Kinect can work fine with people in the background.
I know.
Because Kinect Adventures takes pictures of you from time to time being stupid and a friend of mine was in the background mooning the game everytime it happened.
Vita will probably sell better than the 3DS in the US for quite a while, I would guess. Whether the 3DS can pick back up like the DS did is wholly dependent upon software.
I think so. Uncharted will be a decent draw if Sony can get it out on the airwaves, especially after the sales of 3.
I think both system will run strong for awhile, with the 3DS pulling ahead just because I think the all-ages market is larger than the core market. Sony can grab that back with some good moves. I'd probably approach Epic and Chair and ask for Infinity Blade II as a port. Proof of concept for other developers and a gateway for those who may have started gaming more on their smartphones. Court some Steam devs to do some PSN content.
Basically acknowledge that the Vita can do a wide variety of content, and use that to pull people from those different pools toward the system.
I never got all the hate for Dragon Age II. It took risks, and while it didn't always work, it still had some cool ideas and likable characters.
From what I remember from the complaints and a let's play. The game never really had a decent overarching plot, the fighting was basically trash wave after trash wave, most of the characters were terrible like the retarded Welsh elf or were defined by some gimmick like tits mcgee II, the choices were pretty pointless, there wasn't much of a sense of change after important events, and it didn't use the act structure in any decent way so you had important shit like rise to power taking place off screen, and the game still had some important info mentioned in the codex like what those funky lyrium veins are. For example, your character rises to power in the criminal underworld. That would make for some decent quests or at least a montage, right? Nope. Listen to this narration tell you you did it. Well, now you are going to rise to power within the city's upper class. At least that should be explained with something other than "gold did it." Nope.
The overarching plot was twofold: Hawkes rise to power and the Mage-Templar conflict. The characters bit was highly subjective. Hawke achieved power by being in the right place at the right time and being the most competent man on the scene. Again, not a perfect game, but the spawn of Satan's left nutsack everyone makes it out to be.
I never got all the hate for Dragon Age II. It took risks, and while it didn't always work, it still had some cool ideas and likable characters.
From what I remember from the complaints and a let's play. The game never really had a decent overarching plot, the fighting was basically trash wave after trash wave, most of the characters were terrible like the retarded Welsh elf or were defined by some gimmick like tits mcgee II, the choices were pretty pointless, there wasn't much of a sense of change after important events, and it didn't use the act structure in any decent way so you had important shit like rise to power taking place off screen, and the game still had some important info mentioned in the codex like what those funky lyrium veins are. For example, your character rises to power in the criminal underworld. That would make for some decent quests or at least a montage, right? Nope. Listen to this narration tell you you did it. Well, now you are going to rise to power within the city's upper class. At least that should be explained with something other than "gold did it." Nope.
The overarching plot was twofold: Hawkes rise to power and the Mage-Templar conflict. The characters bit was highly subjective. Hawke achieved power by being in the right place at the right time and being the most competent man on the scene. Again, not a perfect game, but the spawn of Satan's left nutsack everyone makes it out to be.
The problem is if Hawke's rise to power is half of the plot, then most of the plot isn't shown because it tells us she rose to power half the time. The parts where the player plays the main character and doesn't have the story told are the parts where she gets 50 gold and does the deep roads with nothing about rising in the criminal ranks or within society. The mage-templar conflict ended up being a bunch of retarded blood mages (make a deal with demons, what could go wrong?) against a bunch of retarded templars. That didn't even come into any focus until later in the game with sidequests being the main parts where there were mage-templar conflicts before it came into focus.
I never got all the hate for Dragon Age II. It took risks, and while it didn't always work, it still had some cool ideas and likable characters.
