Siren: Blood Curse on the PS3 has sections where the player controls characters who are completely unable to fight back. In many ways, Siren has taken over the mantle of the best traditional survival-horror series around, since Resident Evil became an action game and Silent Hill started to self-destruct with its fourth installment. What's interesting about the Siren games is that you control multiple characters for various sections of the game. Some are physically fit adults, who may even have experience with weapons, while others have disabilities, or are pre-teens, rendering them far more vulnerable to foes and entirely reliant upon either avoiding detection, or running away if spotted.
To be fair, though, the movie was one of the least bad game adaptations I've seen. It was a solid 4/10, maybe even a 5/10. That puts it miles ahead of most other adaptations. It even had a couple of genuinely creepy sequences. Sure, it doesn't really fit with the canon established in the games all that well, but there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
Yes, good point. I'd forgotten how primative the original PS1 controllers were. And, of course, while more civilised controllers soon became available, PS1 games had to be designed to be able to work on the most basic controllers right throughout the lifespan of the console.
Actually, I think I'd rather have a re-imagined version. The original was a great game (as was number 2. 3 was ok and I try to pretend that everything since then doesn't exist), but it has aged quite badly in some respects if you play it now.
For starters, the PS1 graphics are just plain nasty. More seriously, the controls feel dismal to somebody used to more recent offerings. You don't have the options for directional, as oppposed to rotational, movement that you have in the later games and you can tell that the game was designed for a controller with only one analogue stick. A new version (preferrably available reasonably cheap - $30 or so) with touched up graphics and modernised controls would be highly welcome.
Depends. This is a remake of an old game, from a franchise which has, even by a relatively kind assessment, been struggling for a couple of years now. The economics of this particular game are going to be odd. Silent Hill: Homecoming, which was released for the 360 (and PS3? - I can't remember) wasn't exactly a roaring sales success. The franchise's brand has been harmed as the games have picked up a (sadly well deserved) reputation for stagnation and sloppy production values. This is due, I suspect, to the rather chaotic nature of the development of the games from Silent Hill 4 onwards.
The Register ran a good editorial a few days back on how IT systems and technology in general are often blamed unfairly when mistakes occur as a result of human error.
Would it be unfair of me to suggest that the same factors might be at play here?
WoW currently has a meta-achievement for clearing basically all of the achievements associated with current raid content, some of which require you to do fights in very odd ways, others of which are just plain hard. This is currently seen as "the big one" of achievements, not least because it rewards you with a very fast dragon to ride.
I think the slashdot equivalent would have to be as follows:
"Reach all of the achievements listed below:
- Make a +5 moderated post explaining why Windows does something better than Linux. - Make a +5 moderated post explaining why Apple are rubbish. - Make a +5 moderated post explaining why you don't like either Nintendo, or any first-party Nintendo game. - Make a +5 moderated post explaining why you will be voting Republican. - Make a +5 moderated post explaining that sometimes correlation can at least point towards causation. - Make a post complaining about the moderation of one of your previous posts which does not get moderated to -1. - Make a +5 moderated first-post of 300 words or longer on a front-page story. - Make a +5 moderated post on a sotry which is at least 5 days old at the time of your post. - Make a +5 moderated post containing absolutely no punctuation. - Make a +5 moderated post complaining that you can't possibly see how this story is either "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters". - Submit a story which receives at least 1000 comments. - Submit a story which is placed on the front page and centres around a link to your own blog. - Submit a story which is placed on the front page and then submit a duplicate story, also placed on the front page, within 2 weeks.
Unlike most of the others who've disagreed with my post (the whiny rant from Millennium above is an absolute classic case of slashdot wounded-pride mentality - predictable and priceless to see it coming from a 4 figure UID - especially when he throws the "fanboy insult in when I haven't even stated a preference between the 360, PS3 or PC) you make an interesting point with a degree of validity.
I've no doubt that developer expectations did harm the Wii's lineup of titles early on. None of the current gen consoles had a great starting lineup (the PS3 was arguably the best, with Resistance, but that's just picking the best of three bad options). However, the 360 in particular very quickly got a heavily fleshed out lineup, while the Wii... well... didn't. The most substantial additions to its lineup have all been first party titles, which, as in the Cube and N64 generations, have been few, far between and of variable quality (from stellar down to mediocre-verging-on-poor).
However, the Wii's runaway sales success was apparent very, very quickly after the late-2006 launch. We're now well into 2009, almost two and a half years later. By now, developers should have had time to respond. I know that development times are longer these days, but if developers were really serious about climbing onto the Wii, we would have a huge number of big upcoming Wii releases being previewed and hyped like crazy at the moment (even if they're still 6 months from launch), spanning all genres and target demographics. As it is... well... there's Madworld. There might be one or two others in genres I don't follow. But broadly speaking, it's clear that the big release target systems are still the 360 and PS3.
Nintendo's advantage was always going to decay in the second half of the cycle. Despite the arrival of the economic downturn, HDTVs are continuing their steady penetration of the home TV market. The technological gap between the Wii and its competitors is going to start becoming more apparent to the average game-player (which is to say, people who don't see themselves as gamers, but do buy and play the odd game). Moreover, the Wii-mote isn't quite the "cool new thing" like it once was. After the hype of the first year or two, there's a growing recognisation that it's basically a fun little gizmo which is good for some types of game and dreadful for others. It's fairly clear now that there are plenty of genres where it won't supplant the more traditional console controller, or the keyboard+mouse combo.
Actually, the people who have come the closest to saying that Nintendo can't release a good "proper" game these days are... Nintendo. They say it by implication every time they stand up at a game development conference and speak pretty much exclusively about their latest range of casual mini-games, before wrapping up with a comment that "oh, there's a new Mario Kart coming as well".
They're not really interested in putting out the best games any more. In a way, it's hard to blame them - they're almost certainly making more money by putting out Wii-toys for non-gamers now than they made in either the N64 or Gamecube generations. But it does mean that trying to talk about them in the same breath as Microsoft and Sony isn't really relevant any more. This time around, we don't have three console makers playing for the same market. We have two serious contenders, and a very successful "electronic toys" maker which is apparently quite content to be a poor third in the "video games" market.
The Wii market isn't actually as big as it appears. In reality, it's quite possibly smaller than the 360 and PS3 markets.
Nintendo did a great job of selling the Wii to non-gamers. They've got a huge installed base out there now and should, in theory, have the kind of market dominance that the PS2 enjoyed last time around. But they don't.
See, the flip side of selling consoles to non-gamers is that they are... well... non-gamers. If you look at the weekly games sales charts, the only Wii games that really make an impact are Wii Sports, Wii Fit and, to a lesser degree, Mario Kart Wii. All games that are bundled with the Wii console in the most common packages. Elsewhere, the chart is dominated by your Call of Duty games, your Resident Evils, your Maddens and so on. People who actually buy games, as opposed to non-gamers who pick up a Wii and embittered slashdot posters nostalgic for the 80s, do actually tend to make HD graphics and high production values a factor in their purchase.
Your best chance to sell a game with the Wii is at the point of sale with the console itself. Once this has passed, a large majority of the consoles will sit in a cupboard unused. This was never the case with the PS2, and helped ensure that the PS2 got ports of pretty much everything bar first-party exclusives, despite being the weakest of the consoles around at the time from a technical perspective (and a well known "bit of a bugger to port to"). It's pretty much a three way race in terms of actual games sales (and there are signs that the Wii is really struggling here).
