Gamers shouldn't be too disappointed since the nickel metal hydride batteries that power the PalmPSone provide a whopping one and a half hours of continuous gameplay
Is that sarcasm, or does he actually believe this?
I think he means that they shouldn't be too disappointed about not having one of their own, because aside from the novelty value, a portable PSOne isn't really worth it.
The real problem is a First Person perspective doesn't lend itself well to timing jumps and dealing with a lot of other elements common in an action or platformer game.
That's why, once you download the video, you'll see that the game actually allows you to switch between first and third person view modes at all times, both during action sequences and during more mundane "wander the town, talk to some folks, and get a mission" RPG-like sequences. All in all, it's sort of like Metal Gear Solid 2, with third person stealth/platforming action and first person aiming and shooting, but with the switch being performed by pressing a "view switch" button and being able to move around slowly in first person view, rather than having to stand still to shoot like in MGS2.
On a whole it works well, but for the most part, it's nothing really clever or unique. Wander-around-and-talk town sequences are in plenty of action games lately, first-person-shooting-but-third-person-action sequences were already done in MGS2 and plenty of others, and living ammo isn't new, either. Not only did Half-Life give you some very unique living weapons, but Half-Life 2 does it even better by giving you a monster taming weapon that lets you unleash huge-ass monster attacks by figuring out where a monster attack can come from in your environment (like near a skylight, or a hole in the floor, or a flimsy door). And even though the living ammo in this game is pretty amusing and cool-looking, a lot of it is just basic stealth/action weaponry that happens to make cute and/or disgusting noises at you. The various chipmunks, skunks, tribbles, etc. are nothing but stun grenades, gas grenades, land mines, machine guns, and all of the other typical MGS and Splinter Cell weapons dressed up in fur coats.
At least the hero moves like a lightning bolt across the landscape in third person view. That's something I wish a lot more games would have.
The way I see it, a game that I enjoy for 20 hours is much better than a game that I hate for 150. So why the obsession in video game media with quantifying gameplay time?"
Just because 150 hours of gameplay is a selling point does not mean that it is necessarily a selling point for you. For fans of the genre, it can be a godsend. Take Disgaea, for example. One of the major selling points of Disgaea was that if complex RPG/Strategy games are your bag, then that one game will let you enjoy one of the pinnacles of your favorite genre for months in one stretch. And that's what the GTA developers are telling their fans. No more "Okay, I shot ten punks... time to shoot ten more punks" or "Okay, I've had Spidey deliver twenty pizzas, now I can... deliver twenty more". If you love GTA's style of gameplay, then they're promising than San Andreas will let you enjoy its main selling point -- its huge, content-rich world -- for as long as you want without doing the same great stuff over and over again until it nauseates you.
If you're not a really big fan of the genre, it doesn't matter to you, but if you are, then it means the world. If someone could promise me 150 hours of Ico and Prince of Persia's puzzle/action gameplay, rather than six or ten hours of it followed by six months of waiting for the next high quality game in that little niche to come out, I'd be there. Just like I was when Disgaea was released.
However, the difference between those systems and the PSP's situation, is that the PSP looks to ship before ANY 3rd party developers get development hardware. At least Halo was in production... That really great must-have PSP game that is going to come out someday hasn't even been started yet. In two years when it is ready to ship, will the PSP even still be there?
Wait a second, here. We're talking about "FINAL dev kits", not "dev kits". Lots of games are definitely in production for the PSP, such as Metal Gear Acid, Gran Turismo Mobile, and Death Jr. They're just not producing games that are ready for release right now. This isn't like trying to make a movie without a camera. It's like not having any equipment to edit its final cut on once you have all dailies shot.
I would have thought that many of the customers who only buy during sales would be buying a lot more products than if they bought on a semi-regular (non-sale) basis. Surely this means that the customers make up in bulk for the slightly lower profit margin due to sales? After all, the point of sales is to attract a higher product turnover at a lower profit margin, so what are they complaining about?
In a lot of stores, their sales are priced either at or very close to the wholesale cost of the item. They make their real money from either selling overpriced crap that every big chain store marks up (hands-free headsets, cans of compressed air, disc cleaning kits, etc.) and useful-but-costly extended warranties. The problem is that when someone comes in for a sale, they usually buy just that item, and they don't want any crap items or extended warranties. If they came to the store because the item they want is "finally down to $149.99!", then their budget is $149.99 + tax, not $149.99 + tax + an impulse buy item, or $149.99 + tax + $40 for an extended warranty.
In short, the equation on the store's end is: "1 impulse buy item (or extended warranty) >>> three or four sale items"
The files in the iTMS were ripped from the masters using professional gear and software. This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD.
Errr... who would rip a CD to a 128kbps MP3 file, though? You only do that if you want to transfer it over the web and you have a slow connection. Anyone using them purely for home use, or anyone that has a cable connection, would rip them at 320kbps. That's like saying that you prefer apples to oranges because rotten oranges don't taste as good as fresh apples.
I was just thinking the other day about how nice it is that whenever the gaming industry really, really hypes a new game, it usually turns out to be good, unlike the movie industry, where almost every movie with an enormous marketing budget turns out to be crap. Usually when Nintendo really, really hypes a game, it turns out to be a good game, and it it usually gets a lot of notice in gaming magazines specifically because it's such a great game. The same thing happens when Blizzard, Konami, Capcom, Microsoft, or several other large game companies hype a game. Their lesser-known titles like Capcom's Maximo or Megaman Battle Network can be a little spotty, but when they really hype a game, it's because they've chosen the best of their new games.
