Independent? Sure. Any good? No. A cursory look at their rather anemic Wii reviews lists Super Paper Mario at the same rating of the awful Table Tennis, The pretty bad Mario Party 8, and the terrible Carnival Games.
The only reason independent reviews should be better is because it is less likely that you'll be misled by a review. If a site's idea of quality is way out of line of mine (and most of humanity), being independent is irrelevant.
It's not Blizzard that is merging: They've been part of Vivendi universal for years. Their parent company has many developers other developers outside of Blizzard. WoW is their cash cow though.
That said, it doesn't seem like their different developer studios have a lot of synergy though: The end result is a company that has very diverse offerings, and will be difficult to market as a single entity. It's not like either company needed the other for stability purposes though: Both WoW and Guitar Hero are the kind of franchises that allow a company to have a nice R&D budget and take risks with new franchises.
So I guess the merger will just mean they'll be able to push retailers around more easily, and make their revenue even more predictable.
Wow, someone that actually liked the guy. I personally put no value in his reviews, because he's been so far off what I thought about many games over the years: Many times he loved games I just couldn't enjoy much, like Tony Hawk, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves and Halo 3, others he bashed good games for apparently no good reason. Given that he was in charge of reviewing many high profile games, he alone made Gamespot pretty much useless for me.
That said, the reasons for his firing are inexcusable IMO. More so when the game in question is not getting good reviews pretty much anywhere.
The massive increase they talk about is just in relative terms. Nintendo claims they sold 350k wiis last week:more than Gamespot claims the PS3 did all month, and that's because the Wii is still supply constrained. The 360 sold over 200k the same week too.
Even with the price drop, they are still third in the US week to week. The fact that Uncharted, the PS3s best reviewed exclusive this year, is doing poorly just makes it more painful: It seems that people aren't even buying the good games. Not even 300k so far in the US for Ratchet & Clank?
I wish the best to Sony, but I don't think they have a prayer until their biggest names come out. Maybe Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Gran Turismo can stop the bleeding.
Chances are the comment had a lot to do with how the current government says that extra surveillance on Americans is necessary to fight terrorism, and that we should trust them to not misuse the information they get. He's just using their own flawed argument against them.
I'd rather buy the originals myself, if just for the wonders of Microsoft DRM. Did you know that, when your console RRODs, you will only be able to play your downloaded games when logged in to live? Nope, your wife/brother/roommate's account wont be able to play the game.
The original game works as long as the media works, wherever you want. Seems like a better deal to me.
The Uncharted demo was pretty lackluster to me: It takes a bit of Tomb Raider, done badly, and adds a ton of Gears of War, with a worse cover system, no partner, and an enemy spawning system that was dated 4 years ago. Put good graphics on top, and you get a demo that doesn't make me want to buy the full version one bit.
I've actually seen a bunch of contracts with non competes. In fact, the only non-compete I've heard of in my area was only tied to a retention bonus, it expired right after receiving the bonus, and defined competition very tightly. So tightly in fact, that there might only be a couple hundred people in the US that work in a position that would be covered in the agreement.
Unfortunately, significant comebacks are almost impossible, and early die distribution dictates the rest of the game, since the game has an economic engine at heart where rich get richer. The robber allows the players to slow down the leader, but without house rules, getting only a couple of resources in the first 8 rolls pretty much guarantees you're out of contention.
The game is relatively well balanced, but we've all seen games where someone is just playing king maker most of the time, through no fault of his own. When there's groups that can take up to two hours to play the game, that's not a good thing.
I like Eurogames, but I'd rather shoot myself in the foot that go through a game of Puerto Rico. It's not half as deep as it seems to be, each player has very limited control of their own destiny, and the most important decision in the game is to make sure you have a weak player to your right.
Complete bullshit. Preorders are taken for systems and games which haven't had their release-date or retail price announced yet. Are you telling me that those allotments are guaranteed? Did everybody who pre-ordered a Wii from you last Christmas get their system before the new year?
