Editions may vary by region, so I'll link the version I have on pre-order. I wouldn't normally order something this daft, but I'm a major, long-time fan of the Gran Turismo series and even though I have quite a few misgivings about GT5, I felt I ought to push the boat out for it.
Of course, I've already got a nice steering wheel.
This particular marketing stunt has precisely one useful function... to make me feel slightly less bad about having a pre-order in for the £150 Gran Turismo 5 special edition.
That said, at least the Wrangler does actually seem to be real. God only knows if my £10 deposit on GT5 will ever translate into anything tangible.
Except as I said in my post, the concerts themselves, with all the special effects, have been going for over a year. I know it's a hassle, but do try to read before clicking "reply".
Erm... yes, that's great and all. Except Hatsune Miku has been around since 2007, and versons of the the Vocaloid software that powers "her" has been around a good bit longer (since 2004 or so, I think). I'm pretty sure I heard reference to special-effects-heavy concerts more than a year ago.
The software can be used, with a lot of practice, to do reasonably convincing versions of Japanese language songs. Attempts to use the Hatsune Miku vocaloid to do anything in English are usually hilariously awful. Fans of the game portal may be amused to note this rendition of the game's famous closing song... erm... Steal A Lamp.
In fairness, there are Vocaloids which can handle English much better, but this story seemed to be specifically about Hatsune Miku.
This is a slightly tricky one for me. I entirely in favour of very strong action against the development and use of cheats for multiplayer games. They ruin the experience for legitimate, paying customers. When Blizzard go after the developers of multiplayer RTS or WoW cheats, I'm with them 100%. Humiliate the users in public, lock their accounts and pursue the developers through the courts. They're damaging Blizzard's product and they should be treated accordingly.
Singleplayer cheats, however, are another story entirely. What I do in a singleplayer campaign should be entirely my own business; it may increase or decrease my own enjoyment of the game, but it isn't hurting anybody else. Part of the problem here, as I understand it, is that SC2 singleplayer cheat programs use software pathways that are difficult to distinguish from multiplayer cheats. So going after both of them looks like the "safest" option from Blizzard's point of view.
What we need is a return to the days of cheat-codes in games. IDDQD and that sort of thing. Game and platform developers have made this more difficult for themselves by adding a degree of meta-online functionality for singleplayer gaming via achievement systems. But there are already games out there which simply disable achievements while a cheat code is active. Skill levels among players vary wildly and a lot of singleplayer games are probably beyond the ability of many players to finish, which can be a profound irritation given the price tag that they carry. SC2 didn't give me any problems in blasting through the campaign; I was a fairly hardcore Warcraft 3 player for a while, so my RTS skills, while hardly top-end, are more than capable of handling the average singleplayer campaign. Other games, however, have had me desperate for some kind of cheat code to let me past a particularly irritating section (Halo: Reach had a few such moments). Let desperately frustrated players tap in a code to activate a singleplayer cheat and you remove a lot of the incentive to go searching for nasty third-party hacks.
Indeed. They've got some very, very serious rethinking to do just to get the game to a state where playing it doesn't cause actual pain. I'd say that the top priorities would need to be:
- A complete overhaul of the user-interface, rewriting it from the ground up. There is basically nothing in the current UI that strikes me as salvagable. - Implementation of an auction house or equivalent feature to allow for an actually-workable player-based economy. - Performance tuning so that the thing actually runs in a sensible way on even high end PCs. There's a huge mismatch at the moment between the quality of the visuals and the level of performance that a high end gaming PC can achieve. - Servers spread around the world, so that the game doesn't feel worse and worse the further you are from Japan. - Various other major bugfixes, particularly a fix to the "can't alt-tab out of full-screen mode" bug, which was present in FFXI as well.
Those strike me as an extremely fundamental set of changes, some of which would involve substantial rewrites of the game engine. Moreover, doing all of that would not guarantee the game's success. It would just pull it up to the kind of level where it doesn't feel actively broken. Even after doing all of that, the game still wouldn't even have begun to compete with the likes of WoW, Eve Online or LotR:O.
Given that Square-Enix never really made any fundamental changes to the FFXI formula over the years (beyond belatedly adding a windowed-mode option), I can't honestly see they'll even be able to get over the first hurdle. This game looks doomed to me.
It's astounding, isn't it? The manual tells you absolutely nothing about how to play the game. It talks you through the process of setting up an account and it has a keyboard command reference guide. There's a tiny bit of lore. But that's as much as you get.
This is not the kind of MMO that walks you through everything from the start. In WoW, when you create a character, you have a bunch of tips pop up on the screen as soon as you log in, and your first quest-giver is right in front of you. Other modern MMOs like Lord of the Rings online follow the same pattern. Older MMOs, like... well... Final Fantasy XI don't help you out like this. But with those games, the flow of what you're meant to do is pretty much readily apparently and an hour or two of exploration and trial and error will get you into the flow of things. FFXIV, however, is just mystifying. Now that it's been out for a couple of weeks, there are third party sites that will help you through the worst of the learning curve, but you will still spend a substantial portion of your time utterly mystified. And not in a good way.
It's not helped by the fact that the UI is an absolute atrocity. FFXI's interface has dated badly. It was always designed for cross-compatibility with consoles and it feels awfully shabby compared with the slick experience you get from WoW (especially with some nice - and fully ToS-compliant - 3rd party addons). As somebody who has been a hardcore player of (but subsequently kicked the habit of) both FFXI and WoW, what I wanted to see from FFXIV was an game that took the core strengths of FFXI, such as the rich combat system, the job/subjob system and the willingness to trust the players to manage the economy to a greater degree than in WoW-clones, and marries it with the improvements that WoW made to the genre, such as accessibility, interface and variety of gameplay. FFXIV spectacularly fails to deliver anything like this. It sacrifices FFXI's strengths (the subjob system is gone and there isn't even an auction house), while learning next to nothing from WoW and its clones.
I can't speak for Euro-based comparisons, but I do know that the US/UK games price comparison is more complicated than it seems. The UK does, at first glance, seem to get a bad deal on high-street games sales. While highly dependant upon the exchange rate, UK RRPs do tend to look around 25% higher, in my experience.
However...
