SiN

Wonderful ad. We whine and fuss about the "badass" image that games normally get, well, GoW is doing something about it. And the game looks very nice. I mean yeah, the art-style is uninspired, but the gameplay looks solid, and it looks like it's doing *something* different. The shoot-and-cover mechanic sounds great, as well as the reload mechanic. I really wasn't too interested in it before, but having read some reviews, I'd pick it up if I had an X360. And this is saying something since I really can't stand Epic. SiN

Oh please. The PSP is a fine system thats selling well. Sony did not "drop the ball". It would be like saying the Xbox and Gamecube are failures because they came 2nd and 3rd respectively. They didn't fail, they just didn't do as well as the PS2. Oh, and Sony did their research. It'd be foolish to think a big corporation like Sony wouldn't do their research. Like Spider said, they're trying to do portable games differently. It's a different approach, but it's a valid one. But that is bad design. My commute is 20 minutes long and I still couldn't enjoy the game, and I'm an absolute GTA fanboy! Read my post at the top of the page over again. Each of those suggestions would make LCS completely suitable for 30-minute, 20-minute and even 10-minute sessions without ruining the immersive console experience that Sony want to promote with the PSP. SiN

Actually, I kind of agree with that. It would be a pity if the DS was the only handheld around, because as much as I love the system and it's style of games, there is some merit to having immersive handheld experiences. However, that still doesn't mean that a game shouldn't be tailored to the handheld platform. Here are my main complaints about LCS ... (I wrote this a while back in another forum): you can't skip cutscenes until after they've loaded when you die, you lose all your weapons. Early on, it's no biggie, but as you start getting great weapons, it's kinda annoying to start over. What this essentially means is that you're going to have to load the game up over again, drive to your next mission, wait for the cutscene to load, THEN skip the cutscene, and then hopefully finish the mission. It takes me a good five minutes just to get started on a mission! you have to drive back to your appartment to save. This is so that Rockstar don't need to save the "state" of all the people in the city & such. But why couldnt they make it such that you could save anywhere (while not on a mission) and when you load the game, you'll start up in your apartment?! Now note that each of these points not only tailors the game better to the handheld platform, BUT it also doesn't compromise the immersive gameplay. I love that this is (more-or-less) GTA3 on-the-go, I love that there's a proper storyline, proper dialog, proper cars, proper physics and a huge city. In other words, I love the fact that the game is a completely immersive experience. What I hate is that Rockstar didn't take into consideration that I get 20 minutes to play this game a day. And this ... ... is no excuse. Because like you said, it's a *portable* PS2. That means I'll be playing it on the go. That means I may not have all the time in the world to play it. That means I'll probably be interupted while playing. I really love the immersive handheld experience, since I don't have much time to play on "proper" consoles at home. But I am completely convinced an immersion and standard handheld considerations can co-exist. SiN

Honestly, I've got to say that Liberty City Stories is the worst handheld game I've played this year ... and I've bought around a dozen of 'em for the PSP and DS collectively. It's like they said, "lets make GTA on the PSP, but COMPLETELY FORGET that it's a handheld system". Such a shame because I really am a huge GTA fan. You can't imagine how pissed off I was. SiN

Yay! Nice to hear that another person has played one of The Greatest Games Ever Created. SiN

And that's right on the money. Whenever someone bashes Molyneux, I feel the need to swoop in and defend him. This time drummand beat me to it. The thing about the guy is that he speaks as a designer. It's so damn interesting to hear what's going on in his head ... sure the talk does not always equal the game, but that's just because he's talking about the vision and not necessarily the game. Also, stuff like this comes up pretty often ... ... and I guess Molyneux is right as he recently said "You're only as good as your last game". And that's a shame. Because whenever I read a comment like that, I just think of Populous, Theme Park, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and wonder, "where the hell is [insert_posters_name] coming from?" SiN

