That's true in as far as it goes, but I think there's more to it than that.
The money Valve will be raking in from Steam must surely dwarf the money they get from the sales of one of their in-house games. So even if it's not the ideal way to manage one of their game properties in its own right, the incentive for them is to do whatever they can to get people onto the PC and using Steam. And if that means screwing over the console versions a bit, then so be it.
As I said in the original post, I like my 360 and PS3 and use them lots. But my word it is nice to see the boot on the other foot from the PC perspective for once.
The 360 and PS3 are aging and have no successors on the horizon. If I were a betting man, I would put money on the Wii2 being the next Dreamcast. If Valve really want to make a big PC gaming push, then now is the time.
I think this is actually a pretty crafty (and aggressive) move by Valve. One of the frustrations of gaming on the PC is seeing consoles get exclusive content in many games, paid for by the console manufacturer. Usually, the PC is left to languish and pick up the scraps - and sometimes doesn't get the extra content at all (for example, Dead Space 2). Now, an early release (and likely only a very slightly early one) isn't exactly the same as extra content, but it's still a perk for PC players - and various forums today illustrate that this has upset a lot of console gamers.
Why should Valve do this? Because they now have a huge vested interest in the PC as a gaming platform. They're taking a cut on every PC game sold via Steam - which is a large proportion of PC games these days. So for the first time in many years, the PC actually has somebody fighting its corner as a platform in a vaguely effective way. And by dangling a (largely neutered) version of Steam in front of PS3 gamers, they're getting free advertising for their own service and platform.
And if anybody wants to call them evil and scheming, then they have the counter-argument that they're doing all this by getting people to play indie games.
Me? I like gaming on the PC... and on the 360 and PS3. But the PC does have unique features as a platform and I'm glad that there are people out there with actual industry clout who are promoting it.
No, the Wii has low-quality shovelware (which I don't even count, given that 90% of these titles are just bad party games) and first party titles and almost nothing in between, barring a few highly stripped down cash-ins for the big franchises. The PS2 had Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and pretty much every other big cross-platform franchise. Yes, it had a degree of shovelware, but it was fairly irrelevant given the array of big-name titles, mid-market but still decent games and small-budget Japanese quirkiness like Disgaea.
The PS2's software lineup was on an entirely different planet from the Wii's. Compare the PS2 releases from 2006 or 2007 with the Wii releases for this year and you'll see what I mean.
Those are valid questions, but there is one that is even more crushingly important:
Are Nintendo prepared to swallow their pride and do whatever it takes to get a large number of decent third party developers properly committed to the system?
In other words, are they doing all they can to ensure that we don't end up with an N64/Gamecube/Wii situation where by 2 years after launch, the system settles into a cycle of "first party game every 6 months, nothing else of note in the interim"? This would require a pretty big culture shift from the company, with them easing up on some of their paternalist control-freak tendancies and actually trying to get at least parts of the rest of the industry to like them.
Nintendo probably do need to get another console out there, but unless they can actually get the games they need to sell the thing (and first party alone won't cut the mustard), they risk it becoming the next Dreamcast (which is what happened the last time sombody tried to jump ahead of the cycle).
Yeah, this is indeed a problem. There are a few "meaty" games on the Wii - but an awful lot of them are actually PS2 ports. I enjoyed Sakura Wars on the Wii - but then realised that there was a PS2 version out there as well which had better controls and the option of the Japanese language voice track. So even when I found a Wii game I could "get my teeth into", I still ended up regretting the purchase.
Zelda is firmly "been there, done that, bought the T-shirt" now and if I am not prepared to shell out cash to go through the exact same progression and story all over again. Metroid has gone in a few experimental directions recently without actually being particularly good - plus their genre means that they really do suffer next to the competition from not being on an HD console. The party games are... well... party games (and to be honest, Raving Rabbids tends to do it better than the Nintendo first-party stuff). I hated, loathed and despised Mario Kart Wii for stripping the last few "racing" elements out of what was once a decent series. Smash Brothers Brawl was fairly good, but over quickly. The only first party Nintendo game to have felt "meaty" recently was Mario Galaxy 2. And the third party titles? Don't make me laugh...
It's a pity really, because in their (entirely typical) arrogance, Nintendo have missed a colossal opportunity. There are a lot of Japanese developers who are scared to make the jump onto the HD consoles properly. They clung to the PS2 until the last possible moment. Now, a lot of these developers are putting out rubbish, but there are some absolute gems in the mix, such as Persona 3 and 4. These are really, seriously meaty games - 60 hour playthroughs at an absolute minimum, with replay value - and there are actually quite a lot of them. If Nintendo had aggressively courted these developers, it could have pretty much cornered the "quirky but substantial Japanese games" market. There were a few half-hearted stabs in this direction, including a Monster Hunter game, but nothing that really had much appeal - and even those efforts seem to have dried up now. Instead, these games all seem to come out on the PSP (and occasionally the DS). Missed opportunity...
Ironically, despite my earlier post and general Nintendo-sceptic attitude, my Wii does get switched on every day - for Wii Fit.
It's been partially supplanted by Your Shape on the Kinnect, but it's still a good way of motivating myself to actually exercise daily and has been instrumental in me dropping almost 4 stone and getting back into the "normal" range on the BMI chart.