If you develop for the Wii as your main platform, you're also, by tying yourself into its control system, ensuring that you'll need significant changes to port your games over to other systems, widening the target audience. On the other hand, develop for the 360, PS3 or PC and it's not that hard to get your game onto the other two out of those 3 platforms. If you're going for one of the really big releases, you'll probably be putting out a PS2 port anyway to reach the huge installed base of people there who still haven't upgraded. It's cheap and easy to stick some motion controls onto that for a Wii port.
Oh believe me, I'm old enough to remember Molyneux's old games. I played Populus back when it was new. I remember the excitement of getting home with a copy of PC Format which had a 5 1/4 inch floppy on the cover with the demo of Powermonger. (Btw, I mostly liked your post, but comments about "not sure you're old enough or aware enough" do make you sound a bit petulent.)
But the industry has changed since then, as have the expectations of gamers. Back then, if you had a good and original idea, you could build a decent game around it with only a small team and a modest budget. Development teams were still led by visionary geniuses, who not only thought up the concept for the game, but also did a large chunk of the hands on development.
For better or worse (and I do think it's mostly for the better) the industry has changed. Putting out a decent commercial game these days requires years of development, a budget of millions and the efforts of hundreds of people (albeit maybe not all at the same time). The best developers today aren't the ones who can throw out 10 great innovations in game design before breakfast - they're the ones who can define the scope of a game, prevent it from creeping, decide which ideas to lift from elsewhere and then project manage the various teams of programmers, artists and QA people to produce the product on time and to a satisfactory standard, while keeping the publishers off their backs to a sufficient degree that the overall vision isn't compromised. If you look at some of the best games of recent years (I'd nominate World of Warcraft, Dead Space, Crysis and Gears of War), all of them have lifted ideas shamelessly from elsewhere, adding very little of their own but they've been delivered with degree of focus that results in a very polished end product (leaving aside crappy PC ports in a couple of cases).
Now, Molyneux isn't completely lacking in these skills. He's not John Romero and he hasn't turned Lionhead into a running joke like Ion Storm. But it's clear that having hyper-active, ideas-based management is holding Lionhead back from joining the top tier of developers. However, it's still good to have studios like that around, throwing out innovation-rich games for others to cannibalise. This is why I continue to buy Molyneux's games, even though I haven't actually enjoyed one since the original Dungeon Keeper.
Maybe, but the means of "tactile" interaction with the pet, which is at the core of most virtual pet games these days, is pure Black & White. When I see Nintendogs, I think of Black & White far more than I do the Tamagotchi.
I disagree. Molyneux does experiment far more than any other major developer, for the most part. Of course, these days video gaming is pretty well established and there isn't quite the room to invent whole new genres like there was back in the 80s and 90s. But even so, he always seems to me to be trying to find new twists on existing genres, or to mesh genres together in a new way. Fable and Black & White are good examples of this.
The problem is that, despite what people like to think, experimentation and innovation don't often make for very good games. These days, making a good game is, like it or not, generally about polish, attention to detail, technical prowess and the shameless lifting of other people's innovations. Molyneux will put out something interesting and different, which fails to provide any kind of fun. Then a year later, somebody else lifts all of the good ideas and puts them into a package that actually works as a game. Look at how Black & White, which was undoubtedly one of the most broken experiences ever to be marketed as a leisure activity, laid down much of the groundwork for the modern virtual pet genre, which is seriously big money now.
I don't like the guy's games, but I think the industry is better for his involvement.
Halo Wars is to RTSes as Halo was to fpses. The comparison holds up remarkably well.
- Neither was the first attempt at doing the genre on a console. However, both were the first really ambitious efforts at implementing the genre on a console from the ground up, rather than just pinching PC mechanics wholesale (or indeed being a direct port of a PC game).
- Both games were reasonably pleasant to look at, though certainly nowhere near the cutting edge technically.
- Both games were the first examples of their genre to actually feel natural on a console controller.
- In terms of sophistication and variety, both games were years behind equivalent offerings on the PC.
- Both games had a storyline that thought it was far more interesting than it really was.
Now, the thing with Halo is that it really got the ball rolling for big budget fpses on consoles. It showed how, by careful attention to sensitivity on the controller, as well as a few key design decisions (such as not requiring constant 180 degree turns in the way that many PC fpses do), you could render the genre playable - and even enjoyable - on a console.
While Halo was in no way a great game considered on its own merits, it did sow the seeds that resulted in some of the modern console fpses that can give their PC competition a run for its money (such as Resistance: Fall of Man). It will be interesting to see if the same can now be done for the RTS, given that Halo Wars proves that a control system can be made to work.
I'd go broader than games. Pretty much any mass market entertainment these days has to fail to get a real ending, and even then it doesn't usually manage it.
When was the last time you went to the cinema to watch a major release that didn't end with a blatant hook for a sequel? When was the last time you saw a TV show end without some form of cliff-hanger? And yes... when was the last time you saw a game end without a plug for a sequel?
I think TV has it worst. The push to wring as many seasons as possible out of a particular intellectual property has destroyed the capability of a generation of screenwriters to actually write an ending for a story. They write a strong beginning to get people going, then just sit down and churn out "middle" for season after season until the ratings drop and the network starts to swing the axe. Then, if possible, they write in an ending from whatever point in the story they'd managed to get up to.
I remember when I got into watching anime, back in around 2001, the first thing that struck me was that many series did actually have endings. Sure, in some cases the endings were incomprehensible, but at least they were there. However, even with anime, as time has gone one, the classic stand-alone 13 or 26 episode series has fallen from favour in recent years.
The problem is that we are creating a body of cultural products which will not stand the test of time. Now, ok, you can write off 95% (at least) of modern pop culture as ephemera, but it would still be nice to think that we might actually be creating a few things that will still be watched, read or played in fifty years time (and beyond). But unless things have ending, it just won't happen.
Can you imagine if Hamlet never came to an end (ok, if you've ever sat through a bad student production, it might have felt like that) but instead ran on for 17 plays, with 8-12 comprising the little-loved Finland arc, play 4 introducing a new love interest who got written out in play 9 and then the whole thing stopped abruptly after play 17 because the Globe burned down? How many modern TV stories have been ruined by this kind of thing? The X-Files? Lost? Buffy?
Ironically, given what sparked this discussion, MMOs don't actually need an ending. They're not usually intended as a story as such - more as an ongoing, but usually static, world that players participate in. They generally kind of exist in the same continuity-free zones as daily-gag comic strips in newspapers and the like. That they ended Tabula Rasa in the way they did is actually kind of cool and probably rather better than the shoddy game deserved.
I considered all three of these titles suggested, but as I was trying to keep it to 10, none of them quite made the cut. The main criterion I was considering was the effect that games had on later games development and cultural attitudes to gaming.
I think Sim City and Civilisation both fall into the category of "serious games" that Elite pioneered. Yes, they took things to new levels of complexity, but they weren't quite breaking completely uncharted ground in the same way.
