I still can't believe they dumped Midfield Raceway from GT5. In previous installments that had been the perfect track for races between players of... shall we say... differing skill levels. It was pretty easy to get around without spending most of your time off the track and staring at crash barriers, but had a lot you could do around optimising racing lines. So using horsepower handicapping, you could have races on it between good players and very poor players which were fun for both - ideal when you have a large group of friends round. GT5 doesn't really have a good equivalent, but Forza 4's Maple Valley works pretty well.
Gran Turismo 5 is ok, but to be honest, Forza Motorsport 4 is better both as a racing game and as a driving simulator. GT5 has some very specific features that appeal to hardcore car nerds (it has some interesting and obscure old cars, plus a detailed encyclopedia). If that's what you want then GT5 is for you.
Ultimately, however, Forza 4 has better graphics (outside of the relatively small number of "premium" cars, GT5 can be surprisingly ugly), better tracks, better online modes and better customisation options. GT5 could have been awesome, but it needed more attention to the actual gameplay mechanics as opposed to the car-count to really get there.
Or alternatively, you could get it for... like... you know... the games?
It has a huge library by this point and you can get some of the best titles available for the system very cheap, via budget releases, multipacks or plain old retailer-discounting.
The proportion of cross-platform games this generation has been very high between the PS3 and 360 (probably because, despite the differing architectures, they have very similar overall capabilities). Now, PC ports have become more common over the last 18 months or so (that market's getting harder to ignore, particularly for developers wanting practice for next gen hardware). But there are still an awful lot of PS3/360 games out there that you could get access to if you don't already own a 360. Admittedly, the difficulties of developing for the PS3 mean that it tends, in general, to get slightly inferior versions of multi-platform games (though it often needs detailed tech comparisons to point out the differences) - but there are a few Japanese developers, particularly Square-Enix, who are actually better on the Sony hardware.
Then there are the exclusives. Actually, I tend to think some of the big-name PS3 exclusives are over-hyped. The first Uncharted was fun (as is the Vita game), but 2 and 3 were a bit too "interactive movie" as opposed to game. And the Killzone series is a hateful trudge through the least-likeable sci-fi setting ever devised, in which it is impossible not to want to kill each and every one of the characters in unimaginably painful ways.
But then there are some of the best games of this console generation as well. The first and third Resistance games are fantastic console fpses, which shun many of the hateful cliches that go with the genre these days (2-weapon limits, cover systems and regenerating health). The Ratchet & Clank titles are the best action-platformers I've seen in years (and I'm including the Mario Galaxy games in that assessment) - with Crack in Time in particular having some puzzle sections that are reminiscent of the best bits of Portal. And Valkyria Chronicles has made more of an impression on me than any other new IP of this generation (just a pity they mismanaged it with the PSP sequels). You've also got the "definitive" version of Eternal Sonata (the 360 version is lacking large chunks of content), which is probably the best traditional Japanese RPG of this generation (maybe tied with Lost Odyssey over on the 360). By contrast, 360 exclusives (of which there were many early in the generation) have felt quite thin on the ground lately, particularly if Halo's not your thing. The only one to excite me over the coming months is Forza Horizons.
So actually, there are lots of reasons to buy a PS3 and - particularly if you don't have a 360 - it's a good way to get access to a cheap games library (late in the console cycle is always good for this).
Alternatively... well... there's Humble Bundle 6. Which is good and worth and all that, but isn't all that exciting no matter how many exclamation marks you want to stick after it.
No, that wouldn't do it. Not in the same way that the Wiimote did it for the Wii. It would still look like a very traditionally video-gamsey experience to people who don't play (m)any games.
The Wii looked like it was bringing a whole new level of physical activity to gaming. It wasn't, of course (except via Wii-Fit, which I've always had a soft-spot for) - but it was easy to market it as though it was. Remember all those early "I just through my Wiimote through my TV" stories. They were basically a result of people trying to use the system as they'd seen it used in the adverts, and they trailed off after a while. Whatever you do with the Wii-U, it's still going to be people sitting around looking at screens.
Which for a gamer, is fine! I hate motion control. The sooner it dies, the better. Depending on the genre of the game, give me a mouse/keyboard, a 2-stick controller or a touchscreen any day. But the Wii-U's not a great pitch to me, because it's underwhelming hardware that's soon to be obsolete and because I don't trust Nintendo to build the third party partnerships needed to support it. If it's not a great pitch to the casuals either, then it can and will flop.
I don't disagree that the "Japan first" mindset is unpleasant and wrong, but...
The PS3 was not a simultaneous world-wide launch. It wasn't even the same console that launched worldwide. Europe had to wait months to get it, and then got a stripped down version with no back compatibility. I saw the way the wind was blowing and imported a US back-compatible 60gig (my PS2 games being a mix of US and UK versions anyway). Which I had for months before the UK launch.
Meanwhile, the timing of the EU launch for the Wii-U is set to be announced in less than an hour, with the US announcement following a few hours later. So it's a little early to get upset yet.
If I were a betting man, I'd say 11 December for the US and 14 December for Europe.
It would have had a better chance if it was launching in late 2009 or early 2010. Back then, the Wii wasn't as completely moribund as it is now and successors to the PS3 and 360 were a lot further off. Plus Nintendo would have been able to throw more resource at the launch, before they'd suffered 2 years of poor results due to the Wii flatlining and the 3DS needing to be sold at a loss (a first for Nintendo) just to get it a half-way passable installed base.
But launching now? Yes, I think "flop" is probably the likely outcome. The Wii managed huge success in its early years. I think there were two big reasons for this. First, the concept of the Wii was clearly and easily communicated. "Jump around and wave the wand to play games". Everybody can understand that - and it looks fun. Lots of non-gamers bought them (and then, being non-gamers, bought no more games for it after launch). Ok, ok, the motion control was actually hideously inaccurate (only partially rectified by the Wiimote-Plus) and far from jumping around, the best way to play most games was to sit still and make small movements. But by the time people noticed that, they'd already bought.
The second advantage was a media zeitgeist working in Nintendo's favour. There was disillusionment with Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo were getting a lot of press goodwill and free publicity. They had lots of people happy to do their marketing for them.