You went for exactly the wrong example. Every Gamestop in the US had a 'no preorders on Wii or PS3' since E3. Preorders campaigns lasted a whole 15 minutes. The stores advertised when they were taking preorders, and a ton of people lined up just to preorder the consoles. Store employees were banned from getting a console from the store, even if they were off duty and camping out with everyone else.Plenty of stores had triple the amount of people in line for the preorders as they had preorders to give away, and they left with no preorder ticket. A few weeks later, stores opened at midnight, and as far as I could tell they just enough consoles to cover preorders, no more.
Why all of that order and sanity? To avoid what had happened a year before with the 360, where people that preordered even as far back as June didn't get their consoles until new year, precisely because they accepted preorders with no bounds, and came back to bite them. It's hard to make people to preorder anything if then they are not sure they'll get the game/console at launch. They learned it the hard way.
I've also noticed that the stores are pushing crap less and less than they used to. I stopped going there with any regularity when they started doing 3 or 4 up-sells per purchase: Do you want a protection plan for your game?!? How about buying it used for 4 bucks less? No? Then what about this magazine subscription? Do you want to preorder X or Y?. Last time I dropped by for a game that BB retailers didn't have, they didn't try even a single up-sell.
Back then, games were pretty far from their optimal price point because it was pretty much impossible to sell a good game for a good price. No, it had nothing to do with development costs, but with manufacturing costs.
A SNES era cartridge was created with custom made ROM chips that held the game, not unlike ancient arcade cabinets. The more you put on the game, the more chips you needed, and the more expensive it got. It was easy to notice by just weight! Some games also carried extra processors in them, which also increased costs. Only as CDs became the main distribution media and manufacturing costs plummeted did the game development cost even started to matter.
The fact that the bigger companies have the biggest internal bureaucracies in the known universe helps, but even with an equally efficient organization, all those extra towers needed to keep your typical midwestern suburb well covered end up making the price higher than Europe.
As if casual was defined by price. Casual is all about the game's content. Oblivion for 5 bucks is not casual. Guitar hero isn't exactly a cheap game, but it's the definition of casual.
But, if you don't believe me, look at the November and December figures early next year. Chances are GHIII sells about as much in the Wii as the 360 in the US with a smaller install base.
What? Zelda looked bad on my HDTV precisely until I got component cables for the wii, and set the game at 16:9! After that, the blurred colors and geometry went away, and it started to look pretty good.
Are you sure the problem wasn't the settings on your TV? or are you running the console with composite cables?
In my experience, most of the time the problem is not experience in advanced skills: those can be taught anyway. The problem tends to be the very basics, which most people from my graduating college class had in 1999. Many of the applicants seem to be unable to show much curiosity in an interview, and state that their goal is to be running the department in a matter of 3 or 4 years.
When it's hard to find talent for entry level positions, I can't imagine what it can be to have to replace someone with 10 years of experience. 5 people out of school and prayer?
The demo was the typical, derivative platform/action game that the first R&C game was, just prettier and easier. A great buy for $30 or so, but IMO not so much for $60.
For the time being I'll continue playing Zack and Wiki, which reminds me of old point & click adventure games, and is only $40. But knowing how things are, it'll get dismal sales, just like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil did.
Some of which is guessing, based on external texts and some genealogy without dates, like Matthew 1. While it's arguable that a strictly literalist interpretation of the Bible can lead to somewhat different results, nothing short of having biblical figures lasting millions of years would make a literal reading of the Bible to be even a few orders of magnitude from modern geological estimates.
And that's why treating the Bible as a science text book is not a very good idea.
I write retail and warehousing software for a company every American knows.
Have you ever seen work at a warehouse, or at the back of many retail stores? The number of mis-scans, duplicates and such can be pretty significant. Companies account for this by doing physical inventories, which have a substantial labor cost. And those physicals end up disagreeing with sanity check recounts by up to 2%! In a store that has a significant cost per item, a 5 cent tag would be a cheap price to pay to get rid of most of the physical inventory costs and increase the efficiency of inventory control. At $20c, it eats into margins too much for most.
As to the garbage that we must put ALL of our resources into 1 project is silly. America was a rich country following WWII. The space systems helped push America's economy, which lead to better homes and schools. In fact, more ppl own homes in America than any other country. As to USSR, had they not done the space program, it probably would have hurt them. The reality is that after WWII and Stalin, they were hurting from a pride POV. The space program gave them something to believe in. It became a rally point for them.
Welcome to the latest episode of our show: incoherent rambling!.
