Look at the console ownership figures? If people had any interest in Nintendo's vision of gaming (which they've been pushing for the last 2 generations), don't you think it'd be a bit higher than 26%?
Not necessarily a relevant comment to this situation, though. The 3d Realms website does not seem to timestamp its news posts - as I've not looked at it for about 6 years, there's no way of knowing how long that post has been up there. Could have been a few hours, a few weeks, 6 months, a year, or more.
While the "fucktard" thing was perhaps a little harsh, the other points that the grandparent made are valid.
Is this really from a dev? As far as I can see, the user who posted it is British and I don't recall the game being developed over here. Could just be a random user posting misinformation or recycling an old quote?
Of course, I find it pretty hard to believe that this game is ever going to see the light of day, but still...
Let me give a little background. I've been playing games since the mid 1980s. Along the way, I've owned (or had access to when owned by parents) umpteen home computers (C64, Amiga, several PCs) and at least one console from every generation (NES, SNES - later a Genesis as well, although after the generation had ended, Playstation, all 3 of the current gen consoles). Gaming has been my "main" hobby since about 1990. When I was at school, most of my pocket money went on games. Now I'm working, a significant part of my disposable income goes on them.
And I loathe Nintendo - and their fanboys - and what they have become over the last 10 years from the depths of my soul.
Over the last decade, I've seen games get better looking, deeper, more varied and more emotionally involving. I've seen companies such as Squaresoft/Square-Enix, Lucasarts, Bioware, ID, Valve, Epic, Capcom and... yes... even EA and Microsoft produce titles with the sort of quality and longevity that puts almost anything from the 10 years before that to shame. In virtually every genre, there have been advances in technology, gameplay contents and production values, be it RPGs, first-person games, beat-em-ups or just plain old fashioned shooters. But of all the companies who have driven the state of gaming forwards, there's one name noticably lacking: Nintendo.
The reason that people stopped playing Nintendo isn't that it became all "cool" and "hard" to abandon them. It's that they stopped making games that were worth the purchase price a long time ago. You mention Mario Kart. Sure, great game. 10 years ago (longer now, in fact). When the company is still pumping out the same game with slightly updated graphics every console cycle (with Double Dash being a really offensive example), people are going to get bored. Playing Double Dash rather than Burnout Revenge or Gran Turismo 4 (yes, both franchises - but franchises which have developed) does not make you a better person or a better gamer. It makes you a guillible twat.
Nintendo's rhetoric about wanting to return to "real" gameplay is a smokescreen - marketing FUD of the highest order. All Nintendo want to do on a business level is drive gaming back into its old niche corner. Too bad, that's not going to happen. Sony let that genie out of the bottle a decade ago and it won't go back in now. It's my experience that most so-called "real" gamers don't actually play many games, not least because their chosen Messiah-company puts out so few. Rather, they're like the Final Fantasy fans who bang on in every thread about how VI was the last decent game and anybody who likes anything since is stupid; sad, washed up old fanboys trying to impress the "vulgar mobs" by basing a spurious claim to authority on a skewed version of gaming taste that refuses to play anything less than 10 years old on principle.
Decent marketing is only one of the many reasons why the PSX sold as well as it did. To be frank, the biggest reason was, as it's always been in the console industry, that they had the games. They had the kit that let third party developers make the games they wanted (compare this with how Nintendo lost Square over the optical drives issue) and they didn't impose much in the way of content restrictions. Games like Wipeout and Ridge Racer were visually stunning and beat anything that had previously been available on anything less than a $1500 gaming PC into the ground. This was a huge factor in bringing a lot of people who wouldn't previously have touched a console into playing games. Then when you got "serious" games, for the more traditional demographic, like Final Fantasy VII appearing as well, the PSX's domination was pretty much assured.
Far from killing gaming, I'd see the Playstation as having pulled it out of a fairly dangerous slump. Other attempts at the time at driving the industry forwards, such as the Saturn and the Jaguar, had been miserable failures. Nintendo were busy trying to play god and driving games towards their homogenised idea of what a game should be. If a successful, technologically advanced platform that was attractive to developers hadn't appeared, the market wouldn't be anything like as healthy as it is today.
As for the snide remark about 12-year-olds who thought thet were cool for not playing Mario - explain to me please how this is any better than the small, but vocal and annoying group of slashdotters who think that just because they *do* still play Mario, they're somehow "real" games whose opinions magically count for more.
Not convinced me either. Do what he says. Refute his arguments. Demonstrate, using reason and evidence, why the titles he talks about were as appalling as you seem to think they are. Show us all precisely how and where the modern games industry is failing its customers.
If possible, do so without resulting to childing insults and curses.
