Parkingtigers

The game comes out, turns out to be fucking awesome, and Activision are exposed as a total bag of cocks. Again. Creative excellence? Bullshit, if that was an honest criteria then they would have backed this little gem of a game all the way. Glad that Sleeping Dogs was able to survive Activision's attempt to abort it.

Eat all the shit Activision. Eat it all.

I have the bass DLC and it's worth every penny. Every song you already own gets a bass line, there are new challenges, it supports emulated bass so you can get started with even a normal guitar, and it tracks the progress separately from guitar. They nailed it, it's just wonderful.

And I'm now going out to buy a bass.

Guys, I have personally tested a whole bunch of PSP games on the Vita tonight that are NOT on that list. That list is just games that can be downloaded directly to the Vita. If you are copying them across from a PS3 or PC then pretty much every game seems to work.

All of the following games not on the list, from the US PSN store, work on my Vita:

Valkyria Chronicles II.

GUN: Showdown

GTA: Chinatown Wars

GTA: Vice City Stories

Killzone Liberation

LittleBigPlanet

Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords.

Relax guys, the games all work, it's just how you get them onto the device that currently matters.

On the subject of iPads, I find it kind of arrogant that the text box comes with a message saying "Your browser does not support our text editor". Really? That's not very classy. Surely it should be "Our text editor does not support your browser".

Just wanted to say, that as a terrible amateur guitarist with 2 years of self-taught experience, that Rocksmith is incredible. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing, and if you have any interest in learning guitar it is money well spent.

As for the Ars Technica review, well he's an idiot. "You mean I have to plug in a different cable to make it sound right?". Dear god, what a hardship that must be.

1. I'm mostly a lurker, a browser, a casual ne'er do well that watches videos and reads the occasional topic related to the games I looked up. I've contributed to the wiki a bit, though I got discouraged when I realised that most people aren't bothering to do so. I try to leave helpful tips on achievement comments. (Quick P.S. for any staff, when playing through Saints Row 2 I was able to figure out which of the secret achievements were which, so those could be labelled properly now. I left notes on each one to make it quick to do.)

2. I discovered Minecraft just before 1.8 came out, and I've mostly been watching endless videos about it. I had been waiting for the official release so that when I start playing I wouldn't have all my hard work undone by later revisions affecting the terrain generation. Plus I wanted them to finish the code polish, as my MacBook is ooooold. It doesn't play well with Java.

3. I'd like the code so that I could start playing. The game is officially released now, so I could get to work building something outrageously phallic like all other boys of my age. I also don't have access to a credit card at the moment, so it would obviate the need to go through the hassle of arranging to purchase a gift code through someone that does. That would require interaction with another human being, and if I could do that then I wouldn't be wanting to play Minecraft now would I?

4.

No one creeper should

Have all that minecraft power

(Unless it wants it.)

@SpacePenguin said:

Notch actualy just tweeted "Hey,@YogCast! I'm sorry about being a dick."

And then immediately replied to someone else repeating the claims that YOGSCAST swore at kids. He's not admitting to have done anything wrong, he's just regretting the public shitstorm that he created.

Yogscast are correct, he is just a nerd that doesn't know how to run a company. Every single time Notch posts or tweets he digs himself deeper into the hole. The Yogs on the other hand have been nothing but class and graciousness personified in all of this. Which is incredibly big of them considering that they were publicly slandered by Notch while they were flying back to the UK, when they had no way of responding, they had a rabid Notch fan meet them at the airport to abuse them, their site came under a series of DDoS attacks (which is costing them revenue) and their reputations have been damaged and they may not get invited to future events by other companies.

All of this because one big man-baby couldn't stop himself from jumping on Twitter and shouting a bunch of baseless claims, none of which fit with the evidence from Minecon itself. He called them an island of egos, when they spent most of their panel time doing nothing but praising as many members of the modding community as they could. He says they were hard to work with, after they spent thousands of dollars of their own money flying to Vegas, all so they could work for free (and have that work sold on to IGN without their consent).

I've gained huge respect for the people that make silly YouTube videos in all of this affair, but Notch is just coming across as completely inept both socially and professionally. Having a launch party for Minecraft was ridiculous anyway. People spending $100 to celebrate what was basically just a price increase of the game? Because that's all it was. Mojang didn't even leave a competent coder back in Sweden so there was no-one to fix the day one bug that prevented people being able to connect to multiplayer servers.

They are clownshoes, total fucking clownshoes. Shitting all over the most ardent supporters that you have is just indecent on all levels.

@JazGalaxy: That's all well and good, but I don't remember being stuck to have ever been fun. Getting unstuck, that sense of relief when I finally found the correct step forward, now that was fun. All too often the solution was brute-forced rather than deduced. I don't know, I think adventure games are just a hangover from a past time. The main reason that I played them back then, and this is probably true for others as well, is that they were the only games that were telling a coherent narrative. Adventures were an animated book come to life, and the actions of the player determined whether or not you got the next part of the story in a timely manner.

I think King's Quest is perhaps a bad example to give of an adventure game to go back to. I only played on of them to completion (VI possibly), but I do remember them being notorious for being literally unfinishable if you didn't pick up a certain item earlier in the game. That's certainly not fun.

I still want to like adventures, but maybe it is me that grew out of them. The first Monkey Island has aged terribly, and the obtuse puzzles that you mention are far too common in all sorts of games still. I loved the non-verbal storytelling of Machinarium for example, but far too many puzzles just stopped me in my tracks. Now in a skill-based game I'll happily man up and try to suck less until I beat it (or it beats me), but I live in the future now, and if I find a puzzle that stops me I know that 30 seconds on the internet and I can find a way around it. I try to restrain myself, to figure it out the old-fashioned way ... the world has changed though, games have moved on, and sitting for an hour scratching my head and trying different combos of items and background scenery just feels like an hour when I could actually be doing something more worthwhile.

This all sounds a bit negative perhaps, but I rejoice in the fact that many genres of games now have decent storytelling, and often some kind of puzzle elements and mysteries that must be solved. I think what really happened is that the good bits of adventures were folded into other games, leaving the genre kind of unnecessary.

@JazGalaxy said:

the problem with adventure games is that they've forgotten what made adventure games fun in the first place.

They "evolved" with gimmicks and aping whatever trend was sold the most units a few months previous, and as a result, people stopped playing them.

The genre needs to find the fun again, which, generally speaking, means doing away with the computer pointing out objects to interact with (as a favor to you), pointing out where to go (as a favor to you), and telling you how to solve all it's problems. (as a favor to you.)

I disagree with this. I used to tout adventure games as one of my favourite genres back in the day. I must have played a ton of them, but I didn't finish them all. The problem with most adventure games was that they relied on a single solution to each problem, and if you couldn't work out that solution then it just turned into an exercise in pixel hunting, using every command on every item, and every item on every character. Far too many times I just got stopped cold by an obtuse puzzle.

I try and play them still now, every once in a while. They can still be satisfying, solving a tricky puzzle is always rewarding. I just don't have the patience to try and second-guess everything the designers put in, and the temptation to check an online guide is hard to resist. I actually applaud the current trend of putting hints into the games, that way a clue can be given without using an external source and without spoiling a later puzzle by accident.

My favourite of the modern adventures was Stacking. The puzzles weren't too difficult, and they had multiple solutions. You can burn through the main story without too much difficulty as usually one of the solutions to each puzzle should be obvious to every player. Finding them all is there as an optional challenge for those that want it, and there is a robust hints system to help out if you can't crack them all yourself. I think that is probably the best balance of challenge and player satisfaction.

Younger players won't even realise what a pain it was back in the day to get stuck on an adventure game. No GameFAQs, no YouTube walkthroughs, no online forums ... you had to catch the walkthrough in a gaming magazine or be stuck on a puzzle forever.

Man, a lot of people are really dismissive of smartphone gaming in this thread.  Lots of points to address on that score, but I'll settle for just one; namely the suggestion that the App Store doesn't have, and won't get, games of depth and quality to rival "proper handhelds". Remember, the iPhone is only 4 years old.  The App Store is only 3 years old.  The iPad is not even 18 months old.
 
Are there proper portable games on the App Store?  Oh fuck yes.  Without even looking at the platform exclusives, just look at the stuff that came from other systems:
 
World of Goo 
Plants Vs. Zombies 
Geometry Wars
Peggle 
GTA: Chinatown Wars 
Secret of Monkey Island special editions
Sid Meier's Pirates 
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 
Final Fantasy I - III 
Back to the Future adventure games 
Tales of Monkey Island
 
That's just from the top of my head, and of course next week finally sees Final Fantasy Tactics coming to iOS too.  One of the best games on PSP, it'll be one of the best games on iPhone.  Machinarium is coming as well.  The list is much longer than this, there are masses of games from "real" systems now on the App Store.  There are masses of games that could be ported too, if publishers had the will to do it. Ultimately, the only thing as players we need to worry about is games.  The hardware is just a medium to play those games on.  Ports of great games to iOS shows that they can exist on smartphones and tablets.  Getting all sniffy about them not being real consoles is missing the point.  It's a device that plays real games, the quality and scope of which are improving all the time. 
 
It's not the hardware that's going to put Nintendo on the ropes, its the pricing.  There is now an equally capable device in people's pockets where the games don't cost $30 a pop, and which frequently go on sale.  Phoenix Wright is one of the DS's most beloved games, and that is where I first played it.  I recommended it to everyone that would listen.  Got it again on iPhone for one dollar in a sale. Handheld consoles were the one area of gaming where there was no mechanism for cheap, discounted, or sale-price games to regularly compete.  PC gamers have Steam sales.  Console gamers got platinum hits repressings, which were viable thanks to the fact that discs are cheap as hell to make unlike cartridges or UMDs.  App Store changed that.  Even Sony has a flawed yet viable digital store to be able to reduce the price of their games for those that buy them that way.   
 
Nintendo is sticking with a business model that involves trying to sell handheld games at a price that competes with home console titles. Well, good luck with that.  The world has changed, and they need to adapt to it.