This time around, the console has a concept which may or may not be good, but which is much harder to communicate in a 15-20 second TV advert. It's a tabletty... touchpaddy... thing. That does something. But then, you're also playing on the TV. I wouldn't be surprised, given the focus on the controller, if a lot of casuals and non-gamers thought that the Wii-U was actually just a new peripheral for the Wii, rather than a whole new console. Just as happened with the 3DS, which a lot of people thought was just a DS with a 3D screen.
And the media are also a bit bored of Nintendo now. They 3DS was a bit dull. The games haven't been that interesting for ages. And it's all so expensive. Meanwhile... ooooooooh.... SHINY NEW IPHONE! SHINY! ME WANT SHINY!
Plus we now have the 360 and PS3 successors likely to be less than 18 months away and certain to pack a lot more horsepower than the Wii-U.
I'm assuming you're just being sarky, but the question sort-of merits a proper answer in case anybody is actually interested. There are a few reasons:
1) Proof of a particular achievement. Guild websites etc frequently post screenshots of kills of new bosses (or of Arena victories if they're PvP focussed) to demonstrate the level they're playing at as an aid to recruitment. You see less of this these days, since the game added an actual achievement system, along the lines of that seen on Xbox Live or Steam.
2) Guides and walkthroughs for particular parts of the game (generally boss fights). There's a trend these days towards using youtube videos as a substitute for more traditional text-and-pictures guides. Now, youtube videos can have their place in describing MMO encounters (though I hate, loathe and despise them as a susbstitute for walkthroughs for offline games), but text-and-pictures is still much more convenient for a quick-reference guide and people are still making them.
3) Requests for technical help. Something along the lines of "hey, guys, I installed addon x, but it doesn't seem to be working properly - here's a screenshot".
4) Random silliness - either "look, I managed to get my character somewhere that's supposed to be inaccessible" (which you see less of these days) or "look, we used 500 dead gnomes to spell out "bumpoo" in giant letters across the Barrens".
I've been through (and passed) a 2-day assessment centre before, when applying for my first "proper" job. That included exercises designed to simulate the work I'd be doing on appointment - but there's always going to be a degree of artificiality around exercises like that.
It's hugely important to get recruitment right, as a wrong call can have consequences that last months or years. We've all seen cases of the alleged saviour of the universe who gets recruited, only to turn out to be a mediocre employee who trundles along just above the point at which it's worth getting rid of him. Set against that, a week long scrutiny process like this has some merits.
The obvious downside is that by definition, it's pretty much limiting the pool of applicants to those not already in employment. People already working full time will likely struggle to vanish for a full week, particularly if they have family committments that place demands on their vacation time.
There have been minor ones that require Vista or 7. Rather laughably, I seem to remember that the PC version of Halo 2 (which is ancient) "required" Vista in an early (and unsuccessful) attempt to get people to upgrade.
It's only started to get more serious for XP gamers over the last year or so. The news that the next Call of Duty will require Vista or 7 on PC may be the last straw for some.
That's true, but unfortunately, the number of console games which allow for local (split-screen) or LAN multiplayer is pretty damned small these days. With the Wii-U likely to suffer local multiplayer restrictions due to controller limitations, the last bastion of console local multiplayer (Nintendo platforms) looks set to be undermined. Xbox Live and the PSN is increasingly where console multiplayer happens.
Consoles in general have done a good job of undermining their historic strengths vis a vis the PC over this current cycle. In particular, we've lost a lot of the "insert cartridge/disc and play" ethos from console gaming, due to incessant firmware updates, patches and installs.
The move back to PC is already happening. The proportion of games which aren't single platform console exclusives which don't get a PC port is shrinking fast. And if anything, the number of single platform exclusives on the consoles is shrinking even faster; one lesson of this generation has been that development costs are so high that you can't afford to limit your market unless you're getting a very, very high degree of financial support from the console manufacturer.
We're also at the point now where even the shoddiest and most rushed of PC ports are significantly better than the console equivalents. I recently played Spec Ops: The Line (great game, don't be put off by the title and box art, it's not a generic modern military shooter) on the PC and felt pretty hard done by. The port's an absolute mess, with all of the rubbish around lack of graphical and control customisation options that drive PC gamers up the wall. Then I saw the 360 version running on a friend's console. And all of a sudden, I felt rather better about the PC version, simply because it was so much easier to actually see what was going on with a decent resolution.
The true next-gen is probably still 18 months or so away (the Wii-U doesn't really count, in hardware terms). Developers know they can get a head start on it at the moment by working on PC development - particularly with all the indications that the PS4 will go for a more PC-like architecture.
We've been here before, actually. Just as "PC gaming is dying" is a cyclical thing, so is "console games have been left in the dust". The PC actually moved into a very commanding position at the end of the SNES/Genesis cycle, when there was a long gap before really credible console successors emerged in the form of the Playstation and (to a lesser extent) the N64. That was a great time to be a PC gamer and a terrible time to be a console gamer.
We kind of missed out on this at the end of the last cycle because, to be honest, the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube probably had a year or so of life in them when they were replaced by a new generation (indeed, the PS2 carried on doing quite nicely for ages after the PS3 launch, getting some of its best games during this window). But that was in a different economic environment, when there was felt to be a lot of customer demand to spend money on new consoles and when it felt like a genuine race to market. This time around, the PC's had much more of a chance to come into its own.
Of course, 6 months after the next Xbox and the PS4 launch, the gaming headlines will be full of "PC gaming is dying".
Actually, I doubt that Blizzard's actions are related to any recent change of policy by the US Government. Rather, it's about companies looking differently at how current policies might be applied in the wake of the HSBC case that's running at the moment (which may or may not be a piece of Wall Street protectionism).
I can't prove it, because obviously they'll have updated their registration systems now, but I'd be prepared to bet that Blizzard have never allowed the registration of accounts (or at least the purchase of games or subscriptions on accounts) where the customer identified themselves as being from Iran. They - and quite a lot of other companies - would have been operating on the principle that this was enough to get them legally in the clear against charges of dealing with regimes subject to sanctions.
