusives? Praytell, what would these be? Warhawk, perhaps, but every other exclusive on the PS3 has only managed to "mediocre" to "OK" reviews at best. Most of the PS3's best titles are also available on the 360, with many reviewers giving the 360 version the slightest of edges over the PS3 version. At least with the PS2 vs. Xbox, even the PS2 ports that made up a large chunk of the Xbox's total library at least had better graphics, and sometimes, additional content so there was an argument for choosing one over the other. That's not true with the PS3 vs. 360, and the price difference doesn't help things either.
BTW, buying any console in anticipation of an unreleased title is a very bad idea. Anyone who follows the game industry will tell you that release plans get changed all the time. There's no guarantee that the game you're waiting for won't get delayed, canceled or even changed to a multi-platform release - not to mention that unreleased game is impossible to properly review - and who hasn't been burned by an over hyped game in their younger years?
Also, as much as I love Ratchet&Clank, they were never system selling games. Good games - yes, but not systems sellers. Also, with the PS3 costing $500, and games costing $60, you're looking at over $700 just get the PS3, 1 game, and accessories. What game could possibly be worth $700? I don't even think most games are worth $40-50, much less $60, especially when those same games will drop to $20-30 within a year.