From what I remember from the complaints and a let's play. The game never really had a decent overarching plot, the fighting was basically trash wave after trash wave, most of the characters were terrible like the retarded Welsh elf or were defined by some gimmick like tits mcgee II, the choices were pretty pointless, there wasn't much of a sense of change after important events, and it didn't use the act structure in any decent way so you had important shit like rise to power taking place off screen, and the game still had some important info mentioned in the codex like what those funky lyrium veins are. For example, your character rises to power in the criminal underworld. That would make for some decent quests or at least a montage, right? Nope. Listen to this narration tell you you did it. Well, now you are going to rise to power within the city's upper class. At least that should be explained with something other than "gold did it." Nope.
The overarching plot was twofold: Hawkes rise to power and the Mage-Templar conflict. The characters bit was highly subjective. Hawke achieved power by being in the right place at the right time and being the most competent man on the scene. Again, not a perfect game, but the spawn of Satan's left nutsack everyone makes it out to be.
The problem is if Hawke's rise to power is half of the plot, then most of the plot isn't shown because it tells us she rose to power half the time. The parts where the player plays the main character and doesn't have the story told are the parts where she gets 50 gold and does the deep roads with nothing about rising in the criminal ranks or within society. The mage-templar conflict ended up being a bunch of retarded blood mages (make a deal with demons, what could go wrong?) against a bunch of retarded templars. That didn't even come into any focus until later in the game with sidequests being the main parts where there were mage-templar conflicts before it came into focus.
Like I said, the game had flaws, but the Templar-Mage issue is set up litterally in the first ten minutes of the game, and that's not one of them.
...I'd ask what was so wrong with Mass Effect 2, but that leads to bad things.
The beginning and ending were terrible, the environments drastically scaled back and beset with waist high barriers everywhere so they could make the whole experience more Gears of War friendly, scaled back the RPG qualities and scope of the game.
Again, it's not terrible, but the ending was particularly awful and the blatant and completely shallow attempt at an emotional thrill with the whole "Shepard is Dead" thing at the beginning was pathetic.
I read a pretty good write up on ME2 a while back. Wonder if I can find it. Basically started with the whole ridiculous death premise and why that set a bad tone for the whole game.
Both ME2 and DA2 are much less sequels and more superfluous side stories. Quick cash in with a short dev cycle.
I dunno, I thought the beginning's way of resetting the status quo was fine... there's certainly been worse (I hesitate to bring it up again, but: Metroid Other M). For me the ending was pretty thrilling, since I was obsessing over which characters to send on what task and I honestly worried that one wrong move would get my guys killed.
I can see how the RPG streamlining could be annoying, but honestly, the RPG elements in the first Mass Effect weren't all that great. You had to spend far, far too much time wading through an ocean of similar/exactly the same guns to pick what you want. It would be nice if they came to a happy medium.
On the bright side, it's an actual third-person shooter that doesn't play like shit.
I know it's Bioware, but you'd think that not rushing the development cycle, as they allegedly did in ME1, would prevent things like a fuckawful inventory management system, heavy reliance on algorithimically generated terrain, and some of the worse combat AI I've seen in any third-person shooter.
It's funny you say that Sheep, because I think Mass Effect 2 is mediocre, but the beginning and ending are the best parts. The "Shepard death" part was great, both the concept and the actual levels on the Normandy and the subsequent recovery. The ending was a thrill ride from the moment you jump through the relay all the way to Shepard jumping into the ship.
It was the filler in between that really bugged me. The sidequests and the conversations are fine, but the main story was just "go recruit this person. Then go do their loyalty mission that you may or may not care about. Then go recruit this person...." The whole thing felt very lazy, and the non-recruiting parts were not enjoyable sections (Horizon colony, the derelict ship, etc.).
I enjoyed playing through it but have had no desire to play it again to continue my Renegade character from ME1.
The more I ruminate on ME2, the less I like the plot. Almost everything, including the main plot, felt like a side quest, and 90 percent of the game was team building with almost no actual preparation for the fucking mission you were preparing for so the entire plan was winging. I might have liked it if it felt more like a heist movie with careful planning before everything goes wrong.
The combat was also pretty generic feeling with not much going for it.
