Or they could wait until the price in the US has dropped to a level acceptable to those countries? Oh, wait, right, then people just warez it. Apparently Valve doesn't like their US sales being offshored. Guess it's a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
I don't even know how you're supposed to apply different levels of pressure to a button with 1mm traverse and 90% deadzone (or at least the minimum pressure required to move the button at all is like 90% of the pressure needed to move it all the way down). When a game used that I used trial and error until I got the pressure it demanded (took maybe 10 tries sometimes). Using the water pack in Super Mario Sunshine at different pressure levels was trivially easy. Speaking of deadzone, the dualshock's is pretty large. I've tried to do small adjustments with it in games with racing sections and it felt almost digital, the value I wanted was swallowed by the deadzone so I had to alternate between minimal value and zero to get the desired value.
Third parties never stray from the controller design set forth by the console maker, Gamecube and XBox third-party controllers had the analog stick in the primary position. They aren't trying to improve things, they're trying to make a cheap knockoff.
I don't see how a symmetric controller is more intuitive when the game's controls are not symmetric (which is most games). Usually the left analog stick and right buttons are used for controls with the d-pad and right analog stick as secondary inputs (camera controls, weapon switching, etc). Buttons labelled with geometric shapes, two of which are hard to distinguish on crappy TVs, are really confusing as well. For some reason their colors are not primary colors, perhaps Sony was worried about looking too much like the SNES with its red-yellow-green-blue buttons but that doesn't help with distinguishing them.
1. It's expensive. Sony's offer would have to be higher than what Rockstar estimates a 360 version to make AND what Microsoft is willing to bid. 2. The PS3's userbase is smaller than the 360's, it's not a sound business decision to go PS3 exclusive without some MAJOR incentives which reinforces point 1.
I have a feeling Microsoft was willing to pitch a lot of money in to make sure Sony doesn't get exclusivity.
Disc capacity means nothing, hardware means nothing. If Rockstar felt that a cellphone port would be profitable they'd make one and learn to cope with the hardware.
I disagree, the SNES controller's day came and went with that system. The dualshock was just a haphazardly bolted together mess of features, kinda like the NGage. The d-pad on the dualshock is pure pain and should have been altered long ago, the analog stick placement has no place in the modern world and the analog buttons were a completely useless idea (yeah, cue people listing exammples of games that used the analog sensitivity to assign two functions to one button... If it's analog, why is it used as a switch with 2-3 discrete states?). The Gamecube controller is so much better, doesn't hurt to use, has a good analog stick in just the right place and uses a button arrangement that makes it hard to slip into the wrong button row and allows you to understand immediately which buttons are how important, the analog triggers are more useful than analog buttons because they have a longer range of movement and can actually be used analogly (don't think games made much use of that though). While it does have fewer buttons than a Dual Shock (missing R2/3 and L2/3, I count Z as a better placed select button instead of a trigger button) I don't think it's that big of an issue.
Also, why does the Dualshock have a button to toggle analog mode when every single game just forces it to analog on anyway? I've even seen games force analog on and then ignore all analog input...
I find the handles to be problematic as well, for some reason my little finger cramps when I use a dualshock for an intensive game, perhaps they are too short or something (the Gamecube controller's handles are better). The dpad hurts my thumb but diagonals really aren't the problem. If you want another painful controller try the Classic Controller for the Wii, the lack of handles heally hurts my hands when trying to use the analog sticks.
In other words, "I know better than those millions of people what games are good!". Yeah, because it's unlikely that these people just prefer different game styles, no they must all be unenlightened heathens that need to be brought to the light...
Half-Life's cutscenes were horrible, they were just as static as regular cutscenes but put the player in control of the camera which made it easy to miss half of what's happening, especially dialogue which becomes unintelligible at more than 5m distance. The effect reminds me of those theme park rides with dancing animatronic animals.
I think it is fairly uncommon for a bad game to end up in the top sellers list. While a bad game can sell a few million (4 in the case of Enter The Matrix but cases like that are rare) on hype alone it's not enough to sustain sales for long. A top seller needs to have everything, marketing, appeal and, yes, gameplay. how many games make it into the top sellers list despite being low quality? Marketing can do a lot but marketing alone fails against the combined force of marketing AND quality. Look at Nintendo, they have loads of bestselling games by maintaining a high standard of quality whereas Sega fell hard as their quality declined. You can use hype to sell one or two games to a customer but after that he'll learn that you make crap and stop buying your products, if you use that marketing to make him buy a good product he'll buy more.
I have a feeling that sooner or later Rockstar will throw a half-assed port of a PS2 GTA3 game on the Wii (probably with analog stick aiming) and then act surprised as it doesn't sell.
I bet they won't even get around to it before the first points expire so noone can bring their 5000+ points of unspent stars on the Wii. People accumulate that much because, even though you only get 250 per game and 500 per console plus 5 per day, the offerings you can buy for them suck and sell out within seconds. The stars catalogue (list of things you can redeem those stars for) gets updated maybe once a month with about 6 new items and a few hours later only "sold out" signs remaineven though most of the items are crap like a keystrap for 1800 stars. The best deals I've seen were the complete GBA NES classics series for 10000 stars or so and two DS games for 5k each. The first one I couldn't afford and the other two were sold out by the time I saw them (which was at most a day after they were added). Oh, or you could buy a ringtone or a PDF game guide for 350 stars...