Starcraft didn't really influence later games development, because it didn't really bring anything new to the table. It's not strikingly different to any number of other 2d RTSes that were around at the time (eg. C&C: Red Alert, Dark Reign, Krush Kill & Destroy). While it has had a large public following, this has been a regional, rather than a global phenomenon.
There were a few others that I didn't quite feel merited inclusion in the top 10, though they were doubtless important (in no particular order - some more tongue in cheek than others):
Tomb Raider - the first really successful attempt at marketing and selling a game on criteria that... shall we say... have nothing to do with gameplay or technical innovation.
Quake - took the concept of online deathmatches to the wider gaming public.
Quake 2 - the game that spurred the mass-market adoption of 3d acceleration technology on the PC.
Alone in the Dark - the first proper graphical game to actually be scary (I think some of the text adventures and ASCII-art games had pulled this off quite well).
Star Wars: Force Commander - the moment at which the Star Wars logo on a game stopped being a sure sign of high quality and started to be a toxic warning symbol (partially redeemed in recent years by KoTOR).
Ultima Underworld - the first RPG to prove that the genre didn't have to be accompanied by dire graphics.
Halo Wars(???) - possibly the first RTS to actually feel playable on a console(?)
Agreed. In rough order of age, I think my picks would have to be:
Space Invaders - the first video game which is actually fun to play and doesn't need a second player as an opponent.
Elite - the original thinking man's game. Set new standards for scope and depth.
Mario Brothers - pretty much instrumental in establishing the home console market.
Ultima IV - demonstrated that games could actually have a serious, intelligent storyline and didn't need to be just about going out to beat up the Big Bad.
Final Fantasy II - essentially gave birth to the modern Japanese RPG genre (the original was pretty much a hack and slash dungeon crawler). Gave us all the emo teen character designs with silly hair that we know and love today.
Wing Commander - this was the game that proved that presentation could sell and meant that developers also started to think about how to make their games looked good and had well-presented stories. It also, arguably, started the long-running arms race that PC gamers face in trying to ensure that their machine can run the latest games.
Doom - Wolfenstein 3d and Ultima Underworld might have got there first (though UU doesn't quite belong to the same genre), but it was Doom that brought the first-person action game to the masses.
Command & Conquer - I know, I know, Dune 2 is the obvious pick for "first true RTS", but I think C&C is ultimately the game that deserves the credit. It invented the drag-click interface, which has been at the heart of pretty much every PC RTS interface since then. Today, Dune 2 feels borderline unplayable, but C&C doesn't feel all that different to its sequels.`
Final Fantasy VII - Not fundamentally different to its predecessors, except in terms of graphics. However, this was the game that gave the Playstation credibility and changed the shape of the console market irreversibly.
Baldur's Gate - Saved the Western-style RPG from oblivion, at a time when the Gold Box games were long since history, the Eye of the Beholder series had fizzled out and the Ultima series had subjected itself to the most hideous degradation imaginable. Without Baldur's Gate, we almost certainly wouldn't have the likes of Oblivion and Mass Effect today, as they'd never have been seen as commercially viable.
With regard to more recent titles, it's hard to say yet how influential they are, as we haven't had long enough to see their impact on the industry in the long term. However, a few possible candidates that may be influential going forwards are:
Halo - only a slightly-above-average game in most respects, but it was the first to actually make a console controller feel like a natural way of playing an dps.
Warcraft 3 - the first game to successfully introduce RPG elements into an RTS. The RPG/RTS hybrid is becoming an increasingly important genre, as has been most recently demonstrated by Dawn of War 2.
World of Warcraft - the first MMO to go truly mass-market on a worldwide basis.
You have, possibly without realising it, hit upon the real reason there's no Wii port of RE5. And it's far more worrying for Nintendo than any branding/demographic issue.
The Wii can't handle the game from a hardware perspective.
The Gamecube was perfectly competitive with the rest of its generation; more powerful than the PS2 and certainly a reasonable match for an Xbox. The Wii is still closer in its hardware capabilities to a Gamecube than to a PS3 or Xbox 360. Where the Wii does get ports of cross-platform games, these often tend to be co-developed with the PS2 version. Expect to see the Wii cut out of more and more "big news" games as this cycle goes on and developers get more comfortable with the hardware on offer elsewhere. It's not just about graphics - more sophisticated physics modelling and more generally elaborate design philosophies also demand better hardware.
The installed base won't save it, either. The PS2 benefitted from its huge installed base last time around, because most PS2 owners were, to some extent, "gamers". They bought games. The Wii demographic buys, on average, far fewer games (and many Wiis sit unused in cupboards).
No idea if it's maybe something they added for the UK version, but I know for a fact there's a mouse sensitivity slider in my version of the game. I had to turn it down a ways before the game felt playable, but that's normal for me.
The aspect ratio thing is, I admit, annoying. However, the font size seems absolutely fine to me (running in 1680x1050, not tried lower resolutions). The HUD's fine. It tells me everything I need to know and doesn't clutter the screen unnecessarily. To be honest, for a game like this with heavy horror elements, I would almost have preferred a no-HUD approach (a la Dead Space).
And the graphics? They're not Crysis, but let's face it, even 18 months on, nothing else is. They compare reasonably well to anything else I've seen recently.
I honestly do think all the people crying "OMG console port" are completely overdoing it. To me, the game looks and feels like a PC game. Sure, there are a few clues that it was developed for consoles in parallel - the radial weapon select menu being the best example - but there are perfectly PC-friendly alternatives to these (you can still bind specific weapon selections to whatever key you want).
Oh yeah, you're right about the Kingdom Hearts fanbase. I can't say I've noticed it so much regarding Final Fantasy (which I think, as the "bigger" brand, tends to attact more of the mainstream crowd), but if you go looking around for Kingdom Hearts fansites and stuff... well... you'll very quickly find some scary stuff. The kind of stuff that, frankly, makes you wonder whether this whole new-fangled intarweb thing was such a good idea after all. It's almost as bad as Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, which has been covered at length in somethingawful's Awful Link of the Day section over the years. The real irony around KH fandom is that most of it appears to have only the most superficial connection to the (generally very good) games - it's mostly based around some weird fanfiction... fantasy... erm... thing.
I picked up on Nintendo in particular because it's very, very obvious here on slashdot. I've often suspected that "rabid Nintendo fan" is often synonymous with "embittered former-gamer who hasn't actually owned a console for a decade but just hates MS and Sony" (and let's face it, we have a lot of those around these parts). Seriously, try making a post criticising Mario Kart and just wait for the flames. It's a pity in a way; Nintendo do some good stuff in among the reheated rubbish (I'm highly partial to Wii-Fit, which has helped me lose quite a lot of weight), but I read the venom from Nintendo fans online and it just turns me right off. I can't help it; it's an emotional reaction. When I load up a Nintendo game, I just get these visions of rabid slashdot posts flashing through my mind.
There are a few other franchises that stir up the same effect - I can't believe I forgot to mention Halo in my previous post. Halo's an interesting case, actually, in that it can be and is used both ways. All three of the Halo games are a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality, so fanboys highlight the good stuff and bang on about it endlessly, while those with a bone to pick with MS (again, not in short supply here) use the games' shortcomings as conclusive proof of why the Xbox (360) must suck. I suspect the reaction the games deserve is more along the lines of "hmm... a solid enough 7 on 10, but let's not get too hung up on it, eh".