The only two exceptions I could name where gamers were really, truly burned by a heavily marketed game (in recent memory) were Atari's Enter the Matrix and Eidos' Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. And now, thanks to Atari, we have yet another game that had a tons of marketing dollars, tons of press coverage, tons of sales, and tons of suck. A few more games like these and we'll end up with a much more cynical view of the industry, with most gamers regarding new big budget games the same way most people I know viewed the trailer for The Day After Tomorrow: "Wow, that looks really cool. I bet it's going to suck."
Xbox Top Sellers: - MechAssault - Crimson Skies - Ninja Gaiden - Knights of the Old Republic
No driving game, FPS or PC port in the bunch.
Did you really think that no one would catch you in this obvious lie? Halo, Splinter Cell, and Project Gotham Racing are the best-selling XBox games ever (search for "XB"), selling at least 3.18, 1.42, and 1.14 million copies each, along with the Xbox port of Grand Theft Auto (1.02 million). Ninja Gaiden may have recently surpassed this, as the numbers may be as much as a few months old, but I doubt that anything has recently raced past Halo and Splinter Cell.
The bigger problem with nuclear power is getting rid of the waste products. If someone could figure out a good way to launch those into the sun cheaply nuclear power would probably be the best solution.
The problem is that until someone finds a way to teleport matter into space, we're never going to find a safe way to launch nuclear waste into the sun. No matter how safe the solution is, it's always going to come down to the same thing: if something ever goes wrong, the waste will be released and thousands or millions of people will be covered in nuclear waste. Even if they could stop it from leaking into populated areas, which is very difficult once the waste reaches a certain height, the best case scenario is that it will coat a piece of the Earth in nuclear waste and ruin that area's ecosystem.
1) It was faithful to the source material, being written by the same writers, acted by the same actors, etc. 2) It had the additional length required to make a successful game, and little of that is what I would consider 'filler.' 3) It played with the Matrix universe without the rick of 'stepping on the toes' of the sequels... since the sequels had already been planned out at the same time the game was made.
What Enter the Matrix is missing is something harder to grasp at.
Actually, the entire GAME is what I would consider filler. The entire movie franchise was based around The One, a being with incredible god-like powers, fighting against Agent Smith, a being with equally incredible, but very different god-like powers. But in Enter The Matrix, not only do you not play as Neo, but you don't play as any other super-powered individual like Seraph or an Agent. You play as a couple of lame humans who were among the least interesting characters in the movie.
Enter The Matrix is nothing like KOTOR. It's what KOTOR would be like if the game's developers decided that letting you be a Jedi would interfere with the franchise's storyline and forced you to play out the untold adventures of Lando Calrissian instead. If Enter The Matrix let you play as someone with super powers, like maybe one of the previous incarnations of The One, then it would have been perfect, at least from a conceptual standpoint. It would have all of the most important elements of The Matrix without actually interfering with the movies. Instead, its story and scope were just filler, starring the Mysterio and Shocker of the Matrix world. It was very ambitious in its execution, but overall, it was still filler.
"The problem seems to arise from basic differences between films and games as forms of media. Films, like books, are obviously linear, with a specific, tightly defined story arc and specifically defined characters."
Another problem is that games generally aren't the same length as novels or movies. A book like Harry Potter can be condensed into a two or two and a half hour movie and remain pretty faithful to the source material, and though no one actually reads them, two to three hour length movies are very often adapted into novels that retain the fairly standard 150-300 page paperback length. Modern games, on the other hand, are expected to be at least eight to ten hours in length, if not twice as long.
That means that when a game developer adapts a movie into a game, they have to find another six or eight hours (at least) of story and action sequences. And on top of that, they have to make sure that the filler doesn't interfere with any of the possible ideas for where the movie franchise could go in the future, both forward in time (sequels) and also backwards (flashback sequences in the prequel). This is why useless, lame-ass villains like Shocker and Mysterio are featured prominently in the Spider-Man: The Movie games, instead of much more interesting and fun supervillains like Venom or Carnage.
If only more movie studios would just let them go the KOTOR route, we'd be fine. But apparently they won't. So movie games suck, even though they don't have to.
And the Dreamcast failed. Yes, two screens is a unique choice. But in the case of the Dreamcast, gimicky add-ons didn't help the system. Hard-core fans may love that stuff, but it died with the public.
In the past, "the public" has shown that they simply won't buy any add-ons for their game console. For instance, the NES has a nice variety of light gun shooters back when the NES came with a light gun, but today the PS2, a much, much more popular (as in widespread) gaming platform than the NES ever was or could be, only has a small handful of games that support Namco's GunCon 2 light gun peripheral. People are perfectly willing to use a gimmick when you hand it to them in a package deal, but when you expect them to pay a $20-$40 premium for a game just because it uses a light gun, dance pad, or some other peripheral, they'll pass over it for a game that uses their standard controller. In fact, the only successful peripheral in recent memory is the Dual Shock controller for the PlayStation, but that's only because it was well-marketed, fairly cheap, and most importantly could be used for [i]every single game on the system[/i], which justified its $20 purchase with the Western public.
There's simply no comparison between a system that comes with a unique feature built-in and a peripheral that has been created as an expensive add-on to a system that doesn't really need it. The DS is a "gimmick" in the same sense as the PS2's DVD playback ability or the GameCube's internal clock, not the same sense as a light gun, dance pad, or fishing rod controller.
Given the fact that absolutely everyone will admit that Disgaea's unexpected success is the only reason why we're seeing La Pucelle or Phantom Brave in the United States, I'd say that they're taking to it pretty well. The fact that both Nintendo and Square see a market for more Fire Emblem and Front Mission games (respectively) is another strong indicator, too.
5,000 video games. Five thousand. Assuming that this is an entire year's supply of games, this means that 14 games a *day* will be coming out over the next year. Does anyone else think that this might be a stupid number? (and odds are that less than 50% of the coming year's games are going to be showing at E3).