Couscous on
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited December 2011
Shepard dying and being resurrected was the dumbest bullshit. Somehow they managed to take the whole "death is only an inconvenience" things from comic books and make it even less of an issue. I mean fuck, at least in comics the writers have the decency to keep the characters dead for a month or two before they trot them out again. Here Shepard stays dead for roughly three minutes.
It's such a completely unnecessary move that kills any and all dramatic tension there might be because hey, it don't matter if anyone dies, you can always just bring them back. Sure, it's a bit expensive, but it's doable.
Syndicate has been refused classification in Australia, due to being "unsuitable for a minor to see or play." The current Australian classification standards still reject classification (i.e. ban) for any game that is only suitable for citizens over the age of 15.
"Combatants take locational damage and can be explicitly dismembered, decapitated or bisected by the force of the gunfire. The depictions are accompanied by copious bloodspray and injuries are shown realistically and with detail," reads the Classification report obtained by VG24/7. "Flesh and bone are often exposed while arterial sprays of blood continue to spurt from wounds at regular intervals," the report states, discussing an example mission."
The most high-profile Aussie rejection in 2011 was Mortal Kombat, which tried to appeal the decision and lost. The Witcher 2 avoided the issue with a small edit to pass the board. We've contacted EA to find out if the publisher will appeal or resubmit the title with alterations.
Yeha, my complaint is mainly plot. The ending sequence where you pick characters/hope they live is damn fine gameplay, especially in the face of the abject GoW influence.
I didn't like the ending to the story. I should have been more specific.
We'll have to disagree on the death thing. I, personally, felt it to be a cop out.
Shepard dying and being resurrected was the dumbest bullshit. Somehow they managed to take the whole "death is only an inconvenience" things from comic books and make it even less of an issue. I mean fuck, at least in comics the writers have the decency to keep the characters dead for a month or two before they trot them out again. Here Shepard stays dead for roughly three minutes.
It's such a completely unnecessary move that kills any and all dramatic tension there might be because hey, it don't matter if anyone dies, you can always just bring them back. Sure, it's a bit expensive, but it's doable.
And people claim BioWare can write good stories.
Shepard is dead for a matter of months. All the characters you meet from the first game say as much.
Which just leaves us with comic book-caliber writing. Hardly an accomplishment.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Shepard dying and being resurrected was the dumbest bullshit. Somehow they managed to take the whole "death is only an inconvenience" things from comic books and make it even less of an issue. I mean fuck, at least in comics the writers have the decency to keep the characters dead for a month or two before they trot them out again. Here Shepard stays dead for roughly three minutes.
It's such a completely unnecessary move that kills any and all dramatic tension there might be because hey, it don't matter if anyone dies, you can always just bring them back. Sure, it's a bit expensive, but it's doable.
And people claim BioWare can write good stories.
Shepard is dead for a matter of months. All the characters you meet from the first game say as much.
Which just leaves us with comic book-caliber writing. Hardly an accomplishment.
Well, two years, story-wise. But that's not what I'm talking about.
A man in Northern California has filed a lawsuit against Sony over the recently revised terms of service and user agreement for its online services, alleging that the company is conducting unfair business with consumers.
In September, the company inserted a new section into its ToS that stated users cannot enter into a class action lawsuit against Sony unless Sony agrees to the initiation.
This move came in the wake of the PlayStation Network breach earlier this year, during which millions of user accounts on Sony's onlive services were compromised by a cyber attack.
New court documents obtained by Gamasutra, and filed late last month, are on behalf of all those customers who owned a PSN account before the changes to the ToS occurred.
The suit alleges that Sony is forcing PSN users to effectively give up access to online privileges they had already paid for, or give up the right to file a lawsuit against the company.
It also suggests that Sony purposely buried the new clause near the bottom of the ToS and made it difficult to access the form online.
Normally I'd applaud this move, but knowing the current Supreme Court I'd bet that in deciding this case they'd managed to set an even worse precedent for consumers.