The HSBC case has shown (among other things) that getting customers to tick a box certifying that they aren't from such a country is not, in fact, enough to prevent you from having to answer some fairly scary questions. I suspect Blizzard have just looked at their legal risk register and decided that they need to move to an IP-blocking system. So it's not actually a change of policy by either the US Government or Blizzard - but rather a change in approach and methodology.
When you register with Blizzard, part of the information that's required is the country you reside in. The question in my mind is whether "Iran" was ever on the list and - if it was - whether you were able to register an account and purchase games if you set that as your answer.
If - as is quite possible - the only way to register an account in Iran was to pretend to be from somewhere else, then even in the absence of sanctions, Blizzard could probably just shrug, say "TOS violation" and refuse a refund.
The reaction of most half-way decent guilds to the late stages of WotLK and Cataclysm has been to raid less, not to carry on grinding.
My own guild, having been a hardcore 25 man guild for most of Cataclysm, is down to a single 10-man run of Dragon Soul Heroic each week (which takes around 3 hours). Note that this isn't to grind gear - it's just to make sure there's a core team of players still "in the game" to pick things up when the next expansion comes out.
Is it just me who reads TFA and things "this guy's just taken a basic intro-to-psychology course and is all excited thinking he can now explain the whole world"?
If you like gaming, are able to financially support yourself and your gaming and can do so without ruining the rest of your life, then play whatever the hell you like.
Also, the guy doesn't understand modern (Western) MMOs. These are MUCH less about grinding than is commonly considered to be the case. The level "grind" in World of Warcraft is so short as to barely merit the term. Going from 1-85 is best thought of as an extended tutorial where you learn how to play your class ahead of the real game, which begins at level 85.
And once you're at level 85, the game is fundamentally skill based. On the PvP side, that's so obvious that I don't even need to explain it. On the PvE side, it perhaps deserves a slightly longer explanation of what the commonly perceived "gear grind" actually is.
WoW's end-game PvE content is, over the course of each expansion, a series of co-operative challenges of increasing difficulty. The series starts with relatively short 5-man dungeons, which require fairly simple tactics. What then follows - released gradually via patches - is a series of challenges for larger groups (10 or 25 people) which require better reactions, better planning and more complicated tactics.
It's a common misconception that the only difference between the bottom end raids in a WoW expansion and the top end raids is the gear requirement. Yes, you will need better gear to tackle the top-end raids, but this can essentially be thought of as a skill-check system. Before you can progress to the top end raid, you need to prove that you have the skill to defeat the easier, lower-end ones. If you don't have that, then you'll end up banging your head against a brick wall, no matter your gear level.
So back when I was most deeply into the game, in the Burning Crusade era (1st expansion), the bottom end raid was Karazhan and the top end raid was Sunwell Plateau. Karazhan's bosses required fairly simple tactics, with generally just one or two mechanics that players needed to respond to during each fight. The difficulty increased substantially throughout the raid, culminating in a fairly tricky final boss. Said boss was, however, massively simpler than even the first boss in Sunwell Plateau, which required each player to keep track of a large number of factors at once, with any failure resulting in more or less instant death. Also, as you are level capped for this, the fights are not magically getting easier just because you put more time and effort in.
So the attraction in modern, Western MMOs isn't the grind at all - it's about team-work and overcoming challenges co-operatively. Indeed, Western gaming in general has been remarkably successful in eliminating "the grind" - you don't tend to spend much time running in circles doing random encounters in a Bioware game, or one of the Witcher games.
The grind does still live on in some Japanese gaming and in some Eastern MMOs - but that's likely just due to the conservatism of Japanese and Korean developers. It would be great if at some point during the next few years, a high profile Japanese RPG developer (perhaps Square) could take the step of eliminating grinding from its games.
Neither, really. By my own admission, I'd not done as much to protect the machine as I could have done. A Windows 7 machine which had been run through windows update to ensure that it picked up every last security update and which had proper AV software installed would probably have had a better chance than something in default configuration with a single hurried pass through Windows Update.
If you think back to the history of Windows Updates during the lifespan of Vista, there were a lot of updates pushed out with a description like "fixed an issue with the execution of code via a network share".
The permissions on the share were read/write (though not for the whole of drive c). And it was basically a fresh Vista install that I'd run windows update on, but not been as thorough about as I should have been. My own fault, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. Some of the ransomware stuff doing the rounds at the moment is absolutely vicious in how it will spread itself and protect itself from removal.
That's definitely the first thing he needs to do, but there's more besides:
1) Change all passwords. Either do it from a different PC or from that PC AFTER it has been wiped and confirmed clean.
2) Get a few credit checks over the next few months. Depending on how much information the father has actually given away (and it may be more than he's willing to admit), he may have given the scammers enough to do a thorough identity theft job on him. Picking up any attempts at this as early as possible will be important.
3) Some urgent parental re-education. Using a stout stick if necessary.
Oh, and when going to do the disinfection, if you're taking a personal machine with you, make damned sure before you go that it is NOT set to automatically connect to wireless networks. I got stung with this one a few weeks ago when disinfecting an uncle's PC.
He'd picked up one of those ransomware fake-AV trojans that basically renders Windows unusable. I'd figured it was going to be a wipe-and-reinstall job (which indeed it was), but had taken an old laptop with me in case I needed a "clean" PC for anything. This laptop had been my secondary PC until I replaced it with an iPad and I was going to use my trip "up north" as an opportunity to hand it over to the parents, who would make more use of it than I would. It'd just been flattened itself and had a fresh (though updated) Vista install on it. It also has a network share on it, that I'd used to copy a few drivers and other files over from my desktop to save redownloading them.
Anyway, like a fool I boot the thing up as soon as I get in there, forgetting two important things:
1) The laptop will default to connecting to any wireless network it can find and get onto; and
2) My uncle, being a complete idiot, has an unsecured wireless network.
So the laptop connects immediately to his wireless network - and gets infected within seconds by the trojan on his PC via the open network share. Fortunately, I had the Vista disc with me to do an immediate wipe and reinstall on the laptop as well, but it was still frustrating.
Because Onlive is temperamental, unreliable and prone to going bust.
PC gaming is strong right now. Very strong. If Valve would just release their Steam sales figures in a format that would let them fit into the industry sales charts, then we'd probably see some fairly scary stuff.