I might buy six games a year. 6/5000 = 0.12 percent. I like games, but how the hell is *anyone* supposed to keep up with this market?
Even if it really was 5,000 games, which, as an Anonymous Coward pointed out, is not correct, it still wouldn't be a ridiculous number. E3 generally covers more than one year of games (Full Spectrum Warrior and Fable, at least, are from E3 2003) and this year will cover at least eight major platforms: PS2, GameCube, XBox, GBA, PSP, PC, and cell phones.
Obviously, no single gamer is meant to play all of those games, or even a small percentage of those games, in a year or two. Instead, they're aimed at a very broad range of gamers. Kids that only play E-rated GameCube and GBA games, teens who only play crime and FPS games, RPG gamers who are going to support various small niche companies (Atlus, Nihon Falcom, etc.), businessmen who play games on their cellphone when they're bored, PC gamers eagerly awaiting Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, etc.
When we think of gaming, we generally don't take into account things like cell phone games, crappy licensed GBA games, obscure niche titles like The King of Fighters or Ys VI, or just genres that we're not very interested in. But E3 takes all of that into account.
The thing that boggles my mind is that they are taking a (relatively) diverse channel and merging it with one (G4) that has such an even smaller niche audience that it only comprised 1 show in techTV's lineup.
Yeah, that's one of the more ironic parts of this decision. TechTV used to be largely made up of daily content like The Screensavers and Call For Help, which were absolutely useless in reruns a month later ("Oh no! There's a new worm out... hey, that was a month ago!"). For years, they tried to diversify their content so that they could pair those shows up with something that could fill up the rest of their roster with repeatable content. First they tried movies, which failed. Then they tried The Thunderbirds, which didn't last long. Then they finally stumbled upon sci-fi anime, which seems to be working, and paired it with a bunch of new documentary shows that are pretty much hit-or-miss, but don't entirely suck. And now what happens? They're going to become nothing more than a distribution channel for G4, which I'm told has the exact same problem that TechTV had for years -- no repeatable content.
And now that their scope is going to be much more narrow, changing from "TV for geeks" to "TV for gamers" (a subdivision of "geeks"), what are they going to fill their roster with? A new season of Game Over? Maybe some reruns of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show With Captain Lou Albano?
I don't think that's fair at all. While granted, GamePro is not exactly a bastion of gaming insight, they put out a decent product.
GamePro doesn't even take the time to perform basic proofreading. Not only is every issue filled with misspellings and grammatical errors, but in last month's issue, they actually claimed that Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes was, in big bold print, "A remake of the 1988 PS1 classic." This is the sort of effort that goes into their magazine.
While I will concede that their features are usually very interesting, including the letters section and the Watchdog articles, their reviews usually skip over any details or complaints and generally offer you little more than "It rocks" or "It sucks, so I'm giving it a 3.5 out of 5."
And I was only using the terms "professional" and "amateur" in terms of how a publication carries itself. In my opinion, sites like Games Are Fun act much more professionally than GameSpy or IGN ever will.
Rating with numbers or percents is dangerous, because it seems to be a rule, that all games are rated between 80% to 100% and if any game receives any lower rating, it is automatically labelled as a bad game even if the game is billiant and the lower rating is given only by techincal reasons (bugs etc.).
In gaming magazines and websites that are craptacular enough to not have any kind of set ratings policy or enforce any kind of ratings consistency, it's unlikely that the writing will be any better than the numerical designations. Most of the most popular gaming outlets, specifically EGM and I believe also GameSpot, have a ratings policy and enforce some kind of consistency in the ratings, i.e. keeping a reviewer from claiming that one game is better than another and then giving it a lower score, making sure that 9s and 10s are reserved for serious overachievement, making sure that the scores match the tone of the articles in a uniform matter, ensuring that the scores don't needlessly fall into a specific range (like 6-10), etc. If this sort of basic editing isn't performed, then you might as well stop reading that outlet's reviews anyway, because they're clearly either A) a bunch of shills that are afraid to piss any of their advertisers off, or B) just amateurs.
Also, it's tempting to compare numbers between different reviews even if there isn't any common rule set between different gaming magazines for giving these ratings (so the comparing is actually pointless).
I actually agree with you on this point. It's worthwhile to check the score that one reviewer (probably one that you really agree with) gave some older games against the score that he gave to one that you're thinking about buying, but systems like GameRankings are ludicrous. Comparing the reviews from EGM, GameSpot, 1up.com, and other reputable, professional sources against GameSpy, GamePro, or IGN is like averaging out the opinions between a group of college professors and the judging panel for a wet T-shirt contest.
The greatest thing about number scores in reviews is that they let reviewers get their entire message out, even in a confined space. For instance, a lot of the magazines reviews for Prince of Persia started with a small blurb about how the reviewer absolutely LOVED the game, but the rest of it was usually dominated by the warnings that the reviewer felt were very important for every player to know: the camera has some problems, the fighting can be repetitive at some points, the difficulty is very uneven, it's as short as some GBA games, etc. Taken as a whole, the review is very negative; 80% of it is a list of complaints. But taken as a whole and with a score attached, the reviewer is allowed to use his very limited writing space to give the reader a head's up about the game's short-comings while still stressing how wonderful the game really is.
Magazine reviews don't often have the luxury of including a "bottom line" sentence like this one, let alone one that's in a separate paragraph (like this one!), so the number score really helps them sum up their view on a certain game without forcing their opinions of a more obscure game off the magazine's review section and into the ass-end of their website. It allows them to cover both the super-hyped AAA games like Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes or Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and mostly unknown cult hits like Disgaea in the same issue without charging more than $6 an issue.