I go to the US several times a year and always tend to pick up a few games while I'm out there, particularly if the exchange rate is good. What I always notice is how much slower US high-street retailers are to discount games, compared with their UK counterparts, and how few special-offers there are available in the US. I've seen games that are two or three months old and which weren't huge hits still retailing for $60 in Gamestop. In the UK, by contrast, such a game would generally have had in the region of a third knocked off its price by that point (and sometimes more if it had proven a difficult game to shift). Indeed, unless the game you want is either a really major release or right down at the other end of the scale in the "small, cult release" category, you can generally get more than 20% off the RRP just by waiting 2 weeks or so.
That said, we do tend to get stiffed in download-sales a bit, where certain retailers have a habit of just replacing the $ sign with a £. We also get the aggravating situation where some games that are released in the US never make it out over here (eg. Deathsmiles) or take many months to make it over (eg. Persona 3 and 4).
PC game prices used to be more expensive as well. I still have the original boxes for a few old PC games, with price stickers still intact. Their Finest Hour (1989 flight sim) cost £50. Ultima VII cost £40. The original X-Wing cost £45. So too did TIE Fighter. The B-Wing expansion pack for X-Wing cost £30. Gunship 2000 cost £50. Even before you adjust for inflation, it's clear that in the UK at least, PC games have gotten substantially cheaper. I can't remember the last time I spent more than £30 on a PC game that wasn't some kind of special edition.
That said, the packaging that these old games came in was vastly more elaborate than anything you'd get today. Their Finest Hour and Ultima VII in particular have all kinds of neat stuff in the box; mini-history books and cloth maps and the like.
Prices seemed to fall gradually throughout the mid and late 90s, looking at the games in my storage cupboard that still have price labels (a factor that makes it harder to track the trend once modern packaging with its emphasis on shrink-wrapping came in.
Contrary to what some of the comments above seem to assume, I don't think he's quite saying that handheld consoles as we know them today will completely replace full-sized consoles as we know them today. Rather, from what I can make out, he's predicting that consoles will converge at some point where they are portable, but can also be connected up to the mains and your TV/sound system when you're playing at home. This might not be completely ludicrous. After all, I know a few people, including a few fairly serious gamers, who use a laptop as their main machine, but who connect it up to a proper monitory, mouse and keyboard when at home; except at the very top end, the performance difference between laptops and desktops these days is narrower than it used to be.
However, I can kind of understand the "do not want" sentiments above, given the way that many developers, particularly Japanese developers, seem to have fled in terror from the full-sized consoles this generation and focussed instead on the handhelds. So in many franchises these days - I'm thinking particularly here of the likes of Kingdom Hearts and Metal Gear Solid (as far as I can tell, MGS4 was an anomaly and the series is now PSP/3DS focussed), most of the games released this generation have felt like a step backwards from what we were getting when the PS2 ruled the roost. And then we get the likes of Blue Dragon and Valkyria Chronicles, where you get a decent game (awesome, in the case of VC) that debuts on a proper console, only for the developer to milk the franchise mercilessly via churned out handheld sequels that are a step down in terms of both graphics and gameplay.
Amen to that. The PS3 back-compatibility story is a fiasco from start to finish.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I imported a first-gen 60 gig machine from the US, so I get the full hardware-based back compatibility. If you got the 20 gig with the software back-compatibility then you're a bit stuffed, as while the 360's software back-compatibility base has been expanded a few times over the years, I don't think Sony ever implemented (m)any of the planned expansions for the software on the PS3. And if you missed the boat on both of the first-gen Japanese or US models (which means anybody who lives in Europe and didn't import), then you get nothing. And if you got one of those early 60 gigs, then you'd better hope to god that it never breaks (something I live in constant terror of), because if it does, even if it's still under warrenty, you're looking at having to get a PS2 (and all the controllers, memory cards etc) as well.
And to make matters worse, while the PS3 today has a pretty decent games library (catching up fast on the 360 and well ahead of the Wii in most genres), for most of its lifespan to date, it was a bit of a desert for decent games. In fact, I suspect that if I could access a breakdown of the time my PS3 has spent in various games, PS2 games would still be significantly ahead of PS3 titles, largely thanks to the influence of late-cycle PS2 games like Final Fantasy 12 and Personas 3 and 4.
It's funny how developments that reduce the environmental impact of cars often originate from the high-performance end of the spectrum. While I'm no expert, my understanding is that sports such as Formula 1 and Indycar have done massive amounts to improve the fuel efficiency of the cars you see on the roads every day. After all, there's a clear and direct incentive when you have a high performance car out on the track to design something that can carry a smaller (and lighter) fuel tank or get away with fewer refuelling stops. And once you've developed that technology, you might as well make good use of it on a commercial basis.
I like the Steam wallet idea as a general principle, provided they develop it properly; gift-cards, in particular, have been a glaring omission from Steam for quite some time and I'd love to see them introduced. Yes, you can buy games as gifts for other steam users, but there's a relatively high barrier to doing so - you need to make an account, set up your payment details in it, mess around with the friends list etc. This means that unlike, say, Xbox Live, where you can just walk into a shop to buy a gift-card, there's no realistic way for non-gamers to give gift-cards to Steam-users. To be honest, given the number of gift cards that circulate every Christmas (not to mention birthdays throughout the year), I'm surprised they've missed out on this particular revenue stream for so long.
But I'm much less sold on the whole micro-payments for in-game content thing. I don't mind DLC as a concept; I've bought a good few pieces for games I'm particularly fond of; the Mass Effect games, Dragon Age, Forza 3 and Lost Odyssey spring to mind. However, these have all tended to be fairly substantial chunks of content that significantly extend the single-player experience. I tend to see these as small expansion packs, and provided they're priced appropriately, I'm happy to buy. The idea of buying plug-in content for a competitive multiplayer game, however, just feels like a bridge too far...
None of the DLC on offer here really seems to add anything new to the game. As they say, it's only really cosmetic stuff that can't be obtained via entirely in-game methods. And I'm sorry, but while cosmetic stuff as DLC has been there from the infancy of the concept (yay horse armour), I'm still not going to part money for that. So what you're really buying is a shortcut. They're mixing the in-game and real-world economies and allowing people willing to spend real money to speed up their progress in the game.