But the last time I fired up a game that isn't Wii Fit Plus on the thing? God knows. I gave a rented copy of Epic Mickey a go for about an hour, before the camera controls drove me to despair. Before that? Probably Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, which I played through out of affection for the film, although the graphics and controls were truly painful.
I think this is correct. I also think that there's a big issue here about the audience that Nintendo were chasing - non-gamers. They did so very successfully during the Wii's early years. I have colleagues and relatives who would never have bought a "normal" console who bought a Wii. Back in 2007, this was the cool thing to have on the middle-class dinner party circuit.
Thing is, however, the novelty does wear off quite fast and the people who bought the Wii when it was cool and fun have moved on to other things - things which don't involve gaming. Gaming wasn't a part of their life before they bought the Wii, then they played with it for a few weeks and now gaming isn't part of their life again. They might get a short spike of renewed interest if there's another cool new accessory like the balance board, but the law of diminishing returns is very much in effect. They're certainly not going out and buying the games, so the system becomes a graveyard for third party developers, even the ones who do have decent products.
I do wonder whether the 3DS will suffer a similar fate - potentially worse, because I don't think it's had the kind of unprecedented launch hype that the Wii had. It's certainly vulnerable in some respects; the 3d effect will prove to be a gimmick for most people; I can't use it for more than 20 minutes without a splitting headache and pretty much all of the reviews I've read mention that the reviewer turned the 3d off after a day or two. Once you strip the 3d away, you're left with a platform that starts to look a lot like a more expensive and region-locked PSP (complete with loading times, battery life problems and single-analogue-stick control issues).
It could indicate the Wii 2 - or it could just indicate that Nintendo has once again managed to run out of first-party games to ship at pretty much the exact moment that the last remaining third party developers lose all interest in their platform. It wouldn't be the first time.
That said, I think Kotaku probably have this right. The Wii had a very strong few years but is pretty conclusively stalled now - I suspect that despite its early sales lead, it would still end up in third place overall if the cycle were allowed to run for 10 years as some had suggested. MS and Sony have far stronger release lineups for their platforms across pretty much every genre and have hardware that is probably good for a couple more years at least (though I've always been dubious about the 10 year claim). Nintendo will no doubt have a war-chest due to the Wii's early sales, so moving to a new platform which, at the very least, has technical parity with the 360 and PS3 to enable easier cross-platform development would be a smart move. Besides, with the 3DS's long-term success still far from guaranteed, they probably need another basket to keep some of their eggs in.
The big challenge for them is going to be getting third party developers to actually stick with their platform this time, in a way that they haven't for several console cycles now. This probably means facilitating cross-platform development, backing off with some of the "obnoxious" behaviour that they often seem to deploy with the wider industry and, perhaps most importantly, making a real effort to promote third party games on their system and demonstrating that they can actually sell. I'd also suggest shipping any new console with a "proper" controller as well as a motion-wand - a lot of games have felt really "forced" on the Wii-mote/nunchuck and you can't count on everybody going out and buying the classic controller when it's sold separately.
In fairness - I'm in my 30s and have absolutely no interest in my mobile phone, beyond its occasional uses as a tool (I can make £10 of pre-paid credit last 3 months). However, while I'm fine with parents and grandparents, present me with a room full of my extended family and I will find something else - anything else - to be deeply absorbed in. I've made the back of a cereal packet last three hours under those kind of circumstances.
Now, ok, I might just have an unusually repulsive extended family (actually, I'm pretty sure I do), but thinking back to the 16 year old me (in the days before the newly-fangled interweb was much more than a collection of geocities pages with strobe-effect pictures of kittens and hence not worth getting addicted to), nothing horrified me more than the prospect of family parties.
Bulletstorm does at least allow you three weapons (albeit with one of them always locked to the assault rifle - which is at least useful). But yes, it would have been even better if you could have done longer multi-weapon chains.
I wonder if there's a consolisation issue here. A keyboard has lots of buttons for quick weapon selection - a console controller doesn't, so designers tend to retreat to a single "switch weapons" button. The original Resistance and the likes of Ratchet & Clank have shown that weapon-wheels work just fine, but for some reason few developers seem willing to go in this direction.
Bad AI is, I think, a deliberate feature of many modern fpses, particularly those in the Call of Duty mold. What these games are selling is a "cinematic experience" which involves allowing the player to mow down vast numbers of enemies with relative ease. It's unrealistic as hell - and it hardly contributes to the whole po-faced "serious and thoughtful treatment of war" that the likes of Medal of Honor pretend to be - but it's integral to the game and, going off sales figures, it seems to be what a lot of customers want.
The problem with better AI in shooters is that, unsurprisingly, it means that the designers can't throw as many enemies at the player at one time. This in turn means that they don't get the same kind of cinematic experience. Which means they don't get the "oooh flashy" screenshots and promotional videos. Which means that the marketing department tells them it won't sell.
To be honest, I can see both sides of this one. The original Doom is great fun and a large part of that hinges around the player's ability to cut a swathe through huge numbers of braindead demons. If you couldn't take out 5 imps with a single rocket, the game would lose something. That said, the few instances of decent AI in shooters out there (such as the original FEAR) have also produced some fun games.
What does annoy me is when a game pretends it's in any way realistic, but then still insists on the "vast numbers of dumb enemies" trope. This is why the Medal of Honor remake annoyed me as much as it did and why I'm pretty much through with the Call of Duty series.