On a separate note, it also helps when comparing games. If you generally agree with a reviewer and follow them over a period of time, in the same way that many people follow Roger Ebert's movie column and TV show, then you can use their scores to compare different games that they've reviewed. For instance, if you loved Devil May Cry and Shinobi and a certain reviewer gave them both a 9.0, then it's worth looking at the scores to see how that reviewer sizes them up against a new game that you want to buy, especially something similar like Crimson Sea 2 or Samurai Warriors. He could really like those games and find very little to complain about when reviewing them, but still give them a 7.0, meaning that there's nothing wrong with them, but that they're not really top tier games, either.
And really, it's not as if having a number there hurts the review in some way.
But doesn't this just validate that the patent system albeit a little broken generally works.
If giving a patent to anyone for anything that sounds vaguely technical and then waiting for the real inventor to come and prove himself, in spite of the fact that there are many people on the government's payroll with the job title of "patent examiner", is a system that "generally works", then I'd like to know what qualifies as "broken".
As usual, IGN is slightly off the mark. According to GameSpot's article, Factor 5 isn't just moving on to "other platforms", which most people would reasonably identify as the PlayStation 2 or the Xbox. Instead, they're moving onto the next round of console and/or portable systems.
According to Eggebrecht, the only reason Factor 5 has stopped making GameCube games was that they've abandoned current-generation hardware altogether. "It is simply because we have moved into next-generation development," he said.
And the games most played on mobile phones? 80's style arcade games. When you are waiting for a bus, or idling away a few minutes of break time, you don't want anything more involving.
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Your comment about peoples wide FOV is true, but only applicable to FPS and other 3D games. But those sorts of games are not what the mobile phone user typically wants to play. They are too immersive and time demanding. If you want to work your way though Quake X, you'll probably do it on your console or PC.
If Nokia had been smart enough to launch the N-Gage with beefed-up versions of these sorts of games, then your argument would hold water. But instead, the initial N-Gage lineup contained at least: 2 3D games (Tony Hawk and Tomb Raider), 2 sidescrollers (Sonic and Pandemonium), 1 FPS (Red Faction), and only ONE puzzle game (Puyo Pop, which was poorly ported; the indistinct colors ruined the gameplay). Your argument makes even less sense when you take into account the fact that the current N-Gage Lineup contains a new Splinter Cell sidescroller and a Rayman sidescroller, but only three puzzle/arcade games, which are Puyo Pop (still crap, I'd imagine), Puzzle Bobble, and Super Monkey Ball. And Super Monkey Ball's presence on that short list depends on how the N-Gage version actually plays.
If Nokia had followed your very logical strategy, they might have done a lot better. Instead, they decided to go for console-style games on a decidedly old-fashioned and inappropriate vertical screen, which won them a a thumbs-down across the board from magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Just a brief question, since we don't often hear much about the European gaming market:
Is the N-Gage suffering the same sort of bad press in Europe that it's suffering in the United States? Here in the US, it's been the butt of gaming magazine and website jokes for months, to the point where just mentioning it to any gamer would probably elicit laughter. It's really to the point where the only way they could possibly be less popular is if they sent out a press release announcing that "9 Out of 10 Convicted Child Molesters Agree: The N-Gage Kicks Ass". I'd say that they have a much bigger PR problem to tackle than the Virtual Boy or the 32X ever had.
As for Yorda in Ico, I agree that not playing the full game is unfair, but she's also a product of a society (Japan) that still is very inequal. I believe her passiveness and inability is as much a game device as it is a reflection of the view of girls in Japan. Compared to other kinds of oppression, Ico is a harmless fantasy for boys in the end. I mean, who hasn't dreamed of being a hero and saving the girl?
Seriously, people... we're talking about a character who has been abused, locked in a cage, and can now barely walk, let alone perform physical tasks. I think that her personality isn't so much a result of being created by a man, or being created by a Japanese man, as much as it is a product of being abused and locked in a fucking cage.
The state where I live in even requires for these little metal signs to be mounted on the outside of my car with a unquie identifier! Can you believe it? There is a law that I have to have a little sticker on it, which I have to pay for every year also! Am I just renting my vechile from the goverment? I also heard that the Federal Government requires a unquie SN on each an every vechile made! That number is printed on parts all over your vechile and hidden from view.
While this is a pretty funny post, as well as an insightful one, I think it's missing one thing. All of the forms of identification listed here are read from a very short range. In fact, they're read with the naked eye. That's a much shorter range than 1km, and it's the difference between a stalker (be they an agent of the government, a criminal, or whatever else) following you around in their car, and that same stalker being able to track you invisibly from a full kilometer away. If this system is implemented, then millions of people will have a transmitter effectively tethered to their bodies for many hours of the day, providing a very useful tracking system for anyone that wants to spy on them.
Warning: Some moderate (possibly heavy) Ico spoilers will ensue after the quote.
I never finished ICO. Not only did I get stuck at a certain point about halfway through, but more to the point, I grew sick and tired of the girl, Yorda, and her uselessness. This character was so pathetic, it almost made me angry. I admit that this is not the effect the game was intended to have on me or on anyone; however, here's this supposedly sympathetic female character in a video game that can do absolutely nothing for herself and is constantly in danger of being kidnapped. Who better than a man--or in this case, just a boy--to come to her rescue.
If Greg had played Ico all the way through, he would've realized that Yorda was only pathetic because she had been repeatedly injured and abused. The real Yorda was quite a bit more capable, just as the injured, abused Ico was just as pathetic (if not more so) than she was when she was injured.
This is what happens when someone starts their analysis of a game with the words, "I never finished..." That's like watching the first two minutes of the Spider-Man movie, turning your DVD player off, and then devoting two paragraphs to asking why someone would want to watch Peter Parker act like a geeky loser for two hours. If you're going to review or analyze something, you should at least have the maturity to take in the whole thing before gracing us with your ignorant opinion.