But this isn't new, and there is a reason for it.
"PC gaming is dying" is an over-used cliche, albeit one that sometimes (but not currently) is used with a degree of reasonable evidence behind it. PC gaming suffers early in a console cycle. When consoles are capable of putting out near-PC-quality technology, then they dominate the market. Developers aim for them for all kinds of reasons (installed base, ease of development for a consistent platform etc).
But towards the end of a console cycle, the PC has pulled far away in technological terms. All of those clever people who got into games development because they want to push technical frontiers want to develop for the PC. And at some point, they reach a critical mass that even the suits go along with them, justifying it on the basis that it's adaptation for the next console generation. Meanwhile, the quality gap between PC games and console games grows to the point where players start leaping to the former.
We've kind of forgotten this, because it didn't happen at the end of the last console generation. The PS2/Xbox/Gamecube were killed just a bit too early. Many of the PS2's best games came out after the PS3's release. This time around, it's different. A bargain basement PC can easily move graphics way in advance of what the 360/PS3/Wii are capable of.
And the next generation is still some time off. The Wii-U doesn't count. They're talking about PS3 technical parity. Just... lol. The Wii-U is, I suspect, going to be a sales flop of the kind we've not seen in a decade or more. It has a badly-communicated input device and underwhelming tech specs. The Wii succeeded (in the early years, before dying early) because it had a simple, easily understood and easily marketed selling point. The Wii-U has no such thing. The successors to the 360 and PS3 are what matters. And right now, we know nothing about them.
PC gaming has actually been close to victory in the past. Between the point where the SNES became obsolete and the PS1 launched, console gaming went through an existential crisis. Remember the Saturn? The 3D0? Remember anything worth playing on them? No, me neither. If not for the Sony Playstation and its unexpected success, the PC might have become the de facto leader in the games market.
Of course, the Playstation got Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, became a world-conquering phenomenon and the PC slipped back again. But now... the dice are in the air again.
Yes, how dare people who have paid money for a product - or whose job is to advise people whether to spend money on a product - express anything other than abject admiration for it.
Utterly shocking.
Sarcasm aside, I think the opposite is true; Nintendo (and Japanese developers in general) suffer from an overly-loyal core fanbase that will gobble up whatever gets shovelled at them and scream for more, no matter how tired it is.
Nintendo's bad in this respect, but it's not the worst. The fact that, judging by the ongoing train of sequels, there actually appears to be a market for the Hyperdimension Neptunia and Argarest Wars games makes me cry real tears.
I think there's probably quite a simple explanation for this. The amount of debt that students in England and Wales will likely need to take on (barring rich parents) to pay for a degree has risen significantly from this year (not quite at US levels yet, but getting much closer). At the same time, the huge expansion in the numbers going to university has meant that the chances of a degree leading to graduate-level employment have fallen sharply.
The perception now is that if you want to go from university into a "good" job, then you need either a science degree, or an arts degree from one of the elite institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, or one of the other top 10 or so universities). A decade ago, studying a "silly" degree for three years could be justified, from the point of view of an 18 year old, on the basis that it meant you got three years of the student lifestyle. If you didn't get a graduate-level job at the end of it, then at least it hadn't cost you all that much. This has changed now (and in a funny way, this is probably a good thing).
Whether the conventional wisdom will actually prove correct for students starting undergraduate degrees in September this year, I don't know. I suspect a maths degree will always make you more employable than a media studies one, but there's no reason to suspect that any portion of the graduate jobs market is immune to over-saturation.
As tends to get pointed out quite frequently, what we lack in the UK (and have lacked for decades now) is a network of decent technical colleges to prepare people for skilled non-academic jobs.
Problem with the CoD ports on the Wii is that they just aren't very good. I mean, I'm not saying CoD on PC/PS3/360 is actually good, but the Wii ports are awful. Plus, without the aid of the camera-assisted "cheating" that the PS Move does, the Wii Mote (and the Plus version) are just too unsteady for proper precise aim.
The Kinect is a clever little device - I've been really impressed at some of the uses that people have found for it. I'm sure that the next-gen version will be cleverer still and, if MS continue to be as admirably "open"(ish) with the hardware as they were with the first one, then I'm sure we'll see some useful applications of it. I can also see something like this being the future of TV remote controls - until they ruined it a bit with the new dashboard, the ability to control my 360 using voice and gestures (including in stuff like Sky Player) was really convenient.
But the problem with the Kinect is that - for everything bar exercise software (where it's fair-to-middling) - it's an awful games controller. It's really, really bad at sensing rapid movements. I mean, it's generally ok at tracking movements that are relatively slow and considered, but at higher speeds, it struggles. And that's a major problem, given that it pretty much rules out any game that involves precision at speed (which many, many games do).
Now in fairness, the Wii-mote has similar problems, even in its "Plus" incarnation - and, indeed, plenty of Wii games have been ruined or at least harmed by that. But for the most part, developers overcome this by augmenting motion controls with button inputs. Indeed, some of the best games on the Wii, like Super Smash Brothers Brawl, make no use of the motion controls at all.
For the most part, to be honest, I think motion control has been a bit of a passing fad. However, there's one counter-point to this I've found, which is slightly surprising. The Playstation Move came late to the party, is technologically unimpressive (it's a Wii-mote that "cheats" via the addition of a basic camera that tracks a coloured ball on the end) and hasn't created much excitement. However, I've played both Killzone 3 and Resistance 3 using it (augmented by the navigation controller) and can confirm that for playing an fps on a console, it is way, way better than a twin-stick controller. It gives a degree of fine precision to your aim that rivals that of a keyboard and mouse. Large, rapid turns are still a problem compared to PC input, but the gap over traditional console controllers is huge. There's a similar effect on the Vita, actually, where Uncharted allows for something similar via tilt controls. This is one area where I think existing motion control technology can actually enhance games in the long-run, rather than being a short lived party novelty.
Well yes, but Creative Assembly have "considered" the idea of a console version of the Total War games before. And I challenge you to find a more definitively "PC" series than that.