I've been waiting twenty years for video games to have actual stairs and not just a textured, parallax-mapped ramp that characters would simply slide along. Nathan Drake fucking runs up stairs in huge strides. His feet actually land on the steps themselves. He runs up stairs in such a satisfying manner in Uncharted 3 that I seriously, with no sense of irony or self-awareness, want Naughty Dog to release their stair walking animations as a piece of middleware so that it can become an industry standard.
I'm not even joking. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is my game of the year for many reasons, but the way Drake runs up stairs is probably near the top. Few animations in games have ever evoked so much emotion and nuance. When Drake runs up stairs, he's imparting so much tension and excitement into the scene that Naughty Dog's stair-running technology should be considered alongside Havok as a game-changer for the wider gaming industry.
Yeha, my complaint is mainly plot. The ending sequence where you pick characters/hope they live is damn fine gameplay, especially in the face of the abject GoW influence.
I didn't like the ending to the story. I should have been more specific.
We'll have to disagree on the death thing. I, personally, felt it to be a cop out.
Yeah, the death thing was pretty lame and I think the game would have been better without it. Since no one seems to acknowledge it at all.
As for the GoW influence, I can't say that as bad thing but that's because I think the combat in ME1 was janky at best. And say what you want about Epic, but they've been the company best refining third person shooting in last few years.
Honestly, I would say that the problem with the main plot was that it was so disconnected from all the other stuff you were doing. It made sense in a way since well, you were doing the mission on your own time, but it gave it a very disjointed feel. That being said I will say that the characters and dialogue in ME2 were pretty good, though I still have some problems with that but I'm not trying to go to indepth into that at the moment.
ME2 would have been significantly more satisfying if it had a Vigil-style exposition font near the end.
As much as I ascribe to a show, don't tell approach to narratives, my main disappointment with ME2s plot was that it felt a little too vague, a little - as you say - disconnected. Having Harbinger spend a solid ten minutes spouting some stuff at you before the final boss battle would have really helped. It would have given more context, allowed things to wrap up a bit more nicely.
I mean, it felt a bit rushed at the end. Before you even know what's happening, EDI has revealed the human reaper and literally, in ten seconds, you're shooting at it with guns.
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MalReynoldsThe Hunter S Thompson of incredibly mild medicinesRegistered Userregular
Metal Gear Solid's later iterations had good stair walking.
Which is one of the few compliments I'd pay the game series personally.
I dunno, I'd play the shit out of 'Metal Gear: Stair Walker.'
"A new take on the epic fantasy genre... Darkly comic, relatable characters... twisted storyline."
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
Having a ladder boss battle in MGS3 was the best thing Kojima has ever done. It was hilarious and also, strangely, incredibly dramatic and tense. Music makes everything, it seems.
I mean, Metal Gear Solid has been a torrent of sewage from the sluice of Kojimas mouth as far as I am concerned, but it has its moments from time to time.
That being said, I'm more concerned about ladders. It's like very few people can get ladder climbing right.
I find absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that most FPS protagonists can climb a ladder backwards using no hands at 10mph while bending at the waist to look straight down while reloading a fifteen pound assault rifle.
The first game that had ladder animations that I thought were awesome was Killzone on the PS2. They made it a point with that game though, the reload animations were really good as well.
A lack of stairs has also greatly influenced map design. I remember in one of the early Bungie docs they were talking about how they don't have ladders anymore, or stairs. Just ramps. Smooth ramps that you can run up and down to effortlessly change altitude.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
A lack of stairs has also greatly influenced map design. I remember in one of the early Bungie docs they were talking about how they don't have ladders anymore, or stairs. Just ramps. Smooth ramps that you can run up and down to effortlessly change altitude.
I've been waiting twenty years for video games to have actual stairs and not just a textured, parallax-mapped ramp that characters would simply slide along. Nathan Drake fucking runs up stairs in huge strides. His feet actually land on the steps themselves. He runs up stairs in such a satisfying manner in Uncharted 3 that I seriously, with no sense of irony or self-awareness, want Naughty Dog to release their stair walking animations as a piece of middleware so that it can become an industry standard.