Yeah, what we have here is a classic case of a game which is, let's face it, more about the petty politics of console wars rather than the quality of the game itself. It's not alone in this; Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3, Gears of War and its sequel on the 360 and... well... pretty much any first-party Nintendo game on the Wii (Nintendo fanboys are particularly bad for this) all fall into the same category. The rabid elements of the system in question's fanbase have a psychological need to believe that this game must be the BEST THING EVER and any criticism of the game, no matter how moderately expressed or well evidenced, is an OUTRAGEOUS INSULT not only to the game itself, but also to the host system and the personal honour of the fanboy himself.
Owning all 3 systems and not having a particular ideological bias in favour of one of them (though I do find that the nature of the Nintendo fanbase occasionally pushes me away from the Wii a bit), I can generally at least try to take a balanced view of the games in question. Killzone 2 looks very pretty - there's no denying it's making good use of the PS3 hardware. I don't think it's on a par with Crysis graphically, but then, good luck experiencing Crysis properly on any system that doesn't cost at least twice the retail value of the PS3 (even with the performance improvements they made in the patch, and in Crysis Warhead). The gameplay looks fairly generic shooter, albeit with some decent-ish AI. But I'm not really seeing much to set it apart from Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 or FEAR 2, all of which have more or less sated my thirst for shooters in recent months to a perfectly satisfactory standard. I might pick it up at some point, once I've finished FEAR 2, but I can't claim to be in a particular hurry, particularly with Dawn of War 2 due for release any day and liable to soak up a lot of my gaming time over the next month. The apparent flaws relating to plot, variety of enemies and controls are all worrying, though I know better than to trust reviews too far over these things.
To be honest, the shooter I'm really starting to get excited about now is the Aliens title, due to be published by SEGA, but I note the release date on that has now slipped to 2010.
You might think so, but this isn't always how it works out, at least on the public servers. I've been staggered by the degree to which "average" players in objective-based team games can suffer from tunnel vision and consistently miss obvious ways to win.
This was often noticable in old online fpses like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress classic, but if you really want to see it in action, you can't get a better demonstration that World of Warcraft's battlegrounds (which I used to play quite heavily, but have given up on altogether, largely for the reasons outlined below).
For the uninitiated (and unaddicted), a few words of explanation are probably due. World of Warcraft has a number of avenues for player vs player content, but the most widely-played of these are the Battlegrounds. These are large-scale objective based team battles, which reset every time they're won (with the winning team getting increased rewards, though losers also get rewards depending on how well they played). Back when I was playing these, there were four battlegrounds (a fifth has since been added, but I've not even been into it), which follow structures already established by online fpses:
- Alterac Valley is a 40vs40 "assault" style battle, where each team needs to capture towers and graveyards (effectively spawn points) on a path to the enemy base and, once there, kill the enemy general, who is essentially a PvE boss.
- Arathi Basin is a 20v20 classic 5-points capture and hold battle. The more points you hold, the faster your team's score rises.
- Eye of the Storm is a combination of 4-points capture and hold with 1-flag CTF; the sides compete for control of 4 towers and for a centrally positioned flag which can be captured at any friendly tower. The more points you hold, the faster your team's score rises, with capturing the flag granting a small score bonus.
- Warsong Gulch is classic 2-flag capture the flag. The first team to capture the enemy flag 3 times wins.
Now, assuming that the sides are evenly balanced in terms of numbers, there are fairly simple schemes for winning the first three of those (Warsong Gulch is a bit more of a scrum). In particular, there is a very simple formula for winning Arathi basin and Eye of the Storm; capture 3 points, ignoring the one(s) most accessible from the enemy's base and turtle at them and you will almost inevitably win. I've done these battlegrounds hundreds of times and this rule almost inevitably holds true - you should only ever get a close battle when both sides have realised this. A guild team who realise this can dominate these battlegrounds all day.
But how often does it happen with a "public" team? About 1 time in 4. Maybe 1 time in 3. A large majority of players have absolutely no ability to prioritise goals. Having secured their initial "3 points" goal at the start of the battle, they squander it by pressing on for an indefensible position right next to the enemy base, allowing for a counter-attack, or they weaken their defence in Eye of the Storm by making pointless e-peen runs for a flag whose score value isn't significant enough to tip the balance in all but the most closely fought of 2 towers vs 2 towers games. They see a clear goal in front of them and rush towards it without asking whether or not it makes sense to do so. I knew it was time for me to get out of the Battlegrounds scene when I found myself yelling at the screen "NO, YOU IDIOTS, DON'T RUN FOR THE $£%*£^&"£^£"&*("%)!" FARM YOU LEPEROUS LEMMINGS".
Given that I have similar recollections from my time with BF1942 (though that was more directed at having half of a 20 man team queueing up at the runway for the entire battle in the hope of grabbing one of three plane spawns) I can't imagine that this will be any different. Most players will still throw logic to the wind and do whatever their goldfish-like attention span drives them towards.
Indeed. This is such a basic problem that I honestly can't believe it made it past testing. It's compounded by the fact that with a few exceptions (basically free jogging and the longest version of the boxing exercise) most of the exercises are very short. Having to navigate the menus at the end of each exercise really does break my pace.
Oh yeah, I don't deny that BMI can be useful - but it needs to be put in context. Exactly the kind of context you've just put it in. Because without that, it can either lull people into a false sense of security, or tell people that they need to change a perfectly healthy body.
I know two people who have serious issues with Wii-Fit's BMI measurements. I'm not one of them; I'm your average slightly-overweight gamer (probably still 8-10 pounds North of where I should be), who has never exercised much before this. However, one of my friends has been working out fairly seriously for years and is in what must be considered to be spectacularly good shape. When Wii-fit told him he was obese, he just laughed (muscle being heavier than fat, for those who didn't already know). The other was a female friend who has a very, very slender build. She eats normally, isn't even vaguely anorexic or anything, but she's very, narrow across the shoulders, while also being not far short of 6 feet tall. Wii-fit basically told her she was dangerously underweight.
Now, my worry about this (and remember, I really like Wii-fit in general) is that while both of my friends are clever people who know how to interpret this information, the same can't be said to be generally true. Yes, somebody who works out a lot probably knows that they will register as overweight or obese on the BMI scale, because they pay a lot of attention to their body. But they're not the main audience for Wii-fit. I suspect I'm fairly close to the average - never exercised much before, largely because exercise is so damned boring, but turning to Wii-fit in the hope that it will help me over that hurdle. Handing out crudely calculated BMIs (there's no option to tell it your build) with no detailed advice just strikes me as a fairly foolish thing for the software to be doing.
It's the consistent theme that runs throughout Wii-fit. A small amount of time spent on putting in some basic information on fitness and safety, along with a little tool to allow you to create (or even to recommend for you) programmes of exercises would have boosted the value of the package to the average user massively.
Yeah? Try it on any reasonably hard surface for any amount of time with no footwear or unsuitable footware and, believe me, you will *feel* the error in your statement. Push it too hard and you could end up feeling it for days or even weeks. Repeated unabsorbed impacts are bad, mkay?
Running shoes do exist for reasons other than a) keeping sharp bits from poking into your feet and b) allowing chavs to flaunt their ill-gotten spoils.