Let's do some fact checking: According to the 2003 MARS study, 73% of Americans live in their own home. That's not the highest number in the world by any stretch of the imagination. For example, the most recent survey in Spain put that number at 80%. And Spain isn't what I'd call a very wealthy country: In fact, the high percentage of home ownership is considered a bad thing! Home ownership is not good indicator of the economic health of a country anyway.
Most people in the US choose to commute a long distance by car. It isn't like the US has some horrible housing and renting crisis that makes it so that you can't live right next to your job. Instead, what you get are a lot of people who want a big backyard instead of a smaller backyard or apartment. Throw on top of that nearly tax free (and thus cheap) gas prices, and commuting from your big cheap house to work becomes a viable option if big houses with big backyard is your thing. It is a matter of taste more than anything else.
Maybe where you live. Go to the bay area, and look for anything close to a job.
And, even in the midwest, neighborhoods are so segregated that, depending on the job, you might not find something other than rundown apartments, or condos you can't afford.
And then there's how most families have 2 jobs nowadays, in which case one of the two will probably end up having a decent sized commute, because the job market is not so good to let people reject anything that's 10 minutes away from their home.
Americans commute because jobs are all over the place, in cities with very low population density. Your average european doesn't need a car to go to work at all! My father had a 4 minute walk to work. My mother, a 10 minute walk. There are no resdential areas inside of a 20 minute walk from my workplace!
It is true that some people would rather have a 40 minute drive and be able to have a huge house, but they really are a minority today.
Second Life has a good PR team, but that's all they have. They really don't matter. Claiming that they plan to rival Second Life is like claiming that they'll develop an OS that will rival BeOS in market share.
Twilight princess and God of War don't really have that much to do with each other. If you want more combat than Zelda, then it's not an issue of quality, but an issue of what you want out of a game. You might as well say that neither of the two games has enough zombies, so Resident Evil is better.
There are very few games that try to do something similar to Zelda: I only remember two off the top of my head, the Dark Cloud series and Okami. I'd put dark cloud well under TP, and Okami rather even quality wise.
Good gamestops exist, it's just that they are in the minority.
There's about a dozen gamestops in my area. There was ONE that I enjoyed going to, and it had all the characteristics of the one you describe. Recently they changed their management: An awful manager that used to be the most unhelpful SOB from another store took over, and now their helpful employees are gone. Needless to say, after the 4th upsell in a row on the same freaking game I'm back to going to big box stores for anything other than low distribution Atlus titles that they won't stock.
Slashdot Mirror
Independent? Sure. Any good? No. A cursory look at their rather anemic Wii reviews lists Super Paper Mario at the same rating of the awful Table Tennis, The pretty bad Mario Party 8, and the terrible Carnival Games.
The only reason independent reviews should be better is because it is less likely that you'll be misled by a review. If a site's idea of quality is way out of line of mine (and most of humanity), being independent is irrelevant.
It's not Blizzard that is merging: They've been part of Vivendi universal for years. Their parent company has many developers other developers outside of Blizzard. WoW is their cash cow though.
That said, it doesn't seem like their different developer studios have a lot of synergy though: The end result is a company that has very diverse offerings, and will be difficult to market as a single entity. It's not like either company needed the other for stability purposes though: Both WoW and Guitar Hero are the kind of franchises that allow a company to have a nice R&D budget and take risks with new franchises.
So I guess the merger will just mean they'll be able to push retailers around more easily, and make their revenue even more predictable.
Wow, someone that actually liked the guy. I personally put no value in his reviews, because he's been so far off what I thought about many games over the years: Many times he loved games I just couldn't enjoy much, like Tony Hawk, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves and Halo 3, others he bashed good games for apparently no good reason. Given that he was in charge of reviewing many high profile games, he alone made Gamespot pretty much useless for me.
That said, the reasons for his firing are inexcusable IMO. More so when the game in question is not getting good reviews pretty much anywhere.
The massive increase they talk about is just in relative terms. Nintendo claims they sold 350k wiis last week:more than Gamespot claims the PS3 did all month, and that's because the Wii is still supply constrained. The 360 sold over 200k the same week too.