The games industry is not currently in the kind of crisis that the movie industry has been in this year. Sales are strong; the PSP's European launch smashed all records for a new console. I'd take this as good evidence of a largely contented "silent majority" voting with their wallets.
To be honest, when you look at the number of high quality "mainstream" games released over the last year or so, it's not hard to see why. Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Burnout 3, Resident Evil 4, Jade Empire, Gran Turismo 4, Wipeout Pure, the PSP, the DS. The games industry has hammered my bank balance over the last year like never before and I can't say that I feel particularly angry about this. I suspect that in a decade or so's time, we'll be looking back on the 04/05 period as a golden age of gaming.
Halo 2 was, in my opinion, the best fps of last year. More varied than Doom 3, less pretentious than HL2 and less stupidly difficult than the later levels of Farcry. Sure, the ending was a let-down, but it takes a while to get there and the journey is as entertaining as hell. Plus, it actually has an interesting and unique art style, rather than just going for the spec-overload of the PC rivals.
KOTOR is a superb game... one of the best RPGs I've played on any platform in the last few years. KOTOR 2 wasn't quite as good and the PC version was so buggy I took it back and got the X-Box version instead. X-Box version was fine and seemed finished to me.
I've never seen noticable slowdown in San Andreas on PS2 or X-Box. If you have, you may have a dodgy drive in your console. The control system was the same as that in GTA3 and Vice City, more or less. Most people seem to have figured it out by now. I'll admit I wasn't a huge fan of San Andreas (nor the other GTA3 games) myself, but I know I'm in the minority there and I can't pin down why I don't like it, other than the fact that the whole hip-hop culture sends me batshit.
MGS2 is a love-it-or-hate-it game. I loved it, so did a lot of other people. So did IGN's reviewer. They've hated games that I've loved before. Reviewers are individuals and are going to react to games as individuals, however objective they try to be.
Not played a Tomb Raider game since the second, so for all I know you may have a point there.
To cut a long story short, reviewers can never hope to reflect the opinion of everybody who buys the games they review. Best practice is generally to find a review site where the opinions basically coincide with your own and follow that. IGN fits the bill nicely for me and also, I'm guessing, for the grandparent. If it doesn't work for you, that's fine, but it's hardly evidence of corruption.
From what I've seen, most "major" shops had about 30 PSPs... a lot of them had boards outside showing how many were left, with the numbers being crossed out as they sold. Smaller branches seem to have had about half this number.
Interestingly, the Game in Victoria station has now ceased selling Gamecube titles (except for a few in the second-hand trays) as they needed the shelf-space for PSP titles. Will be interesting to see if that policy is here to stay and if it's extended to bigger branches (the outlet in Victoria is pretty small and not exactly space-rich).
Seriously, why does slashdot tolerate so much FUD regarding the PSP? Is it seriously so threatening to have a decent competitor to Nintendo on the handheld market?
My daily round-trip commute, until fairly recently, was just over 3 hours. When the trains were broken, which in this country is a pretty regular occurence, I could spend up to 5, even 6 hours a day on the train. Not once, in all this time, did I get so much as a low battery warning from my PSP, whether I'd been watching stuff from the memory stick, from a UMD movie disk, or playing a game. The *only* game I have in which loading times are even noticable to any significant extent is Untold Legends, which is an RPG and a fairly heavyweight undertaking for any handheld. Lumines, Wipeout, Ridge-Racer, Metal Gear Acid, Mercury and Death Jr. all have very, very quick loading times, with several minutes play at the very least between each load.
This is very true. I've got a fairly substantial train commute myself. I've always seen a lot of Gameboys and GBAs (particularly the SP) on the train. However, a fortnight after the DS launch, all the DSes had vanished and the GBAs had come back. Having tried using my own DS on the train, I can see why; the stylus is an absolute pain in the arse to use in an environment that's rattling and shaking a lot. With the video-from-memory-stick capabilities, I'd expect to see the PSP being a huge hit with the (fairly affluent) commuter crowd. I've been using mine to watch movies, TV shows etc on the train for months now, with a lot of jealous glares.
The PSP had it's EU launch today. I work in central London and took a walk around at lunch-time today, popping into a good few shops selling it to see what take-up was like (not to buy one myself - I got a US import back in May).
Simply put, it looks phenomenal. I know the initial sales in the US weren't quite what were expected, but at 1PM today, I couldn't find a single shop in the Victoria-area that still had stock to sell. I went into Dixons, HMV, Game and Virgin and all of them had sold out. I heard the guy in Game saying that they'd sold out of the non-preordered machines within about 10 minutes of the midnight opening. There were queues to the door in a few shops with people trying to find out where to get hold of them and staff phoning sister-stores to find out if anybody else had them in stock, with no apparent success.