Slashdot Mirror
Siren: Blood Curse on the PS3 has sections where the player controls characters who are completely unable to fight back. In many ways, Siren has taken over the mantle of the best traditional survival-horror series around, since Resident Evil became an action game and Silent Hill started to self-destruct with its fourth installment. What's interesting about the Siren games is that you control multiple characters for various sections of the game. Some are physically fit adults, who may even have experience with weapons, while others have disabilities, or are pre-teens, rendering them far more vulnerable to foes and entirely reliant upon either avoiding detection, or running away if spotted.
To be fair, though, the movie was one of the least bad game adaptations I've seen. It was a solid 4/10, maybe even a 5/10. That puts it miles ahead of most other adaptations. It even had a couple of genuinely creepy sequences. Sure, it doesn't really fit with the canon established in the games all that well, but there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
Yes, good point. I'd forgotten how primative the original PS1 controllers were. And, of course, while more civilised controllers soon became available, PS1 games had to be designed to be able to work on the most basic controllers right throughout the lifespan of the console.
Actually, I think I'd rather have a re-imagined version. The original was a great game (as was number 2. 3 was ok and I try to pretend that everything since then doesn't exist), but it has aged quite badly in some respects if you play it now.
For starters, the PS1 graphics are just plain nasty. More seriously, the controls feel dismal to somebody used to more recent offerings. You don't have the options for directional, as oppposed to rotational, movement that you have in the later games and you can tell that the game was designed for a controller with only one analogue stick. A new version (preferrably available reasonably cheap - $30 or so) with touched up graphics and modernised controls would be highly welcome.
Depends. This is a remake of an old game, from a franchise which has, even by a relatively kind assessment, been struggling for a couple of years now. The economics of this particular game are going to be odd. Silent Hill: Homecoming, which was released for the 360 (and PS3? - I can't remember) wasn't exactly a roaring sales success. The franchise's brand has been harmed as the games have picked up a (sadly well deserved) reputation for stagnation and sloppy production values. This is due, I suspect, to the rather chaotic nature of the development of the games from Silent Hill 4 onwards.
The Register ran a good editorial a few days back on how IT systems and technology in general are often blamed unfairly when mistakes occur as a result of human error.
Would it be unfair of me to suggest that the same factors might be at play here?
WoW currently has a meta-achievement for clearing basically all of the achievements associated with current raid content, some of which require you to do fights in very odd ways, others of which are just plain hard. This is currently seen as "the big one" of achievements, not least because it rewards you with a very fast dragon to ride.
I think the slashdot equivalent would have to be as follows:
"Reach all of the achievements listed below:
- Make a +5 moderated post explaining why Windows does something better than Linux.
- Make a +5 moderated post explaining why Apple are rubbish.
- Make a +5 moderated post explaining why you don't like either Nintendo, or any first-party Nintendo game.
- Make a +5 moderated post explaining why you will be voting Republican.
- Make a +5 moderated post explaining that sometimes correlation can at least point towards causation.
- Make a post complaining about the moderation of one of your previous posts which does not get moderated to -1.
- Make a +5 moderated first-post of 300 words or longer on a front-page story.
- Make a +5 moderated post on a sotry which is at least 5 days old at the time of your post.
- Make a +5 moderated post containing absolutely no punctuation.
- Make a +5 moderated post complaining that you can't possibly see how this story is either "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters".
- Submit a story which receives at least 1000 comments.
- Submit a story which is placed on the front page and centres around a link to your own blog.
- Submit a story which is placed on the front page and then submit a duplicate story, also placed on the front page, within 2 weeks.
Reward: Unlimited mod-points"
Unlike most of the others who've disagreed with my post (the whiny rant from Millennium above is an absolute classic case of slashdot wounded-pride mentality - predictable and priceless to see it coming from a 4 figure UID - especially when he throws the "fanboy insult in when I haven't even stated a preference between the 360, PS3 or PC) you make an interesting point with a degree of validity.
I've no doubt that developer expectations did harm the Wii's lineup of titles early on. None of the current gen consoles had a great starting lineup (the PS3 was arguably the best, with Resistance, but that's just picking the best of three bad options). However, the 360 in particular very quickly got a heavily fleshed out lineup, while the Wii... well... didn't. The most substantial additions to its lineup have all been first party titles, which, as in the Cube and N64 generations, have been few, far between and of variable quality (from stellar down to mediocre-verging-on-poor).
However, the Wii's runaway sales success was apparent very, very quickly after the late-2006 launch. We're now well into 2009, almost two and a half years later. By now, developers should have had time to respond. I know that development times are longer these days, but if developers were really serious about climbing onto the Wii, we would have a huge number of big upcoming Wii releases being previewed and hyped like crazy at the moment (even if they're still 6 months from launch), spanning all genres and target demographics. As it is... well... there's Madworld. There might be one or two others in genres I don't follow. But broadly speaking, it's clear that the big release target systems are still the 360 and PS3.
Nintendo's advantage was always going to decay in the second half of the cycle. Despite the arrival of the economic downturn, HDTVs are continuing their steady penetration of the home TV market. The technological gap between the Wii and its competitors is going to start becoming more apparent to the average game-player (which is to say, people who don't see themselves as gamers, but do buy and play the odd game). Moreover, the Wii-mote isn't quite the "cool new thing" like it once was. After the hype of the first year or two, there's a growing recognisation that it's basically a fun little gizmo which is good for some types of game and dreadful for others. It's fairly clear now that there are plenty of genres where it won't supplant the more traditional console controller, or the keyboard+mouse combo.
Actually, the people who have come the closest to saying that Nintendo can't release a good "proper" game these days are... Nintendo. They say it by implication every time they stand up at a game development conference and speak pretty much exclusively about their latest range of casual mini-games, before wrapping up with a comment that "oh, there's a new Mario Kart coming as well".
They're not really interested in putting out the best games any more. In a way, it's hard to blame them - they're almost certainly making more money by putting out Wii-toys for non-gamers now than they made in either the N64 or Gamecube generations. But it does mean that trying to talk about them in the same breath as Microsoft and Sony isn't really relevant any more. This time around, we don't have three console makers playing for the same market. We have two serious contenders, and a very successful "electronic toys" maker which is apparently quite content to be a poor third in the "video games" market.
The Wii market isn't actually as big as it appears. In reality, it's quite possibly smaller than the 360 and PS3 markets.
Nintendo did a great job of selling the Wii to non-gamers. They've got a huge installed base out there now and should, in theory, have the kind of market dominance that the PS2 enjoyed last time around. But they don't.
See, the flip side of selling consoles to non-gamers is that they are... well... non-gamers. If you look at the weekly games sales charts, the only Wii games that really make an impact are Wii Sports, Wii Fit and, to a lesser degree, Mario Kart Wii. All games that are bundled with the Wii console in the most common packages. Elsewhere, the chart is dominated by your Call of Duty games, your Resident Evils, your Maddens and so on. People who actually buy games, as opposed to non-gamers who pick up a Wii and embittered slashdot posters nostalgic for the 80s, do actually tend to make HD graphics and high production values a factor in their purchase.
Your best chance to sell a game with the Wii is at the point of sale with the console itself. Once this has passed, a large majority of the consoles will sit in a cupboard unused. This was never the case with the PS2, and helped ensure that the PS2 got ports of pretty much everything bar first-party exclusives, despite being the weakest of the consoles around at the time from a technical perspective (and a well known "bit of a bugger to port to"). It's pretty much a three way race in terms of actual games sales (and there are signs that the Wii is really struggling here).