Even with the price drop, they are still third in the US week to week. The fact that Uncharted, the PS3s best reviewed exclusive this year, is doing poorly just makes it more painful: It seems that people aren't even buying the good games. Not even 300k so far in the US for Ratchet & Clank?
I wish the best to Sony, but I don't think they have a prayer until their biggest names come out. Maybe Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Gran Turismo can stop the bleeding.
It seemed to me like sarcasm.
Chances are the comment had a lot to do with how the current government says that extra surveillance on Americans is necessary to fight terrorism, and that we should trust them to not misuse the information they get. He's just using their own flawed argument against them.
I'd rather buy the originals myself, if just for the wonders of Microsoft DRM. Did you know that, when your console RRODs, you will only be able to play your downloaded games when logged in to live? Nope, your wife/brother/roommate's account wont be able to play the game.
The original game works as long as the media works, wherever you want. Seems like a better deal to me.
The Uncharted demo was pretty lackluster to me: It takes a bit of Tomb Raider, done badly, and adds a ton of Gears of War, with a worse cover system, no partner, and an enemy spawning system that was dated 4 years ago. Put good graphics on top, and you get a demo that doesn't make me want to buy the full version one bit.
I've actually seen a bunch of contracts with non competes. In fact, the only non-compete I've heard of in my area was only tied to a retention bonus, it expired right after receiving the bonus, and defined competition very tightly. So tightly in fact, that there might only be a couple hundred people in the US that work in a position that would be covered in the agreement.
I guess the US is larger than you thought.
Unfortunately, significant comebacks are almost impossible, and early die distribution dictates the rest of the game, since the game has an economic engine at heart where rich get richer. The robber allows the players to slow down the leader, but without house rules, getting only a couple of resources in the first 8 rolls pretty much guarantees you're out of contention.
The game is relatively well balanced, but we've all seen games where someone is just playing king maker most of the time, through no fault of his own. When there's groups that can take up to two hours to play the game, that's not a good thing.
I like Eurogames, but I'd rather shoot myself in the foot that go through a game of Puerto Rico. It's not half as deep as it seems to be, each player has very limited control of their own destiny, and the most important decision in the game is to make sure you have a weak player to your right.
You went for exactly the wrong example. Every Gamestop in the US had a 'no preorders on Wii or PS3' since E3. Preorders campaigns lasted a whole 15 minutes. The stores advertised when they were taking preorders, and a ton of people lined up just to preorder the consoles. Store employees were banned from getting a console from the store, even if they were off duty and camping out with everyone else.Plenty of stores had triple the amount of people in line for the preorders as they had preorders to give away, and they left with no preorder ticket. A few weeks later, stores opened at midnight, and as far as I could tell they just enough consoles to cover preorders, no more.
Why all of that order and sanity? To avoid what had happened a year before with the 360, where people that preordered even as far back as June didn't get their consoles until new year, precisely because they accepted preorders with no bounds, and came back to bite them. It's hard to make people to preorder anything if then they are not sure they'll get the game/console at launch. They learned it the hard way.
I've also noticed that the stores are pushing crap less and less than they used to. I stopped going there with any regularity when they started doing 3 or 4 up-sells per purchase: Do you want a protection plan for your game?!? How about buying it used for 4 bucks less? No? Then what about this magazine subscription? Do you want to preorder X or Y?. Last time I dropped by for a game that BB retailers didn't have, they didn't try even a single up-sell.
Back then, games were pretty far from their optimal price point because it was pretty much impossible to sell a good game for a good price. No, it had nothing to do with development costs, but with manufacturing costs.
A SNES era cartridge was created with custom made ROM chips that held the game, not unlike ancient arcade cabinets. The more you put on the game, the more chips you needed, and the more expensive it got. It was easy to notice by just weight! Some games also carried extra processors in them, which also increased costs. Only as CDs became the main distribution media and manufacturing costs plummeted did the game development cost even started to matter.
Two words: population density.
The fact that the bigger companies have the biggest internal bureaucracies in the known universe helps, but even with an equally efficient organization, all those extra towers needed to keep your typical midwestern suburb well covered end up making the price higher than Europe.
As if casual was defined by price. Casual is all about the game's content. Oblivion for 5 bucks is not casual. Guitar hero isn't exactly a cheap game, but it's the definition of casual.