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Gamers shouldn't be too disappointed since the nickel metal hydride batteries that power the PalmPSone provide a whopping one and a half hours of continuous gameplay
Is that sarcasm, or does he actually believe this?
I think he means that they shouldn't be too disappointed about not having one of their own, because aside from the novelty value, a portable PSOne isn't really worth it.
The real problem is a First Person perspective doesn't lend itself well to timing jumps and dealing with a lot of other elements common in an action or platformer game.
That's why, once you download the video, you'll see that the game actually allows you to switch between first and third person view modes at all times, both during action sequences and during more mundane "wander the town, talk to some folks, and get a mission" RPG-like sequences. All in all, it's sort of like Metal Gear Solid 2, with third person stealth/platforming action and first person aiming and shooting, but with the switch being performed by pressing a "view switch" button and being able to move around slowly in first person view, rather than having to stand still to shoot like in MGS2.
On a whole it works well, but for the most part, it's nothing really clever or unique. Wander-around-and-talk town sequences are in plenty of action games lately, first-person-shooting-but-third-person-action sequences were already done in MGS2 and plenty of others, and living ammo isn't new, either. Not only did Half-Life give you some very unique living weapons, but Half-Life 2 does it even better by giving you a monster taming weapon that lets you unleash huge-ass monster attacks by figuring out where a monster attack can come from in your environment (like near a skylight, or a hole in the floor, or a flimsy door). And even though the living ammo in this game is pretty amusing and cool-looking, a lot of it is just basic stealth/action weaponry that happens to make cute and/or disgusting noises at you. The various chipmunks, skunks, tribbles, etc. are nothing but stun grenades, gas grenades, land mines, machine guns, and all of the other typical MGS and Splinter Cell weapons dressed up in fur coats.
At least the hero moves like a lightning bolt across the landscape in third person view. That's something I wish a lot more games would have.
The way I see it, a game that I enjoy for 20 hours is much better than a game that I hate for 150. So why the obsession in video game media with quantifying gameplay time?"
Just because 150 hours of gameplay is a selling point does not mean that it is necessarily a selling point for you. For fans of the genre, it can be a godsend. Take Disgaea, for example. One of the major selling points of Disgaea was that if complex RPG/Strategy games are your bag, then that one game will let you enjoy one of the pinnacles of your favorite genre for months in one stretch. And that's what the GTA developers are telling their fans. No more "Okay, I shot ten punks... time to shoot ten more punks" or "Okay, I've had Spidey deliver twenty pizzas, now I can... deliver twenty more". If you love GTA's style of gameplay, then they're promising than San Andreas will let you enjoy its main selling point -- its huge, content-rich world -- for as long as you want without doing the same great stuff over and over again until it nauseates you.
If you're not a really big fan of the genre, it doesn't matter to you, but if you are, then it means the world. If someone could promise me 150 hours of Ico and Prince of Persia's puzzle/action gameplay, rather than six or ten hours of it followed by six months of waiting for the next high quality game in that little niche to come out, I'd be there. Just like I was when Disgaea was released.
However, the difference between those systems and the PSP's situation, is that the PSP looks to ship before ANY 3rd party developers get development hardware. At least Halo was in production... That really great must-have PSP game that is going to come out someday hasn't even been started yet. In two years when it is ready to ship, will the PSP even still be there?
Wait a second, here. We're talking about "FINAL dev kits", not "dev kits". Lots of games are definitely in production for the PSP, such as Metal Gear Acid, Gran Turismo Mobile, and Death Jr. They're just not producing games that are ready for release right now. This isn't like trying to make a movie without a camera. It's like not having any equipment to edit its final cut on once you have all dailies shot.
I would have thought that many of the customers who only buy during sales would be buying a lot more products than if they bought on a semi-regular (non-sale) basis. Surely this means that the customers make up in bulk for the slightly lower profit margin due to sales? After all, the point of sales is to attract a higher product turnover at a lower profit margin, so what are they complaining about?
In a lot of stores, their sales are priced either at or very close to the wholesale cost of the item. They make their real money from either selling overpriced crap that every big chain store marks up (hands-free headsets, cans of compressed air, disc cleaning kits, etc.) and useful-but-costly extended warranties. The problem is that when someone comes in for a sale, they usually buy just that item, and they don't want any crap items or extended warranties. If they came to the store because the item they want is "finally down to $149.99!", then their budget is $149.99 + tax, not $149.99 + tax + an impulse buy item, or $149.99 + tax + $40 for an extended warranty.
In short, the equation on the store's end is:
"1 impulse buy item (or extended warranty) >>> three or four sale items"
The files in the iTMS were ripped from the masters using professional gear and software. This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD.
Errr... who would rip a CD to a 128kbps MP3 file, though? You only do that if you want to transfer it over the web and you have a slow connection. Anyone using them purely for home use, or anyone that has a cable connection, would rip them at 320kbps. That's like saying that you prefer apples to oranges because rotten oranges don't taste as good as fresh apples.
I was just thinking the other day about how nice it is that whenever the gaming industry really, really hypes a new game, it usually turns out to be good, unlike the movie industry, where almost every movie with an enormous marketing budget turns out to be crap. Usually when Nintendo really, really hypes a game, it turns out to be a good game, and it it usually gets a lot of notice in gaming magazines specifically because it's such a great game. The same thing happens when Blizzard, Konami, Capcom, Microsoft, or several other large game companies hype a game. Their lesser-known titles like Capcom's Maximo or Megaman Battle Network can be a little spotty, but when they really hype a game, it's because they've chosen the best of their new games.