If you develop for the Wii as your main platform, you're also, by tying yourself into its control system, ensuring that you'll need significant changes to port your games over to other systems, widening the target audience. On the other hand, develop for the 360, PS3 or PC and it's not that hard to get your game onto the other two out of those 3 platforms. If you're going for one of the really big releases, you'll probably be putting out a PS2 port anyway to reach the huge installed base of people there who still haven't upgraded. It's cheap and easy to stick some motion controls onto that for a Wii port.
Oh believe me, I'm old enough to remember Molyneux's old games. I played Populus back when it was new. I remember the excitement of getting home with a copy of PC Format which had a 5 1/4 inch floppy on the cover with the demo of Powermonger. (Btw, I mostly liked your post, but comments about "not sure you're old enough or aware enough" do make you sound a bit petulent.)
But the industry has changed since then, as have the expectations of gamers. Back then, if you had a good and original idea, you could build a decent game around it with only a small team and a modest budget. Development teams were still led by visionary geniuses, who not only thought up the concept for the game, but also did a large chunk of the hands on development.
For better or worse (and I do think it's mostly for the better) the industry has changed. Putting out a decent commercial game these days requires years of development, a budget of millions and the efforts of hundreds of people (albeit maybe not all at the same time). The best developers today aren't the ones who can throw out 10 great innovations in game design before breakfast - they're the ones who can define the scope of a game, prevent it from creeping, decide which ideas to lift from elsewhere and then project manage the various teams of programmers, artists and QA people to produce the product on time and to a satisfactory standard, while keeping the publishers off their backs to a sufficient degree that the overall vision isn't compromised. If you look at some of the best games of recent years (I'd nominate World of Warcraft, Dead Space, Crysis and Gears of War), all of them have lifted ideas shamelessly from elsewhere, adding very little of their own but they've been delivered with degree of focus that results in a very polished end product (leaving aside crappy PC ports in a couple of cases).
Now, Molyneux isn't completely lacking in these skills. He's not John Romero and he hasn't turned Lionhead into a running joke like Ion Storm. But it's clear that having hyper-active, ideas-based management is holding Lionhead back from joining the top tier of developers. However, it's still good to have studios like that around, throwing out innovation-rich games for others to cannibalise. This is why I continue to buy Molyneux's games, even though I haven't actually enjoyed one since the original Dungeon Keeper.
Maybe, but the means of "tactile" interaction with the pet, which is at the core of most virtual pet games these days, is pure Black & White. When I see Nintendogs, I think of Black & White far more than I do the Tamagotchi.
I disagree. Molyneux does experiment far more than any other major developer, for the most part. Of course, these days video gaming is pretty well established and there isn't quite the room to invent whole new genres like there was back in the 80s and 90s. But even so, he always seems to me to be trying to find new twists on existing genres, or to mesh genres together in a new way. Fable and Black & White are good examples of this.
The problem is that, despite what people like to think, experimentation and innovation don't often make for very good games. These days, making a good game is, like it or not, generally about polish, attention to detail, technical prowess and the shameless lifting of other people's innovations. Molyneux will put out something interesting and different, which fails to provide any kind of fun. Then a year later, somebody else lifts all of the good ideas and puts them into a package that actually works as a game. Look at how Black & White, which was undoubtedly one of the most broken experiences ever to be marketed as a leisure activity, laid down much of the groundwork for the modern virtual pet genre, which is seriously big money now.
I don't like the guy's games, but I think the industry is better for his involvement.
Halo Wars is to RTSes as Halo was to fpses. The comparison holds up remarkably well.
- Neither was the first attempt at doing the genre on a console. However, both were the first really ambitious efforts at implementing the genre on a console from the ground up, rather than just pinching PC mechanics wholesale (or indeed being a direct port of a PC game).
- Both games were reasonably pleasant to look at, though certainly nowhere near the cutting edge technically.
- Both games were the first examples of their genre to actually feel natural on a console controller.
- In terms of sophistication and variety, both games were years behind equivalent offerings on the PC.
- Both games had a storyline that thought it was far more interesting than it really was.
Now, the thing with Halo is that it really got the ball rolling for big budget fpses on consoles. It showed how, by careful attention to sensitivity on the controller, as well as a few key design decisions (such as not requiring constant 180 degree turns in the way that many PC fpses do), you could render the genre playable - and even enjoyable - on a console.
While Halo was in no way a great game considered on its own merits, it did sow the seeds that resulted in some of the modern console fpses that can give their PC competition a run for its money (such as Resistance: Fall of Man). It will be interesting to see if the same can now be done for the RTS, given that Halo Wars proves that a control system can be made to work.
I'd go broader than games. Pretty much any mass market entertainment these days has to fail to get a real ending, and even then it doesn't usually manage it.
When was the last time you went to the cinema to watch a major release that didn't end with a blatant hook for a sequel? When was the last time you saw a TV show end without some form of cliff-hanger? And yes... when was the last time you saw a game end without a plug for a sequel?
I think TV has it worst. The push to wring as many seasons as possible out of a particular intellectual property has destroyed the capability of a generation of screenwriters to actually write an ending for a story. They write a strong beginning to get people going, then just sit down and churn out "middle" for season after season until the ratings drop and the network starts to swing the axe. Then, if possible, they write in an ending from whatever point in the story they'd managed to get up to.
I remember when I got into watching anime, back in around 2001, the first thing that struck me was that many series did actually have endings. Sure, in some cases the endings were incomprehensible, but at least they were there. However, even with anime, as time has gone one, the classic stand-alone 13 or 26 episode series has fallen from favour in recent years.
The problem is that we are creating a body of cultural products which will not stand the test of time. Now, ok, you can write off 95% (at least) of modern pop culture as ephemera, but it would still be nice to think that we might actually be creating a few things that will still be watched, read or played in fifty years time (and beyond). But unless things have ending, it just won't happen.
Can you imagine if Hamlet never came to an end (ok, if you've ever sat through a bad student production, it might have felt like that) but instead ran on for 17 plays, with 8-12 comprising the little-loved Finland arc, play 4 introducing a new love interest who got written out in play 9 and then the whole thing stopped abruptly after play 17 because the Globe burned down? How many modern TV stories have been ruined by this kind of thing? The X-Files? Lost? Buffy?
Ironically, given what sparked this discussion, MMOs don't actually need an ending. They're not usually intended as a story as such - more as an ongoing, but usually static, world that players participate in. They generally kind of exist in the same continuity-free zones as daily-gag comic strips in newspapers and the like. That they ended Tabula Rasa in the way they did is actually kind of cool and probably rather better than the shoddy game deserved.
I considered all three of these titles suggested, but as I was trying to keep it to 10, none of them quite made the cut. The main criterion I was considering was the effect that games had on later games development and cultural attitudes to gaming.
I think Sim City and Civilisation both fall into the category of "serious games" that Elite pioneered. Yes, they took things to new levels of complexity, but they weren't quite breaking completely uncharted ground in the same way.