Europe has traditionally been a very Sony friendly territory, even when they do shaft us over release dates. I'll be interested to see our DS vs PSP sales figures come Christmas.
In terms of gameplay mechanics, Freespace was closer to the Wing Commander school than the X-Wing. I always preferred the X-Wing style of combat. It was slower, needed more tactical thinking and more careful use of your wingmen and simulated large battles involving multiple capital ships better. After the original X-Wing game, it was very rarely a case of "your ship against the entire enemy fleet". In TIE Fighter and XW:Aliance, you're usualy going into battle with friendly capital ship support. You needed to use every system on your fighter well to beat the harder missions and power allocation was something that needed to be tweaked constantly. The battles felt far more organic than any other space-flight sim's and there was a much greater degree of background detail in the missions, when they occur in a busy area of space. Having unrelated freighter convoys passing through the area, docking and even fighting each other while you're involved in another fight adds a real level of immersion.
Wing Commander combat had always been faster and shallower, from the original game through to Prophecy. The afterburner feature, along with the very high rate of fire on the guns, contributed to a style of dogfighting that was much more spray and pray than X-Wing's more considered dogfighting. In terms of gameplay, there isn't much to set Wing Commander Prophecy and Freespace 2 apart. Both of them feel and look almost identical. Power allocation etc only need to be tweaked from the default settings on a very few missions. The only real differences between the games were that Prophecy had better cutscenes/plot (and yes, I actually quite like the whole FMV-cutscene thing), while Freespace's capital ships fired big lasers at each other (with little real effect on gameplay). On balance, I'd take the cutscenes.
That's not a particularly bad list; System Shock, Magic Carpet, X-Com and maybe Syndicate are all ripe for a return. The others don't strike me as great choices, though. The series I'd really like to see return would be:
X-Wing and Wing Commander series: Freespace was nothing more than an inferior knock-off of these. I'd particularly like to see the old X-Wing games resurrected. The Rogue Squadron games we have now are ok... they're among the few Cube games really worth playing... but they're far too arcadey for my tastes. A decent, tactical space-flight sim would make me very happy. On the Wing Commander front, I'd love to see a new Privateer.
Aliens vs. Predator: The PS2/X-Box RTS was, quite frankly, shite. However, this is still a franchise that has a lot of potential. Imagine a version of this done on the Doom 3 engine. Hell, cut the Predator out if you want and just make it an Aliens game. With the technological capabilities of the next gen, this should be scary as hell.
Star Control: Star Control 2 remains one of my favorite Sci-Fi RPGs of all time, not least because of the fantastic arcade-style combat. The third installment sucked, but that's no reason why we couldn't have a remake or another sequel on decent hardware.
Streets of Rage: Don't get me wrong, the current generation of consoles has had some great action beat-em-ups, with God of War standing out as perhaps the best example, but I do miss the old side-scrollers. Feel free to substitute Final Fight instead if that was more your thing.
Ultima: PLEASE can we have a new Ultima game (that isn't a MMORPG). We'll forgive you Ultima 9. Just bring back the vast game-worlds and complex ethical systems. Do this right, with a decent interface and combat system, and you could easily get something to rival the Final Fantasy series. Also, while we're at it, can we have a new Ultima Underworld please?
Gunship: What ever happened to all the helicopter games? Gunship 2000 was one of my favorite fight-sims ever, but the genre just seems to have vanished. I wouldn't even mind seeing a more arcadey version of this.
No, it's definitely true. I can confirm this, having just tested it in Exult.
Make sure you have the "right" blacksmith. The one you want isn't the murder one where you start the game, nor is it his house, where you meet Spark. It's the "haunted" one with the damaged door (and the randomly moving chairs inside) in the South-West side of Trinsic. You need to use pretty much every crate in Trinsic to make a staircase, though. Once you get up, walk around the North side of the chimney, even though it looks like there's no room. Takes about 10 mins to access, from starting a new game.
Argh... noticed a critical typo moments after hitting post.
Should read "Hell, I don't even do software/music/video piracy, because I still believe in the ideal that if you CAN'T justify spending money on something inessential, then you shouldn't have it."
This should not be a matter for the law to get involved in, plain and simple. At worst, the guy is breaking the game's TOS (in which case it's an issue for the GMs).
Lineage II is a PVP game which lets you take items from characters you defeat. It seems to me that, aside from the botting aspect, there's nothing in this guy's behaviour that's wrong. The botting aspect, if a TOS violation, should probably be punished by the suspension of his account.