In other words, if you expect anything other than cheap merchandise with a Nintendo logo for the equivalent of 6-10 games you're going to be disappointed. The US had some "register two games and get some free stuff" deals, Japan has occassioanl exclusive games and whatnot for fairly low points values, Europe gets crappy merchandise that only sells out because people have given up all hope for anything useful to come along. Supposedly earlier days saw controllers and such sold on there but I've joined around the time Super Mario Sunshine came out and it was all crap then already.
You sound like you're talking about the Wii, I think the thread starter meant the Gamecube. The Wii wasn't Kaplan's work anymore, Reginald Fils-Aime is in charge of marketing the Wii. Considering the amount of total bullshit Kaplan spouted during her time I have no idea why people do anything but cheer when hearing about her leaving. That bullshit wasn't the ordinary marketing hype, it was blatant false information. I think it was Kaplan who announced that the Wii would not have a region lock and got shot down almost immediately by Nintendo of Europe (who probably don't like the thought of people importing the games at half the price they'd pay locally).
A lot provided the game is innovative. After all a demo is supposed to demonstrate the selling points of the game. When a game is innovative you can usually see that in the demo already.
I agree, R&C is more shooting than platforming. While it does have its share of platforms I'd estimate more than 50% of the time is spent on shooting things. And seriously, Earth Defense Force 2 is the best Third Person Shooter, at least until they make a second EDF game for the 360 and include Pale Wing (second character with her own weapon arsenal) again.
I'm not saying R&C is bad but I'm currently playing through R&C2, the first R&C game I've played and it has already started to feel kinda repetitive, I don't think I'm going to buy more games from the series because the amount of that gameplay I got from R&C2 is enough. I hope it doesn't end up feeling as bad as Super Mario Sunshine later on.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't strike me until the second to last sentence that Apple and Orange seem strangely fitting together.
However if it was developed in the US and fell under US trade restrictions it wouldn't have made it out of the country in first place.
Or they could wait until the price in the US has dropped to a level acceptable to those countries? Oh, wait, right, then people just warez it. Apparently Valve doesn't like their US sales being offshored. Guess it's a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
I don't even know how you're supposed to apply different levels of pressure to a button with 1mm traverse and 90% deadzone (or at least the minimum pressure required to move the button at all is like 90% of the pressure needed to move it all the way down). When a game used that I used trial and error until I got the pressure it demanded (took maybe 10 tries sometimes). Using the water pack in Super Mario Sunshine at different pressure levels was trivially easy. Speaking of deadzone, the dualshock's is pretty large. I've tried to do small adjustments with it in games with racing sections and it felt almost digital, the value I wanted was swallowed by the deadzone so I had to alternate between minimal value and zero to get the desired value.
Third parties never stray from the controller design set forth by the console maker, Gamecube and XBox third-party controllers had the analog stick in the primary position. They aren't trying to improve things, they're trying to make a cheap knockoff.
I don't see how a symmetric controller is more intuitive when the game's controls are not symmetric (which is most games). Usually the left analog stick and right buttons are used for controls with the d-pad and right analog stick as secondary inputs (camera controls, weapon switching, etc). Buttons labelled with geometric shapes, two of which are hard to distinguish on crappy TVs, are really confusing as well. For some reason their colors are not primary colors, perhaps Sony was worried about looking too much like the SNES with its red-yellow-green-blue buttons but that doesn't help with distinguishing them.
Twin analog? IIRC the right analog stick was used to select a weapon, not for aiming.
1. It's expensive. Sony's offer would have to be higher than what Rockstar estimates a 360 version to make AND what Microsoft is willing to bid.
2. The PS3's userbase is smaller than the 360's, it's not a sound business decision to go PS3 exclusive without some MAJOR incentives which reinforces point 1.
I have a feeling Microsoft was willing to pitch a lot of money in to make sure Sony doesn't get exclusivity.
Disc capacity means nothing, hardware means nothing. If Rockstar felt that a cellphone port would be profitable they'd make one and learn to cope with the hardware.
I disagree, the SNES controller's day came and went with that system. The dualshock was just a haphazardly bolted together mess of features, kinda like the NGage. The d-pad on the dualshock is pure pain and should have been altered long ago, the analog stick placement has no place in the modern world and the analog buttons were a completely useless idea (yeah, cue people listing exammples of games that used the analog sensitivity to assign two functions to one button... If it's analog, why is it used as a switch with 2-3 discrete states?). The Gamecube controller is so much better, doesn't hurt to use, has a good analog stick in just the right place and uses a button arrangement that makes it hard to slip into the wrong button row and allows you to understand immediately which buttons are how important, the analog triggers are more useful than analog buttons because they have a longer range of movement and can actually be used analogly (don't think games made much use of that though). While it does have fewer buttons than a Dual Shock (missing R2/3 and L2/3, I count Z as a better placed select button instead of a trigger button) I don't think it's that big of an issue.