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I still can't believe they dumped Midfield Raceway from GT5. In previous installments that had been the perfect track for races between players of... shall we say... differing skill levels. It was pretty easy to get around without spending most of your time off the track and staring at crash barriers, but had a lot you could do around optimising racing lines. So using horsepower handicapping, you could have races on it between good players and very poor players which were fun for both - ideal when you have a large group of friends round. GT5 doesn't really have a good equivalent, but Forza 4's Maple Valley works pretty well.
Gran Turismo 5 is ok, but to be honest, Forza Motorsport 4 is better both as a racing game and as a driving simulator. GT5 has some very specific features that appeal to hardcore car nerds (it has some interesting and obscure old cars, plus a detailed encyclopedia). If that's what you want then GT5 is for you.
Ultimately, however, Forza 4 has better graphics (outside of the relatively small number of "premium" cars, GT5 can be surprisingly ugly), better tracks, better online modes and better customisation options. GT5 could have been awesome, but it needed more attention to the actual gameplay mechanics as opposed to the car-count to really get there.
Or alternatively, you could get it for... like... you know... the games?
It has a huge library by this point and you can get some of the best titles available for the system very cheap, via budget releases, multipacks or plain old retailer-discounting.
The proportion of cross-platform games this generation has been very high between the PS3 and 360 (probably because, despite the differing architectures, they have very similar overall capabilities). Now, PC ports have become more common over the last 18 months or so (that market's getting harder to ignore, particularly for developers wanting practice for next gen hardware). But there are still an awful lot of PS3/360 games out there that you could get access to if you don't already own a 360. Admittedly, the difficulties of developing for the PS3 mean that it tends, in general, to get slightly inferior versions of multi-platform games (though it often needs detailed tech comparisons to point out the differences) - but there are a few Japanese developers, particularly Square-Enix, who are actually better on the Sony hardware.
Then there are the exclusives. Actually, I tend to think some of the big-name PS3 exclusives are over-hyped. The first Uncharted was fun (as is the Vita game), but 2 and 3 were a bit too "interactive movie" as opposed to game. And the Killzone series is a hateful trudge through the least-likeable sci-fi setting ever devised, in which it is impossible not to want to kill each and every one of the characters in unimaginably painful ways.
But then there are some of the best games of this console generation as well. The first and third Resistance games are fantastic console fpses, which shun many of the hateful cliches that go with the genre these days (2-weapon limits, cover systems and regenerating health). The Ratchet & Clank titles are the best action-platformers I've seen in years (and I'm including the Mario Galaxy games in that assessment) - with Crack in Time in particular having some puzzle sections that are reminiscent of the best bits of Portal. And Valkyria Chronicles has made more of an impression on me than any other new IP of this generation (just a pity they mismanaged it with the PSP sequels). You've also got the "definitive" version of Eternal Sonata (the 360 version is lacking large chunks of content), which is probably the best traditional Japanese RPG of this generation (maybe tied with Lost Odyssey over on the 360). By contrast, 360 exclusives (of which there were many early in the generation) have felt quite thin on the ground lately, particularly if Halo's not your thing. The only one to excite me over the coming months is Forza Horizons.
So actually, there are lots of reasons to buy a PS3 and - particularly if you don't have a 360 - it's a good way to get access to a cheap games library (late in the console cycle is always good for this).
Alternatively... well... there's Humble Bundle 6. Which is good and worth and all that, but isn't all that exciting no matter how many exclamation marks you want to stick after it.
No, that wouldn't do it. Not in the same way that the Wiimote did it for the Wii. It would still look like a very traditionally video-gamsey experience to people who don't play (m)any games.
The Wii looked like it was bringing a whole new level of physical activity to gaming. It wasn't, of course (except via Wii-Fit, which I've always had a soft-spot for) - but it was easy to market it as though it was. Remember all those early "I just through my Wiimote through my TV" stories. They were basically a result of people trying to use the system as they'd seen it used in the adverts, and they trailed off after a while. Whatever you do with the Wii-U, it's still going to be people sitting around looking at screens.
Which for a gamer, is fine! I hate motion control. The sooner it dies, the better. Depending on the genre of the game, give me a mouse/keyboard, a 2-stick controller or a touchscreen any day. But the Wii-U's not a great pitch to me, because it's underwhelming hardware that's soon to be obsolete and because I don't trust Nintendo to build the third party partnerships needed to support it. If it's not a great pitch to the casuals either, then it can and will flop.
Oh wow did I get that one wrong. 18 November for the US and 30 November for Europe.
So Japan gets it last. Take that, shrinking Japanese gaming demographic.
I don't disagree that the "Japan first" mindset is unpleasant and wrong, but...
The PS3 was not a simultaneous world-wide launch. It wasn't even the same console that launched worldwide. Europe had to wait months to get it, and then got a stripped down version with no back compatibility. I saw the way the wind was blowing and imported a US back-compatible 60gig (my PS2 games being a mix of US and UK versions anyway). Which I had for months before the UK launch.
Meanwhile, the timing of the EU launch for the Wii-U is set to be announced in less than an hour, with the US announcement following a few hours later. So it's a little early to get upset yet.
If I were a betting man, I'd say 11 December for the US and 14 December for Europe.
It would have had a better chance if it was launching in late 2009 or early 2010. Back then, the Wii wasn't as completely moribund as it is now and successors to the PS3 and 360 were a lot further off. Plus Nintendo would have been able to throw more resource at the launch, before they'd suffered 2 years of poor results due to the Wii flatlining and the 3DS needing to be sold at a loss (a first for Nintendo) just to get it a half-way passable installed base.
But launching now? Yes, I think "flop" is probably the likely outcome. The Wii managed huge success in its early years. I think there were two big reasons for this. First, the concept of the Wii was clearly and easily communicated. "Jump around and wave the wand to play games". Everybody can understand that - and it looks fun. Lots of non-gamers bought them (and then, being non-gamers, bought no more games for it after launch). Ok, ok, the motion control was actually hideously inaccurate (only partially rectified by the Wiimote-Plus) and far from jumping around, the best way to play most games was to sit still and make small movements. But by the time people noticed that, they'd already bought.
The second advantage was a media zeitgeist working in Nintendo's favour. There was disillusionment with Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo were getting a lot of press goodwill and free publicity. They had lots of people happy to do their marketing for them.