You shouldn't outlaw the theft of property, or even murder, in online *gaming* worlds. Some of these games, such as the Lineage series, EVE Online and World of Warcraft are designed specifically with PVP in mind. Some, such as Final Fantasy XI, aren't. If you don't want to take the chance of being robbed and murdered, don't play a PVP RPG. It's not as if any sane games designer is going to make a PVP MMORPG (or any MMORPG aimed at making a profit) permadeath anyway.
In real life, I am a good, law abiding little citizen. Hell, I don't even do software/music/video piracy, because I still believe in the ideal that if you justify spending money on something inessential, then you shouldn't have it. However, when I play games, which are ultimately a form of escapism and release, I sometimes want to be a bit nasty. I want to beat people up and loot their still-warm corpse. If you're going to bring the law into stuff like that, then you're taking the whole point away and soon virtual worlds will be as heavily constrained as the real world.
He was marked troll because that's what happen to people who make posts critical of Nintendo on slashdot. It's a long-running, well-known and wide-spread problem and, short of (extremely unlikely) admin intervention to remove moderation rights from the accounts reponsible, it's unlikely to go away.
Too many people think that moderation exists just to promote the views they believe in and silence the views they don't. Too many people also believe that if they moderate down enough posts critical of Nintendo, they'll get free goodies in the post or something.
OK, so now address the original poster's point. Name me a single exclusive game set for release on the Cube this Christmas that's even vaguely likely to be worth waiting for. Looking at a few pre-order websites, I see:
A load of cross platform titles (Prince of Persia 3, Madden) Pokemon XD (been there, done that) Shadow the Hedgehog (another no-doubt brutal 3d mutilation of a once-decent franchise.) A few movie licensed games which, although I can't be bothered looking up the details, are probably cross-platform anyway. Erm... That's it...
The whole knee-jerk Nintendo fanboy thing got old a long time ago.
I do get the feeling that Nintendo looked at the gaming world as the SNES neared the end of its lifespan and liked what they saw. Sega had put up a good fight, but they'd been beaten by a moderate margin in the "set top" console wars and been utterly vanquished in the handheld arena. Nintendo had a huge lineup of third party developers who, they thought, needed Nintendo more than Nintendo needed them. They had a huge installed base for their current system and the would-be successors to their crown, such as Atari (remember the Jaguar) were, quite frankly, hopeless. Therefore, they sat back and prepared to enjoy exploiting their monopoly.
In other words, they took their eye of the ball.
This is, I suspect, why so many people who actually harboured affection for Nintendo took such utter pleasure in watching Sony utterly cream them in the next round of the console battle. There's no denying that the real, crippling damage to Nintendo was done during the PS1/N64 generation, when it was shown that Nintendo just weren't dynamic enough to keep up with the competition.
However, the X-Box has also played an important role in Nintendo's current woes. Outside of Japan, the X-Box has proven the more popular "second console", among people who own multiple machines. It's soaked up a lot of spare consumer cash that would otherwise have gone to Nintendo in this way. Furthermore, MS have also managed to put Nintendo, in the eyes of most commentators in the mainstream media, out of the running in the next round of the console wars. Being starved of the oxygen of wider publicity is not going to help the Revolution's debut at all.
I wasn't necessarily referring to any sales benefit from launching a year early, although I do believe that having a Christmas all to themselves won't hurt MS. I was talking more about the fact that console prices tend to be reviewed and reduced regularly throughout their life-cycle, with the first big price cut (usually the biggest of all) coming about a year after launch.
We've already seen Bill Gates promise to launch Halo 3 in the week the PS3 comes out, to try to steal Sony's thunder. Personally, I don't see that one working. However, by giving the 360 a big price cut in the week the Revolution comes out, MS could, at a single stroke, decimate Nintendo's sales by taking away one of their biggest selling points. Factor in the fact that the 360 will be a "mature" console by this point, with a large-ish games lineup, and things could look very grim for Nintendo indeed.
You make some good points here, but I'm going to take issue with you on the whole price-point topic.
You see, while the Revolution's launch price will probably be less than the 360's, don't forget that the 360 will have had the better part of a year on sale by the Revolution's launch. Console prices often get heavily reduced at around this point. I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if MS lowered the price of the 360 to the same as the Revolution's specifically to coincide with the Revolution's launch. That's what I'd be doing in their shoes.
Also, I think the price of the console is vasty over-rated as a determining factor for sales. The PS2 has been consistently the most expensive of the current gen consoles during this cycle, yet it's outsold the competitors by crazy amounts. Game prices are arguably more important, and Nintendo are usually the most expensive here.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the console ownership figures? If people had any interest in Nintendo's vision of gaming (which they've been pushing for the last 2 generations), don't you think it'd be a bit higher than 26%?
Not necessarily a relevant comment to this situation, though. The 3d Realms website does not seem to timestamp its news posts - as I've not looked at it for about 6 years, there's no way of knowing how long that post has been up there. Could have been a few hours, a few weeks, 6 months, a year, or more.