Starcraft didn't really influence later games development, because it didn't really bring anything new to the table. It's not strikingly different to any number of other 2d RTSes that were around at the time (eg. C&C: Red Alert, Dark Reign, Krush Kill & Destroy). While it has had a large public following, this has been a regional, rather than a global phenomenon.
There were a few others that I didn't quite feel merited inclusion in the top 10, though they were doubtless important (in no particular order - some more tongue in cheek than others):
Tomb Raider - the first really successful attempt at marketing and selling a game on criteria that... shall we say... have nothing to do with gameplay or technical innovation.
Quake - took the concept of online deathmatches to the wider gaming public.
Quake 2 - the game that spurred the mass-market adoption of 3d acceleration technology on the PC.
Alone in the Dark - the first proper graphical game to actually be scary (I think some of the text adventures and ASCII-art games had pulled this off quite well).
Star Wars: Force Commander - the moment at which the Star Wars logo on a game stopped being a sure sign of high quality and started to be a toxic warning symbol (partially redeemed in recent years by KoTOR).
Ultima Underworld - the first RPG to prove that the genre didn't have to be accompanied by dire graphics.
Halo Wars(???) - possibly the first RTS to actually feel playable on a console(?)
Grand Theft Auto - for giving us Jack Thompson
Agreed. In rough order of age, I think my picks would have to be:
Space Invaders - the first video game which is actually fun to play and doesn't need a second player as an opponent.
Elite - the original thinking man's game. Set new standards for scope and depth.
Mario Brothers - pretty much instrumental in establishing the home console market.
Ultima IV - demonstrated that games could actually have a serious, intelligent storyline and didn't need to be just about going out to beat up the Big Bad.
Final Fantasy II - essentially gave birth to the modern Japanese RPG genre (the original was pretty much a hack and slash dungeon crawler). Gave us all the emo teen character designs with silly hair that we know and love today.
Wing Commander - this was the game that proved that presentation could sell and meant that developers also started to think about how to make their games looked good and had well-presented stories. It also, arguably, started the long-running arms race that PC gamers face in trying to ensure that their machine can run the latest games.
Doom - Wolfenstein 3d and Ultima Underworld might have got there first (though UU doesn't quite belong to the same genre), but it was Doom that brought the first-person action game to the masses.
Command & Conquer - I know, I know, Dune 2 is the obvious pick for "first true RTS", but I think C&C is ultimately the game that deserves the credit. It invented the drag-click interface, which has been at the heart of pretty much every PC RTS interface since then. Today, Dune 2 feels borderline unplayable, but C&C doesn't feel all that different to its sequels.`
Final Fantasy VII - Not fundamentally different to its predecessors, except in terms of graphics. However, this was the game that gave the Playstation credibility and changed the shape of the console market irreversibly.
Baldur's Gate - Saved the Western-style RPG from oblivion, at a time when the Gold Box games were long since history, the Eye of the Beholder series had fizzled out and the Ultima series had subjected itself to the most hideous degradation imaginable. Without Baldur's Gate, we almost certainly wouldn't have the likes of Oblivion and Mass Effect today, as they'd never have been seen as commercially viable.
With regard to more recent titles, it's hard to say yet how influential they are, as we haven't had long enough to see their impact on the industry in the long term. However, a few possible candidates that may be influential going forwards are:
Halo - only a slightly-above-average game in most respects, but it was the first to actually make a console controller feel like a natural way of playing an dps.
Warcraft 3 - the first game to successfully introduce RPG elements into an RTS. The RPG/RTS hybrid is becoming an increasingly important genre, as has been most recently demonstrated by Dawn of War 2.
World of Warcraft - the first MMO to go truly mass-market on a worldwide basis.
You have, possibly without realising it, hit upon the real reason there's no Wii port of RE5. And it's far more worrying for Nintendo than any branding/demographic issue.
The Wii can't handle the game from a hardware perspective.
The Gamecube was perfectly competitive with the rest of its generation; more powerful than the PS2 and certainly a reasonable match for an Xbox. The Wii is still closer in its hardware capabilities to a Gamecube than to a PS3 or Xbox 360. Where the Wii does get ports of cross-platform games, these often tend to be co-developed with the PS2 version. Expect to see the Wii cut out of more and more "big news" games as this cycle goes on and developers get more comfortable with the hardware on offer elsewhere. It's not just about graphics - more sophisticated physics modelling and more generally elaborate design philosophies also demand better hardware.
The installed base won't save it, either. The PS2 benefitted from its huge installed base last time around, because most PS2 owners were, to some extent, "gamers". They bought games. The Wii demographic buys, on average, far fewer games (and many Wiis sit unused in cupboards).
No idea if it's maybe something they added for the UK version, but I know for a fact there's a mouse sensitivity slider in my version of the game. I had to turn it down a ways before the game felt playable, but that's normal for me.
The aspect ratio thing is, I admit, annoying. However, the font size seems absolutely fine to me (running in 1680x1050, not tried lower resolutions). The HUD's fine. It tells me everything I need to know and doesn't clutter the screen unnecessarily. To be honest, for a game like this with heavy horror elements, I would almost have preferred a no-HUD approach (a la Dead Space).
And the graphics? They're not Crysis, but let's face it, even 18 months on, nothing else is. They compare reasonably well to anything else I've seen recently.
I honestly do think all the people crying "OMG console port" are completely overdoing it. To me, the game looks and feels like a PC game. Sure, there are a few clues that it was developed for consoles in parallel - the radial weapon select menu being the best example - but there are perfectly PC-friendly alternatives to these (you can still bind specific weapon selections to whatever key you want).
Oh yeah, you're right about the Kingdom Hearts fanbase. I can't say I've noticed it so much regarding Final Fantasy (which I think, as the "bigger" brand, tends to attact more of the mainstream crowd), but if you go looking around for Kingdom Hearts fansites and stuff... well... you'll very quickly find some scary stuff. The kind of stuff that, frankly, makes you wonder whether this whole new-fangled intarweb thing was such a good idea after all. It's almost as bad as Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, which has been covered at length in somethingawful's Awful Link of the Day section over the years. The real irony around KH fandom is that most of it appears to have only the most superficial connection to the (generally very good) games - it's mostly based around some weird fanfiction... fantasy... erm... thing.
I picked up on Nintendo in particular because it's very, very obvious here on slashdot. I've often suspected that "rabid Nintendo fan" is often synonymous with "embittered former-gamer who hasn't actually owned a console for a decade but just hates MS and Sony" (and let's face it, we have a lot of those around these parts). Seriously, try making a post criticising Mario Kart and just wait for the flames. It's a pity in a way; Nintendo do some good stuff in among the reheated rubbish (I'm highly partial to Wii-Fit, which has helped me lose quite a lot of weight), but I read the venom from Nintendo fans online and it just turns me right off. I can't help it; it's an emotional reaction. When I load up a Nintendo game, I just get these visions of rabid slashdot posts flashing through my mind.
There are a few other franchises that stir up the same effect - I can't believe I forgot to mention Halo in my previous post. Halo's an interesting case, actually, in that it can be and is used both ways. All three of the Halo games are a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality, so fanboys highlight the good stuff and bang on about it endlessly, while those with a bone to pick with MS (again, not in short supply here) use the games' shortcomings as conclusive proof of why the Xbox (360) must suck. I suspect the reaction the games deserve is more along the lines of "hmm... a solid enough 7 on 10, but let's not get too hung up on it, eh".