It's very close to the most hilariously awful form of DLC around. You might not have come across this yet, as to date it's been limited to a relatively small number of (mostly Japanese) not very good games. You'll find it in the likes of Cross Edge and Argarest Wars, but also in the odd Western title like Dante's Inferno. I'm talking about the ability to buy, using real money, in-game cash, items and experience points for your single-player game. As in, this is all stuff that's present in the base game, on the disk that you have paid money for, and isn't (generally) even locked away. But if you want to get it without hours of grinding, you've got to pay money. What they're basically saying (and the design of many of the games affected is clearly supposed to support this) is: "We've given you a game here, but if you actually want to enjoy it properly, you've got to give us some more money now. Because if you don't... well... I hope you like running in circles killing rats. Because that's where the next 20 hours of your life will be going".
No, the Wii is fully region locked. The 360 is in theory region locked, but in practice about 50% unlocked.
And yes, it's down to price differences between markets. But it's also a big incentive towards piracy. After all, if your game isn't available in your region, but there's a way of unlocking your console and importing it, you'll do that. And if this also makes your machine able to play pirated games... well... that's something that you might think about later.
The DSi locking is for download titles only. In itself, it's not tremendously painful (and not as bad as the inability to transfer downloaded content from one DS to another, though allegedly the 3DS will fix this), but given that Nintendo are now the only one of the big three console developers to absolutely insist on region locking for games on their platform, it had a kind of "thin end of the wedge" feel.
And why does it matter? As I say in my original post, for me, the whole point of portable consoles is that they are portable. It's very rare for me to sit at home playing on the DS or PSP. I take them with me when I travel, and I travel to the US a fair bit. If I can't pick up a game at the airport when I'm over there because it won't run on my handheld, then the value of that handheld is much reduced for me.
The PSP, of course, has region locking for UMD movies. But I understand that's a requirement of the movie studios, rather than a Sony thing. Sony in general seems a bit fed up of region locking. While both the PSP and PS3 have the technical capability to implement region locking for games, Sony have never switched it on. The 360 is in theory region locked and in the early years of its life-cycle, most games were locked. In general, however, it's left to the discretion of the publisher and these days they just don't seem to bother locking most releases. It's pretty easy to find out online whether or not a title is locked.
But anyway, on a proper console, region locking is a significant nuisance, but ultimately something I'll live with if I have to. On a handheld, it's a deal-breaker for me.
Despite my innate skepticism towards Nintendo, I'm fairly interested in the 3DS. It feels like we saw a big jump forward in handheld technology a few years ago, with the original DS and the PSP, but that we've not seen anything since then except for a succession of "lites" and other assorted rehashes (including the dismal PSP Go). The 3DS looks as though it should be capable of pushing the technical limits of handheld gaming beyond the PSP, so yes, I'm interested. The likely price-tag doesn't put me off too much. I can afford it, but it does likely mean that it won't get the kind of instant 8-15 playground mass-adoption that the GBA and DS had. If anything, that could be a good thing for me personally, if it means that early games may be more likely to appeal to grown-ups.
However, I do have a few misgivings that make me nervous about the whole thing.
First of all... region locking. Does the 3DS have it? Traditionally, handhelds have been region free, but Nintendo (who have always been the most draconian and least ethical in this respect) have already introduced elements of region locking into the DSi. One of the major uses I have for handhelds is passing the time on trips to the US. If there is widespread region locking on the 3DS, then I'm not interested.
Second... how usable will it be when used in a genuinely portable capacity. When I'm in the comfort of my own home, I'm more likely to want to play games on my PC or a full-sized console than a handheld. So a handheld needs to be properly usable on the move. This has always, for me, been the PSP's biggest advantage over the DS. Using the PSP on a train (or a bumpy flight) is not a problem. Using the DS stylus under those circumstances tends to be a mess. Throw 3D technology into the mix and I can imagine things getting "interesting". I'll be looking carefully at the early reviews to try to get a sense of this.
And third... what will the games lineup be like? Things look fairly promising here; the range of titles unveiled so far does not look bad for a launch line-up. And the precedent from the DS gives reasonable cause for optimism, with decent coverage of most genres. However, there's always that nagging doubt that stems from the fact that the last 3 "full sized" Nintendo consoles have all, within a year or two of launch, become the near-exclusive preserve of Nintendo first party titles (which vary wildly in quality and don't tend to be frequent releases) and low-quality "family" party games, with the occasional decent game that slips through vanishing into a pit of obscurity (yes, Eternal Darkness and Dead Space: Extraction, I'm looking at you). I'd imagine that a degree of support from the big Japanese developers like Square-Enix would be guaranteed, particularly with so many of them apparently struggling to keep up with the development costs of the full sized consoles, but I'd like to know which Western developers are interested.
Yeah, well, when even TFA is using "digital" to refer to downloads as opposed to physical media I'm not going to worry too much. Go drill a hole in your own head; then you'll have a real problem to worry about.
Just to add my personal perspective on the digital vs physical media thing:
Legal downloaded content wins in the convenience stakes (let's leave piracy out of this for the moment; I've not done it for products available in my region for over a decade anyway). I've got a reasonable connection, so it takes less time for me to download the average game (say... 6 gigs) or high definition movie than it does for me to go out to the shops and buy it. As far as games go, high street retailers have made things even worse for themselves here by making shopping there such a miserable experience. No, I don't want to buy pre-owned. No, I don't want to pre-order stuff. I want to be able to walk into the shop, having a reasonable expectation that a title released within the last 6 months will be available there, and buy it.
Online physical retail (eg. Amazon) has some advantages; pretty much anything I want will be available somewhere and in theory all I have to do is click to buy it and wait for the postman. Unfortunately, in the UK at least, there's a bit of a flaw in this plan; the Royal Mail. Service quality across the country is highly patchy. My parents get a great mail service, with a reliable daily delivery and a postman they've known for years who knows what to do with a parcel if they're not in when he calls. Me? If I'm lucky, I get three deliveries a week. If it's a parcel, the postman may put it through the letterbox, but more likely he'll take it back to the depot, which means taking a 45 minute round trip on Saturday morning (the only time opening hours allow me to get there) to collect it. So while in theory this is as simple as a digital purchase, in reality there are far more pitfalls.
So is it a clear-cut case of digital distribution always winning for me? Not quite. There are two factors that can still drive me towards a physical purchase.