While the "fucktard" thing was perhaps a little harsh, the other points that the grandparent made are valid.
Is this really from a dev? As far as I can see, the user who posted it is British and I don't recall the game being developed over here. Could just be a random user posting misinformation or recycling an old quote?
Of course, I find it pretty hard to believe that this game is ever going to see the light of day, but still...
This post proves my point entirely.
Let me give a little background. I've been playing games since the mid 1980s. Along the way, I've owned (or had access to when owned by parents) umpteen home computers (C64, Amiga, several PCs) and at least one console from every generation (NES, SNES - later a Genesis as well, although after the generation had ended, Playstation, all 3 of the current gen consoles). Gaming has been my "main" hobby since about 1990. When I was at school, most of my pocket money went on games. Now I'm working, a significant part of my disposable income goes on them.
And I loathe Nintendo - and their fanboys - and what they have become over the last 10 years from the depths of my soul.
Over the last decade, I've seen games get better looking, deeper, more varied and more emotionally involving. I've seen companies such as Squaresoft/Square-Enix, Lucasarts, Bioware, ID, Valve, Epic, Capcom and... yes... even EA and Microsoft produce titles with the sort of quality and longevity that puts almost anything from the 10 years before that to shame. In virtually every genre, there have been advances in technology, gameplay contents and production values, be it RPGs, first-person games, beat-em-ups or just plain old fashioned shooters. But of all the companies who have driven the state of gaming forwards, there's one name noticably lacking: Nintendo.
The reason that people stopped playing Nintendo isn't that it became all "cool" and "hard" to abandon them. It's that they stopped making games that were worth the purchase price a long time ago. You mention Mario Kart. Sure, great game. 10 years ago (longer now, in fact). When the company is still pumping out the same game with slightly updated graphics every console cycle (with Double Dash being a really offensive example), people are going to get bored. Playing Double Dash rather than Burnout Revenge or Gran Turismo 4 (yes, both franchises - but franchises which have developed) does not make you a better person or a better gamer. It makes you a guillible twat.
Nintendo's rhetoric about wanting to return to "real" gameplay is a smokescreen - marketing FUD of the highest order. All Nintendo want to do on a business level is drive gaming back into its old niche corner. Too bad, that's not going to happen. Sony let that genie out of the bottle a decade ago and it won't go back in now. It's my experience that most so-called "real" gamers don't actually play many games, not least because their chosen Messiah-company puts out so few. Rather, they're like the Final Fantasy fans who bang on in every thread about how VI was the last decent game and anybody who likes anything since is stupid; sad, washed up old fanboys trying to impress the "vulgar mobs" by basing a spurious claim to authority on a skewed version of gaming taste that refuses to play anything less than 10 years old on principle.
Decent marketing is only one of the many reasons why the PSX sold as well as it did. To be frank, the biggest reason was, as it's always been in the console industry, that they had the games. They had the kit that let third party developers make the games they wanted (compare this with how Nintendo lost Square over the optical drives issue) and they didn't impose much in the way of content restrictions. Games like Wipeout and Ridge Racer were visually stunning and beat anything that had previously been available on anything less than a $1500 gaming PC into the ground. This was a huge factor in bringing a lot of people who wouldn't previously have touched a console into playing games. Then when you got "serious" games, for the more traditional demographic, like Final Fantasy VII appearing as well, the PSX's domination was pretty much assured.
Far from killing gaming, I'd see the Playstation as having pulled it out of a fairly dangerous slump. Other attempts at the time at driving the industry forwards, such as the Saturn and the Jaguar, had been miserable failures. Nintendo were busy trying to play god and driving games towards their homogenised idea of what a game should be. If a successful, technologically advanced platform that was attractive to developers hadn't appeared, the market wouldn't be anything like as healthy as it is today.
As for the snide remark about 12-year-olds who thought thet were cool for not playing Mario - explain to me please how this is any better than the small, but vocal and annoying group of slashdotters who think that just because they *do* still play Mario, they're somehow "real" games whose opinions magically count for more.
Not convinced me either. Do what he says. Refute his arguments. Demonstrate, using reason and evidence, why the titles he talks about were as appalling as you seem to think they are. Show us all precisely how and where the modern games industry is failing its customers.
If possible, do so without resulting to childing insults and curses.
Failing that, just shut up.
No, grandparent is, broadly speaking, right.
The games industry is not currently in the kind of crisis that the movie industry has been in this year. Sales are strong; the PSP's European launch smashed all records for a new console. I'd take this as good evidence of a largely contented "silent majority" voting with their wallets.
