The sense of touch is a god damn important thing to a whole lot of people. The Wii controllers at the very least let you feel things through rumble, and the basic sensation of holding a physical object. What this kind of utter bullshit does is take Sony's fuckup removal of the rumble from their SixAxis and multiply that by dozens. Even if it works as advertised, they have effectively removed the ability to feel what you are doing. You have a system where the user makes a larger physical investment and receives even less feedback than before. There is literally no tactile feedback to this system.
Relaxation is out the window, you require a larger space for gameplay (not to mention multiplayer), and game designs are forced to rely on a technology that, unless this is SCI-FI HAPPY FUN LET'S-PRETEND-HOUR, is nowhere near as precise as even the cheapest mocap rig you'll find out there. A simple depth-aware camera (looks stereo to me) simply will not be enough. Kudo's hilarious attempts at demoing the mocap (even though this was an early version) and watching the thing freak the fuck out speaks volumes. I don't even want to get into the lighting conditions this thing probably requires.
This shit is Playstation Eye all over again. Look forward to waving your hands popping balloons, and not feeling a god damn thing when you do. Technology trumping the user experience, what a fucking hoot.
I'm actually kind of *angry* with people who think the next evolutionary step in controllers is removing buttons altogether. Say what you want about the Wii, pairing triangulation with accelerometers is a very solid first step towards a motion sensitive controller that is precise enough for gameplay and still capable of providing physical response. Maybe it's time someone stepped up and looked at gloves again? Jesus christ, let me FEEL something!
Guess it needs saying that i'm a 360 owner and i love the system.
Edit: The "dicks" thing is sort of tongue in cheek :P It's just my gut feeling. People wanting to take my toys away. Grr.
So Relic releasing their DOW2 soundtrack for free got me thinking about custom soundtracks. Bionic Commando is here soon, and i keep thinking about playing it with the Rearmed soundtrack. What i would love would be if the 360 or PS3 had a "copy soundtrack" option for games that choose to support that feature, that simply takes a set of tracks stored on the game disc and copies them over to the HD, so you can play them from your console whenever, or as a custom soundtrack for other games.
A lot of game soundtracks are split up into dozens of files per song, to let the music change dynamically along with the gameplay, so developers would have to choose to implement such a feature specifically for this purpose.
I think it'd be worthwhile though. For some games the music lives on beyond the gameplay.
10. Why the hell is there not a straight up Mad Max licensed cover based shooter/vehicular combat game? Is Fallout now "our" official Mad Max? Watched The Road Warrior the other day and god damn. There's material to spare, shall we say. Age of Max. Yeah.
9. Why the hell are there still Wii games that don't use pointer support throughout all menus? Seeing stick-controlled keyboards now is like being spat in the face.
8. Why the hell isn't Games for Windows Live integrated 100% with Live Messenger? Why does it have to live in its own separate application? GFWL has no chance of survival as long as its being perceived as addon bloatware; if it was an integral part of Windows that might make it less of a god damn pain to deal with. The service itself works. It just got beat viciously with the frontend ugly stick.
7. Why the hell do i pay full price for XBL Gold in Europe when i get only a slice of the feature set?
6. Why the hell hasnt Persona 4 been ported to the Wii? Actually, why aren't more JRPGs being ported/made for the Wii? Anything menu-driven was born to roll on that box, and it's not like it's a small market share. Digging out my PS2 to play Persona felt so unnecessary.
5. Why the hell isn't there 360 backwards compatibility for Oddworld Stranger's wrath? If there is ONE system on my shelf i feel i shouldn't have to hook up again it's my xbox classic. When Call of Cthulhu is backwards compatible, what's the deal? Is it a Riddick kind of problem where they hacked the hell out of the system to the extent where it isn't really standards compliant?
4. Why the hell have nobody managed to make a good straight up hardcore action game set in the Warhammer 40k universe? Playing Gears of war 2 keeps making me think about Terminator space marines
3. Why the hell are game-specced laptops still popular? Why did i keep buying them? Jesus.
2. Why the hell aren't Lucasarts pushing out old adventure games like crazy for the Wii? Or Steam? It's good to see Revolution try the water, but for Lucasarts this is a straight up dosbox nobrainer. I will happily buy a Monkey island 1-3 pack for 30 bucks to this day if performance and compatibility is guaranteed. Why are they not doing asset updates / rereleases of games like Grim Fandango? Mature, well written, deep stories are rarer now than ever, and they're sitting on a hoard of them.
1. Why the hell isn't Chu Chu Rocket on XBLA, Wiiware and PSN yet? Best competitive game ever. Also the most violent, if you're in the same room as whoever you just sent the cats on.
