Thrik

And if the hardware is so old that you can't work out how it relates to what's listed under the requirements, best to assume it's not sufficient.

Am I missing some kind of guideline or rule that prohibits mentioning Uncharted fuckin' 2? Because that is way up at the top of my 2009 list.

Yeah, I'd say the graphics do the job but they're not really anything special. I mean obviously if this were on the 360 or PS3 the game would look absolutely incredible, more like the pre-rendered art they used to advertise the game. I could see a 2D Mario game looking amazing with sweet use of post processing, depth of field, sophisticated lighting, etc. As it is, while the game is fantastic and it's great to see a return to side-scrolling gameplay, it's not exactly visually astounding. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the Donkey Kong Country series from like 15 years ago does the psuedo-3D thing better and is more aesthetically pleasing overall. The fact it's 3D doesn't really benefit this game at all, and to be honest considering the Wii's HD ineptitude I think doing it as full 2D and using the Wii's power on that would have resulted in a far greater visual feast — the jaggies really get on my nerves on my 42-inch screen. I mean just look at what the SNES managed to output when it dedicated its power to 2D (Donkey Kong Country, Yoshi's Island). Whoops, went into a bit of a rant there. Did I mention this game is nostalgic as fuck and really fun?

It's really annoying because otherwise a lot of the music is really good.

Bloody Nintendo. First Mario Galaxy, now this. I swear, they're turned pulling nostalgia strings into a fine art. When I pulled up to the final castle in the first world, I was thinking "God man, if only they used the Mario World bowser's castle theme". So they only fucking did remix it. Then as if I wasn't already buzzing by the time I got to the big metal door, I went through and was treated to the Yoshi's Island Kamek type deal with the same sound effects and everything. Maybe I'm a soft target for this kind of thing, but man this makes a great experience for me. Highly recommended for childhood Mario enthusiasts. ;

They're not quite as bad in the Wii version, which I got today. At least now they're not played through the DS's tiny speakers, and it's still funny how the baddies dance to it. I've only played two levels but I already rate this game 'Yeah baby!'. Playing a 2D Mario game on the big screen and being smashed in the face with a bagful of nostalgia (koopa kids, flying ship, menu music, clown copter from Mario World, Yoshi, cave music from Mario 64) is just undisputably great.

I think you're reading a bit too much into the Zelda thing, although it's completely understandable why considering the trailer. I'm getting the feeling it'll be more a homage to the genre/era in general, and not just Zelda — though they obviously focused on that for this trailer. From looking at the screenshots it'll look and play like a psuedo-3D version of any number of overhead RPGs of the late 80s/90s, with the more dramatic angles in the trailer used sparingly. In fact it looks a lot like Phantom Hourglass, except more blocky. The gameplay could be wonderfully original like you'd expect from an indie title, or it could be derivative as fuck. If it's the former then I'm pretty happy with that. While I wouldn't go as far as to say it's like a freeware fan game, it does seem more like an indie title — not sure if the concept can stretch to the full retail price it's going for.

Oh man, Atlus looks amazing — I'd never have imagined turning pixel art into cube art could look so great. Fez doesn't really do it for me.

Jesus christ, that bloody 'choir' effect again? I don't know what it's meant to be or why the development team thinks it works well, but it is seriously the lamest audio cue I've heard in years — just like it was when I heard it in the DS version. The game doesn't look as terrible to me as it does to Jake, actually artistically it seems to fit really well into the Mario Bros line of games. It's definitely not got anywhere near the charm of the Mario World line though, which I always preferred.

I just finished this and want to affirm that it is without a doubt my game of the year. Holy shit, how epic? Makes Uncharted 1 looks positively trivial in comparison. If Uncharted 3 is as inevitable as I'd imagine it is, how the fuck are they going to top this?

Bit late to the party here, but I just burned through chapters 3 and 4 and think they're easily the strongest two of the series thus far. Chapter 3 was very satisfying from a gameplay perspective, whereas chapter 4 was fantastic on a story level I thought and I loved the overall atmosphere of Flotsam by night. About time we went inside a damn bar! I personally don't get all this criticism about the at all — I thought they did a great job of injecting some higher stakes into the story without being too dramatic about it. Besides, did anyone at any point really think the ? I certainly never did, even as . Of course now watch it turn out that last one was permanent. I think this latest episode really brought home to me how quality this series has actually been. The engine seems to be at its best handling these darker scenes, with the aesthetics being way above EMI in my opinion. And also not only did this episode feature some great music of its own, but it also reused some of the best stuff from the previous ones. At this point I can definitely say Tales of Monkey Island sits well above EMI as an overall game for me, although as I suspected it hasn't come particularly close to knocking any of the original trilogy off the top three seats.

As a purely personal observation, most metal heads I've ever known (90% of which from college) are well into games.

No, metal is very much a big thing in Europe — particularly England, which is where a lot of the genre's foundations were laid and where three of the game's main voice actors come from (Lemmy, Halford, Ozzy). I'm also surprised by the relatively low sales here, but then I haven't seen that much in the way of aggressive marketing here to the extent that has been done in the US (chat show appearances, frequent TV ads, etc). Not to say it hasn't received a lot of love from EA, but going by the failure of DJ Hero which had loads of marketing it seems something's in the air at the moment and a game needs more marketing than usual to even sell decently. Quite a few big games like Guitar Hero 5 and Need for Speed have had unexpectedly low sales during the last month. Maybe all that talk about the Modern Warfare 2 effect was justified after all.