To be honest, when you look at the number of high quality "mainstream" games released over the last year or so, it's not hard to see why. Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Burnout 3, Resident Evil 4, Jade Empire, Gran Turismo 4, Wipeout Pure, the PSP, the DS. The games industry has hammered my bank balance over the last year like never before and I can't say that I feel particularly angry about this. I suspect that in a decade or so's time, we'll be looking back on the 04/05 period as a golden age of gaming.
Disagree with you strongly here.
Halo 2 was, in my opinion, the best fps of last year. More varied than Doom 3, less pretentious than HL2 and less stupidly difficult than the later levels of Farcry. Sure, the ending was a let-down, but it takes a while to get there and the journey is as entertaining as hell. Plus, it actually has an interesting and unique art style, rather than just going for the spec-overload of the PC rivals.
KOTOR is a superb game... one of the best RPGs I've played on any platform in the last few years. KOTOR 2 wasn't quite as good and the PC version was so buggy I took it back and got the X-Box version instead. X-Box version was fine and seemed finished to me.
I've never seen noticable slowdown in San Andreas on PS2 or X-Box. If you have, you may have a dodgy drive in your console. The control system was the same as that in GTA3 and Vice City, more or less. Most people seem to have figured it out by now. I'll admit I wasn't a huge fan of San Andreas (nor the other GTA3 games) myself, but I know I'm in the minority there and I can't pin down why I don't like it, other than the fact that the whole hip-hop culture sends me batshit.
MGS2 is a love-it-or-hate-it game. I loved it, so did a lot of other people. So did IGN's reviewer. They've hated games that I've loved before. Reviewers are individuals and are going to react to games as individuals, however objective they try to be.
Not played a Tomb Raider game since the second, so for all I know you may have a point there.
To cut a long story short, reviewers can never hope to reflect the opinion of everybody who buys the games they review. Best practice is generally to find a review site where the opinions basically coincide with your own and follow that. IGN fits the bill nicely for me and also, I'm guessing, for the grandparent. If it doesn't work for you, that's fine, but it's hardly evidence of corruption.
Except it isn't. See the numerous posts on this subject above. The figures are from retailers and are actual sales estimates.
Please mod parent down... it is decidedly *not* informative.
From what I've seen, most "major" shops had about 30 PSPs... a lot of them had boards outside showing how many were left, with the numbers being crossed out as they sold. Smaller branches seem to have had about half this number.
Interestingly, the Game in Victoria station has now ceased selling Gamecube titles (except for a few in the second-hand trays) as they needed the shelf-space for PSP titles. Will be interesting to see if that policy is here to stay and if it's extended to bigger branches (the outlet in Victoria is pretty small and not exactly space-rich).
FUD...
Seriously, why does slashdot tolerate so much FUD regarding the PSP? Is it seriously so threatening to have a decent competitor to Nintendo on the handheld market?
My daily round-trip commute, until fairly recently, was just over 3 hours. When the trains were broken, which in this country is a pretty regular occurence, I could spend up to 5, even 6 hours a day on the train. Not once, in all this time, did I get so much as a low battery warning from my PSP, whether I'd been watching stuff from the memory stick, from a UMD movie disk, or playing a game. The *only* game I have in which loading times are even noticable to any significant extent is Untold Legends, which is an RPG and a fairly heavyweight undertaking for any handheld. Lumines, Wipeout, Ridge-Racer, Metal Gear Acid, Mercury and Death Jr. all have very, very quick loading times, with several minutes play at the very least between each load.
This is very true. I've got a fairly substantial train commute myself. I've always seen a lot of Gameboys and GBAs (particularly the SP) on the train. However, a fortnight after the DS launch, all the DSes had vanished and the GBAs had come back. Having tried using my own DS on the train, I can see why; the stylus is an absolute pain in the arse to use in an environment that's rattling and shaking a lot. With the video-from-memory-stick capabilities, I'd expect to see the PSP being a huge hit with the (fairly affluent) commuter crowd. I've been using mine to watch movies, TV shows etc on the train for months now, with a lot of jealous glares.
The PSP had it's EU launch today. I work in central London and took a walk around at lunch-time today, popping into a good few shops selling it to see what take-up was like (not to buy one myself - I got a US import back in May).
Simply put, it looks phenomenal. I know the initial sales in the US weren't quite what were expected, but at 1PM today, I couldn't find a single shop in the Victoria-area that still had stock to sell. I went into Dixons, HMV, Game and Virgin and all of them had sold out. I heard the guy in Game saying that they'd sold out of the non-preordered machines within about 10 minutes of the midnight opening. There were queues to the door in a few shops with people trying to find out where to get hold of them and staff phoning sister-stores to find out if anybody else had them in stock, with no apparent success.