The first is DRM. With PC gaming, this is largely becoming a moot issue; toxic DRM looks like it's here to stay, unfortunately, and going for a physical copy does not protect you from it. In fact, in a small number of cases, the Steam version of a game (and I think Steam more or less falls on the right side of the acceptability threshold; certainly it's the least worst plausible option around) means you actually get a version without the worst of the restrictions in the physical copy. For movies, I really don't like what some of the online distributors are doing to their files these days. Sure, I don't like a lot of the stuff that happens when I put a Blu-Ray in my drive, but at least you can put a Blu-Ray disc in any compatible system and it will play. I bought a couple of anime episodes on a download-to-own basis from Funimation early last year and basically found that despite what they advertised on their website, it was basically impossible to transfer them to my new PC without repurchasing (this may or may not have changed since; I didn't feel inclined to give them any repeat custom).
The DRM issue is also tied in with the second-hand issue. It's not as big an issue for me as for others. I strongly object to the rip-off manner in which high street game retailers treat second hand games (which strikes me as exploitation of the gullible given the margins involved), so I don't trade in games. However, when I run short of shelf-space, I do tend to give away old games to friends, family and colleagues. Now granted, with Steam I never run short of shelf-space, but I'd still like to know that the option is there.
The other reason why I might go for a physical copy is more positive (and, in my opinion, represents the best hope for the survival of physical media); added value in the packaging. Call me vapid, but I actually like some of the stuff you can get bundled with the special editions of games and movies these days. I like tin boxes, glossy art-books, coins, all that kind of thing. I'm not quite sure that I'm smitten enough to go for the $150 collector's edition of Gran Turismo 5, but I can't deny it's tempting. If I were in the physical dis
I've had a Wii since launch, have got the Wii Motion Plus addon and now own PS Move. Ironically, I don't actually like motion control; I guess I keep hoping that something will convince me of the benefits. Anyway, after a couple of days with the PS Move, my conclusions are as follows:
- The accuracy of the PS Move's tracking is a million miles better than the basic Wii-mote's, and still a long way ahead of Wii Motion Plus. This applies to both the accuracy of the motion tracking, and accuracy of the pointer. There's none of the skipping and jerkiness that you get with the Wii-mote (even with the + enhancement) and I haven't personally been able to detect any lag at all.
- The initial games are poor. Sports Champions is probably the best; it's basically Wii Sports with realistic graphics and slightly more of a single-player experience. But at heart, it's still just a party game/tech demo (as was Wii Sports). The other games are atrocious.
- The calibration requirement is extremely annoying within the initial launch games. However, this is probably because they're all variation of the party-game theme, requiring callibration between each mini-game (probably on the assumption that players might be changing around a lot). I would expect and hope that in a "proper" game, there would be far less of this.
- Despite some initial reports to the contrary, PS Move doesn't need any more space in your living room than the Wii did. The space I have available is less than the officially stated requirements, but we had no space-related problems.
- However (and this is quite a significant point), due to the reliance on the camera, the calibration routine becomes tricky with players of different heights. I'm not even talking about adult/child differences here. Callibrating with one 6 foot 3 player and one 5 foot 2 player was doable but took some time and effort.
- And I'm still not convinced that motion control actually adds anything to gaming beyond a brief novelty.
Yeah, the PSP was incredible at release. I still prefer it to the DS, due to the better graphics, larger library of games I'm actually interested in and lack of reliance on a stylus that's very difficult to use on public transport (a big issue for a lot of commuters).
But now... you have to worry about it. The PSP Go has been as miserable a failure as any handheld I've seen since the N-Gage. And hey, at least the N-Gage got people talking about it. And with the 3DS on the horizon, the PSP is about to lose its graphical edge in the handheld arena. A decent, serious revision (or rather, a full-blown successor) is probably needed.
I wouldn't describe the PSP as an awful platform. It's got a pretty decent installed base and quite a large library of very enjoyable games. If there was such a thing as a PSPGo exclusive game, then that might well count, though...
There is, however, a separate category of games which appeared on one platform when they would blatantly have been a better game on other platforms that were around at the time. This is a category that includes a lot of PSP titles and a huge number of third party Wii titles. Peace Walker is certainly one example. The recently released Valkyria Chronicles 2 is another (though at least we may now be getting a proper PS3 sequel). And then there's the likes of Monster Hunter Tri and Arc Rise Fantasia; games which are horribly crippled compared to what they could have been, because they've been shoehorned to fit on the Wii. Sadly, the lower development costs on platforms like the PSP, DS and Wii probably means that we haven't seen the last of this trend.
The figures you quote for the profit/loss on a console sale are based on launch prices. Component prices fall over time (generally faster than console prices fall) and in general a console will edge back into profit on each unit sold somewhere around the middle of its cycle. I believe both the PS3 and 360 now generally sell at a profit (albeit not much of one).
But yes, the money is in games sales, rather than in system sales. The reason why console games tend to be more expensive than PC games, even with functionally identical cross-platform games? On the console game, there's a fairly large wodge of cash that goes straight back to the console manufacturer. This doesn't just apply to first-party games. If you want to release a game for a console, you pay your share to the manufacturer (another reason why console developers don't encourage homebrew, outside of controller marketplaces like the indie section of Xbox Live).
At this stage of the console cycle, the manufacturers should, in theory, be raking in the cash. They've got their consoles out there and they probably don't need to be doing serious R&D on the next generation yet (there seems to be a consensus that this generation will spend longer at the top of the tree than the 5 years that previous generations have been allowed). They shouldn't be having to worry about producing so many console units, as sales will most likely be past their peak, and they can just sit back and let the cash flow in from all of those third party games that they don't even have to invest much in the way of cash into (beyond certification).
In reality, it isn't actually working quite this neatly. I don't have the figures for Sony or MS's gaming divisions for this year to hand, but Nintendo posted a record loss for Q2 2010, despite a huge installed base. The weakness of the Wii's third party lineup may well be an aggravating factor in that. An installed base does very little for you, unless the console owners are actually going out and buying games.
No, I define World of Goo and Portal as "games with indie roots which are actually much, much better than the overwhelming majority of true indie games". Steam and Xbox Live Arcade do have their uses as filters to let you see the absolute best of the stuff that comes out of the indie and sort-of-indie scenes. And even there, they're not usually more than brief distractions.
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Editions may vary by region, so I'll link the version I have on pre-order. I wouldn't normally order something this daft, but I'm a major, long-time fan of the Gran Turismo series and even though I have quite a few misgivings about GT5, I felt I ought to push the boat out for it.