The only two exceptions I could name where gamers were really, truly burned by a heavily marketed game (in recent memory) were Atari's Enter the Matrix and Eidos' Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. And now, thanks to Atari, we have yet another game that had a tons of marketing dollars, tons of press coverage, tons of sales, and tons of suck. A few more games like these and we'll end up with a much more cynical view of the industry, with most gamers regarding new big budget games the same way most people I know viewed the trailer for The Day After Tomorrow: "Wow, that looks really cool. I bet it's going to suck."
Xbox Top Sellers:
- MechAssault
- Crimson Skies
- Ninja Gaiden
- Knights of the Old Republic
No driving game, FPS or PC port in the bunch.
Did you really think that no one would catch you in this obvious lie? Halo, Splinter Cell, and Project Gotham Racing are the best-selling XBox games ever (search for "XB"), selling at least 3.18, 1.42, and 1.14 million copies each, along with the Xbox port of Grand Theft Auto (1.02 million). Ninja Gaiden may have recently surpassed this, as the numbers may be as much as a few months old, but I doubt that anything has recently raced past Halo and Splinter Cell.
The bigger problem with nuclear power is getting rid of the waste products. If someone could figure out a good way to launch those into the sun cheaply nuclear power would probably be the best solution.
The problem is that until someone finds a way to teleport matter into space, we're never going to find a safe way to launch nuclear waste into the sun. No matter how safe the solution is, it's always going to come down to the same thing: if something ever goes wrong, the waste will be released and thousands or millions of people will be covered in nuclear waste. Even if they could stop it from leaking into populated areas, which is very difficult once the waste reaches a certain height, the best case scenario is that it will coat a piece of the Earth in nuclear waste and ruin that area's ecosystem.
1) It was faithful to the source material, being written by the same writers, acted by the same actors, etc.
2) It had the additional length required to make a successful game, and little of that is what I would consider 'filler.'
3) It played with the Matrix universe without the rick of 'stepping on the toes' of the sequels... since the sequels had already been planned out at the same time the game was made.
What Enter the Matrix is missing is something harder to grasp at.
Actually, the entire GAME is what I would consider filler. The entire movie franchise was based around The One, a being with incredible god-like powers, fighting against Agent Smith, a being with equally incredible, but very different god-like powers. But in Enter The Matrix, not only do you not play as Neo, but you don't play as any other super-powered individual like Seraph or an Agent. You play as a couple of lame humans who were among the least interesting characters in the movie.
Enter The Matrix is nothing like KOTOR. It's what KOTOR would be like if the game's developers decided that letting you be a Jedi would interfere with the franchise's storyline and forced you to play out the untold adventures of Lando Calrissian instead. If Enter The Matrix let you play as someone with super powers, like maybe one of the previous incarnations of The One, then it would have been perfect, at least from a conceptual standpoint. It would have all of the most important elements of The Matrix without actually interfering with the movies. Instead, its story and scope were just filler, starring the Mysterio and Shocker of the Matrix world. It was very ambitious in its execution, but overall, it was still filler.
"The problem seems to arise from basic differences between films and games as forms of media. Films, like books, are obviously linear, with a specific, tightly defined story arc and specifically defined characters."
Another problem is that games generally aren't the same length as novels or movies. A book like Harry Potter can be condensed into a two or two and a half hour movie and remain pretty faithful to the source material, and though no one actually reads them, two to three hour length movies are very often adapted into novels that retain the fairly standard 150-300 page paperback length. Modern games, on the other hand, are expected to be at least eight to ten hours in length, if not twice as long.
That means that when a game developer adapts a movie into a game, they have to find another six or eight hours (at least) of story and action sequences. And on top of that, they have to make sure that the filler doesn't interfere with any of the possible ideas for where the movie franchise could go in the future, both forward in time (sequels) and also backwards (flashback sequences in the prequel). This is why useless, lame-ass villains like Shocker and Mysterio are featured prominently in the Spider-Man: The Movie games, instead of much more interesting and fun supervillains like Venom or Carnage.
If only more movie studios would just let them go the KOTOR route, we'd be fine. But apparently they won't. So movie games suck, even though they don't have to.
And the Dreamcast failed. Yes, two screens is a unique choice. But in the case of the Dreamcast, gimicky add-ons didn't help the system. Hard-core fans may love that stuff, but it died with the public.
In the past, "the public" has shown that they simply won't buy any add-ons for their game console. For instance, the NES has a nice variety of light gun shooters back when the NES came with a light gun, but today the PS2, a much, much more popular (as in widespread) gaming platform than the NES ever was or could be, only has a small handful of games that support Namco's GunCon 2 light gun peripheral. People are perfectly willing to use a gimmick when you hand it to them in a package deal, but when you expect them to pay a $20-$40 premium for a game just because it uses a light gun, dance pad, or some other peripheral, they'll pass over it for a game that uses their standard controller. In fact, the only successful peripheral in recent memory is the Dual Shock controller for the PlayStation, but that's only because it was well-marketed, fairly cheap, and most importantly could be used for [i]every single game on the system[/i], which justified its $20 purchase with the Western public.
There's simply no comparison between a system that comes with a unique feature built-in and a peripheral that has been created as an expensive add-on to a system that doesn't really need it. The DS is a "gimmick" in the same sense as the PS2's DVD playback ability or the GameCube's internal clock, not the same sense as a light gun, dance pad, or fishing rod controller.
How will most Americans take to the game?
Given the fact that absolutely everyone will admit that Disgaea's unexpected success is the only reason why we're seeing La Pucelle or Phantom Brave in the United States, I'd say that they're taking to it pretty well. The fact that both Nintendo and Square see a market for more Fire Emblem and Front Mission games (respectively) is another strong indicator, too.
5,000 video games. Five thousand. Assuming that this is an entire year's supply of games, this means that 14 games a *day* will be coming out over the next year. Does anyone else think that this might be a stupid number? (and odds are that less than 50% of the coming year's games are going to be showing at E3).