Month-one sales are pretty critical when it comes to a publisher determining the success of a game, so in the context of this conversation not really. It does seem that Brutal Legend isn't the massive hit EA was hoping and marketed for, although Schafer games do tend to have a really long shelf life so EA may still turn a profit. It doesn't have the long-term sustainability of some games though, so it won't be a magical LittleBigPlanet-esque recovery. The sales really aren't too bad, though. It seems quite a few games you'd expect to have sold well in October didn't, including DJ Hero which sold even less than Brutal Legend.

EA runs a number of internal namesake studios, such as EA LA which develops Command & Conquer. They have a number of fully-owned subsidiaries too (eg: Criterion, Maxis, BioWare, Pandemic, Mythic). I'd imagine many of the lay-offs came from at least the former dozen or so studios. Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA_%28video_game_company%29#Studios_and_subsidiaries

At this point I am starting to blame gamers more than publishers for shitty sequel bonanzas.

I'm sure I saw numbers a week or so ago putting EA's losses this quarter at well in excess of $300 million, so I think it's fair to say EA probably is having genuine issues and aren't just being dicks. Maybe they bit off more than they can chew by going crazy with the original IP. It did seem almost surreal how much EA was going in that direction, and a better balance of established and new is bound to be more sustainable. I just hope getting their fingers burnt doesn't make them completely retreat from supporting original IP. Returning to sequel churning would be very sad.

Hahaha, I can't believe how many people have difficulty with those. All you need to do is hold down the guitar button to burn them. Also with regards to your backstory stuff, have you been discovering the legends? They're the bigger statues knocking around, which are opened with the earthshaker and are similar to the mental vaults in Psychonauts except instead of psychological trauma they reveal awesome narrated backstory. I just finished the game today, and I definitely give it an overall thumbs up. It's probably not as accomplished and tidy a tale as Psychonauts IMO, but it is nonetheless a really captivating experience and I really felt drawn into it during the 19 hours it took me to finish it (still missing a legend and loads of concept art though). I actually thought the RTS stuff was great, but then I've always liked RTS games. It did a fantastic job of bringing the principles of RTS gaming to a more action-orientated context, being nowhere near as tactical as something like Command & Conquer. In fact for someone like me used to such complexity, it was a bit of a walk in the park and I didn't fail a single RTS sequence on regular difficulty. The main criticism I would level at the game is the slight roughness to certain things: car engine sounds could be better, lack of variety to side missions and their included dialogue, etc. The actual length of the game wasn't too bad for me and about on par with any Schafer game, though I think it's easy to expect more due to the epicness of the world and amount of time we've been waiting for the game. Overall, it's great. I'd definitely be up for seeing more of the world via some serious DLC though, and even a sequel could be pretty awesome — though not at the expensive of an original Schafer IP.

There's actually not a single thing I find appealing about those Epic Mickey screenshots. Ultra fail.

That's a pretty extreme example. I don't know if I'm really shit or something, but I've literally been regularly playing GTA4 since it came out, and after dozens of hours I'm still only at like 58%. Most current-gen games last me 10–20 hours though, including Brutal Legend of which I'm at 15 hours and have just gotten past the dry ice mines. To be honest it doesn't seem as short as people were making out.

Man, when the hell is stuff loaded then? Do you get a small pause or something if you skip a cutscene almost immediately?

Yeah Psych, good call there. I think it's fair to say not all of them are pre-rendered because in many cases it just wouldn't be necessary and would be too problematic because of the potential variation in the environment. eljay, I've not watched it myself yet but your interpretation doesn't sound right. It's always going to take less time to start playing a video than to stream in a load of high-detail models, textures, etc. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if they cleverly use the cutscenes to quietly load the data for the next scene in the background whilst minimal processing is being spent on the video, hence how the game has no loading screens.

Apparently the making-of documentaries included with the game highlight the fact that they're videos and not real-time cutscenes, however as you say they're taken from in-engine footage. I'd imagine the reason they did this was so it could transition so quickly between gameplay and cutscene (it happens a lot), and also so any slowdown can be smoothed away in post-production through frame manipulation. As it's on blu-ray I'd imagine they didn't really give a shit about doing this despite the gains not being that significant.

Seem like pretty respectable week-one numbers, especially considering that's only the US. If you look back through the previous weeks it's on par with or beating some pretty big franchises' week-one numbers. It's only 40,000 off Guitar Hero 5's 360/PS3 week-one sales — pity it didn't quite match it, to piss off Activision!

Anyone caught this? Started on Monday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_%28BBC_TV_series%29 It's from the same team as Planet Earth, which at least some of you should know to be an outstanding series. Pretty much the spiritual sequel, including the same music composer; plenty of incredible slow-motion footage; and of course David Attenborough. Having watched one episode I can safely say if you liked Planet Earth you're going to love this, as it features all the hallmarks that made it such an engaging and even emotional watch. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the footage I've seen thus far surpasses that in Planet Earth with regards to the 'How the hell did they manage to capture this?' aspect. In fact, forget whether or not you saw Planet Earth, or even whether or not you like nature documentaries — just watch it.