Emulation isn't really an option ... the quality is simply "okay". Rez looks *much* better on the actual system, plus, I recall the last level of Rez would crash on Chankast. I've had the "thinks it's an audio CD" problem before (with Rez too, I think) and I'm pretty sure it's just a case of a bad CD. If the CD is a burned copy, consider reburning it on a different brand CDR. If you bought it original, try to download a copy off the net. You really shouldn't have any moral problems with this, as neither Sega nor UGA make money off this any more. My solution was simply to take out the disc, clean it a bit, and load it right back in again. Didn't take more than two or three tries before it eventually booted up. SiN

I heard that in XII you can pretty much automate the combat sequences ... leaving the player to pretty much do nothing, right? I mean, whenever I've brought up my "FF isn't actually a game" argument, people always say, "the combat is where the interaction is at", and now, err ..... SiN

The only thing that's going to fill up BluRay discs are FMVs. Trying to fill a BR disc with anything else is impossible. We can't make significantly higher resolution textures, because the hardware can't handle it. We can't make larger amounts of textures because we don't have the manpower to do it. What we can do though, is have several pre-calculated texture maps over each model (ie: bump maps, normal maps, etc). Sound Fx is already done at 44 KHz, and doing anything higher is a waste of space, since you won't be able to hear the difference. Everything else is dirt cheap. 3D models don't take up much space. And code (including physics, lighting, gameplay, etc) takes up no more than 5 to 10 megabytes. This generation won't have any content that DVD9 can't hold. SiN

Yeah, I preordered it, but haven't found the time to play it just yet. Might give it a go tonight, but most likely next weekend. SiN

Preview of Alan Wake on Gamespot ... looks like it's shaping up gameplay wise. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/alanwake/news.html?sid=6159046&mode=previews&tag=previews;story;0 SiN

You've scored 22 points! You're batting 880! SiN

DVDs are still region-locked aren't they? The X360 is still region-locked. And I'm certain that when all is said and done, the PS3 will be region-locked. What I'm thinking though, is that they'll all be region-locked like the X360. That is, the hardware will support region-locking, but it'll be up to the publisher to enable it. SiN

I don't see what all the fuss over region-locking is ... Nintendo has *always* been this way. Home consoles are region-locked, handhelds aren't. SiN

Colour me unimpressed. Am I the only one who loves the concept of the Wii, but think that most developers have entirely missed the point? Reading the interview, the guy takes two pages to explain how to control the character ... and quite frankly, it sounds more complicated and less reliable than just using a dual-analog controller. "Gestures" are the same as button presses, except harder to remember. And with all the freedom of the Wiimote, why is it that most developers want to use the nunchuck addon too? Doesn't that just complicate matters further? I was most disappointed when I heard about the controls for Super Mario Galaxy. Nintendo are suppose to be the ones using the hardware the best, but even they couldn't come up with a simple scheme that just uses the Wiimote. The controls for Galaxy look even more complicated than the controls for Mario64. SiN

Tell me about it! I was just on vacation in the States. First off, the Gamestop store in the states was double the size of any EBGames I've seen here in Canada. Second, the prices were much cheaper ... I managed to pick up GTA: Liberty City Stories, Exit, Brain Age and Trauma Center for just US$110, which is about C$120. That money would have got me 2, *maybe* 3 games if I was lucky in Canada. SiN

@Kingz: Carmack is still an ogl whore ... but he uses directinput & directsound, just not direct3d. @miffy: Rather obvious, but are your sound card drivers up-to-date? the D3 engine used some crazy Creative EAX stuff, so if your drivers are old, thats probably why the sound is glitching up. SiN