I might buy six games a year. 6/5000 = 0.12 percent. I like games, but how the hell is *anyone* supposed to keep up with this market?
Even if it really was 5,000 games, which, as an Anonymous Coward pointed out, is not correct, it still wouldn't be a ridiculous number. E3 generally covers more than one year of games (Full Spectrum Warrior and Fable, at least, are from E3 2003) and this year will cover at least eight major platforms: PS2, GameCube, XBox, GBA, PSP, PC, and cell phones.
Obviously, no single gamer is meant to play all of those games, or even a small percentage of those games, in a year or two. Instead, they're aimed at a very broad range of gamers. Kids that only play E-rated GameCube and GBA games, teens who only play crime and FPS games, RPG gamers who are going to support various small niche companies (Atlus, Nihon Falcom, etc.), businessmen who play games on their cellphone when they're bored, PC gamers eagerly awaiting Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, etc.
When we think of gaming, we generally don't take into account things like cell phone games, crappy licensed GBA games, obscure niche titles like The King of Fighters or Ys VI, or just genres that we're not very interested in. But E3 takes all of that into account.
The thing that boggles my mind is that they are taking a (relatively) diverse channel and merging it with one (G4) that has such an even smaller niche audience that it only comprised 1 show in techTV's lineup.
Yeah, that's one of the more ironic parts of this decision. TechTV used to be largely made up of daily content like The Screensavers and Call For Help, which were absolutely useless in reruns a month later ("Oh no! There's a new worm out... hey, that was a month ago!"). For years, they tried to diversify their content so that they could pair those shows up with something that could fill up the rest of their roster with repeatable content. First they tried movies, which failed. Then they tried The Thunderbirds, which didn't last long. Then they finally stumbled upon sci-fi anime, which seems to be working, and paired it with a bunch of new documentary shows that are pretty much hit-or-miss, but don't entirely suck. And now what happens? They're going to become nothing more than a distribution channel for G4, which I'm told has the exact same problem that TechTV had for years -- no repeatable content.
And now that their scope is going to be much more narrow, changing from "TV for geeks" to "TV for gamers" (a subdivision of "geeks"), what are they going to fill their roster with? A new season of Game Over? Maybe some reruns of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show With Captain Lou Albano?
I don't think that's fair at all. While granted, GamePro is not exactly a bastion of gaming insight, they put out a decent product.
GamePro doesn't even take the time to perform basic proofreading. Not only is every issue filled with misspellings and grammatical errors, but in last month's issue, they actually claimed that Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes was, in big bold print, "A remake of the 1988 PS1 classic." This is the sort of effort that goes into their magazine.
While I will concede that their features are usually very interesting, including the letters section and the Watchdog articles, their reviews usually skip over any details or complaints and generally offer you little more than "It rocks" or "It sucks, so I'm giving it a 3.5 out of 5."
And I was only using the terms "professional" and "amateur" in terms of how a publication carries itself. In my opinion, sites like Games Are Fun act much more professionally than GameSpy or IGN ever will.
Rating with numbers or percents is dangerous, because it seems to be a rule, that all games are rated between 80% to 100% and if any game receives any lower rating, it is automatically labelled as a bad game even if the game is billiant and the lower rating is given only by techincal reasons (bugs etc.).
In gaming magazines and websites that are craptacular enough to not have any kind of set ratings policy or enforce any kind of ratings consistency, it's unlikely that the writing will be any better than the numerical designations. Most of the most popular gaming outlets, specifically EGM and I believe also GameSpot, have a ratings policy and enforce some kind of consistency in the ratings, i.e. keeping a reviewer from claiming that one game is better than another and then giving it a lower score, making sure that 9s and 10s are reserved for serious overachievement, making sure that the scores match the tone of the articles in a uniform matter, ensuring that the scores don't needlessly fall into a specific range (like 6-10), etc. If this sort of basic editing isn't performed, then you might as well stop reading that outlet's reviews anyway, because they're clearly either A) a bunch of shills that are afraid to piss any of their advertisers off, or B) just amateurs.
Also, it's tempting to compare numbers between different reviews even if there isn't any common rule set between different gaming magazines for giving these ratings (so the comparing is actually pointless).
I actually agree with you on this point. It's worthwhile to check the score that one reviewer (probably one that you really agree with) gave some older games against the score that he gave to one that you're thinking about buying, but systems like GameRankings are ludicrous. Comparing the reviews from EGM, GameSpot, 1up.com, and other reputable, professional sources against GameSpy, GamePro, or IGN is like averaging out the opinions between a group of college professors and the judging panel for a wet T-shirt contest.
The greatest thing about number scores in reviews is that they let reviewers get their entire message out, even in a confined space. For instance, a lot of the magazines reviews for Prince of Persia started with a small blurb about how the reviewer absolutely LOVED the game, but the rest of it was usually dominated by the warnings that the reviewer felt were very important for every player to know: the camera has some problems, the fighting can be repetitive at some points, the difficulty is very uneven, it's as short as some GBA games, etc. Taken as a whole, the review is very negative; 80% of it is a list of complaints. But taken as a whole and with a score attached, the reviewer is allowed to use his very limited writing space to give the reader a head's up about the game's short-comings while still stressing how wonderful the game really is.
Magazine reviews don't often have the luxury of including a "bottom line" sentence like this one, let alone one that's in a separate paragraph (like this one!), so the number score really helps them sum up their view on a certain game without forcing their opinions of a more obscure game off the magazine's review section and into the ass-end of their website. It allows them to cover both the super-hyped AAA games like Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes or Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and mostly unknown cult hits like Disgaea in the same issue without charging more than $6 an issue.