This time around, the console has a concept which may or may not be good, but which is much harder to communicate in a 15-20 second TV advert. It's a tabletty... touchpaddy... thing. That does something. But then, you're also playing on the TV. I wouldn't be surprised, given the focus on the controller, if a lot of casuals and non-gamers thought that the Wii-U was actually just a new peripheral for the Wii, rather than a whole new console. Just as happened with the 3DS, which a lot of people thought was just a DS with a 3D screen.
And the media are also a bit bored of Nintendo now. They 3DS was a bit dull. The games haven't been that interesting for ages. And it's all so expensive. Meanwhile... ooooooooh.... SHINY NEW IPHONE! SHINY! ME WANT SHINY!
Plus we now have the 360 and PS3 successors likely to be less than 18 months away and certain to pack a lot more horsepower than the Wii-U.
It's the wrong console at the wrong time.
I'm assuming you're just being sarky, but the question sort-of merits a proper answer in case anybody is actually interested. There are a few reasons:
1) Proof of a particular achievement. Guild websites etc frequently post screenshots of kills of new bosses (or of Arena victories if they're PvP focussed) to demonstrate the level they're playing at as an aid to recruitment. You see less of this these days, since the game added an actual achievement system, along the lines of that seen on Xbox Live or Steam.
2) Guides and walkthroughs for particular parts of the game (generally boss fights). There's a trend these days towards using youtube videos as a substitute for more traditional text-and-pictures guides. Now, youtube videos can have their place in describing MMO encounters (though I hate, loathe and despise them as a susbstitute for walkthroughs for offline games), but text-and-pictures is still much more convenient for a quick-reference guide and people are still making them.
3) Requests for technical help. Something along the lines of "hey, guys, I installed addon x, but it doesn't seem to be working properly - here's a screenshot".
4) Random silliness - either "look, I managed to get my character somewhere that's supposed to be inaccessible" (which you see less of these days) or "look, we used 500 dead gnomes to spell out "bumpoo" in giant letters across the Barrens".
I've been through (and passed) a 2-day assessment centre before, when applying for my first "proper" job. That included exercises designed to simulate the work I'd be doing on appointment - but there's always going to be a degree of artificiality around exercises like that.
It's hugely important to get recruitment right, as a wrong call can have consequences that last months or years. We've all seen cases of the alleged saviour of the universe who gets recruited, only to turn out to be a mediocre employee who trundles along just above the point at which it's worth getting rid of him. Set against that, a week long scrutiny process like this has some merits.
The obvious downside is that by definition, it's pretty much limiting the pool of applicants to those not already in employment. People already working full time will likely struggle to vanish for a full week, particularly if they have family committments that place demands on their vacation time.
There have been minor ones that require Vista or 7. Rather laughably, I seem to remember that the PC version of Halo 2 (which is ancient) "required" Vista in an early (and unsuccessful) attempt to get people to upgrade.
It's only started to get more serious for XP gamers over the last year or so. The news that the next Call of Duty will require Vista or 7 on PC may be the last straw for some.
That's true, but unfortunately, the number of console games which allow for local (split-screen) or LAN multiplayer is pretty damned small these days. With the Wii-U likely to suffer local multiplayer restrictions due to controller limitations, the last bastion of console local multiplayer (Nintendo platforms) looks set to be undermined. Xbox Live and the PSN is increasingly where console multiplayer happens.
Consoles in general have done a good job of undermining their historic strengths vis a vis the PC over this current cycle. In particular, we've lost a lot of the "insert cartridge/disc and play" ethos from console gaming, due to incessant firmware updates, patches and installs.
The move back to PC is already happening. The proportion of games which aren't single platform console exclusives which don't get a PC port is shrinking fast. And if anything, the number of single platform exclusives on the consoles is shrinking even faster; one lesson of this generation has been that development costs are so high that you can't afford to limit your market unless you're getting a very, very high degree of financial support from the console manufacturer.
We're also at the point now where even the shoddiest and most rushed of PC ports are significantly better than the console equivalents. I recently played Spec Ops: The Line (great game, don't be put off by the title and box art, it's not a generic modern military shooter) on the PC and felt pretty hard done by. The port's an absolute mess, with all of the rubbish around lack of graphical and control customisation options that drive PC gamers up the wall. Then I saw the 360 version running on a friend's console. And all of a sudden, I felt rather better about the PC version, simply because it was so much easier to actually see what was going on with a decent resolution.
The true next-gen is probably still 18 months or so away (the Wii-U doesn't really count, in hardware terms). Developers know they can get a head start on it at the moment by working on PC development - particularly with all the indications that the PS4 will go for a more PC-like architecture.
We've been here before, actually. Just as "PC gaming is dying" is a cyclical thing, so is "console games have been left in the dust". The PC actually moved into a very commanding position at the end of the SNES/Genesis cycle, when there was a long gap before really credible console successors emerged in the form of the Playstation and (to a lesser extent) the N64. That was a great time to be a PC gamer and a terrible time to be a console gamer.
We kind of missed out on this at the end of the last cycle because, to be honest, the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube probably had a year or so of life in them when they were replaced by a new generation (indeed, the PS2 carried on doing quite nicely for ages after the PS3 launch, getting some of its best games during this window). But that was in a different economic environment, when there was felt to be a lot of customer demand to spend money on new consoles and when it felt like a genuine race to market. This time around, the PC's had much more of a chance to come into its own.
Of course, 6 months after the next Xbox and the PS4 launch, the gaming headlines will be full of "PC gaming is dying".
Actually, I doubt that Blizzard's actions are related to any recent change of policy by the US Government. Rather, it's about companies looking differently at how current policies might be applied in the wake of the HSBC case that's running at the moment (which may or may not be a piece of Wall Street protectionism).
I can't prove it, because obviously they'll have updated their registration systems now, but I'd be prepared to bet that Blizzard have never allowed the registration of accounts (or at least the purchase of games or subscriptions on accounts) where the customer identified themselves as being from Iran. They - and quite a lot of other companies - would have been operating on the principle that this was enough to get them legally in the clear against charges of dealing with regimes subject to sanctions.
