SoccerDude28

Yes To be more competitive in North America and Europe http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/09/news_6120096.html

I friggin hate Sega and every other big publisher out there. Not only are they suffocating what is left for us PC gamers, they are turning great PC franchises to trash. And on a fuckin far inferior platform too. Sega should stick to their retarded sonic and virtua fighter crap and leave the best strategy game for people who actually went and shed 1000 dollars on their PC's to play such games. And they say all japanese publishers are innovators. MY ASS.

What does bill gates pay you by the hour or something?

Well I had a moron threatening to beat me up coz I won a game against him in NBA 2004 and had to leave before he could get his "revenge". The worst are the ones I read about in a world of warcraft review. Those having a 60 something level who play on PvP servers, and what they do is kill the newbie and wait near his corpse. Once his ghost comes back to its body and the newbie can resume playing again, they kill him again. So it renders the game unplayable.

Darn Microsoft

For me it was: Halo: Combat Evolved on the PC, Metal Gear Solid series, and Grand turismo 3

Beyond good and evil 2. I was bummed to see no sequel for this game. Also a proper sequel for Prince of persia sands of time, not the crap they came up with.

What do you guys think of this prediction? I know Nintendo has shunned that be4, but with the number of cubes lying around in retail stores, I am not sure how long Nintendo can last in the console wars. Here is what Trip Hawkins had to say in an interview: "What do you think about Nintendo's future? People have commented that they should focus only on portable systems in the future." My magic eight ball says they will be acquired by Microsoft within five years. You can read the whole article here

Well to my knowledge, Nintendo does better in Japan than the US, but not as close as the PS2. And a lot of these companies now count on US sales. It's a huge market we have here for video games, the largest in the world, followed by the Japanese market.

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Okay I finally finished Halo on the PC. Here are my thoughts: Strengths: 1- Shield: very nice touch. Instead of running around looking for health when you are about to die, here you can just run around and hide, till your shield goes back to full. It adds a feeling of security. 2- Vehicles: Again brilliant. You have the jeep, the tank, the ghost ship and the banchee. I especially liked the tank whatever it's called. It is so powerful and wipes out everything in its way. 3- AI: Again excellent especially the combine forces. The combine hide behind walls when you shoot at them. Also the invisibility shield adds a level of strategy to the fighting. I especially was impressed with the blue combine that carries the blaster and the plasma grenade. He killed me several times by smoking me out of my hideout with a grenade. 4- Squad: It's really nice to have backup fire in a firefight. The squad members are pretty smart in general and are a great addition to the fighting. 5- Graphics: For a 3 year old game, I was impressed with the graphics, and it ran very smoothly, but then I have a monster machine. I wonder how it runs on the lower end machines back when it came out. Weaknesses: 1- Repetitveness: First the level design. That was the biggest turn off for me. The first 2 levels aboard the ship and when you land on Halo are very different and vibrant, but then it goes into an endless rut of a room after room that look exactly identical. I wish the developers made the game smaller but varied up the level design a little. 2- Handling only 2 weapons: Although I understand the idea behind it, and it might provide some strategy like some people mentioned, I was really frustrated, coz I had to backtrack a lot at times to pick up a rocket launcher which is only useful for short spurts. I wish weapons like the sniper gun and rocket launcher can always be carried, but then you can carry only 2 guns of any kind (combine blasters or human blasters). 3- checkpoint system: Doesn't work well for a shooter. It was implemented well here, but there were some long fights when you couldn't save (like at the end). It was especially frustrating since you can die by a sudden grenade thrown at you that sticks on you and you can't brush it off. So overall the game was very enjoyable in some levels, but then it became tedious, and very long. But not the type of varied length that makes you excited to see what's next. The superficial length created by endless rooms. I wouldn't consider it a bad shooter because of all the things it does right, but the single player campaign on the PC fell short mainly in terms of level design. If the developers took their time to make use of all the vehicles,squad, and smart AI to create more varrying and dynamic levels, this game could have been one of the best single player shooters out there.