The good news is that it seems Insomniac have heard this loud and clear. The third game is bringing back the weapon-wheel and, I believe, split-screen modes (though would need to check the latter).
I think you're right about Gears of War. They probably compared R1's sales to GoW's and felt envious, forgetting that GoW was released for a mature platform which already had a large installed base, while R1 was a launch title for a system that proved a bit of a slow-starter.
Not sure I agree with that. Short and easy are different concepts. Plenty of modern games - including console games - which typify everything I said above are actually quite difficult. Halo Reach was one particular example - I found it a good bit harder than many other fpses, including a lot of old ones. But it's hard for all the wrong reasons - it has a serious hard on for inflicting cheap deaths and 1-hit-kills on the player, combined with a moronically broken checkpoint system.
In fact, old games are often a lot easier than you might remember. If you're used to modern fpses, you can probably blast through the original Quake (perhaps the original "game whose campaign was crap because of the multiplayer focus") on the top difficulty setting in a couple of hours. Doom, Duke Nukem 3d, Quake 2 etc all fall into the same category. The Halos and Call of Duties of this world are actually a good bit harder by comparison - but mostly because they rely on cheap Dragon's Lair-style game mechanics.
The same holds true for RTSes. The original Command & Conquer and Warcraft 2 feel ludicrously easy these days. Play Starcraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2 on anything above the minimum difficulty and they are much harder. Probably the only genre which has gotten consistently easier is the RPG; generally because gamers outside of Japan no longer tolerate the insane amounts of grinding (and sometimes sheer bloody obtusness) that these games used to require in the 80s and early 90s.
Oh god yes, I couldn't agree more. The real problem I have with multiplayer modes forced into games that don't need them is that they often end up forcing the game design down particular pathways, which don't always improve the experience.
Take weapon balance, for example. Multiplayer gamers these days being too lazy to actually find and pick up weapons like we had do back in the days of Doom and Quake (yes, yes, get off my lawn etc), the trend is for game designers to try to make sure that all of the weapons in first and third person shooters are "balanced". And yet for me, part of the appeal of a decent first person shooter is upgrading my arsenal as I go along; picking up better weapons and managing the limited ammo available for them. Remember the first time you found a BFG in Doom? You don't get feelings like that too often any more, as there's an absolute terror of allowing one weapon to be "better" than any of the others. I suspect that similar considerations force the adoption of my least favorite trope of modern action gaming ever - the 2 weapons limit. This absolutely ruined the campaign in Resistance 2 (sequel to what I still maintain is the best console fps ever) by making it far riskier to actually experiment with all the weird and wacky weapons that are Insomniac's speciality - if you can only carry two weapons at a time, you're going to stick with the rifle+shotgun combo 95% of the time and trust the game to put a sniper rifle in your path if you come up on one of the obligatory sniping sections.
Then there's the ridiculously short campaigns that are often justified on the basis of multiplayer. Look at something like Homefront; a game which is ostensibly all about its plot and setting has a ludicrous campaign that I beat in less than 4 and a half hours, which doesn't do anything to actually delve into the world they've created. And the excuse - there's multiplayer. It's noticable that Bulletstorm, which de-emphasises multiplayer as far as a modern marketing department will allow, bucks this trend and actually has a pretty decent campaign length (I brought my first playthrough home in a little under 11 hours).
I know there are people out there who really dig multiplayer in these things. But there are a lot of us who don't; after being very, very heavily into the Counter-Strike scene 8-10 years ago, I have had enough experience of being sworn at in German by 14 year olds for this lifetime. Multiplayer these days is limited to occasional co-op with real-life friends - and that doesn't require absolutely every game to have a tagged on multiplayer modes. Besides - pick a random "yesterday's big thing" shooter - 6 months old or greater - that wasn't a massive multiplayer phenomenon like a CoD or Halo and then try to find a server with more than 2 people on it. I did this with a few games on my steam list and in most cases, it just wasn't happening.
I didn't say I wouldn't use the device - I said I wouldn't use the 3d. The thing is still going to get games that I want - unlike their full-sized machines, Nintendo handhelds tend to have very decent third party support and with Japanese developers scared to death of the HD consoles, the handhelds will still get a lot of the quirky and obscure stuff I like. There's just a part of me that wishes that they'd ditched the whole 3d thing and put out a more normal "DS2".
It is, but I suspect a lot of that power is going on the 3d and isn't actually available for games to use on straightforward visual quality. If you take the 3DS version of Ridge Racer and put it alongside the PSP version (which wasn't quite a launch title, but was still one of the earliest games on the system), then when both games are running in 2d, the PSP game looks notably better, with significantly more detail (plus the higher resolution).
Now, it's entirely legitimate to counter that the 3DS looks better due to its 3d effect and for a lot of people this will be valid. Unfortunately, since the 3d causes me actual physical pain after a fairly short time, I don't see myself using it much going forward.
I picked up my 3DS at UK launch on Friday. So far, I've had a single black-screen (which happened on quitting a game), which isn't a major irritation. The hinges, however, are very, very loose - if the thing isn't in the "full open" position, it tends to either flop towards that or to flop closed. Other than that, it feels like a fairly nice piece of kit, rather than the "plastic toy" feel you got from the DS.
The biggest problem for me has been headaches associated with even the mildest 3d settings. I've made a more detailed post about that (and other experiences with the machine more generally) in my journal, though it may be a bit on the tl;dr side.