Europe has traditionally been a very Sony friendly territory, even when they do shaft us over release dates. I'll be interested to see our DS vs PSP sales figures come Christmas.
Hmm... I disagree completely here.
In terms of gameplay mechanics, Freespace was closer to the Wing Commander school than the X-Wing. I always preferred the X-Wing style of combat. It was slower, needed more tactical thinking and more careful use of your wingmen and simulated large battles involving multiple capital ships better. After the original X-Wing game, it was very rarely a case of "your ship against the entire enemy fleet". In TIE Fighter and XW:Aliance, you're usualy going into battle with friendly capital ship support. You needed to use every system on your fighter well to beat the harder missions and power allocation was something that needed to be tweaked constantly. The battles felt far more organic than any other space-flight sim's and there was a much greater degree of background detail in the missions, when they occur in a busy area of space. Having unrelated freighter convoys passing through the area, docking and even fighting each other while you're involved in another fight adds a real level of immersion.
Wing Commander combat had always been faster and shallower, from the original game through to Prophecy. The afterburner feature, along with the very high rate of fire on the guns, contributed to a style of dogfighting that was much more spray and pray than X-Wing's more considered dogfighting. In terms of gameplay, there isn't much to set Wing Commander Prophecy and Freespace 2 apart. Both of them feel and look almost identical. Power allocation etc only need to be tweaked from the default settings on a very few missions. The only real differences between the games were that Prophecy had better cutscenes/plot (and yes, I actually quite like the whole FMV-cutscene thing), while Freespace's capital ships fired big lasers at each other (with little real effect on gameplay). On balance, I'd take the cutscenes.
Of course, if we can't have a new Star Control game, we could always hope for the next best thing. A sports-spinoff:
:)
Frungy-Bowl 2006!
Man, the ZoqFotPik were cool
That's not a particularly bad list; System Shock, Magic Carpet, X-Com and maybe Syndicate are all ripe for a return. The others don't strike me as great choices, though. The series I'd really like to see return would be:
X-Wing and Wing Commander series: Freespace was nothing more than an inferior knock-off of these. I'd particularly like to see the old X-Wing games resurrected. The Rogue Squadron games we have now are ok... they're among the few Cube games really worth playing... but they're far too arcadey for my tastes. A decent, tactical space-flight sim would make me very happy. On the Wing Commander front, I'd love to see a new Privateer.
Aliens vs. Predator: The PS2/X-Box RTS was, quite frankly, shite. However, this is still a franchise that has a lot of potential. Imagine a version of this done on the Doom 3 engine. Hell, cut the Predator out if you want and just make it an Aliens game. With the technological capabilities of the next gen, this should be scary as hell.
Star Control: Star Control 2 remains one of my favorite Sci-Fi RPGs of all time, not least because of the fantastic arcade-style combat. The third installment sucked, but that's no reason why we couldn't have a remake or another sequel on decent hardware.
Streets of Rage: Don't get me wrong, the current generation of consoles has had some great action beat-em-ups, with God of War standing out as perhaps the best example, but I do miss the old side-scrollers. Feel free to substitute Final Fight instead if that was more your thing.
Ultima: PLEASE can we have a new Ultima game (that isn't a MMORPG). We'll forgive you Ultima 9. Just bring back the vast game-worlds and complex ethical systems. Do this right, with a decent interface and combat system, and you could easily get something to rival the Final Fantasy series. Also, while we're at it, can we have a new Ultima Underworld please?
Gunship: What ever happened to all the helicopter games? Gunship 2000 was one of my favorite fight-sims ever, but the genre just seems to have vanished. I wouldn't even mind seeing a more arcadey version of this.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the Chinese government already does this with a lot of books.
No, it's definitely true. I can confirm this, having just tested it in Exult.
Make sure you have the "right" blacksmith. The one you want isn't the murder one where you start the game, nor is it his house, where you meet Spark. It's the "haunted" one with the damaged door (and the randomly moving chairs inside) in the South-West side of Trinsic. You need to use pretty much every crate in Trinsic to make a staircase, though. Once you get up, walk around the North side of the chimney, even though it looks like there's no room. Takes about 10 mins to access, from starting a new game.
Argh... noticed a critical typo moments after hitting post.
Should read "Hell, I don't even do software/music/video piracy, because I still believe in the ideal that if you CAN'T justify spending money on something inessential, then you shouldn't have it."
This should not be a matter for the law to get involved in, plain and simple. At worst, the guy is breaking the game's TOS (in which case it's an issue for the GMs).
Lineage II is a PVP game which lets you take items from characters you defeat. It seems to me that, aside from the botting aspect, there's nothing in this guy's behaviour that's wrong. The botting aspect, if a TOS violation, should probably be punished by the suspension of his account.