On a separate note, it also helps when comparing games. If you generally agree with a reviewer and follow them over a period of time, in the same way that many people follow Roger Ebert's movie column and TV show, then you can use their scores to compare different games that they've reviewed. For instance, if you loved Devil May Cry and Shinobi and a certain reviewer gave them both a 9.0, then it's worth looking at the scores to see how that reviewer sizes them up against a new game that you want to buy, especially something similar like Crimson Sea 2 or Samurai Warriors. He could really like those games and find very little to complain about when reviewing them, but still give them a 7.0, meaning that there's nothing wrong with them, but that they're not really top tier games, either.
And really, it's not as if having a number there hurts the review in some way.
Correct me if i'm wrong ..
But doesn't this just validate that the patent system albeit a little broken generally works.
If giving a patent to anyone for anything that sounds vaguely technical and then waiting for the real inventor to come and prove himself, in spite of the fact that there are many people on the government's payroll with the job title of "patent examiner", is a system that "generally works", then I'd like to know what qualifies as "broken".
As usual, IGN is slightly off the mark. According to GameSpot's article, Factor 5 isn't just moving on to "other platforms", which most people would reasonably identify as the PlayStation 2 or the Xbox. Instead, they're moving onto the next round of console and/or portable systems.
According to Eggebrecht, the only reason Factor 5 has stopped making GameCube games was that they've abandoned current-generation hardware altogether. "It is simply because we have moved into next-generation development," he said.
And the games most played on mobile phones? 80's style arcade games. When you are waiting for a bus, or idling away a few minutes of break time, you don't want anything more involving.
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Your comment about peoples wide FOV is true, but only applicable to FPS and other 3D games. But those sorts of games are not what the mobile phone user typically wants to play. They are too immersive and time demanding. If you want to work your way though Quake X, you'll probably do it on your console or PC.
If Nokia had been smart enough to launch the N-Gage with beefed-up versions of these sorts of games, then your argument would hold water. But instead, the initial N-Gage lineup contained at least: 2 3D games (Tony Hawk and Tomb Raider), 2 sidescrollers (Sonic and Pandemonium), 1 FPS (Red Faction), and only ONE puzzle game (Puyo Pop, which was poorly ported; the indistinct colors ruined the gameplay). Your argument makes even less sense when you take into account the fact that the current N-Gage Lineup contains a new Splinter Cell sidescroller and a Rayman sidescroller, but only three puzzle/arcade games, which are Puyo Pop (still crap, I'd imagine), Puzzle Bobble, and Super Monkey Ball. And Super Monkey Ball's presence on that short list depends on how the N-Gage version actually plays.
If Nokia had followed your very logical strategy, they might have done a lot better. Instead, they decided to go for console-style games on a decidedly old-fashioned and inappropriate vertical screen, which won them a a thumbs-down across the board from magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Just a brief question, since we don't often hear much about the European gaming market:
Is the N-Gage suffering the same sort of bad press in Europe that it's suffering in the United States? Here in the US, it's been the butt of gaming magazine and website jokes for months, to the point where just mentioning it to any gamer would probably elicit laughter. It's really to the point where the only way they could possibly be less popular is if they sent out a press release announcing that "9 Out of 10 Convicted Child Molesters Agree: The N-Gage Kicks Ass". I'd say that they have a much bigger PR problem to tackle than the Virtual Boy or the 32X ever had.
As for Yorda in Ico, I agree that not playing the full game is unfair, but she's also a product of a society (Japan) that still is very inequal. I believe her passiveness and inability is as much a game device as it is a reflection of the view of girls in Japan. Compared to other kinds of oppression, Ico is a harmless fantasy for boys in the end. I mean, who hasn't dreamed of being a hero and saving the girl?
Seriously, people... we're talking about a character who has been abused, locked in a cage, and can now barely walk, let alone perform physical tasks. I think that her personality isn't so much a result of being created by a man, or being created by a Japanese man, as much as it is a product of being abused and locked in a fucking cage.
The state where I live in even requires for these little metal signs to be mounted on the outside of my car with a unquie identifier! Can you believe it? There is a law that I have to have a little sticker on it, which I have to pay for every year also! Am I just renting my vechile from the goverment? I also heard that the Federal Government requires a unquie SN on each an every vechile made! That number is printed on parts all over your vechile and hidden from view.
While this is a pretty funny post, as well as an insightful one, I think it's missing one thing. All of the forms of identification listed here are read from a very short range. In fact, they're read with the naked eye. That's a much shorter range than 1km, and it's the difference between a stalker (be they an agent of the government, a criminal, or whatever else) following you around in their car, and that same stalker being able to track you invisibly from a full kilometer away. If this system is implemented, then millions of people will have a transmitter effectively tethered to their bodies for many hours of the day, providing a very useful tracking system for anyone that wants to spy on them.
Warning: Some moderate (possibly heavy) Ico spoilers will ensue after the quote.
I never finished ICO. Not only did I get stuck at a certain point about halfway through, but more to the point, I grew sick and tired of the girl, Yorda, and her uselessness. This character was so pathetic, it almost made me angry. I admit that this is not the effect the game was intended to have on me or on anyone; however, here's this supposedly sympathetic female character in a video game that can do absolutely nothing for herself and is constantly in danger of being kidnapped. Who better than a man--or in this case, just a boy--to come to her rescue.
If Greg had played Ico all the way through, he would've realized that Yorda was only pathetic because she had been repeatedly injured and abused. The real Yorda was quite a bit more capable, just as the injured, abused Ico was just as pathetic (if not more so) than she was when she was injured.
This is what happens when someone starts their analysis of a game with the words, "I never finished..." That's like watching the first two minutes of the Spider-Man movie, turning your DVD player off, and then devoting two paragraphs to asking why someone would want to watch Peter Parker act like a geeky loser for two hours. If you're going to review or analyze something, you should at least have the maturity to take in the whole thing before gracing us with your ignorant opinion.