Of course, I've already got a nice steering wheel.
This particular marketing stunt has precisely one useful function... to make me feel slightly less bad about having a pre-order in for the £150 Gran Turismo 5 special edition.
That said, at least the Wrangler does actually seem to be real. God only knows if my £10 deposit on GT5 will ever translate into anything tangible.
You mean nobody told you? Just don't ask which bit of her body the Milky Way is. Trust me, you really don't want to know.
Except as I said in my post, the concerts themselves, with all the special effects, have been going for over a year. I know it's a hassle, but do try to read before clicking "reply".
Erm... yes, that's great and all. Except Hatsune Miku has been around since 2007, and versons of the the Vocaloid software that powers "her" has been around a good bit longer (since 2004 or so, I think). I'm pretty sure I heard reference to special-effects-heavy concerts more than a year ago.
The software can be used, with a lot of practice, to do reasonably convincing versions of Japanese language songs. Attempts to use the Hatsune Miku vocaloid to do anything in English are usually hilariously awful. Fans of the game portal may be amused to note this rendition of the game's famous closing song... erm... Steal A Lamp.
In fairness, there are Vocaloids which can handle English much better, but this story seemed to be specifically about Hatsune Miku.
Ok, I didn't know that. In fairness, I didn't look - I should have.
In that case, go Blizzard! It should be open-season on the cheat developers.
This is a slightly tricky one for me. I entirely in favour of very strong action against the development and use of cheats for multiplayer games. They ruin the experience for legitimate, paying customers. When Blizzard go after the developers of multiplayer RTS or WoW cheats, I'm with them 100%. Humiliate the users in public, lock their accounts and pursue the developers through the courts. They're damaging Blizzard's product and they should be treated accordingly.
Singleplayer cheats, however, are another story entirely. What I do in a singleplayer campaign should be entirely my own business; it may increase or decrease my own enjoyment of the game, but it isn't hurting anybody else. Part of the problem here, as I understand it, is that SC2 singleplayer cheat programs use software pathways that are difficult to distinguish from multiplayer cheats. So going after both of them looks like the "safest" option from Blizzard's point of view.
What we need is a return to the days of cheat-codes in games. IDDQD and that sort of thing. Game and platform developers have made this more difficult for themselves by adding a degree of meta-online functionality for singleplayer gaming via achievement systems. But there are already games out there which simply disable achievements while a cheat code is active. Skill levels among players vary wildly and a lot of singleplayer games are probably beyond the ability of many players to finish, which can be a profound irritation given the price tag that they carry. SC2 didn't give me any problems in blasting through the campaign; I was a fairly hardcore Warcraft 3 player for a while, so my RTS skills, while hardly top-end, are more than capable of handling the average singleplayer campaign. Other games, however, have had me desperate for some kind of cheat code to let me past a particularly irritating section (Halo: Reach had a few such moments). Let desperately frustrated players tap in a code to activate a singleplayer cheat and you remove a lot of the incentive to go searching for nasty third-party hacks.
Indeed. They've got some very, very serious rethinking to do just to get the game to a state where playing it doesn't cause actual pain. I'd say that the top priorities would need to be:
- A complete overhaul of the user-interface, rewriting it from the ground up. There is basically nothing in the current UI that strikes me as salvagable.
- Implementation of an auction house or equivalent feature to allow for an actually-workable player-based economy.
- Performance tuning so that the thing actually runs in a sensible way on even high end PCs. There's a huge mismatch at the moment between the quality of the visuals and the level of performance that a high end gaming PC can achieve.
- Servers spread around the world, so that the game doesn't feel worse and worse the further you are from Japan.
- Various other major bugfixes, particularly a fix to the "can't alt-tab out of full-screen mode" bug, which was present in FFXI as well.
Those strike me as an extremely fundamental set of changes, some of which would involve substantial rewrites of the game engine. Moreover, doing all of that would not guarantee the game's success. It would just pull it up to the kind of level where it doesn't feel actively broken. Even after doing all of that, the game still wouldn't even have begun to compete with the likes of WoW, Eve Online or LotR:O.
Given that Square-Enix never really made any fundamental changes to the FFXI formula over the years (beyond belatedly adding a windowed-mode option), I can't honestly see they'll even be able to get over the first hurdle. This game looks doomed to me.
It's astounding, isn't it? The manual tells you absolutely nothing about how to play the game. It talks you through the process of setting up an account and it has a keyboard command reference guide. There's a tiny bit of lore. But that's as much as you get.
This is not the kind of MMO that walks you through everything from the start. In WoW, when you create a character, you have a bunch of tips pop up on the screen as soon as you log in, and your first quest-giver is right in front of you. Other modern MMOs like Lord of the Rings online follow the same pattern. Older MMOs, like... well... Final Fantasy XI don't help you out like this. But with those games, the flow of what you're meant to do is pretty much readily apparently and an hour or two of exploration and trial and error will get you into the flow of things. FFXIV, however, is just mystifying. Now that it's been out for a couple of weeks, there are third party sites that will help you through the worst of the learning curve, but you will still spend a substantial portion of your time utterly mystified. And not in a good way.
It's not helped by the fact that the UI is an absolute atrocity. FFXI's interface has dated badly. It was always designed for cross-compatibility with consoles and it feels awfully shabby compared with the slick experience you get from WoW (especially with some nice - and fully ToS-compliant - 3rd party addons). As somebody who has been a hardcore player of (but subsequently kicked the habit of) both FFXI and WoW, what I wanted to see from FFXIV was an game that took the core strengths of FFXI, such as the rich combat system, the job/subjob system and the willingness to trust the players to manage the economy to a greater degree than in WoW-clones, and marries it with the improvements that WoW made to the genre, such as accessibility, interface and variety of gameplay. FFXIV spectacularly fails to deliver anything like this. It sacrifices FFXI's strengths (the subjob system is gone and there isn't even an auction house), while learning next to nothing from WoW and its clones.
I can't speak for Euro-based comparisons, but I do know that the US/UK games price comparison is more complicated than it seems. The UK does, at first glance, seem to get a bad deal on high-street games sales. While highly dependant upon the exchange rate, UK RRPs do tend to look around 25% higher, in my experience.
However...