You shouldn't outlaw the theft of property, or even murder, in online *gaming* worlds. Some of these games, such as the Lineage series, EVE Online and World of Warcraft are designed specifically with PVP in mind. Some, such as Final Fantasy XI, aren't. If you don't want to take the chance of being robbed and murdered, don't play a PVP RPG. It's not as if any sane games designer is going to make a PVP MMORPG (or any MMORPG aimed at making a profit) permadeath anyway.
In real life, I am a good, law abiding little citizen. Hell, I don't even do software/music/video piracy, because I still believe in the ideal that if you justify spending money on something inessential, then you shouldn't have it. However, when I play games, which are ultimately a form of escapism and release, I sometimes want to be a bit nasty. I want to beat people up and loot their still-warm corpse. If you're going to bring the law into stuff like that, then you're taking the whole point away and soon virtual worlds will be as heavily constrained as the real world.
He was marked troll because that's what happen to people who make posts critical of Nintendo on slashdot. It's a long-running, well-known and wide-spread problem and, short of (extremely unlikely) admin intervention to remove moderation rights from the accounts reponsible, it's unlikely to go away.
Too many people think that moderation exists just to promote the views they believe in and silence the views they don't. Too many people also believe that if they moderate down enough posts critical of Nintendo, they'll get free goodies in the post or something.
OK, so now address the original poster's point. Name me a single exclusive game set for release on the Cube this Christmas that's even vaguely likely to be worth waiting for. Looking at a few pre-order websites, I see:
A load of cross platform titles (Prince of Persia 3, Madden)
Pokemon XD (been there, done that)
Shadow the Hedgehog (another no-doubt brutal 3d mutilation of a once-decent franchise.)
A few movie licensed games which, although I can't be bothered looking up the details, are probably cross-platform anyway.
Erm...
That's it...
The whole knee-jerk Nintendo fanboy thing got old a long time ago.
For the most part, this is true.
I do get the feeling that Nintendo looked at the gaming world as the SNES neared the end of its lifespan and liked what they saw. Sega had put up a good fight, but they'd been beaten by a moderate margin in the "set top" console wars and been utterly vanquished in the handheld arena. Nintendo had a huge lineup of third party developers who, they thought, needed Nintendo more than Nintendo needed them. They had a huge installed base for their current system and the would-be successors to their crown, such as Atari (remember the Jaguar) were, quite frankly, hopeless. Therefore, they sat back and prepared to enjoy exploiting their monopoly.
In other words, they took their eye of the ball.
This is, I suspect, why so many people who actually harboured affection for Nintendo took such utter pleasure in watching Sony utterly cream them in the next round of the console battle. There's no denying that the real, crippling damage to Nintendo was done during the PS1/N64 generation, when it was shown that Nintendo just weren't dynamic enough to keep up with the competition.
However, the X-Box has also played an important role in Nintendo's current woes. Outside of Japan, the X-Box has proven the more popular "second console", among people who own multiple machines. It's soaked up a lot of spare consumer cash that would otherwise have gone to Nintendo in this way. Furthermore, MS have also managed to put Nintendo, in the eyes of most commentators in the mainstream media, out of the running in the next round of the console wars. Being starved of the oxygen of wider publicity is not going to help the Revolution's debut at all.
I wasn't necessarily referring to any sales benefit from launching a year early, although I do believe that having a Christmas all to themselves won't hurt MS. I was talking more about the fact that console prices tend to be reviewed and reduced regularly throughout their life-cycle, with the first big price cut (usually the biggest of all) coming about a year after launch.
We've already seen Bill Gates promise to launch Halo 3 in the week the PS3 comes out, to try to steal Sony's thunder. Personally, I don't see that one working. However, by giving the 360 a big price cut in the week the Revolution comes out, MS could, at a single stroke, decimate Nintendo's sales by taking away one of their biggest selling points. Factor in the fact that the 360 will be a "mature" console by this point, with a large-ish games lineup, and things could look very grim for Nintendo indeed.
You make some good points here, but I'm going to take issue with you on the whole price-point topic.
You see, while the Revolution's launch price will probably be less than the 360's, don't forget that the 360 will have had the better part of a year on sale by the Revolution's launch. Console prices often get heavily reduced at around this point. I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if MS lowered the price of the 360 to the same as the Revolution's specifically to coincide with the Revolution's launch. That's what I'd be doing in their shoes.
Also, I think the price of the console is vasty over-rated as a determining factor for sales. The PS2 has been consistently the most expensive of the current gen consoles during this cycle, yet it's outsold the competitors by crazy amounts. Game prices are arguably more important, and Nintendo are usually the most expensive here.