...needs to be fired. Asap. It's bizarre to have such a through-and-through polished and next gen experience tarnished by this bumbling infantile 1998 bullshit. Not even just the inventory, the menus between missions where you manage and buy/sell stuff, it's all apocalyptically bad, and it's especially obvious in co-op, where they shift and move around like crazy as two players try to use them properly. Too many "Are you sure?" prompts, button legends that don't match the context you're in, HIDDEN buttons they don't tell you about in-game, it's just plain BAD. My dad's homemade website makes more sense than these things.
The aiming is fine, and it looks cool. Whatever if i can't strafe while i do this. What bothers me is when i can't pick something up without DESTROYING (?!) a single round of pistol ammo that's taking up a slot, or that i can't, when requested by my partner to trade over some ammo, simply push a button to do so without having to go into the menus.
Arggh i wish they could just patch this fixed, because i'm having so much fun with the game otherwise!
Just a friendly warning. I was using the m-audio Triggerfinger for a long while before the constant MIDI driver dropouts were cockblocking me for live shows. Picked up the Akai MPD24 on a recommendation. Let it be said that every time i hook this thing up i am blown away by how utterly rotten it is. Fucking piece of junk, transmits poly aftertouch on every pad. AFTERTOUCH? Show me a sequencer that lets you map that to anything of value. Please?
The more i think about it the more "done" Bioshock is. That game's good ending really wrapped it up nice and pretty for me. What i was hoping when there was talk of sequels was something like Shock 2, which really just took the few elements of Shock 1 that were integral to that experience and transposed it to a new setting, adding enough new to it to make it seem fresh again. A simple return to rapture feels like a copout to me.
What really IS Bioshock when the Ryan thread is finished? That game was intensely personal. Take that away and i'm not sure what we're left with. I just know it's not as appealing to me.
So the Persona 4 videos on here made me want to check the game out for myself. Got a US import (us Europeans are so screwed), and have been playing for the past 3 hours. Which puts me right past the point where the actual game bit starts ;-P
I really, really like the way this game looks. The menus are super crazy sharp, the transitions, everything is just pure class. It's funny to be wowed by menus i guess, but it says a lot about how cheap a frontend games can get away with these days. Anything beyond a vertical or horizontal column of options on a dimmed background seems to be too much effort. Weirdly, i thought it was fun just to open the system menu in P4 and watch the transitions (colored bars layering to form the UI).
Frankly, as passè as it is to compare .jp games to western games in terms of visual fidelity, i think it's pretty obvious that japan have the artform nailed as far as 2d goes. No wonder they're sticking to that; They're sickeningly good at it, down to such subtle things as color palette selection. It really puts the visual oomph of games like Gears 2 in a different light, if not just a different perspective. It's engineers versus artists all over again.
Going to savor this one. It's a great game to chill out with over a cup of tea after making my thumbs bleed at SF4 or repeatedly overheating my laptop with Dawn of war 2.
Being a obsessive compulsive completist, i've been gritting my teeth through the experience of sucking at Street fighter 4, to the point where i now feel like i genuinely suck less. And that is pretty awesome in itself.
I guess i've become used to being cuddled by games. SF4 does not at any moment make you feel cool unless you make an effort to that end; This is as far from a button masher as you can get. Spending hours trying to perfect guile's low light kick-light punch-medium punch-flash kick combo is an exercise i wouldn't normally call fun. And it really isn't. What is fun is landing it in a fight.
This balance between ardous, painful practise of systems that sometimes feel difficult just to spite you, and the glorious sensation of actually learning a new skill and successfully applying it, is what i guess is what keeps people coming back again and again. But it's also, i expect, a huge detractor for beginners; I at least knew how to play Guile alright beforehand. Coming into this not even really knowing how a charge move works and how you can charge midair or mid-move, and meeting this brick wall of a game that assumes you DO know, it has got to be a profoundly painful experience.
I'm having a lot of fun mastering Guile. Even learning to enjoy pulling off his super after i realized cancelling out of a flash kick into it is actually easier than pulling it off clean. I had an awesome match against an E.Honda player who would consistently try to jump in to start combos, who i would simply airthrow the hell back down again and again. It put the fear in him so obviously it totally broke his style, and it was awesome to watch him try to revert back to moves he hadn't practised. That's what SF is about really; competition and fucked up psychology. I'm loving it. Though i really need a fightpad.
What a bullshit movement to do on the 360 stick. 90% of the times it turns into a flashkick, and the remaining 10% feel like complete accidents. This shit is making me ill.
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