The HSBC case has shown (among other things) that getting customers to tick a box certifying that they aren't from such a country is not, in fact, enough to prevent you from having to answer some fairly scary questions. I suspect Blizzard have just looked at their legal risk register and decided that they need to move to an IP-blocking system. So it's not actually a change of policy by either the US Government or Blizzard - but rather a change in approach and methodology.
When you register with Blizzard, part of the information that's required is the country you reside in. The question in my mind is whether "Iran" was ever on the list and - if it was - whether you were able to register an account and purchase games if you set that as your answer.
If - as is quite possible - the only way to register an account in Iran was to pretend to be from somewhere else, then even in the absence of sanctions, Blizzard could probably just shrug, say "TOS violation" and refuse a refund.
The reaction of most half-way decent guilds to the late stages of WotLK and Cataclysm has been to raid less, not to carry on grinding.
My own guild, having been a hardcore 25 man guild for most of Cataclysm, is down to a single 10-man run of Dragon Soul Heroic each week (which takes around 3 hours). Note that this isn't to grind gear - it's just to make sure there's a core team of players still "in the game" to pick things up when the next expansion comes out.
Is it just me who reads TFA and things "this guy's just taken a basic intro-to-psychology course and is all excited thinking he can now explain the whole world"?
If you like gaming, are able to financially support yourself and your gaming and can do so without ruining the rest of your life, then play whatever the hell you like.
Also, the guy doesn't understand modern (Western) MMOs. These are MUCH less about grinding than is commonly considered to be the case. The level "grind" in World of Warcraft is so short as to barely merit the term. Going from 1-85 is best thought of as an extended tutorial where you learn how to play your class ahead of the real game, which begins at level 85.
And once you're at level 85, the game is fundamentally skill based. On the PvP side, that's so obvious that I don't even need to explain it. On the PvE side, it perhaps deserves a slightly longer explanation of what the commonly perceived "gear grind" actually is.
WoW's end-game PvE content is, over the course of each expansion, a series of co-operative challenges of increasing difficulty. The series starts with relatively short 5-man dungeons, which require fairly simple tactics. What then follows - released gradually via patches - is a series of challenges for larger groups (10 or 25 people) which require better reactions, better planning and more complicated tactics.
It's a common misconception that the only difference between the bottom end raids in a WoW expansion and the top end raids is the gear requirement. Yes, you will need better gear to tackle the top-end raids, but this can essentially be thought of as a skill-check system. Before you can progress to the top end raid, you need to prove that you have the skill to defeat the easier, lower-end ones. If you don't have that, then you'll end up banging your head against a brick wall, no matter your gear level.
So back when I was most deeply into the game, in the Burning Crusade era (1st expansion), the bottom end raid was Karazhan and the top end raid was Sunwell Plateau. Karazhan's bosses required fairly simple tactics, with generally just one or two mechanics that players needed to respond to during each fight. The difficulty increased substantially throughout the raid, culminating in a fairly tricky final boss. Said boss was, however, massively simpler than even the first boss in Sunwell Plateau, which required each player to keep track of a large number of factors at once, with any failure resulting in more or less instant death. Also, as you are level capped for this, the fights are not magically getting easier just because you put more time and effort in.
So the attraction in modern, Western MMOs isn't the grind at all - it's about team-work and overcoming challenges co-operatively. Indeed, Western gaming in general has been remarkably successful in eliminating "the grind" - you don't tend to spend much time running in circles doing random encounters in a Bioware game, or one of the Witcher games.
The grind does still live on in some Japanese gaming and in some Eastern MMOs - but that's likely just due to the conservatism of Japanese and Korean developers. It would be great if at some point during the next few years, a high profile Japanese RPG developer (perhaps Square) could take the step of eliminating grinding from its games.
Neither, really. By my own admission, I'd not done as much to protect the machine as I could have done. A Windows 7 machine which had been run through windows update to ensure that it picked up every last security update and which had proper AV software installed would probably have had a better chance than something in default configuration with a single hurried pass through Windows Update.
If you think back to the history of Windows Updates during the lifespan of Vista, there were a lot of updates pushed out with a description like "fixed an issue with the execution of code via a network share".
The permissions on the share were read/write (though not for the whole of drive c). And it was basically a fresh Vista install that I'd run windows update on, but not been as thorough about as I should have been. My own fault, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. Some of the ransomware stuff doing the rounds at the moment is absolutely vicious in how it will spread itself and protect itself from removal.
That's definitely the first thing he needs to do, but there's more besides:
1) Change all passwords. Either do it from a different PC or from that PC AFTER it has been wiped and confirmed clean.
2) Get a few credit checks over the next few months. Depending on how much information the father has actually given away (and it may be more than he's willing to admit), he may have given the scammers enough to do a thorough identity theft job on him. Picking up any attempts at this as early as possible will be important.
3) Some urgent parental re-education. Using a stout stick if necessary.
Oh, and when going to do the disinfection, if you're taking a personal machine with you, make damned sure before you go that it is NOT set to automatically connect to wireless networks. I got stung with this one a few weeks ago when disinfecting an uncle's PC.
He'd picked up one of those ransomware fake-AV trojans that basically renders Windows unusable. I'd figured it was going to be a wipe-and-reinstall job (which indeed it was), but had taken an old laptop with me in case I needed a "clean" PC for anything. This laptop had been my secondary PC until I replaced it with an iPad and I was going to use my trip "up north" as an opportunity to hand it over to the parents, who would make more use of it than I would. It'd just been flattened itself and had a fresh (though updated) Vista install on it. It also has a network share on it, that I'd used to copy a few drivers and other files over from my desktop to save redownloading them.
Anyway, like a fool I boot the thing up as soon as I get in there, forgetting two important things:
1) The laptop will default to connecting to any wireless network it can find and get onto; and
2) My uncle, being a complete idiot, has an unsecured wireless network.
So the laptop connects immediately to his wireless network - and gets infected within seconds by the trojan on his PC via the open network share. Fortunately, I had the Vista disc with me to do an immediate wipe and reinstall on the laptop as well, but it was still frustrating.
Because Onlive is temperamental, unreliable and prone to going bust.