But, if you don't believe me, look at the November and December figures early next year. Chances are GHIII sells about as much in the Wii as the 360 in the US with a smaller install base.
What? Zelda looked bad on my HDTV precisely until I got component cables for the wii, and set the game at 16:9! After that, the blurred colors and geometry went away, and it started to look pretty good.
Are you sure the problem wasn't the settings on your TV? or are you running the console with composite cables?
In my experience, most of the time the problem is not experience in advanced skills: those can be taught anyway. The problem tends to be the very basics, which most people from my graduating college class had in 1999. Many of the applicants seem to be unable to show much curiosity in an interview, and state that their goal is to be running the department in a matter of 3 or 4 years.
When it's hard to find talent for entry level positions, I can't imagine what it can be to have to replace someone with 10 years of experience. 5 people out of school and prayer?
The demo was the typical, derivative platform/action game that the first R&C game was, just prettier and easier. A great buy for $30 or so, but IMO not so much for $60.
For the time being I'll continue playing Zack and Wiki, which reminds me of old point & click adventure games, and is only $40. But knowing how things are, it'll get dismal sales, just like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil did.
The proponents of young earth use chronologies like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology
Some of which is guessing, based on external texts and some genealogy without dates, like Matthew 1. While it's arguable that a strictly literalist interpretation of the Bible can lead to somewhat different results, nothing short of having biblical figures lasting millions of years would make a literal reading of the Bible to be even a few orders of magnitude from modern geological estimates.
And that's why treating the Bible as a science text book is not a very good idea.
I write retail and warehousing software for a company every American knows.
Have you ever seen work at a warehouse, or at the back of many retail stores? The number of mis-scans, duplicates and such can be pretty significant. Companies account for this by doing physical inventories, which have a substantial labor cost. And those physicals end up disagreeing with sanity check recounts by up to 2%! In a store that has a significant cost per item, a 5 cent tag would be a cheap price to pay to get rid of most of the physical inventory costs and increase the efficiency of inventory control. At $20c, it eats into margins too much for most.
Welcome to the latest episode of our show: incoherent rambling!.
Let's do some fact checking: According to the 2003 MARS study, 73% of Americans live in their own home. That's not the highest number in the world by any stretch of the imagination. For example, the most recent survey in Spain put that number at 80%. And Spain isn't what I'd call a very wealthy country: In fact, the high percentage of home ownership is considered a bad thing! Home ownership is not good indicator of the economic health of a country anyway.
Maybe where you live. Go to the bay area, and look for anything close to a job. And, even in the midwest, neighborhoods are so segregated that, depending on the job, you might not find something other than rundown apartments, or condos you can't afford.
And then there's how most families have 2 jobs nowadays, in which case one of the two will probably end up having a decent sized commute, because the job market is not so good to let people reject anything that's 10 minutes away from their home.
Americans commute because jobs are all over the place, in cities with very low population density. Your average european doesn't need a car to go to work at all! My father had a 4 minute walk to work. My mother, a 10 minute walk. There are no resdential areas inside of a 20 minute walk from my workplace!
It is true that some people would rather have a 40 minute drive and be able to have a huge house, but they really are a minority today.
Second Life has a good PR team, but that's all they have. They really don't matter. Claiming that they plan to rival Second Life is like claiming that they'll develop an OS that will rival BeOS in market share.
Twilight princess and God of War don't really have that much to do with each other. If you want more combat than Zelda, then it's not an issue of quality, but an issue of what you want out of a game. You might as well say that neither of the two games has enough zombies, so Resident Evil is better.
There are very few games that try to do something similar to Zelda: I only remember two off the top of my head, the Dark Cloud series and Okami. I'd put dark cloud well under TP, and Okami rather even quality wise.
Check your facts: Halo 2 came out for the old xbox, not the 360.
Good gamestops exist, it's just that they are in the minority.
There's about a dozen gamestops in my area. There was ONE that I enjoyed going to, and it had all the characteristics of the one you describe. Recently they changed their management: An awful manager that used to be the most unhelpful SOB from another store took over, and now their helpful employees are gone. Needless to say, after the 4th upsell in a row on the same freaking game I'm back to going to big box stores for anything other than low distribution Atlus titles that they won't stock.