SiN

*EVERY* game. SiN

Tiring, but it does sound like fun. An obvious question I guess, but why not buy it now and play it with them? SiN

It's being developed by Sony Japan. It's also coming out on the PSP if that helps. SiN

Cynicism FTW! Honestly, these titles sound great. The X360/PS3 title is a great way to experiment with emotional characters in video games. The important part here is that your sidekick is a robot/alien/whatever. This means they can focus less on making her realistic in every possible way, and focus more on the character interaction. Hell, if they were feeling particularly ballsy, they could even use a voice-synth and have limitless dialog options. I don't know why everyones fussing over the Wii game. The Wii needs more physics-based games, plus even though I don't really know what "the charm of a Saturday-morning cartoon" means, I'm guessing it'll have a somewhat imaginative art style. And of course there's the "Spielberg, stick to movies" brigade (not here, but on other websites). Have we all forgotten that Spielberg is infact a gamer? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but was he not responsible for the first Medal Of Honour game? And did he not have some sort of influence at "the old" LucasArts. I know he had influence on The Dig, but I've heard stories about him visiting LA along with Lucas a couple of times. Rodi's got it spot on too ... note that he isn't doing "epic story from A to B" games. He's doing games where the player influences the world. All of this makes me think he's got a shot at doing something decent, if not great. SiN

@Wrestlevania: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2007/06/27/reggie-on-his-big-plans-for-a-little-nintendo-wiiware.aspx"](source) That seems pretty concise to me. @nsps: I could certainly be wrong. That's the number I heard a while back. I had a quick look around the ESRB website earlier today but couldn't find anything about the cost of rating. SiN

Ack, sorry. It does make sense, but I wasn't very clear. Quality Assurance (QA) means testing a game for bugs. Quality Control means making sure a game isn't shit. So if Nintendo did both, when the 15th sub-standard Bejewelled clone is sent to them, it would pass QA (assuming there were no bugs in it) but would probably fail QC ("the game isn't up to our standards, and we don't need any more bejewelled games thanks"). [edit]So just to clarify, in the context of that quote, these are the two facts that correlate: Hope that makes sense. [/edit] SiN

Actually, the news is a bit shit. It says that Nintendo will allow anything on WiiWare as long as it passes their QA and gets an ESRB rating. So first, there's no quality control. Second, Ninty says they won't rate the game for you. Third, you'll need a Wii devkit to write WiiWare. What this all means is that to write a WiiWare game, you'll need at least $5000 + $2500* to fund your projects. The real little guys like you and I need not apply. *($5000 = esrb rating cost as I recall. The ninty development website says Wii devkits cost between $2500-$7500 ... I just took the best case) On the other hand, Microsoft lets you write stuff for your Xbox for $99 a year. The catch is that if the game isn't up to snuff, they won't put it up on XBLA. Which isn't much of a catch, seeing as Quality Control is quite important ... WiiWare could very well end up with a hundred Bejewelled clones, whereas Microsoft will simply not let that happen. It's a bit depressing really, because Ninty could have done something awesome here. Typical Nintendo, come late to the game, and underwhelm. Sounds a bit like their last-gen "online" plan, doesn't it? SiN

That's exactly what happens. So yeah, you'll need a gc pad and memory card. SiN

It's not a matter of "can they sell it in North America" or "can they sell it in Europe" ... it's a matter of "can they publish it on the Wii and PS2". And the answer is no. The Big Three have a policy stating that they won't approve AO games for release on their respective consoles. That's that. The only thing Take2 can do with the game in it's current form is port it to the PC and sell it online. SiN

Same offices, so it's probably a mix of old and new talent. I had the same reaction when I heard the news, but I figure if anyone can make a great RPG out of this it would be Bioware. SiN