Obviously, turning the 3d off solves this problem, but that does leave you with a machine that is basically an expensive and slightly underpowered PSP with a touchscreen.
I posted a bunch of thoughts on the 3DS based on my early experiences with it in my journal. The TL;DR version is that it made my head-throb and my eyes feel tired after about 15 minutes, and if I kept on playing beyond that, I was letting myself in for several hours of headache.
If EA are sending out takedown notices, then they really had better have an official port in the pipeline. I'm going to leave aside the moral dimensions of copyright law for a moment and focus on something else - the fact that this is a game that needs preserving in an accessible form.
Ultima IV is, to my mind, one of the most important games in the history of computer and video gaming as a medium. While the first three Ultima games (and Akalabeth) had been relatively straightforward "hack and slash" type RPGs, Ultima IV was revolutionary. It was a game based around morality, where the objective wasn't to defeat the big bad and save the world, but rather become a paragon of virtue. It was an early sign that the medium was capable of "growing up" and its influence over the years has been immense. While hack and slash still predominates, you can see the influence of Ultima IV underpinning pretty much every Bioware RPG, as well as a whole host of other games which attempt to tell more sophisticated stories or allow the player a degree of freedom in how to accomplish objectives.
In terms of significance to the development of the RPG genre, I'd rank Ultima IV as sitting alongside the second installments in the Final Fantasy and Baldur's Gate series - the former for its development of what we now recognise as the standard model for Japanese RPG storytelling and the latter for re-popularising the genre in the West following a major period of decline in the mid-90s.
It's a sad fact that because people at the time saw them as ephemeral, many of the significant early works in film and television have been lost forever. It would be nice - and no doubt welcomed by future generations - if we could actually preserve the most important early gaming titles in a readily playable form.
Indeed - and the problem with the Intellimouse Explorer 3 is that despite quite a bit of prodding around, I've never found a way to open it up and clean the wheel-joints that doesn't actually break the thing.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that TFA is actually a gratuitous piece of advertising fluff, which basically says "our competitors' products are rubbish so buy ours"...
I've tried all kinds of mice over the years, including high-end Razer gaming mice and the like - and to be honest, I've never found that there's any kind of big, glaring performance difference. I think the most important thing with regard to mice is just to find one that you're comfortable with. For me, the Intellimouse Explorer 3 (but emphatically not the later versions) fits my hand well and has the right number of buttons positioned just where I want them, so I use that. It also has the advantage of being pretty cheap, which is handy since the wheel tends to gum up after 18 months or so in a way that I've never been able to fix, requiring periodic replacements.
But at the end of the day, any "performance" differences are going to be pretty slim, so I'd just focus on getting something you're comfortable with and that supports your hand properly, to avoid joint pains later in life. The same goes for the keyboard - I've seen players with expensive gaming mice risk giving themselves all kinds of RSI by using keyboards which, through either sheer cheap-and-nastiness or plain old bad design, force their hands into all kinds of contortions.
I doubt it's a publicity stunt. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that they were a bit nervous about the feedback they got when they let the gaming press loose on the game last month.
The feedback was by no means universally negative - it was clear that a lot of the journos really, really wanted to like the game (as do I). Besides, previews in this industry (as in most other entertainment industries) tend to focus on the positive. However, there were quite a few coded (and sometimes not so coded) caveats in the reviews. Comments about a lack of graphical polish, about poor physics and level design that left players confused about where to go next. Experience shows that in some cases, criticism like that is a prelude to either a lukewarm reception or, in some cases, a critical pasting. Look at the build up to the release of the AvP game last year for comparisons.
If the kind of niggles highlighted were the kind of thing that could be ironed out with a month or so of extra polish, then I'm not entirely surprised they decided to push the game back a little.
My own biggest concern about the game? It seems to subscribe the that utterly infuriating modern diktat that the player in an fps can never be allowed to carry more than 2 or 3 weapons at a time. This is a stupid, over-rated device that has no place anywhere but at the hardcore end of the military simulator range (eg. Operation Flashpoint). All it achieves in most games is to push players away from the more interesting parts of the arsenal on offer and towards the "rifle and shotgun" safe combo. It ruined Resistance 2 and I'm desperately hoping it doesn't ruin DNF.
The whole point behind TFA is that online distribution methods have made the "international release" thing pretty trivial. You even mention Steam in your own post - and Steam is by no means the only option. The "support" issue is pretty much redundant. If your game has a bug you need to patch, said patch doesn't really need too much in the way of regional variation. And hey, I never said anything about obliging people to provide translations.
Now in an ideal world - which is to say a completely implausible world that exists only in my frenzied imagination - copyright protections would not apply to works that were "released" globally but not available in your territory. Which would, in most cases, give the industry a choice between "simultaneous worldwide releases" or "three days of legal, state endorsed piracy-mania in Europe".
Yes, I know there are a billion and one reasons why this would never happen, but I still smile at the thought.
As others have said, your PSP has a duff battery. I get a clear 6 hours out of mine, provided I'm using headphones.
The batteries do wear out over time - I've known them drop as low as 2 hours charge and am now on my third battery since I got my PSP at launch in 2005. This has never been much of a problem for a system where battery replacements are cheap and easy to do. If the NGP isn't going to let you swap the battery, however, then I have serious reservations. I've actually no idea whether the 3DS allows for battery swapping. If it doesn't, then the same concerns would apply.