I go to the US several times a year and always tend to pick up a few games while I'm out there, particularly if the exchange rate is good. What I always notice is how much slower US high-street retailers are to discount games, compared with their UK counterparts, and how few special-offers there are available in the US. I've seen games that are two or three months old and which weren't huge hits still retailing for $60 in Gamestop. In the UK, by contrast, such a game would generally have had in the region of a third knocked off its price by that point (and sometimes more if it had proven a difficult game to shift). Indeed, unless the game you want is either a really major release or right down at the other end of the scale in the "small, cult release" category, you can generally get more than 20% off the RRP just by waiting 2 weeks or so.
That said, we do tend to get stiffed in download-sales a bit, where certain retailers have a habit of just replacing the $ sign with a £. We also get the aggravating situation where some games that are released in the US never make it out over here (eg. Deathsmiles) or take many months to make it over (eg. Persona 3 and 4).
PC game prices used to be more expensive as well. I still have the original boxes for a few old PC games, with price stickers still intact. Their Finest Hour (1989 flight sim) cost £50. Ultima VII cost £40. The original X-Wing cost £45. So too did TIE Fighter. The B-Wing expansion pack for X-Wing cost £30. Gunship 2000 cost £50. Even before you adjust for inflation, it's clear that in the UK at least, PC games have gotten substantially cheaper. I can't remember the last time I spent more than £30 on a PC game that wasn't some kind of special edition.
That said, the packaging that these old games came in was vastly more elaborate than anything you'd get today. Their Finest Hour and Ultima VII in particular have all kinds of neat stuff in the box; mini-history books and cloth maps and the like.
Prices seemed to fall gradually throughout the mid and late 90s, looking at the games in my storage cupboard that still have price labels (a factor that makes it harder to track the trend once modern packaging with its emphasis on shrink-wrapping came in.
Contrary to what some of the comments above seem to assume, I don't think he's quite saying that handheld consoles as we know them today will completely replace full-sized consoles as we know them today. Rather, from what I can make out, he's predicting that consoles will converge at some point where they are portable, but can also be connected up to the mains and your TV/sound system when you're playing at home. This might not be completely ludicrous. After all, I know a few people, including a few fairly serious gamers, who use a laptop as their main machine, but who connect it up to a proper monitory, mouse and keyboard when at home; except at the very top end, the performance difference between laptops and desktops these days is narrower than it used to be.
However, I can kind of understand the "do not want" sentiments above, given the way that many developers, particularly Japanese developers, seem to have fled in terror from the full-sized consoles this generation and focussed instead on the handhelds. So in many franchises these days - I'm thinking particularly here of the likes of Kingdom Hearts and Metal Gear Solid (as far as I can tell, MGS4 was an anomaly and the series is now PSP/3DS focussed), most of the games released this generation have felt like a step backwards from what we were getting when the PS2 ruled the roost. And then we get the likes of Blue Dragon and Valkyria Chronicles, where you get a decent game (awesome, in the case of VC) that debuts on a proper console, only for the developer to milk the franchise mercilessly via churned out handheld sequels that are a step down in terms of both graphics and gameplay.
Amen to that. The PS3 back-compatibility story is a fiasco from start to finish.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I imported a first-gen 60 gig machine from the US, so I get the full hardware-based back compatibility. If you got the 20 gig with the software back-compatibility then you're a bit stuffed, as while the 360's software back-compatibility base has been expanded a few times over the years, I don't think Sony ever implemented (m)any of the planned expansions for the software on the PS3. And if you missed the boat on both of the first-gen Japanese or US models (which means anybody who lives in Europe and didn't import), then you get nothing. And if you got one of those early 60 gigs, then you'd better hope to god that it never breaks (something I live in constant terror of), because if it does, even if it's still under warrenty, you're looking at having to get a PS2 (and all the controllers, memory cards etc) as well.
And to make matters worse, while the PS3 today has a pretty decent games library (catching up fast on the 360 and well ahead of the Wii in most genres), for most of its lifespan to date, it was a bit of a desert for decent games. In fact, I suspect that if I could access a breakdown of the time my PS3 has spent in various games, PS2 games would still be significantly ahead of PS3 titles, largely thanks to the influence of late-cycle PS2 games like Final Fantasy 12 and Personas 3 and 4.
It's funny how developments that reduce the environmental impact of cars often originate from the high-performance end of the spectrum. While I'm no expert, my understanding is that sports such as Formula 1 and Indycar have done massive amounts to improve the fuel efficiency of the cars you see on the roads every day. After all, there's a clear and direct incentive when you have a high performance car out on the track to design something that can carry a smaller (and lighter) fuel tank or get away with fewer refuelling stops. And once you've developed that technology, you might as well make good use of it on a commercial basis.
I like the Steam wallet idea as a general principle, provided they develop it properly; gift-cards, in particular, have been a glaring omission from Steam for quite some time and I'd love to see them introduced. Yes, you can buy games as gifts for other steam users, but there's a relatively high barrier to doing so - you need to make an account, set up your payment details in it, mess around with the friends list etc. This means that unlike, say, Xbox Live, where you can just walk into a shop to buy a gift-card, there's no realistic way for non-gamers to give gift-cards to Steam-users. To be honest, given the number of gift cards that circulate every Christmas (not to mention birthdays throughout the year), I'm surprised they've missed out on this particular revenue stream for so long.
But I'm much less sold on the whole micro-payments for in-game content thing. I don't mind DLC as a concept; I've bought a good few pieces for games I'm particularly fond of; the Mass Effect games, Dragon Age, Forza 3 and Lost Odyssey spring to mind. However, these have all tended to be fairly substantial chunks of content that significantly extend the single-player experience. I tend to see these as small expansion packs, and provided they're priced appropriately, I'm happy to buy. The idea of buying plug-in content for a competitive multiplayer game, however, just feels like a bridge too far...
None of the DLC on offer here really seems to add anything new to the game. As they say, it's only really cosmetic stuff that can't be obtained via entirely in-game methods. And I'm sorry, but while cosmetic stuff as DLC has been there from the infancy of the concept (yay horse armour), I'm still not going to part money for that. So what you're really buying is a shortcut. They're mixing the in-game and real-world economies and allowing people willing to spend real money to speed up their progress in the game.