I'm not even joking. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is my game of the year for many reasons, but the way Drake runs up stairs is probably near the top. Few animations in games have ever evoked so much emotion and nuance. When Drake runs up stairs, he's imparting so much tension and excitement into the scene that Naughty Dog's stair-running technology should be considered alongside Havok as a game-changer for the wider gaming industry.
At any rate, Child's Play? Humble Bundle? Pfft. Here's the greatest video game-related charity event:
Crazy Dave, whom you might remember as Plants vs. Zombies' power-up purveyor, can't speak English. But that hasn't stopped him from producing a rap song, apparently, which PopCap is now selling for 99 cents on iTunes in order to raise some money for charity this holiday season. The single, which features "Cray-Z" murmuring over a bombastic beat, has already picked up over 600,000 views on YouTube, and PopCap says all profits on the song's sale are going to Concern Worldwide.
What's Concern do with its nonprofit funds? It helps grow plants, of course. How else are we going to take on the coming zombie bobsled threat?
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I know.
Because Kinect Adventures takes pictures of you from time to time being stupid and a friend of mine was in the background mooning the game everytime it happened.
I think so. Uncharted will be a decent draw if Sony can get it out on the airwaves, especially after the sales of 3.
I think both system will run strong for awhile, with the 3DS pulling ahead just because I think the all-ages market is larger than the core market. Sony can grab that back with some good moves. I'd probably approach Epic and Chair and ask for Infinity Blade II as a port. Proof of concept for other developers and a gateway for those who may have started gaming more on their smartphones. Court some Steam devs to do some PSN content.
Basically acknowledge that the Vita can do a wide variety of content, and use that to pull people from those different pools toward the system.
I doubt Sony will be that smart, but whatever.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
The overarching plot was twofold: Hawkes rise to power and the Mage-Templar conflict. The characters bit was highly subjective. Hawke achieved power by being in the right place at the right time and being the most competent man on the scene. Again, not a perfect game, but the spawn of Satan's left nutsack everyone makes it out to be.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
Like I said, the game had flaws, but the Templar-Mage issue is set up litterally in the first ten minutes of the game, and that's not one of them.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
I heard complaints that people thought they were over the top but it did make the otherwise grindy combat pretty visceral.
Yeah, those were pretty cool. I guess my party of three rogues and a mage just made such short work of enemies that I never got the grindy feeling.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
It is great fun when you click on a dude and seconds later that guy and the three guys next to him explode into clouds of blood.
You don't actually see Hawke's rise to power because it all takes place in between chapters. You only see snippets.
And the fact that...
Seemed amateurish. I've read explanations that something about the area itself having something wrong with it that convinces mages to do that.
Otherwise, it was an obvious rush job.
With that said, I beat it and thought it was okay. Not great.
Which is more than I can say for Mass Effect 2.
It'll probably drop a bit, but hopefully it stays high. It would be nice to see the Vita and 3DS do well now.
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...I'd ask what was so wrong with Mass Effect 2, but that leads to bad things.
The beginning and ending were terrible, the environments drastically scaled back and beset with waist high barriers everywhere so they could make the whole experience more Gears of War friendly, scaled back the RPG qualities and scope of the game.
Again, it's not terrible, but the ending was particularly awful and the blatant and completely shallow attempt at an emotional thrill with the whole "Shepard is Dead" thing at the beginning was pathetic.
I read a pretty good write up on ME2 a while back. Wonder if I can find it. Basically started with the whole ridiculous death premise and why that set a bad tone for the whole game.
Both ME2 and DA2 are much less sequels and more superfluous side stories. Quick cash in with a short dev cycle.
I can see how the RPG streamlining could be annoying, but honestly, the RPG elements in the first Mass Effect weren't all that great. You had to spend far, far too much time wading through an ocean of similar/exactly the same guns to pick what you want. It would be nice if they came to a happy medium.