Also, why does the Dualshock have a button to toggle analog mode when every single game just forces it to analog on anyway? I've even seen games force analog on and then ignore all analog input...
I find the handles to be problematic as well, for some reason my little finger cramps when I use a dualshock for an intensive game, perhaps they are too short or something (the Gamecube controller's handles are better). The dpad hurts my thumb but diagonals really aren't the problem. If you want another painful controller try the Classic Controller for the Wii, the lack of handles heally hurts my hands when trying to use the analog sticks.
In other words, "I know better than those millions of people what games are good!". Yeah, because it's unlikely that these people just prefer different game styles, no they must all be unenlightened heathens that need to be brought to the light...
Half-Life's cutscenes were horrible, they were just as static as regular cutscenes but put the player in control of the camera which made it easy to miss half of what's happening, especially dialogue which becomes unintelligible at more than 5m distance. The effect reminds me of those theme park rides with dancing animatronic animals.
I think it is fairly uncommon for a bad game to end up in the top sellers list. While a bad game can sell a few million (4 in the case of Enter The Matrix but cases like that are rare) on hype alone it's not enough to sustain sales for long. A top seller needs to have everything, marketing, appeal and, yes, gameplay. how many games make it into the top sellers list despite being low quality? Marketing can do a lot but marketing alone fails against the combined force of marketing AND quality. Look at Nintendo, they have loads of bestselling games by maintaining a high standard of quality whereas Sega fell hard as their quality declined. You can use hype to sell one or two games to a customer but after that he'll learn that you make crap and stop buying your products, if you use that marketing to make him buy a good product he'll buy more.
I have a feeling that sooner or later Rockstar will throw a half-assed port of a PS2 GTA3 game on the Wii (probably with analog stick aiming) and then act surprised as it doesn't sell.
You could get that four Zelda game disc IIRC. That thing was NEVER added to the stars catalogue here.
He downloads them to have fun, he buys them for profit. Completely independent actions.
I think they're mostly worried about any hack allowing the system to run warez, that homebrew gets blocked is a coincidence.
You wouldn't but the 99% of the userbase that doesn't have a flashcard might.
We could cite it as a demonstration of what happens when someone doesn't play videogames...
He should be put under the foot of a Gundam.
I bet they won't even get around to it before the first points expire so noone can bring their 5000+ points of unspent stars on the Wii. People accumulate that much because, even though you only get 250 per game and 500 per console plus 5 per day, the offerings you can buy for them suck and sell out within seconds. The stars catalogue (list of things you can redeem those stars for) gets updated maybe once a month with about 6 new items and a few hours later only "sold out" signs remaineven though most of the items are crap like a keystrap for 1800 stars. The best deals I've seen were the complete GBA NES classics series for 10000 stars or so and two DS games for 5k each. The first one I couldn't afford and the other two were sold out by the time I saw them (which was at most a day after they were added). Oh, or you could buy a ringtone or a PDF game guide for 350 stars...
In other words, if you expect anything other than cheap merchandise with a Nintendo logo for the equivalent of 6-10 games you're going to be disappointed. The US had some "register two games and get some free stuff" deals, Japan has occassioanl exclusive games and whatnot for fairly low points values, Europe gets crappy merchandise that only sells out because people have given up all hope for anything useful to come along. Supposedly earlier days saw controllers and such sold on there but I've joined around the time Super Mario Sunshine came out and it was all crap then already.
You sound like you're talking about the Wii, I think the thread starter meant the Gamecube. The Wii wasn't Kaplan's work anymore, Reginald Fils-Aime is in charge of marketing the Wii. Considering the amount of total bullshit Kaplan spouted during her time I have no idea why people do anything but cheer when hearing about her leaving. That bullshit wasn't the ordinary marketing hype, it was blatant false information. I think it was Kaplan who announced that the Wii would not have a region lock and got shot down almost immediately by Nintendo of Europe (who probably don't like the thought of people importing the games at half the price they'd pay locally).
A lot provided the game is innovative. After all a demo is supposed to demonstrate the selling points of the game. When a game is innovative you can usually see that in the demo already.
I agree, R&C is more shooting than platforming. While it does have its share of platforms I'd estimate more than 50% of the time is spent on shooting things. And seriously, Earth Defense Force 2 is the best Third Person Shooter, at least until they make a second EDF game for the 360 and include Pale Wing (second character with her own weapon arsenal) again.
I'm not saying R&C is bad but I'm currently playing through R&C2, the first R&C game I've played and it has already started to feel kinda repetitive, I don't think I'm going to buy more games from the series because the amount of that gameplay I got from R&C2 is enough. I hope it doesn't end up feeling as bad as Super Mario Sunshine later on.
Marketing managed to sell Enter The Matrix. ETM was a fairly ugly game.
Does it still use O for firing the gun? That's my biggest gripe with R&C2 on the PS2, can't reliably jump and shoot at the same time.
As long as Valve doesn't shut your copy down because you live in the wrong place...