I highly doubt that sony and Microsoft weren't prepared. And did you ever sit and ponder why a cube costs 99 bucks whereas a PS2 and XBOX cost 149? Could it be that people aren't actually buying it?

Thanks Marek for the link. It puts this guy in a whole new perspective.

That's exactly my point. KOTOR is a fine example of a game that is challenging (Malak was the toughest boss ever) but not frustrating, coz you can use quicksave wherever you want or just rely on the autosave feature. Why can't every console game utilize the same scheme?

I don't hate Nintendo. I have nothing against them. I am just stating what I see in target, costco, best buy and most retail stores I go to. There are many cubes that are sitting there on the shelves with no one buying them. They are a very niche market compared to the XBOX and PS2. I bet you people were saying the same when Sega was into consoles. Oh they have sonic, virtua fighter and even soul calibur. How can the dreamcast fail? Well it did, there's just too much competition to handle. Maybe MS will not buy them and most probably they won't die as a company. They will just reallign into either software like Sega and Atari did, or purely handheld. But I highly doubt that they can stay profitable in the ever competitive console war.

Not this year or the next one but in 4-5 years? Plus Sony is slowly going into the handheld market now. You can't stop the flood - Halo.

Nope can you please provide a link?? Well I dunno, maybe they won't be bought by MS, but I for one don't believe that they can survive as a console company for long. They remind me a lot of Sega back in the day. Everyone was bragging about how superior the dreamcast was, but they didn't last long under the Nintendo/PS pressure. During Xmas, my gf was looking for a console, and everywhere we went, the only one that was available for sale was the cube. PS2 and XBOX were always sold out. Anyway that's my own belief, you can take it with a grain of salt.

Here's another one (and that actually happens to my gf). You know that you've played too much the Sims when you dream that people are clicking on you with a mouse.

I have an NVIDIA. Everytime I buy a game that says "runs best on NVIDIA" it runs like a troll, and when it says "runs best on ATI" it runs like a breeze. Wonder why ???

Here's one from me. You know you've played too much Everquest when all your friends are trolls and elves.

See, what is challenging for you is very frustrating for me. That is the problem with the checkpoint system. I dunno, maybe I'm not good at shooters as you? But I still want to play them and not feel frustrated. I don't have a problem with a checkpoint system, if it is augmented with a quicksave for all the other people who would otherwise die frequently. HL2 does it perfectly, it has an autosave thing, with a quick save if you want to use it. It doesn't hurt in terms of challenge, it removes the frustration.

I have nothing against the targetting in Halo, coz I pretty much kicked ass with a keyboard and a mouse. But another complaint I have about it is the lack of save anywhere or a quicksave button. Consoles need to get out of the habit of savepoints. They are so frustrating, and to be honest, I am yet to play a game without a save anywhere where I'm not about to throw the goddamn gamepad or monitor out of the window. I especially found the level with a lot of rockets and grenades and the big tanks frustrating. I would wipe out almost every thing on the screen, to be wiped out by a flood carrying a rocket launcher and then I have to repeat the same shit over again. It creates a virtual difficulty that to me is more frustration than fun. And weilding only 2 weapons sucks. coz Some levels you need a sniper weapon, a rocket launcher and a machine gun, so you need to carry 2, and then retrace for the third one to pick it up again. It again adds to the virtual difficulty and frustration. What's wrong with carrying gazillion weapons?

Yeah I bet that would be fun But I play games usually solely and I rarely play multi-player. My gf is not much into FPS'es

I totally understand why a keyboard and mouse would be frustrating for a platformer, especially if there are combos. I mean it sucks to go look for E,C,EE to mean punch kick punch punch when you can click on the appropriate buttons on a gamepad. But any platformer that is ported to a PC should allow mapping of every aspect of the game to a controller seemlessly. I finished playing POP:Warrior within a few months back, and I used a PC with a gamepad. I am very pleased with how Ubisoft supported mapping every single button on the PS2 and XBOX gamepads, to a PC gamepad. It really felt like playing the game on my PS2. I hope Tim Schaffer will take that into consideration in the PC version of the game.