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That's true in as far as it goes, but I think there's more to it than that.
The money Valve will be raking in from Steam must surely dwarf the money they get from the sales of one of their in-house games. So even if it's not the ideal way to manage one of their game properties in its own right, the incentive for them is to do whatever they can to get people onto the PC and using Steam. And if that means screwing over the console versions a bit, then so be it.
As I said in the original post, I like my 360 and PS3 and use them lots. But my word it is nice to see the boot on the other foot from the PC perspective for once.
The 360 and PS3 are aging and have no successors on the horizon. If I were a betting man, I would put money on the Wii2 being the next Dreamcast. If Valve really want to make a big PC gaming push, then now is the time.
I think this is actually a pretty crafty (and aggressive) move by Valve. One of the frustrations of gaming on the PC is seeing consoles get exclusive content in many games, paid for by the console manufacturer. Usually, the PC is left to languish and pick up the scraps - and sometimes doesn't get the extra content at all (for example, Dead Space 2). Now, an early release (and likely only a very slightly early one) isn't exactly the same as extra content, but it's still a perk for PC players - and various forums today illustrate that this has upset a lot of console gamers.
Why should Valve do this? Because they now have a huge vested interest in the PC as a gaming platform. They're taking a cut on every PC game sold via Steam - which is a large proportion of PC games these days. So for the first time in many years, the PC actually has somebody fighting its corner as a platform in a vaguely effective way. And by dangling a (largely neutered) version of Steam in front of PS3 gamers, they're getting free advertising for their own service and platform.
And if anybody wants to call them evil and scheming, then they have the counter-argument that they're doing all this by getting people to play indie games.
Me? I like gaming on the PC... and on the 360 and PS3. But the PC does have unique features as a platform and I'm glad that there are people out there with actual industry clout who are promoting it.
No, the Wii has low-quality shovelware (which I don't even count, given that 90% of these titles are just bad party games) and first party titles and almost nothing in between, barring a few highly stripped down cash-ins for the big franchises. The PS2 had Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and pretty much every other big cross-platform franchise. Yes, it had a degree of shovelware, but it was fairly irrelevant given the array of big-name titles, mid-market but still decent games and small-budget Japanese quirkiness like Disgaea.
The PS2's software lineup was on an entirely different planet from the Wii's. Compare the PS2 releases from 2006 or 2007 with the Wii releases for this year and you'll see what I mean.
Those are valid questions, but there is one that is even more crushingly important:
Are Nintendo prepared to swallow their pride and do whatever it takes to get a large number of decent third party developers properly committed to the system?
In other words, are they doing all they can to ensure that we don't end up with an N64/Gamecube/Wii situation where by 2 years after launch, the system settles into a cycle of "first party game every 6 months, nothing else of note in the interim"? This would require a pretty big culture shift from the company, with them easing up on some of their paternalist control-freak tendancies and actually trying to get at least parts of the rest of the industry to like them.
Nintendo probably do need to get another console out there, but unless they can actually get the games they need to sell the thing (and first party alone won't cut the mustard), they risk it becoming the next Dreamcast (which is what happened the last time sombody tried to jump ahead of the cycle).
Yeah, this is indeed a problem. There are a few "meaty" games on the Wii - but an awful lot of them are actually PS2 ports. I enjoyed Sakura Wars on the Wii - but then realised that there was a PS2 version out there as well which had better controls and the option of the Japanese language voice track. So even when I found a Wii game I could "get my teeth into", I still ended up regretting the purchase.
Zelda is firmly "been there, done that, bought the T-shirt" now and if I am not prepared to shell out cash to go through the exact same progression and story all over again. Metroid has gone in a few experimental directions recently without actually being particularly good - plus their genre means that they really do suffer next to the competition from not being on an HD console. The party games are... well... party games (and to be honest, Raving Rabbids tends to do it better than the Nintendo first-party stuff). I hated, loathed and despised Mario Kart Wii for stripping the last few "racing" elements out of what was once a decent series. Smash Brothers Brawl was fairly good, but over quickly. The only first party Nintendo game to have felt "meaty" recently was Mario Galaxy 2. And the third party titles? Don't make me laugh...
It's a pity really, because in their (entirely typical) arrogance, Nintendo have missed a colossal opportunity. There are a lot of Japanese developers who are scared to make the jump onto the HD consoles properly. They clung to the PS2 until the last possible moment. Now, a lot of these developers are putting out rubbish, but there are some absolute gems in the mix, such as Persona 3 and 4. These are really, seriously meaty games - 60 hour playthroughs at an absolute minimum, with replay value - and there are actually quite a lot of them. If Nintendo had aggressively courted these developers, it could have pretty much cornered the "quirky but substantial Japanese games" market. There were a few half-hearted stabs in this direction, including a Monster Hunter game, but nothing that really had much appeal - and even those efforts seem to have dried up now. Instead, these games all seem to come out on the PSP (and occasionally the DS). Missed opportunity...
Ironically, despite my earlier post and general Nintendo-sceptic attitude, my Wii does get switched on every day - for Wii Fit.
It's been partially supplanted by Your Shape on the Kinnect, but it's still a good way of motivating myself to actually exercise daily and has been instrumental in me dropping almost 4 stone and getting back into the "normal" range on the BMI chart.