Or, "that isn't a flux-capacitor, that's my wife!" SiN

I hate this whole "lets be cynical about the next generation" thing. The "we don't need more power for games" is crap. GTA3+ would not have been possible with the PS1/N64 era of technology. All that fancy physics work going on with Half-Life 2 would not have been possible either. Even our precious Katamari Damacy wouldn't have been possible, both the CPU and GPU would have been inadequete. The "graphics dont make games" argument is also not entirely true. For the most part, I agree with it. But a game like Shadow of the Colossus would not have been as amazing without the atmospheric graphics. Even the previously mentioned Katamari Damacy would not have been possible without the new video cards ... there'd simply be too many polys to render, even if they are pretty primitive. However, despite this, I am a supporter of the Wii and I understand what Nintendo are saying about it. They're saying "we don't need more power for games", but that's only kind of true. Sure, great games can be made with current technology. But even more amazing stuff can be made with the extra power, as I illustrated above. Most games made with new tech end up being old_games + extra_shinyness, but there will be a few games that'll put this technology to good use. With the 360, we've already seen this with two games: Oblivion and Dead Rising. And beside all of this, I think the real big feature of the next generation is online connectivity. For me, Xbox Live Arcade will be the "killer app" I get a 360 for. Geometry Wars, Street Fighter 2, Llamasofts new game, Castle Crashers, etc are the games I really want. And the fact that Microsoft are really pushing indys to work on XBLA ... I'd say this is going to be the greatest generation for innovative games. I don't know about you, but the future is looking very bright to me. SiN

The maddest shmup ever: Gridrunner ++ (ohhhh, fluffy sheepie!) SiN

Uhhh, I can't remember ... I got passed that desert place ... and then went under the mansion ... and then got teleported somewhere ... and then got bored shitless. The "new enemies" didn't do it for me ... I just did the same attacks over and over. As I recall, I didn't actually feel the need to change my tactics too often. The puzzles were far too simple and didn't have enough variety. The dialog was pretty funny, but it wasn't enough to save the dire gameplay. SiN

I got incredibly bored around 8 hours into it ... too damn repetitive! Although, the fact that an RPG kept me occupied for that long is quite the achievement. See, I'm of the opnion that most/all RPGs are just fundamentally flawed. I'm an all genre guy, and I have a game I love in just about every genre, but I've yet to find one I even vaguely enjoy in the RPG genre. SiN

I think the key is making the controls simple, not the concept. The problem with the games you mentioned is that they just weren't designed for mobiles, and more importantly, I suspect no extra considerations were made for the mobile platform. I could definitely see Joust working on a mobile if the developers put time and effort into designing it around the phones interface. On a related note, this is actually quite a relevant topic for me since I'm in the process of porting an indy developeprs library of games onto mobiles. We started by porting a puzzle game, which was simple enough (3 key controls). The interesting thing is that it's a fast paced puzzle game. It works really well as a mobile game, because the controls work. The controls are simple and don't require you to push too many buttons or even use 2 hands if you dont want to. The next game(s) on the list are shmups, which are going to be a bigger challenge. But I'm convinced that despite being rather fast-paced, if the controls are simple enough (and intuitive enough) a game, no matter how fast or complex, can work on mobiles. SiN

Hmmmm ... I'm not too sure. First off, like I mentioned before, waiting until next year for the cheaper (and more importantly) cooler systems might be a good idea. Overheating 360s aren't an issue anymore, but I've heard that they're still rather loud and still have a large PSU. The 65nm 360s will almost certainly fix both these issues. More importantly, I'm not entirely convinced by that first article. It's saying a tonne of things about what the 360 is like *now* but Microsoft can change all of that at a whim. Everything mentioned could turn right around: The price of games in Asia could go up. They don't *need* to include English in their games. XBL accounts could start to be region-locked. And when the region-locking games starts getting stricter, and the releases in Asia get thinner, you'll be stuck with a system that can't actually play any of the games you want. So yeah, it does sound like a great deal right now, but everything could change and you'd definitely lose out. On the other hand, everything could stay the same, and you'd have saved a good deal of money. Whether it's worth the risk or not is up to you, I just wanted to point out that there are risks, as the article you posted doesn't seem to go into them too much. SiN

What sucks is that no publisher picked this lovely looking game up. I'm glad XBLA exists so that games like this can be made. As for buying a 360, it's games like this, along with Geometry Wars, Worms 2D XBLA (T17 are very close to officially announcing it) and Jeff Minters new game that'll talk me into it. Of course, there'll be a couple of "full" games that I'll want to get too, but I think XBL is the 360s greatest strength. I think it's best to wait till next year though ... while the build quality seems to be good now, they'll be manufacturing the 65nm chipsets starting next year, which means cheaper, quieter and cooler xbox360s. (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6148098.html) SiN