Spore has been hyped about as much as Duke Nukem Forever. That is, it really hasn't at all. That doesn't stop "the internet" from bitching about how the game has been hyped to death though. The presentations for Spore were a part of Will Wrights GDC speech. They tied directly into what he was talking about. I guess he did some presentations after that, but again, the hype has been very minimal. Another laughable point the internet has informed me about is how the game will look like crap by 2009 and/or won't be very special. Incorrect on both counts. The beauty of procedural content is that enhancing the graphics is literally a matter of changing a couple of numbers in the code, and recompiling. As for how "new" the concept will be ... even if the game came out in 2010+, it would still be fresh! Apart from some indies, nobody actually has the balls to pull off what Maxis/Wright are doing now. It's the same reason Lionhead/Molyneux will always have the godgame genre to themselves. B&W was in development for 4 years ... during that time nobody had the balls to step up to the plate and beat Lionhead at their own game. Spore isn't your typical game, so it doesn't follow the typical rules of development. I reckon all these delays are either due to balancing issues, or fleshing out the gameplay. Just give Maxis the time they need to put something special out. SiN

That's the thing, it really doesn't. Not as far as I can see anyway. And that's the reason BBFC gave for banning it. They pretty much said that while Manhunt1 was pretty gruesome, the game put your actions in context. Manhunt2 is just cold, unjustified killing. We don't really need this ... we need the creative talents at Rockstar to come up with something meaningful. I hope the "no certificate/AO" rating makes this happen, but somehow, I think it'll just encourage this behavior even more. SiN

I doubt it. Aren't we a bit more lenient than the States? ESRB might as well have not given it a certificate. A game with an AO rating doesn't get stocked, period. I don't know how I feel about the whole thing. I'm not convinced the BBFC made a terrible decision here. The game honestly doesn't sound like it has any redeeming features at all. It's only feature is shock value, which is really a bit immature. I'm sick of games featuring violence just for the sake of being sick/gruesome/etc. Moving away from this train of thought is going to be essential if we want video games to grow up. And similar to Carmaggedon, this sounds like a developer wanting to know how far they can push the limits. Rockstar will no doubt clean up the game and release it in an "M rating" form ... hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they have some of the media/code ready for that. Because when they threw in the "ripping off another mans testicles" feature, surely they thought that the game might get an AO rating ... I imagine they've had a "backup plan" for this scenario. SiN

Yeah, in the original you'd start at the beginning of the level when you died. But from what miffy said, it sounds like Gameloft added checkpoints within each level ... I could be wrong. What annoyed me more about the original is that if you quit the game, you'd have to start all the way back at level 1 when you got booted it up again. I think I would've beaten if it wasn't for that. SiN

On a vaguely related side-note, I should really drop out of university and become an actor instead. The way I see it, since terrorists are the new communists, and I'm Middle Eastern, I'll have no trouble what-so-ever finding jobs as "badguy extra #121" for at least twenty years. All I need to do is speak a bit of broken Arabic (I can kinda do that) and work an AK47. SiN

Uhh, there were no checkpoints in the original. So to answer your question, no the original wasn't this hard, it was HARDER! I got my first PC (a 33MHz 486, 4mb ram) when I was eight years old, and I got PoP soon thereafter. I never did beat it ... I did get to level 7 though, which (I think) is further than most people got. SiN

The only problem is that video games, as an interactive medium, need feedback. B&W and Fable were games marketed around the fact that you could be good or evil. If they couldn't demo the "good or evil gameplay mechanic" it would be a pretty hard sell, both to publishers and to the press. But yeah, definitely a good point though, and one that I agree with. SiN