Yeah, what we have here is a classic case of a game which is, let's face it, more about the petty politics of console wars rather than the quality of the game itself. It's not alone in this; Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3, Gears of War and its sequel on the 360 and... well... pretty much any first-party Nintendo game on the Wii (Nintendo fanboys are particularly bad for this) all fall into the same category. The rabid elements of the system in question's fanbase have a psychological need to believe that this game must be the BEST THING EVER and any criticism of the game, no matter how moderately expressed or well evidenced, is an OUTRAGEOUS INSULT not only to the game itself, but also to the host system and the personal honour of the fanboy himself.
Owning all 3 systems and not having a particular ideological bias in favour of one of them (though I do find that the nature of the Nintendo fanbase occasionally pushes me away from the Wii a bit), I can generally at least try to take a balanced view of the games in question. Killzone 2 looks very pretty - there's no denying it's making good use of the PS3 hardware. I don't think it's on a par with Crysis graphically, but then, good luck experiencing Crysis properly on any system that doesn't cost at least twice the retail value of the PS3 (even with the performance improvements they made in the patch, and in Crysis Warhead). The gameplay looks fairly generic shooter, albeit with some decent-ish AI. But I'm not really seeing much to set it apart from Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 or FEAR 2, all of which have more or less sated my thirst for shooters in recent months to a perfectly satisfactory standard. I might pick it up at some point, once I've finished FEAR 2, but I can't claim to be in a particular hurry, particularly with Dawn of War 2 due for release any day and liable to soak up a lot of my gaming time over the next month. The apparent flaws relating to plot, variety of enemies and controls are all worrying, though I know better than to trust reviews too far over these things.
To be honest, the shooter I'm really starting to get excited about now is the Aliens title, due to be published by SEGA, but I note the release date on that has now slipped to 2010.
You might think so, but this isn't always how it works out, at least on the public servers. I've been staggered by the degree to which "average" players in objective-based team games can suffer from tunnel vision and consistently miss obvious ways to win.
This was often noticable in old online fpses like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress classic, but if you really want to see it in action, you can't get a better demonstration that World of Warcraft's battlegrounds (which I used to play quite heavily, but have given up on altogether, largely for the reasons outlined below).
For the uninitiated (and unaddicted), a few words of explanation are probably due. World of Warcraft has a number of avenues for player vs player content, but the most widely-played of these are the Battlegrounds. These are large-scale objective based team battles, which reset every time they're won (with the winning team getting increased rewards, though losers also get rewards depending on how well they played). Back when I was playing these, there were four battlegrounds (a fifth has since been added, but I've not even been into it), which follow structures already established by online fpses:
- Alterac Valley is a 40vs40 "assault" style battle, where each team needs to capture towers and graveyards (effectively spawn points) on a path to the enemy base and, once there, kill the enemy general, who is essentially a PvE boss.
- Arathi Basin is a 20v20 classic 5-points capture and hold battle. The more points you hold, the faster your team's score rises.
- Eye of the Storm is a combination of 4-points capture and hold with 1-flag CTF; the sides compete for control of 4 towers and for a centrally positioned flag which can be captured at any friendly tower. The more points you hold, the faster your team's score rises, with capturing the flag granting a small score bonus.
- Warsong Gulch is classic 2-flag capture the flag. The first team to capture the enemy flag 3 times wins.
Now, assuming that the sides are evenly balanced in terms of numbers, there are fairly simple schemes for winning the first three of those (Warsong Gulch is a bit more of a scrum). In particular, there is a very simple formula for winning Arathi basin and Eye of the Storm; capture 3 points, ignoring the one(s) most accessible from the enemy's base and turtle at them and you will almost inevitably win. I've done these battlegrounds hundreds of times and this rule almost inevitably holds true - you should only ever get a close battle when both sides have realised this. A guild team who realise this can dominate these battlegrounds all day.
But how often does it happen with a "public" team? About 1 time in 4. Maybe 1 time in 3. A large majority of players have absolutely no ability to prioritise goals. Having secured their initial "3 points" goal at the start of the battle, they squander it by pressing on for an indefensible position right next to the enemy base, allowing for a counter-attack, or they weaken their defence in Eye of the Storm by making pointless e-peen runs for a flag whose score value isn't significant enough to tip the balance in all but the most closely fought of 2 towers vs 2 towers games. They see a clear goal in front of them and rush towards it without asking whether or not it makes sense to do so. I knew it was time for me to get out of the Battlegrounds scene when I found myself yelling at the screen "NO, YOU IDIOTS, DON'T RUN FOR THE $£%*£^&"£^£"&*("%)!" FARM YOU LEPEROUS LEMMINGS".
Given that I have similar recollections from my time with BF1942 (though that was more directed at having half of a 20 man team queueing up at the runway for the entire battle in the hope of grabbing one of three plane spawns) I can't imagine that this will be any different. Most players will still throw logic to the wind and do whatever their goldfish-like attention span drives them towards.
Indeed. This is such a basic problem that I honestly can't believe it made it past testing. It's compounded by the fact that with a few exceptions (basically free jogging and the longest version of the boxing exercise) most of the exercises are very short. Having to navigate the menus at the end of each exercise really does break my pace.
Oh yeah, I don't deny that BMI can be useful - but it needs to be put in context. Exactly the kind of context you've just put it in. Because without that, it can either lull people into a false sense of security, or tell people that they need to change a perfectly healthy body.
I know two people who have serious issues with Wii-Fit's BMI measurements. I'm not one of them; I'm your average slightly-overweight gamer (probably still 8-10 pounds North of where I should be), who has never exercised much before this. However, one of my friends has been working out fairly seriously for years and is in what must be considered to be spectacularly good shape. When Wii-fit told him he was obese, he just laughed (muscle being heavier than fat, for those who didn't already know). The other was a female friend who has a very, very slender build. She eats normally, isn't even vaguely anorexic or anything, but she's very, narrow across the shoulders, while also being not far short of 6 feet tall. Wii-fit basically told her she was dangerously underweight.
Now, my worry about this (and remember, I really like Wii-fit in general) is that while both of my friends are clever people who know how to interpret this information, the same can't be said to be generally true. Yes, somebody who works out a lot probably knows that they will register as overweight or obese on the BMI scale, because they pay a lot of attention to their body. But they're not the main audience for Wii-fit. I suspect I'm fairly close to the average - never exercised much before, largely because exercise is so damned boring, but turning to Wii-fit in the hope that it will help me over that hurdle. Handing out crudely calculated BMIs (there's no option to tell it your build) with no detailed advice just strikes me as a fairly foolish thing for the software to be doing.
It's the consistent theme that runs throughout Wii-fit. A small amount of time spent on putting in some basic information on fitness and safety, along with a little tool to allow you to create (or even to recommend for you) programmes of exercises would have boosted the value of the package to the average user massively.
Yeah? Try it on any reasonably hard surface for any amount of time with no footwear or unsuitable footware and, believe me, you will *feel* the error in your statement. Push it too hard and you could end up feeling it for days or even weeks. Repeated unabsorbed impacts are bad, mkay?
Running shoes do exist for reasons other than a) keeping sharp bits from poking into your feet and b) allowing chavs to flaunt their ill-gotten spoils.