PC gaming is strong right now. Very strong. If Valve would just release their Steam sales figures in a format that would let them fit into the industry sales charts, then we'd probably see some fairly scary stuff.
But this isn't new, and there is a reason for it.
"PC gaming is dying" is an over-used cliche, albeit one that sometimes (but not currently) is used with a degree of reasonable evidence behind it. PC gaming suffers early in a console cycle. When consoles are capable of putting out near-PC-quality technology, then they dominate the market. Developers aim for them for all kinds of reasons (installed base, ease of development for a consistent platform etc).
But towards the end of a console cycle, the PC has pulled far away in technological terms. All of those clever people who got into games development because they want to push technical frontiers want to develop for the PC. And at some point, they reach a critical mass that even the suits go along with them, justifying it on the basis that it's adaptation for the next console generation. Meanwhile, the quality gap between PC games and console games grows to the point where players start leaping to the former.
We've kind of forgotten this, because it didn't happen at the end of the last console generation. The PS2/Xbox/Gamecube were killed just a bit too early. Many of the PS2's best games came out after the PS3's release. This time around, it's different. A bargain basement PC can easily move graphics way in advance of what the 360/PS3/Wii are capable of.
And the next generation is still some time off. The Wii-U doesn't count. They're talking about PS3 technical parity. Just... lol. The Wii-U is, I suspect, going to be a sales flop of the kind we've not seen in a decade or more. It has a badly-communicated input device and underwhelming tech specs. The Wii succeeded (in the early years, before dying early) because it had a simple, easily understood and easily marketed selling point. The Wii-U has no such thing. The successors to the 360 and PS3 are what matters. And right now, we know nothing about them.
PC gaming has actually been close to victory in the past. Between the point where the SNES became obsolete and the PS1 launched, console gaming went through an existential crisis. Remember the Saturn? The 3D0? Remember anything worth playing on them? No, me neither. If not for the Sony Playstation and its unexpected success, the PC might have become the de facto leader in the games market.
Of course, the Playstation got Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, became a world-conquering phenomenon and the PC slipped back again. But now... the dice are in the air again.
Yes, how dare people who have paid money for a product - or whose job is to advise people whether to spend money on a product - express anything other than abject admiration for it.
Utterly shocking.
Sarcasm aside, I think the opposite is true; Nintendo (and Japanese developers in general) suffer from an overly-loyal core fanbase that will gobble up whatever gets shovelled at them and scream for more, no matter how tired it is.
Nintendo's bad in this respect, but it's not the worst. The fact that, judging by the ongoing train of sequels, there actually appears to be a market for the Hyperdimension Neptunia and Argarest Wars games makes me cry real tears.
I think there's probably quite a simple explanation for this. The amount of debt that students in England and Wales will likely need to take on (barring rich parents) to pay for a degree has risen significantly from this year (not quite at US levels yet, but getting much closer). At the same time, the huge expansion in the numbers going to university has meant that the chances of a degree leading to graduate-level employment have fallen sharply.
The perception now is that if you want to go from university into a "good" job, then you need either a science degree, or an arts degree from one of the elite institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, or one of the other top 10 or so universities). A decade ago, studying a "silly" degree for three years could be justified, from the point of view of an 18 year old, on the basis that it meant you got three years of the student lifestyle. If you didn't get a graduate-level job at the end of it, then at least it hadn't cost you all that much. This has changed now (and in a funny way, this is probably a good thing).
Whether the conventional wisdom will actually prove correct for students starting undergraduate degrees in September this year, I don't know. I suspect a maths degree will always make you more employable than a media studies one, but there's no reason to suspect that any portion of the graduate jobs market is immune to over-saturation.
As tends to get pointed out quite frequently, what we lack in the UK (and have lacked for decades now) is a network of decent technical colleges to prepare people for skilled non-academic jobs.
Problem with the CoD ports on the Wii is that they just aren't very good. I mean, I'm not saying CoD on PC/PS3/360 is actually good, but the Wii ports are awful. Plus, without the aid of the camera-assisted "cheating" that the PS Move does, the Wii Mote (and the Plus version) are just too unsteady for proper precise aim.
The Kinect is a clever little device - I've been really impressed at some of the uses that people have found for it. I'm sure that the next-gen version will be cleverer still and, if MS continue to be as admirably "open"(ish) with the hardware as they were with the first one, then I'm sure we'll see some useful applications of it. I can also see something like this being the future of TV remote controls - until they ruined it a bit with the new dashboard, the ability to control my 360 using voice and gestures (including in stuff like Sky Player) was really convenient.
But the problem with the Kinect is that - for everything bar exercise software (where it's fair-to-middling) - it's an awful games controller. It's really, really bad at sensing rapid movements. I mean, it's generally ok at tracking movements that are relatively slow and considered, but at higher speeds, it struggles. And that's a major problem, given that it pretty much rules out any game that involves precision at speed (which many, many games do).
Now in fairness, the Wii-mote has similar problems, even in its "Plus" incarnation - and, indeed, plenty of Wii games have been ruined or at least harmed by that. But for the most part, developers overcome this by augmenting motion controls with button inputs. Indeed, some of the best games on the Wii, like Super Smash Brothers Brawl, make no use of the motion controls at all.
For the most part, to be honest, I think motion control has been a bit of a passing fad. However, there's one counter-point to this I've found, which is slightly surprising. The Playstation Move came late to the party, is technologically unimpressive (it's a Wii-mote that "cheats" via the addition of a basic camera that tracks a coloured ball on the end) and hasn't created much excitement. However, I've played both Killzone 3 and Resistance 3 using it (augmented by the navigation controller) and can confirm that for playing an fps on a console, it is way, way better than a twin-stick controller. It gives a degree of fine precision to your aim that rivals that of a keyboard and mouse. Large, rapid turns are still a problem compared to PC input, but the gap over traditional console controllers is huge. There's a similar effect on the Vita, actually, where Uncharted allows for something similar via tilt controls. This is one area where I think existing motion control technology can actually enhance games in the long-run, rather than being a short lived party novelty.
Well yes, but Creative Assembly have "considered" the idea of a console version of the Total War games before. And I challenge you to find a more definitively "PC" series than that.