Okay, so I watched the gameplay video ... I'm feeling a bit better about the game, but not much. The IK stuff on the colossus looked pretty cool. Mainly because it made the game actually feel a bit 3D, as opposed to the 2d-in-3d that warcraft3 was. Still, not by much. The Havok physics looks criminally underused. To me, it looks like they're just using it for the debris when units/structures blow up. I guess it would kill too much bandwidth to use it for actual gameplay. What really impressed me was the versatility of the units. Definitely liked how each unit genuinely felt unique. They all kinda did their own thing ... they didn't feel like a base unit with tweaked variables. But ultimately, that's all there was to impress. SC2 looks like a game made for the fans, and only the fans. The fact that "x rushes" are encouraged pretty much confirms that for me. It's more hardcore, more complex, and ultimately, more of what SC fans are used to. So it's a play-it-safe sequel by Blizzard then. Which I think is a shame. Most fans have flat-out said that if Blizzard put shit in a box, and labeled it "Starcraft 2" they'd buy it. Doing a by-the-numbers sequel seems like a huge wasted opportunity to try something different. And more over, it also means that people like me who weren't fans of the original aren't even going to bother. I've never enjoyed a Blizz game (I even bought WC3, but didn't like it) so I was really hoping SC2 would be "the one". But alas, it doesn't look that way. SiN

There were a couple of true 3D engines before Quake I think, but none were quite as "proper". I mean, most were pseudo-3d (like Duke3d), used sprites for characters, had shoddy lighting, or had very high system requirements. Quake did *everything* in 3D. The "hand-and-weapon", the enemies, the weapons/healthpacks on the floor, the levels, etc. Of course, special fx were sprites, but that's still true till today. Quake was the first engine that had no restrictions at all. Dan isn't too far off the mark either, Carmack has always said that Quake was his last truly revolutionary engine, everything since then has just been an evolution of the Quake engine. SiN

Yeah, I played HL2 and Doom 3 on my laptop. It's perfectly doable with an external mouse. Big tip though! If you're using a Windows-based laptop, remember to disable the touchpad mouse when playing ... I cannot count the number of times my hand brushed over the pad which made me stare right AT THE FLOOR!!! This should be fine for a Mac since (as I recall) they only support one mouse at a time, so when you hook up your external mouse, the pad will be disabled automatically. SiN

Well, the game already looks quite far into development. It's been in development since the Frozen Throne was out, so that's like a good three years now. If they had any killer features, I think they would be implemented (and announced) by now. Looking at the website though, presents us with these features: ... and in the FAQ ... Soo ... new units and structures, the 2d game will be rendered in 3d, and ummmm, that's really about it. It was mentioned somewhere else in the FAQ that the game would use Havoc, which is pretty neat (and not mentioned anywhere else oddly enough). But can you honestly say that feature list strikes alot of confidence in SC2 turning into an innovative game? And more importantly, can you honestly say you'd be *this* excited about SC2 if it wasn't the sequel to Starcraft? I think the excitement for this game is pretty much riding on the quality of the first game, as opposed to the features presented in SC2. I'm sure it'll be an excellent game, and a very polished game, and certainly a very balanced game, but it'll leave me cold because it'll still be using the same RTS format pioneered over a decade ago, albeit with some interesting tweaks. I'd love to be proven wrong though, so I'm still keeping my eye on this one. SiN

No, it was directed at BooJaka. He said the list was puzzling because alot of the titles he wanted to play aren't on there. All I'm saying is that they can't really go "we should get these titles working" and just make it happen. SiN

That isn't how emulation works. They don't go, "alright chaps, let's get FF12 working today". They work on aspects of emulation, like getting different opcodes ("commands") of the emotion engine working, translating data in the PS2 graphics card to the PS3 graphics card, I/O, timing, etc. Then, whatever happens to work is put on the BC list. Sure they could look into why FF12 isn't working, and work on those aspects, but that's a little harder than it sounds. SiN

Actually, there's a bigger problem with having Saturn games on the Wii ... it's a bloody difficult system to emulate! The Saturn's architecture is very complex, so it's a task just emulating the system, nevermind getting to work at a decent speed on the Wii! SiN

That's cool, we can forget about how awesome the AI in Black & White was, and pretend that Lionhead will forget to use it for the dog AI. SiN