It's very close to the most hilariously awful form of DLC around. You might not have come across this yet, as to date it's been limited to a relatively small number of (mostly Japanese) not very good games. You'll find it in the likes of Cross Edge and Argarest Wars, but also in the odd Western title like Dante's Inferno. I'm talking about the ability to buy, using real money, in-game cash, items and experience points for your single-player game. As in, this is all stuff that's present in the base game, on the disk that you have paid money for, and isn't (generally) even locked away. But if you want to get it without hours of grinding, you've got to pay money. What they're basically saying (and the design of many of the games affected is clearly supposed to support this) is: "We've given you a game here, but if you actually want to enjoy it properly, you've got to give us some more money now. Because if you don't... well... I hope you like running in circles killing rats. Because that's where the next 20 hours of your life will be going".
No, the Wii is fully region locked. The 360 is in theory region locked, but in practice about 50% unlocked.
And yes, it's down to price differences between markets. But it's also a big incentive towards piracy. After all, if your game isn't available in your region, but there's a way of unlocking your console and importing it, you'll do that. And if this also makes your machine able to play pirated games... well... that's something that you might think about later.
The DSi locking is for download titles only. In itself, it's not tremendously painful (and not as bad as the inability to transfer downloaded content from one DS to another, though allegedly the 3DS will fix this), but given that Nintendo are now the only one of the big three console developers to absolutely insist on region locking for games on their platform, it had a kind of "thin end of the wedge" feel.
And why does it matter? As I say in my original post, for me, the whole point of portable consoles is that they are portable. It's very rare for me to sit at home playing on the DS or PSP. I take them with me when I travel, and I travel to the US a fair bit. If I can't pick up a game at the airport when I'm over there because it won't run on my handheld, then the value of that handheld is much reduced for me.
The PSP, of course, has region locking for UMD movies. But I understand that's a requirement of the movie studios, rather than a Sony thing. Sony in general seems a bit fed up of region locking. While both the PSP and PS3 have the technical capability to implement region locking for games, Sony have never switched it on. The 360 is in theory region locked and in the early years of its life-cycle, most games were locked. In general, however, it's left to the discretion of the publisher and these days they just don't seem to bother locking most releases. It's pretty easy to find out online whether or not a title is locked.
But anyway, on a proper console, region locking is a significant nuisance, but ultimately something I'll live with if I have to. On a handheld, it's a deal-breaker for me.
Despite my innate skepticism towards Nintendo, I'm fairly interested in the 3DS. It feels like we saw a big jump forward in handheld technology a few years ago, with the original DS and the PSP, but that we've not seen anything since then except for a succession of "lites" and other assorted rehashes (including the dismal PSP Go). The 3DS looks as though it should be capable of pushing the technical limits of handheld gaming beyond the PSP, so yes, I'm interested. The likely price-tag doesn't put me off too much. I can afford it, but it does likely mean that it won't get the kind of instant 8-15 playground mass-adoption that the GBA and DS had. If anything, that could be a good thing for me personally, if it means that early games may be more likely to appeal to grown-ups.
However, I do have a few misgivings that make me nervous about the whole thing.
First of all... region locking. Does the 3DS have it? Traditionally, handhelds have been region free, but Nintendo (who have always been the most draconian and least ethical in this respect) have already introduced elements of region locking into the DSi. One of the major uses I have for handhelds is passing the time on trips to the US. If there is widespread region locking on the 3DS, then I'm not interested.
Second... how usable will it be when used in a genuinely portable capacity. When I'm in the comfort of my own home, I'm more likely to want to play games on my PC or a full-sized console than a handheld. So a handheld needs to be properly usable on the move. This has always, for me, been the PSP's biggest advantage over the DS. Using the PSP on a train (or a bumpy flight) is not a problem. Using the DS stylus under those circumstances tends to be a mess. Throw 3D technology into the mix and I can imagine things getting "interesting". I'll be looking carefully at the early reviews to try to get a sense of this.
And third... what will the games lineup be like? Things look fairly promising here; the range of titles unveiled so far does not look bad for a launch line-up. And the precedent from the DS gives reasonable cause for optimism, with decent coverage of most genres. However, there's always that nagging doubt that stems from the fact that the last 3 "full sized" Nintendo consoles have all, within a year or two of launch, become the near-exclusive preserve of Nintendo first party titles (which vary wildly in quality and don't tend to be frequent releases) and low-quality "family" party games, with the occasional decent game that slips through vanishing into a pit of obscurity (yes, Eternal Darkness and Dead Space: Extraction, I'm looking at you). I'd imagine that a degree of support from the big Japanese developers like Square-Enix would be guaranteed, particularly with so many of them apparently struggling to keep up with the development costs of the full sized consoles, but I'd like to know which Western developers are interested.
Yeah, well, when even TFA is using "digital" to refer to downloads as opposed to physical media I'm not going to worry too much. Go drill a hole in your own head; then you'll have a real problem to worry about.
Just to add my personal perspective on the digital vs physical media thing:
Legal downloaded content wins in the convenience stakes (let's leave piracy out of this for the moment; I've not done it for products available in my region for over a decade anyway). I've got a reasonable connection, so it takes less time for me to download the average game (say... 6 gigs) or high definition movie than it does for me to go out to the shops and buy it. As far as games go, high street retailers have made things even worse for themselves here by making shopping there such a miserable experience. No, I don't want to buy pre-owned. No, I don't want to pre-order stuff. I want to be able to walk into the shop, having a reasonable expectation that a title released within the last 6 months will be available there, and buy it.
Online physical retail (eg. Amazon) has some advantages; pretty much anything I want will be available somewhere and in theory all I have to do is click to buy it and wait for the postman. Unfortunately, in the UK at least, there's a bit of a flaw in this plan; the Royal Mail. Service quality across the country is highly patchy. My parents get a great mail service, with a reliable daily delivery and a postman they've known for years who knows what to do with a parcel if they're not in when he calls. Me? If I'm lucky, I get three deliveries a week. If it's a parcel, the postman may put it through the letterbox, but more likely he'll take it back to the depot, which means taking a 45 minute round trip on Saturday morning (the only time opening hours allow me to get there) to collect it. So while in theory this is as simple as a digital purchase, in reality there are far more pitfalls.
So is it a clear-cut case of digital distribution always winning for me? Not quite. There are two factors that can still drive me towards a physical purchase.
The first is DRM. With PC gaming, this is largely becoming a moot issue; toxic DRM looks like it's here to stay, unfortunately, and going for a physical copy does not protect you from it. In fact, in a small number of cases, the Steam version of a game (and I think Steam more or less falls on the right side of the acceptability threshold; certainly it's the least worst plausible option around) means you actually get a version without the worst of the restrictions in the physical copy. For movies, I really don't like what some of the online distributors are doing to their files these days. Sure, I don't like a lot of the stuff that happens when I put a Blu-Ray in my drive, but at least you can put a Blu-Ray disc in any compatible system and it will play. I bought a couple of anime episodes on a download-to-own basis from Funimation early last year and basically found that despite what they advertised on their website, it was basically impossible to transfer them to my new PC without repurchasing (this may or may not have changed since; I didn't feel inclined to give them any repeat custom).
The DRM issue is also tied in with the second-hand issue. It's not as big an issue for me as for others. I strongly object to the rip-off manner in which high street game retailers treat second hand games (which strikes me as exploitation of the gullible given the margins involved), so I don't trade in games. However, when I run short of shelf-space, I do tend to give away old games to friends, family and colleagues. Now granted, with Steam I never run short of shelf-space, but I'd still like to know that the option is there.
The other reason why I might go for a physical copy is more positive (and, in my opinion, represents the best hope for the survival of physical media); added value in the packaging. Call me vapid, but I actually like some of the stuff you can get bundled with the special editions of games and movies these days. I like tin boxes, glossy art-books, coins, all that kind of thing. I'm not quite sure that I'm smitten enough to go for the $150 collector's edition of Gran Turismo 5, but I can't deny it's tempting. If I were in the physical dis
I've had a Wii since launch, have got the Wii Motion Plus addon and now own PS Move. Ironically, I don't actually like motion control; I guess I keep hoping that something will convince me of the benefits. Anyway, after a couple of days with the PS Move, my conclusions are as follows:
- The accuracy of the PS Move's tracking is a million miles better than the basic Wii-mote's, and still a long way ahead of Wii Motion Plus. This applies to both the accuracy of the motion tracking, and accuracy of the pointer. There's none of the skipping and jerkiness that you get with the Wii-mote (even with the + enhancement) and I haven't personally been able to detect any lag at all.
- The initial games are poor. Sports Champions is probably the best; it's basically Wii Sports with realistic graphics and slightly more of a single-player experience. But at heart, it's still just a party game/tech demo (as was Wii Sports). The other games are atrocious.
- The calibration requirement is extremely annoying within the initial launch games. However, this is probably because they're all variation of the party-game theme, requiring callibration between each mini-game (probably on the assumption that players might be changing around a lot). I would expect and hope that in a "proper" game, there would be far less of this.
- Despite some initial reports to the contrary, PS Move doesn't need any more space in your living room than the Wii did. The space I have available is less than the officially stated requirements, but we had no space-related problems.
- However (and this is quite a significant point), due to the reliance on the camera, the calibration routine becomes tricky with players of different heights. I'm not even talking about adult/child differences here. Callibrating with one 6 foot 3 player and one 5 foot 2 player was doable but took some time and effort.
- And I'm still not convinced that motion control actually adds anything to gaming beyond a brief novelty.
Yeah, the PSP was incredible at release. I still prefer it to the DS, due to the better graphics, larger library of games I'm actually interested in and lack of reliance on a stylus that's very difficult to use on public transport (a big issue for a lot of commuters).
But now... you have to worry about it. The PSP Go has been as miserable a failure as any handheld I've seen since the N-Gage. And hey, at least the N-Gage got people talking about it. And with the 3DS on the horizon, the PSP is about to lose its graphical edge in the handheld arena. A decent, serious revision (or rather, a full-blown successor) is probably needed.
I wouldn't describe the PSP as an awful platform. It's got a pretty decent installed base and quite a large library of very enjoyable games. If there was such a thing as a PSPGo exclusive game, then that might well count, though...
There is, however, a separate category of games which appeared on one platform when they would blatantly have been a better game on other platforms that were around at the time. This is a category that includes a lot of PSP titles and a huge number of third party Wii titles. Peace Walker is certainly one example. The recently released Valkyria Chronicles 2 is another (though at least we may now be getting a proper PS3 sequel). And then there's the likes of Monster Hunter Tri and Arc Rise Fantasia; games which are horribly crippled compared to what they could have been, because they've been shoehorned to fit on the Wii. Sadly, the lower development costs on platforms like the PSP, DS and Wii probably means that we haven't seen the last of this trend.
Partly correct, but still not quite right.
The figures you quote for the profit/loss on a console sale are based on launch prices. Component prices fall over time (generally faster than console prices fall) and in general a console will edge back into profit on each unit sold somewhere around the middle of its cycle. I believe both the PS3 and 360 now generally sell at a profit (albeit not much of one).
But yes, the money is in games sales, rather than in system sales. The reason why console games tend to be more expensive than PC games, even with functionally identical cross-platform games? On the console game, there's a fairly large wodge of cash that goes straight back to the console manufacturer. This doesn't just apply to first-party games. If you want to release a game for a console, you pay your share to the manufacturer (another reason why console developers don't encourage homebrew, outside of controller marketplaces like the indie section of Xbox Live).
At this stage of the console cycle, the manufacturers should, in theory, be raking in the cash. They've got their consoles out there and they probably don't need to be doing serious R&D on the next generation yet (there seems to be a consensus that this generation will spend longer at the top of the tree than the 5 years that previous generations have been allowed). They shouldn't be having to worry about producing so many console units, as sales will most likely be past their peak, and they can just sit back and let the cash flow in from all of those third party games that they don't even have to invest much in the way of cash into (beyond certification).
In reality, it isn't actually working quite this neatly. I don't have the figures for Sony or MS's gaming divisions for this year to hand, but Nintendo posted a record loss for Q2 2010, despite a huge installed base. The weakness of the Wii's third party lineup may well be an aggravating factor in that. An installed base does very little for you, unless the console owners are actually going out and buying games.
No, I define World of Goo and Portal as "games with indie roots which are actually much, much better than the overwhelming majority of true indie games". Steam and Xbox Live Arcade do have their uses as filters to let you see the absolute best of the stuff that comes out of the indie and sort-of-indie scenes. And even there, they're not usually more than brief distractions.