I know it's Bioware, but you'd think that not rushing the development cycle, as they allegedly did in ME1, would prevent things like a fuckawful inventory management system, heavy reliance on algorithimically generated terrain, and some of the worse combat AI I've seen in any third-person shooter.
It was the filler in between that really bugged me. The sidequests and the conversations are fine, but the main story was just "go recruit this person. Then go do their loyalty mission that you may or may not care about. Then go recruit this person...." The whole thing felt very lazy, and the non-recruiting parts were not enjoyable sections (Horizon colony, the derelict ship, etc.).
I enjoyed playing through it but have had no desire to play it again to continue my Renegade character from ME1.
I'll agree he can get on my wick sometimes, but Santa's not that bad.
I was teasing. :P
The combat was also pretty generic feeling with not much going for it.
It's such a completely unnecessary move that kills any and all dramatic tension there might be because hey, it don't matter if anyone dies, you can always just bring them back. Sure, it's a bit expensive, but it's doable.
And people claim BioWare can write good stories.
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/20/syndicate-refused-classification-in-australia-called-unsuitabl/
I didn't like the ending to the story. I should have been more specific.
We'll have to disagree on the death thing. I, personally, felt it to be a cop out.
Shepard is dead for a matter of months. All the characters you meet from the first game say as much.
Which just leaves us with comic book-caliber writing. Hardly an accomplishment.
Well, two years, story-wise. But that's not what I'm talking about.
I've been waiting twenty years for video games to have actual stairs and not just a textured, parallax-mapped ramp that characters would simply slide along. Nathan Drake fucking runs up stairs in huge strides. His feet actually land on the steps themselves. He runs up stairs in such a satisfying manner in Uncharted 3 that I seriously, with no sense of irony or self-awareness, want Naughty Dog to release their stair walking animations as a piece of middleware so that it can become an industry standard.
I'm not even joking. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is my game of the year for many reasons, but the way Drake runs up stairs is probably near the top. Few animations in games have ever evoked so much emotion and nuance. When Drake runs up stairs, he's imparting so much tension and excitement into the scene that Naughty Dog's stair-running technology should be considered alongside Havok as a game-changer for the wider gaming industry.
Which is one of the few compliments I'd pay the game series personally.
Yeah, the death thing was pretty lame and I think the game would have been better without it. Since no one seems to acknowledge it at all.
As for the GoW influence, I can't say that as bad thing but that's because I think the combat in ME1 was janky at best. And say what you want about Epic, but they've been the company best refining third person shooting in last few years.
Honestly, I would say that the problem with the main plot was that it was so disconnected from all the other stuff you were doing. It made sense in a way since well, you were doing the mission on your own time, but it gave it a very disjointed feel. That being said I will say that the characters and dialogue in ME2 were pretty good, though I still have some problems with that but I'm not trying to go to indepth into that at the moment.
As much as I ascribe to a show, don't tell approach to narratives, my main disappointment with ME2s plot was that it felt a little too vague, a little - as you say - disconnected. Having Harbinger spend a solid ten minutes spouting some stuff at you before the final boss battle would have really helped. It would have given more context, allowed things to wrap up a bit more nicely.
I mean, it felt a bit rushed at the end. Before you even know what's happening, EDI has revealed the human reaper and literally, in ten seconds, you're shooting at it with guns.
I dunno, I'd play the shit out of 'Metal Gear: Stair Walker.'
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
I should leave.
That being said, I'm more concerned about ladders. It's like very few people can get ladder climbing right.
I mean, Metal Gear Solid has been a torrent of sewage from the sluice of Kojimas mouth as far as I am concerned, but it has its moments from time to time.
I find absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that most FPS protagonists can climb a ladder backwards using no hands at 10mph while bending at the waist to look straight down while reloading a fifteen pound assault rifle.
The first game that had ladder animations that I thought were awesome was Killzone on the PS2. They made it a point with that game though, the reload animations were really good as well.
The future is wheelchair accessible.
Niko Bellic would like a word.
At any rate, Child's Play? Humble Bundle? Pfft. Here's the greatest video game-related charity event: