With almost complete certainty, the "wave dash" was never purposely intended to be in the game. It's exact reasons like this why fans and journalists alike proclaim Melee to be the deepest fighter ever created.
As if SSBM is the first fighting game with this kind of stuff in it! AFAIK the term "wave dashing" is even taken from the Tekken series. The author also mentions the L-cancel, but similar cancels have been an advanced staple of most modern fighting games for at least a decade (the earliest example I am familiar with is the original Virtual On released in 1995, but I am sure there are earlier examples). Finding and taking advantage of gameplay 'glitches' has been a common event in fighting games pretty much from the genre's inception. A lot of times these glitches are a surprise even to the developers, who then adjust and balance the newly found gameplay techniques in a sequel or revision to the game. This is just business as usual.
It's great that the author has found a fighting game that he enjoys so much, but a lot of the claims about SSBM's depth seem to be the observations of somebody who simply doesn't know much about the genre. The vast majority of decent fighting games (VF, DOA, Tekken, SC, Virtual On, KOF, SF, etc.) have enormous amounts of depth that simply isn't readily apparent until you are very experienced with the game, so it isn't a surprise that SSBM features the same kind of thing. You could probably argue the same is true of any reasonably complex game (look at some of the tricks used in Quake1 speed-running, for example).
It still was an interesting article, even if many of its claims were a little inflated.
Even your 'clarified' argument still doesn't make sense. Most of the games released every year simply aren't available on the PC. Graphics aren't everything (though I'll admit I generally play console games partially because they do often have better art). Not sure what you are referring to with slowness - most of my favorite console games run at a solid 60 fps. (Generally smoother than the average PC game on my not too slow PC hardware.)
Huh? Alice was a huge hit for EA. Nearly everytime I go to a store with PC games in it I see a budget Alice rerelease sitting on the shelves. How did EA back away from it?
(And I'm not sure I would agree that it was edgy or original, but that's not really relevant.)
It wouldn't really be considered an original game anyway (since it trades on the very famous Alice in Wonderland). And it's very likely the GP post meant games that EA had actually developed, not published. So Undying might count, but again, it uses the very marketable Clive Barker name...
You just linked to some anonymous fucker's blog as "proof"! What's wrong with you? I didn't think I needed to point out who Major Nelson is. Apparently I was wrong.
First of all, it's been known for a while that the plan is to have all Xbox games eventually playable on the 360. Here's confirmation of that. It's likely that a few of the more obscure cases may end up not working (the same is true for the PS2 and the GBA), but the plan is to make the emulator complete. So IGN's little "let's spread fear that Panzer Dragoon Orta won't be playable, based on no facts!" rant is silly.
Another problem is that the authors of this article apparently doesn't understand console emulation, which is why their estimated playable titles number ("let's speculate that number is somewhere between five and 20") is so ridiculous. Generally you create the emulator to be fairly full featured and then test a whole bunch of games on it. Then you improve the emulation for certain games that you are targetting. As compatibility for these games (like Halo 2) gets better, those improvements will automatically apply to a huge number of other titles as well. It's not like you have to do the same amount of work for every game to get it functional - a huge portion of games end up compatible for 'free'. Because of this there's simply no way you can guess how many titles will work at launch. The only way I could see the number being that low is if MS' emulation testers don't have enough time to check enough games. It would be nice if the 360 has some kind of secret feature to force an emulation attempt, but I rather doubt that.
Last I heard MS had excellent developers working on the emulator (including some MAME and VirtualPC devs) so I expect good things. We admittedly don't know much yet. But this article is just all silly guesses with an implication that there is actually solid information behind much of it. That's BS.
I love the fact that when I play Halo 2 I am matched with people of roughly my skill level. Going back to all of the PC FPS games that don't do this is extremely frustrating (for both the extreme newbies and annoying pros, not to mention the unbalanced teams), and it sounds like the non-Xbox Live ways to play Halo 2 online would be the same way.
Re:If precedent means anything you're half right
on
Xbox 360 for $300
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· Score: 1
Yes they have. This was especially pronounced in the already mentioned N64 era, where it wasn't uncommon to pay $10 or more above the standard $50 retail videogame price. Things have definitely gotten better in the GC era, but even then you see stuff like some of their Player's Choice games retailing for $30, unlike the $20 that is standard for the other two consoles.
(And as an aside Nintendo has also always demanded higher royalties than its competitors. So publishing games on a Nintendo system is also more expensive for the publishers.)
You can't have possibly played every last good game released on the consoles this generation. But there have still been great games released in the last few months. You shouldn't just stick to the annual six or so big releases for each system. I can't possibly recommend Phantom Dust highly enough (though you really should play it on Xbox Live to get the full impact). The recently released Forza Motorsport is also tremendously popular (and that is a big release, now that I think about it). But there are plenty of new games out there if you actually look for them.
and even so, some developers are 'upset' at the performance they're going to get from ibm's ppc chips for the next gen consoles.. so maybe just maybe the problem is with the vendor...
I think until these anonymous developers come forward and make themselves known it is hard to buy into their arguments. Project Gotham Racing 3 in 720p certainly looks far more impressive than games on today's PC hardware. So do games like Gears of War, DOA4, and Kameo - it all throws a lot of these complaints into question. Isn't it possible that those complaining developers just might not be good enough to deal with the extra complexity? Maybe they just haven't got a handle on it yet?
It is original. Hideki Naganuma works at Wavemaster, which is Sega's music (and sound?) development team. He's a Sega employee. And I have to agree that his songs were the meat of the soundtracks, especially for Future (which was kind of uneven, really in every area).
And in the interview he admits he found no conspiracy at all. It clearly sounds like it was just a random thought he had (a lot of people had similar thoughts about 9/11, that's only normal nowadays), so he investigated it to see for sure.
The article actually mentions again and again that the Beta devkits (incidentally the Alphas running G5s were "real devkits" too) have better performance (though still not up to the final level) than the last ones. Apparently these kits were actually supposed to hit pre-E3, which is one of the reasons things were a little more underwhelming than they should have been.
It's an interesting article to read, but I am not sure what the anonymous parent is referring to.
Oh, by the way, Virtual ON on Xbox live would also Rock! enough Said! Oh, it so would. But only old Virtual On, like the Oratorio Tangram era. Hitmaker/AM3 hasn't made a good Virtual On game since then.
I am not sure, but they did post misinformation. Even the blurb clearly states that it is a game for the next Xbox, which would not have gone into development five years ago. Maybe the mods felt it was made up information just to troll? Overrated makes more sense to me, but it's not like there were any links to back up this fairly obscure information.
God knows they will hack and slash out whatever functionality (despite its importance) to ship 360 before the PS3.
Care to list any examples of this? The closest I can think of is maybe a HD disc drive, but a built-in hard disk instead is going to give far more of an actual gaming benefit. There's no way the system could come with both and still be reasonably priced.
They already seem to be neglecting their starting line up so they can launch "the good stuff" when PS3 goes on the shelves.
Huh? Are you referring to Halo 3, I assume? Nothing wrong with leaving that to launch next year, especially since Halo 2 was only released a year prior to the 360's launch date. They still have system seller sequels like PGR3 and DOA4 (the Xbox1 launch titles in these series were the second and third Xbox titles to launch a million units), along with plenty of other games - including significantly more Japanese launch support this time. What's missing exactly?
PGR3 is a big budget system seller game, just like the previous two were (the original was the second Xbox game to reach one million sales, right after Halo 1). There is no gameplay tradeoff in spending lots of money on beautiful graphics. Even if the budget wasn't huge to begin with, it would arguably be in MS' best interest to spend the extra money to make its launch games graphical standouts. They need to counter Sony's lies about the 360 being "Xbox 1.5", and a gorgeous PGR3 will partially do just that.
And PGR2 was already pretty good with the physics. Since the goal of the series isn't the realism of Forza or Gran Turismo there is only so far they would want to take the physics. Most of the gameplay improvements in this one will probably be more about course and 'campaign' design, not to mention lots of multiplayer evolution (and arguably revolution with stuff like Gotham TV).
You also probably wouldn't bother using the GPU for physics anyway. Ignoring that it's kind of a bad/ineffective idea to begin with, the 360 already has a triple core CPU. You'd be better off using one of those cores for physics.
Jeez man, chill out. He was mostly right about the strawman thing. You haven't done anything to really refute his original argument that a small subset of the gaming population buys an abnormally high proportion of all games sold. Telling him to "put up or shut up" because you don't believe a commonly accepted theory doesn't count as a substansive argument. Neither does comparing apples (last year's release of Halo 2) to oranges (a series of Pokemon games that started coming out back in 1995, AFAIK). And since Pokemon is arguably the best selling game ever (though I do think counting 3+ titles as a single title is silly), you could use it to make any kind of silly argument against other games anyway. ex: Since Pokemon outsold the Sims people obviously don't like American games much, since Pokemon outsold Pac-man arcade machines that shows that arcade games have always been insignificant, etc. Using these absolutely exceptional examples as some kind of general rule is a ridiculous way to make an argument. It's complete nonsense.
And you actually hurt your own argument anyway in your original post. Everybody knows that sequels very rarely outsell their predecessors, especially if the original was a major hit (if it was a sleeper hit or whatnot it is more common). So Halo 2 managing to quickly outsell it's predecessor is actually reasonable evidence that online play did have a significant impact of some kind on sales.
He really shouldn't have flamed you (even though you started it), but you are still coming off as a massive, frothing-at-the-mouth Nintendo fanboy. Please calm dowm and try to be a little more logical in the future. If Nintendo is actually doing as awesome as you say (number 2 publisher in the world, blah blah blah), they hardly need this kind of zealotry to defend them, do they?
And how does PGR1 and/or PGR2 in any way make you think Bizarre won't make a great game? Your post sounds like some kind of cliche gameplay over graphics argument to me, but that's a ridiculous complaint to make for a PGR game. We already know the gameplay is going to be freaking amazing since it's a PGR game - there's no news in that.
That doesn't mean there won't be some great new gameplay features in PGR3, of course. But implying that the gameplay might not get the same attention as the graphics is ridiculous.
Probably since the PGR series doesn't really let you hit buildings, so it wouldn't be remotely easy for Bizarre to show that. But nothing I've seen so far looks too different from the earliest video they released (running at merely 25% of full power, too). Bizarre's track record for honesty should also stand for something - if they show off the game's looks, that's what it is going to look like at a minimum. That's always been the case.
And as impressive as these textures are, what Bizarre is doing with the graphics isn't as difficult as it may seem. If you look at the wireframes of the buildings you can see it isn't done through some insane amount of polygons or anything unbelievable like that. It's just really good source material (ie high rez textures from photographs) combined with a really nice implementation of technology like normal mapping (seen in Doom3, HL2, Phantom Dust, etc.). Aesthetically it looks amazing, but this isn't some amazing visual leap beyond current day technology.
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As if SSBM is the first fighting game with this kind of stuff in it! AFAIK the term "wave dashing" is even taken from the Tekken series. The author also mentions the L-cancel, but similar cancels have been an advanced staple of most modern fighting games for at least a decade (the earliest example I am familiar with is the original Virtual On released in 1995, but I am sure there are earlier examples). Finding and taking advantage of gameplay 'glitches' has been a common event in fighting games pretty much from the genre's inception. A lot of times these glitches are a surprise even to the developers, who then adjust and balance the newly found gameplay techniques in a sequel or revision to the game. This is just business as usual.
It's great that the author has found a fighting game that he enjoys so much, but a lot of the claims about SSBM's depth seem to be the observations of somebody who simply doesn't know much about the genre. The vast majority of decent fighting games (VF, DOA, Tekken, SC, Virtual On, KOF, SF, etc.) have enormous amounts of depth that simply isn't readily apparent until you are very experienced with the game, so it isn't a surprise that SSBM features the same kind of thing. You could probably argue the same is true of any reasonably complex game (look at some of the tricks used in Quake1 speed-running, for example).
It still was an interesting article, even if many of its claims were a little inflated.
Even your 'clarified' argument still doesn't make sense. Most of the games released every year simply aren't available on the PC. Graphics aren't everything (though I'll admit I generally play console games partially because they do often have better art). Not sure what you are referring to with slowness - most of my favorite console games run at a solid 60 fps. (Generally smoother than the average PC game on my not too slow PC hardware.)
Nope, Nintendo is a definite third in the console race. You need to update your info - this has been true for well more than a year now.
Huh? Alice was a huge hit for EA. Nearly everytime I go to a store with PC games in it I see a budget Alice rerelease sitting on the shelves. How did EA back away from it?
(And I'm not sure I would agree that it was edgy or original, but that's not really relevant.)
It wouldn't really be considered an original game anyway (since it trades on the very famous Alice in Wonderland). And it's very likely the GP post meant games that EA had actually developed, not published. So Undying might count, but again, it uses the very marketable Clive Barker name...
You just linked to some anonymous fucker's blog as "proof"! What's wrong with you?
I didn't think I needed to point out who Major Nelson is. Apparently I was wrong.
It's name is REVOLUTION. What kind of title could possibly be designed to create more hype? :D
First of all, it's been known for a while that the plan is to have all Xbox games eventually playable on the 360. Here's confirmation of that. It's likely that a few of the more obscure cases may end up not working (the same is true for the PS2 and the GBA), but the plan is to make the emulator complete. So IGN's little "let's spread fear that Panzer Dragoon Orta won't be playable, based on no facts!" rant is silly.
Another problem is that the authors of this article apparently doesn't understand console emulation, which is why their estimated playable titles number ("let's speculate that number is somewhere between five and 20") is so ridiculous. Generally you create the emulator to be fairly full featured and then test a whole bunch of games on it. Then you improve the emulation for certain games that you are targetting. As compatibility for these games (like Halo 2) gets better, those improvements will automatically apply to a huge number of other titles as well. It's not like you have to do the same amount of work for every game to get it functional - a huge portion of games end up compatible for 'free'. Because of this there's simply no way you can guess how many titles will work at launch. The only way I could see the number being that low is if MS' emulation testers don't have enough time to check enough games. It would be nice if the 360 has some kind of secret feature to force an emulation attempt, but I rather doubt that.
Last I heard MS had excellent developers working on the emulator (including some MAME and VirtualPC devs) so I expect good things. We admittedly don't know much yet. But this article is just all silly guesses with an implication that there is actually solid information behind much of it. That's BS.
Seriously, the number of games made for the Xbox that are worth a shit I can count on one hand.
You either:
A. Are a severe troll.
B. Have terrible taste in games.
I love the fact that when I play Halo 2 I am matched with people of roughly my skill level. Going back to all of the PC FPS games that don't do this is extremely frustrating (for both the extreme newbies and annoying pros, not to mention the unbalanced teams), and it sounds like the non-Xbox Live ways to play Halo 2 online would be the same way.
Yes they have. This was especially pronounced in the already mentioned N64 era, where it wasn't uncommon to pay $10 or more above the standard $50 retail videogame price. Things have definitely gotten better in the GC era, but even then you see stuff like some of their Player's Choice games retailing for $30, unlike the $20 that is standard for the other two consoles.
(And as an aside Nintendo has also always demanded higher royalties than its competitors. So publishing games on a Nintendo system is also more expensive for the publishers.)
You can't have possibly played every last good game released on the consoles this generation. But there have still been great games released in the last few months. You shouldn't just stick to the annual six or so big releases for each system. I can't possibly recommend Phantom Dust highly enough (though you really should play it on Xbox Live to get the full impact). The recently released Forza Motorsport is also tremendously popular (and that is a big release, now that I think about it). But there are plenty of new games out there if you actually look for them.
and even so, some developers are 'upset' at the performance they're going to get from ibm's ppc chips for the next gen consoles.. so maybe just maybe the problem is with the vendor...
I think until these anonymous developers come forward and make themselves known it is hard to buy into their arguments. Project Gotham Racing 3 in 720p certainly looks far more impressive than games on today's PC hardware. So do games like Gears of War, DOA4, and Kameo - it all throws a lot of these complaints into question. Isn't it possible that those complaining developers just might not be good enough to deal with the extra complexity? Maybe they just haven't got a handle on it yet?
It is original. Hideki Naganuma works at Wavemaster, which is Sega's music (and sound?) development team. He's a Sega employee. And I have to agree that his songs were the meat of the soundtracks, especially for Future (which was kind of uneven, really in every area).
And in the interview he admits he found no conspiracy at all. It clearly sounds like it was just a random thought he had (a lot of people had similar thoughts about 9/11, that's only normal nowadays), so he investigated it to see for sure.
The article actually mentions again and again that the Beta devkits (incidentally the Alphas running G5s were "real devkits" too) have better performance (though still not up to the final level) than the last ones. Apparently these kits were actually supposed to hit pre-E3, which is one of the reasons things were a little more underwhelming than they should have been.
It's an interesting article to read, but I am not sure what the anonymous parent is referring to.
Oh, by the way, Virtual ON on Xbox live would also Rock! enough Said!
Oh, it so would. But only old Virtual On, like the Oratorio Tangram era. Hitmaker/AM3 hasn't made a good Virtual On game since then.
Doesn't seem that strange to me. After all, Dungeons & Dragons was derived from tabletop wargames.
I am not sure, but they did post misinformation. Even the blurb clearly states that it is a game for the next Xbox, which would not have gone into development five years ago. Maybe the mods felt it was made up information just to troll? Overrated makes more sense to me, but it's not like there were any links to back up this fairly obscure information.
That's...unexpected. Why, exactly? Even a medium sized TV would offer a bigger screen. Probably similar resolution, too. Is it just a privacy issue?
God knows they will hack and slash out whatever functionality (despite its importance) to ship 360 before the PS3.
Care to list any examples of this? The closest I can think of is maybe a HD disc drive, but a built-in hard disk instead is going to give far more of an actual gaming benefit. There's no way the system could come with both and still be reasonably priced.
They already seem to be neglecting their starting line up so they can launch "the good stuff" when PS3 goes on the shelves.
Huh? Are you referring to Halo 3, I assume? Nothing wrong with leaving that to launch next year, especially since Halo 2 was only released a year prior to the 360's launch date. They still have system seller sequels like PGR3 and DOA4 (the Xbox1 launch titles in these series were the second and third Xbox titles to launch a million units), along with plenty of other games - including significantly more Japanese launch support this time. What's missing exactly?
PGR3 is a big budget system seller game, just like the previous two were (the original was the second Xbox game to reach one million sales, right after Halo 1). There is no gameplay tradeoff in spending lots of money on beautiful graphics. Even if the budget wasn't huge to begin with, it would arguably be in MS' best interest to spend the extra money to make its launch games graphical standouts. They need to counter Sony's lies about the 360 being "Xbox 1.5", and a gorgeous PGR3 will partially do just that.
And PGR2 was already pretty good with the physics. Since the goal of the series isn't the realism of Forza or Gran Turismo there is only so far they would want to take the physics. Most of the gameplay improvements in this one will probably be more about course and 'campaign' design, not to mention lots of multiplayer evolution (and arguably revolution with stuff like Gotham TV).
You also probably wouldn't bother using the GPU for physics anyway. Ignoring that it's kind of a bad/ineffective idea to begin with, the 360 already has a triple core CPU. You'd be better off using one of those cores for physics.
Jeez man, chill out. He was mostly right about the strawman thing. You haven't done anything to really refute his original argument that a small subset of the gaming population buys an abnormally high proportion of all games sold. Telling him to "put up or shut up" because you don't believe a commonly accepted theory doesn't count as a substansive argument. Neither does comparing apples (last year's release of Halo 2) to oranges (a series of Pokemon games that started coming out back in 1995, AFAIK). And since Pokemon is arguably the best selling game ever (though I do think counting 3+ titles as a single title is silly), you could use it to make any kind of silly argument against other games anyway. ex: Since Pokemon outsold the Sims people obviously don't like American games much, since Pokemon outsold Pac-man arcade machines that shows that arcade games have always been insignificant, etc. Using these absolutely exceptional examples as some kind of general rule is a ridiculous way to make an argument. It's complete nonsense.
And you actually hurt your own argument anyway in your original post. Everybody knows that sequels very rarely outsell their predecessors, especially if the original was a major hit (if it was a sleeper hit or whatnot it is more common). So Halo 2 managing to quickly outsell it's predecessor is actually reasonable evidence that online play did have a significant impact of some kind on sales.
He really shouldn't have flamed you (even though you started it), but you are still coming off as a massive, frothing-at-the-mouth Nintendo fanboy. Please calm dowm and try to be a little more logical in the future. If Nintendo is actually doing as awesome as you say (number 2 publisher in the world, blah blah blah), they hardly need this kind of zealotry to defend them, do they?
And for a Halo 2 LAN match most people (at least 3/4 of them) don't even need to bring anything. (Maybe a controller.)
And how does PGR1 and/or PGR2 in any way make you think Bizarre won't make a great game? Your post sounds like some kind of cliche gameplay over graphics argument to me, but that's a ridiculous complaint to make for a PGR game. We already know the gameplay is going to be freaking amazing since it's a PGR game - there's no news in that.
That doesn't mean there won't be some great new gameplay features in PGR3, of course. But implying that the gameplay might not get the same attention as the graphics is ridiculous.
Probably since the PGR series doesn't really let you hit buildings, so it wouldn't be remotely easy for Bizarre to show that. But nothing I've seen so far looks too different from the earliest video they released (running at merely 25% of full power, too). Bizarre's track record for honesty should also stand for something - if they show off the game's looks, that's what it is going to look like at a minimum. That's always been the case.
And as impressive as these textures are, what Bizarre is doing with the graphics isn't as difficult as it may seem. If you look at the wireframes of the buildings you can see it isn't done through some insane amount of polygons or anything unbelievable like that. It's just really good source material (ie high rez textures from photographs) combined with a really nice implementation of technology like normal mapping (seen in Doom3, HL2, Phantom Dust, etc.). Aesthetically it looks amazing, but this isn't some amazing visual leap beyond current day technology.