But the last time I fired up a game that isn't Wii Fit Plus on the thing? God knows. I gave a rented copy of Epic Mickey a go for about an hour, before the camera controls drove me to despair. Before that? Probably Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, which I played through out of affection for the film, although the graphics and controls were truly painful.
I think this is correct. I also think that there's a big issue here about the audience that Nintendo were chasing - non-gamers. They did so very successfully during the Wii's early years. I have colleagues and relatives who would never have bought a "normal" console who bought a Wii. Back in 2007, this was the cool thing to have on the middle-class dinner party circuit.
Thing is, however, the novelty does wear off quite fast and the people who bought the Wii when it was cool and fun have moved on to other things - things which don't involve gaming. Gaming wasn't a part of their life before they bought the Wii, then they played with it for a few weeks and now gaming isn't part of their life again. They might get a short spike of renewed interest if there's another cool new accessory like the balance board, but the law of diminishing returns is very much in effect. They're certainly not going out and buying the games, so the system becomes a graveyard for third party developers, even the ones who do have decent products.
I do wonder whether the 3DS will suffer a similar fate - potentially worse, because I don't think it's had the kind of unprecedented launch hype that the Wii had. It's certainly vulnerable in some respects; the 3d effect will prove to be a gimmick for most people; I can't use it for more than 20 minutes without a splitting headache and pretty much all of the reviews I've read mention that the reviewer turned the 3d off after a day or two. Once you strip the 3d away, you're left with a platform that starts to look a lot like a more expensive and region-locked PSP (complete with loading times, battery life problems and single-analogue-stick control issues).
It could indicate the Wii 2 - or it could just indicate that Nintendo has once again managed to run out of first-party games to ship at pretty much the exact moment that the last remaining third party developers lose all interest in their platform. It wouldn't be the first time.
That said, I think Kotaku probably have this right. The Wii had a very strong few years but is pretty conclusively stalled now - I suspect that despite its early sales lead, it would still end up in third place overall if the cycle were allowed to run for 10 years as some had suggested. MS and Sony have far stronger release lineups for their platforms across pretty much every genre and have hardware that is probably good for a couple more years at least (though I've always been dubious about the 10 year claim). Nintendo will no doubt have a war-chest due to the Wii's early sales, so moving to a new platform which, at the very least, has technical parity with the 360 and PS3 to enable easier cross-platform development would be a smart move. Besides, with the 3DS's long-term success still far from guaranteed, they probably need another basket to keep some of their eggs in.
The big challenge for them is going to be getting third party developers to actually stick with their platform this time, in a way that they haven't for several console cycles now. This probably means facilitating cross-platform development, backing off with some of the "obnoxious" behaviour that they often seem to deploy with the wider industry and, perhaps most importantly, making a real effort to promote third party games on their system and demonstrating that they can actually sell. I'd also suggest shipping any new console with a "proper" controller as well as a motion-wand - a lot of games have felt really "forced" on the Wii-mote/nunchuck and you can't count on everybody going out and buying the classic controller when it's sold separately.
In fairness - I'm in my 30s and have absolutely no interest in my mobile phone, beyond its occasional uses as a tool (I can make £10 of pre-paid credit last 3 months). However, while I'm fine with parents and grandparents, present me with a room full of my extended family and I will find something else - anything else - to be deeply absorbed in. I've made the back of a cereal packet last three hours under those kind of circumstances.
Now, ok, I might just have an unusually repulsive extended family (actually, I'm pretty sure I do), but thinking back to the 16 year old me (in the days before the newly-fangled interweb was much more than a collection of geocities pages with strobe-effect pictures of kittens and hence not worth getting addicted to), nothing horrified me more than the prospect of family parties.
Bulletstorm does at least allow you three weapons (albeit with one of them always locked to the assault rifle - which is at least useful). But yes, it would have been even better if you could have done longer multi-weapon chains.
I wonder if there's a consolisation issue here. A keyboard has lots of buttons for quick weapon selection - a console controller doesn't, so designers tend to retreat to a single "switch weapons" button. The original Resistance and the likes of Ratchet & Clank have shown that weapon-wheels work just fine, but for some reason few developers seem willing to go in this direction.
Bad AI is, I think, a deliberate feature of many modern fpses, particularly those in the Call of Duty mold. What these games are selling is a "cinematic experience" which involves allowing the player to mow down vast numbers of enemies with relative ease. It's unrealistic as hell - and it hardly contributes to the whole po-faced "serious and thoughtful treatment of war" that the likes of Medal of Honor pretend to be - but it's integral to the game and, going off sales figures, it seems to be what a lot of customers want.
The problem with better AI in shooters is that, unsurprisingly, it means that the designers can't throw as many enemies at the player at one time. This in turn means that they don't get the same kind of cinematic experience. Which means they don't get the "oooh flashy" screenshots and promotional videos. Which means that the marketing department tells them it won't sell.
To be honest, I can see both sides of this one. The original Doom is great fun and a large part of that hinges around the player's ability to cut a swathe through huge numbers of braindead demons. If you couldn't take out 5 imps with a single rocket, the game would lose something. That said, the few instances of decent AI in shooters out there (such as the original FEAR) have also produced some fun games.
What does annoy me is when a game pretends it's in any way realistic, but then still insists on the "vast numbers of dumb enemies" trope. This is why the Medal of Honor remake annoyed me as much as it did and why I'm pretty much through with the Call of Duty series.
The good news is that it seems Insomniac have heard this loud and clear. The third game is bringing back the weapon-wheel and, I believe, split-screen modes (though would need to check the latter).
I think you're right about Gears of War. They probably compared R1's sales to GoW's and felt envious, forgetting that GoW was released for a mature platform which already had a large installed base, while R1 was a launch title for a system that proved a bit of a slow-starter.
Not sure I agree with that. Short and easy are different concepts. Plenty of modern games - including console games - which typify everything I said above are actually quite difficult. Halo Reach was one particular example - I found it a good bit harder than many other fpses, including a lot of old ones. But it's hard for all the wrong reasons - it has a serious hard on for inflicting cheap deaths and 1-hit-kills on the player, combined with a moronically broken checkpoint system.
In fact, old games are often a lot easier than you might remember. If you're used to modern fpses, you can probably blast through the original Quake (perhaps the original "game whose campaign was crap because of the multiplayer focus") on the top difficulty setting in a couple of hours. Doom, Duke Nukem 3d, Quake 2 etc all fall into the same category. The Halos and Call of Duties of this world are actually a good bit harder by comparison - but mostly because they rely on cheap Dragon's Lair-style game mechanics.
The same holds true for RTSes. The original Command & Conquer and Warcraft 2 feel ludicrously easy these days. Play Starcraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2 on anything above the minimum difficulty and they are much harder. Probably the only genre which has gotten consistently easier is the RPG; generally because gamers outside of Japan no longer tolerate the insane amounts of grinding (and sometimes sheer bloody obtusness) that these games used to require in the 80s and early 90s.
Oh god yes, I couldn't agree more. The real problem I have with multiplayer modes forced into games that don't need them is that they often end up forcing the game design down particular pathways, which don't always improve the experience.
Take weapon balance, for example. Multiplayer gamers these days being too lazy to actually find and pick up weapons like we had do back in the days of Doom and Quake (yes, yes, get off my lawn etc), the trend is for game designers to try to make sure that all of the weapons in first and third person shooters are "balanced". And yet for me, part of the appeal of a decent first person shooter is upgrading my arsenal as I go along; picking up better weapons and managing the limited ammo available for them. Remember the first time you found a BFG in Doom? You don't get feelings like that too often any more, as there's an absolute terror of allowing one weapon to be "better" than any of the others. I suspect that similar considerations force the adoption of my least favorite trope of modern action gaming ever - the 2 weapons limit. This absolutely ruined the campaign in Resistance 2 (sequel to what I still maintain is the best console fps ever) by making it far riskier to actually experiment with all the weird and wacky weapons that are Insomniac's speciality - if you can only carry two weapons at a time, you're going to stick with the rifle+shotgun combo 95% of the time and trust the game to put a sniper rifle in your path if you come up on one of the obligatory sniping sections.
Then there's the ridiculously short campaigns that are often justified on the basis of multiplayer. Look at something like Homefront; a game which is ostensibly all about its plot and setting has a ludicrous campaign that I beat in less than 4 and a half hours, which doesn't do anything to actually delve into the world they've created. And the excuse - there's multiplayer. It's noticable that Bulletstorm, which de-emphasises multiplayer as far as a modern marketing department will allow, bucks this trend and actually has a pretty decent campaign length (I brought my first playthrough home in a little under 11 hours).
I know there are people out there who really dig multiplayer in these things. But there are a lot of us who don't; after being very, very heavily into the Counter-Strike scene 8-10 years ago, I have had enough experience of being sworn at in German by 14 year olds for this lifetime. Multiplayer these days is limited to occasional co-op with real-life friends - and that doesn't require absolutely every game to have a tagged on multiplayer modes. Besides - pick a random "yesterday's big thing" shooter - 6 months old or greater - that wasn't a massive multiplayer phenomenon like a CoD or Halo and then try to find a server with more than 2 people on it. I did this with a few games on my steam list and in most cases, it just wasn't happening.
I didn't say I wouldn't use the device - I said I wouldn't use the 3d. The thing is still going to get games that I want - unlike their full-sized machines, Nintendo handhelds tend to have very decent third party support and with Japanese developers scared to death of the HD consoles, the handhelds will still get a lot of the quirky and obscure stuff I like. There's just a part of me that wishes that they'd ditched the whole 3d thing and put out a more normal "DS2".
It is, but I suspect a lot of that power is going on the 3d and isn't actually available for games to use on straightforward visual quality. If you take the 3DS version of Ridge Racer and put it alongside the PSP version (which wasn't quite a launch title, but was still one of the earliest games on the system), then when both games are running in 2d, the PSP game looks notably better, with significantly more detail (plus the higher resolution).
Now, it's entirely legitimate to counter that the 3DS looks better due to its 3d effect and for a lot of people this will be valid. Unfortunately, since the 3d causes me actual physical pain after a fairly short time, I don't see myself using it much going forward.
I picked up my 3DS at UK launch on Friday. So far, I've had a single black-screen (which happened on quitting a game), which isn't a major irritation. The hinges, however, are very, very loose - if the thing isn't in the "full open" position, it tends to either flop towards that or to flop closed. Other than that, it feels like a fairly nice piece of kit, rather than the "plastic toy" feel you got from the DS.
The biggest problem for me has been headaches associated with even the mildest 3d settings. I've made a more detailed post about that (and other experiences with the machine more generally) in my journal, though it may be a bit on the tl;dr side.
Obviously, turning the 3d off solves this problem, but that does leave you with a machine that is basically an expensive and slightly underpowered PSP with a touchscreen.
I posted a bunch of thoughts on the 3DS based on my early experiences with it in my journal. The TL;DR version is that it made my head-throb and my eyes feel tired after about 15 minutes, and if I kept on playing beyond that, I was letting myself in for several hours of headache.
If EA are sending out takedown notices, then they really had better have an official port in the pipeline. I'm going to leave aside the moral dimensions of copyright law for a moment and focus on something else - the fact that this is a game that needs preserving in an accessible form.
Ultima IV is, to my mind, one of the most important games in the history of computer and video gaming as a medium. While the first three Ultima games (and Akalabeth) had been relatively straightforward "hack and slash" type RPGs, Ultima IV was revolutionary. It was a game based around morality, where the objective wasn't to defeat the big bad and save the world, but rather become a paragon of virtue. It was an early sign that the medium was capable of "growing up" and its influence over the years has been immense. While hack and slash still predominates, you can see the influence of Ultima IV underpinning pretty much every Bioware RPG, as well as a whole host of other games which attempt to tell more sophisticated stories or allow the player a degree of freedom in how to accomplish objectives.
In terms of significance to the development of the RPG genre, I'd rank Ultima IV as sitting alongside the second installments in the Final Fantasy and Baldur's Gate series - the former for its development of what we now recognise as the standard model for Japanese RPG storytelling and the latter for re-popularising the genre in the West following a major period of decline in the mid-90s.
It's a sad fact that because people at the time saw them as ephemeral, many of the significant early works in film and television have been lost forever. It would be nice - and no doubt welcomed by future generations - if we could actually preserve the most important early gaming titles in a readily playable form.
Indeed - and the problem with the Intellimouse Explorer 3 is that despite quite a bit of prodding around, I've never found a way to open it up and clean the wheel-joints that doesn't actually break the thing.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that TFA is actually a gratuitous piece of advertising fluff, which basically says "our competitors' products are rubbish so buy ours"... I've tried all kinds of mice over the years, including high-end Razer gaming mice and the like - and to be honest, I've never found that there's any kind of big, glaring performance difference. I think the most important thing with regard to mice is just to find one that you're comfortable with. For me, the Intellimouse Explorer 3 (but emphatically not the later versions) fits my hand well and has the right number of buttons positioned just where I want them, so I use that. It also has the advantage of being pretty cheap, which is handy since the wheel tends to gum up after 18 months or so in a way that I've never been able to fix, requiring periodic replacements. But at the end of the day, any "performance" differences are going to be pretty slim, so I'd just focus on getting something you're comfortable with and that supports your hand properly, to avoid joint pains later in life. The same goes for the keyboard - I've seen players with expensive gaming mice risk giving themselves all kinds of RSI by using keyboards which, through either sheer cheap-and-nastiness or plain old bad design, force their hands into all kinds of contortions.
I doubt it's a publicity stunt. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that they were a bit nervous about the feedback they got when they let the gaming press loose on the game last month.
The feedback was by no means universally negative - it was clear that a lot of the journos really, really wanted to like the game (as do I). Besides, previews in this industry (as in most other entertainment industries) tend to focus on the positive. However, there were quite a few coded (and sometimes not so coded) caveats in the reviews. Comments about a lack of graphical polish, about poor physics and level design that left players confused about where to go next. Experience shows that in some cases, criticism like that is a prelude to either a lukewarm reception or, in some cases, a critical pasting. Look at the build up to the release of the AvP game last year for comparisons.
If the kind of niggles highlighted were the kind of thing that could be ironed out with a month or so of extra polish, then I'm not entirely surprised they decided to push the game back a little.
My own biggest concern about the game? It seems to subscribe the that utterly infuriating modern diktat that the player in an fps can never be allowed to carry more than 2 or 3 weapons at a time. This is a stupid, over-rated device that has no place anywhere but at the hardcore end of the military simulator range (eg. Operation Flashpoint). All it achieves in most games is to push players away from the more interesting parts of the arsenal on offer and towards the "rifle and shotgun" safe combo. It ruined Resistance 2 and I'm desperately hoping it doesn't ruin DNF.
The whole point behind TFA is that online distribution methods have made the "international release" thing pretty trivial. You even mention Steam in your own post - and Steam is by no means the only option. The "support" issue is pretty much redundant. If your game has a bug you need to patch, said patch doesn't really need too much in the way of regional variation. And hey, I never said anything about obliging people to provide translations.
Now in an ideal world - which is to say a completely implausible world that exists only in my frenzied imagination - copyright protections would not apply to works that were "released" globally but not available in your territory. Which would, in most cases, give the industry a choice between "simultaneous worldwide releases" or "three days of legal, state endorsed piracy-mania in Europe".
Yes, I know there are a billion and one reasons why this would never happen, but I still smile at the thought.
As others have said, your PSP has a duff battery. I get a clear 6 hours out of mine, provided I'm using headphones.
The batteries do wear out over time - I've known them drop as low as 2 hours charge and am now on my third battery since I got my PSP at launch in 2005. This has never been much of a problem for a system where battery replacements are cheap and easy to do. If the NGP isn't going to let you swap the battery, however, then I have serious reservations. I've actually no idea whether the 3DS allows for battery swapping. If it doesn't, then the same concerns would apply.