Does anyone else play Killzone 2?
- Thread starter Vinman
- Start date
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I hope all the money the International Federation of People Who Set Up Daikatana Jokes at Forums gives you keeps you warm at night.
ELTEE
Vice Admiral
Well, Playstation features the Gran Turismo series - so I can't completely bash it. I'm a sucker for that franchise. Plus, none of my Playstations has ever broken or failed.
frostytheplebe
Seventh Part of the Seal
Wow... it features ANOTHER racing game that hasn't changed much (if at all) in 10 years!
Frosty
a full fledged GF
Well, if this is true then you must be casting some kind of enchantment on them.
frostytheplebe
Seventh Part of the Seal
Well... my PS2 never had a problem. Until my drunk (Now ex)girlfriend kicked it over.
don't ask...
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
But come on, guys, really -- a troll-the-other-console thread at the CZ? Aren't we better than that? Aren't we smarter than that? Can't we all just shake hands and agree to respect our respective choices and that what really matters is enjoying games no matter what hardware is running them and also that the Wii sucks?
Frosty
a full fledged GF
YOUR GIRLFRIEND
I was just thinking recently about how weird it is that the Japanese are almost completely irrelevant in terms of videogames now. The only Jap game I've bought in a year is Soul Calibur IV, and I haven't played that nearly as much as I played the original.
frostytheplebe
Seventh Part of the Seal
I stupidly shelled out the $250 for the Wii when it first came out (oh the hours wasted creating Mis...) ahem, anyway, in my opinion a lot of smart thinking went into the Wii.
It appears that Nintendos egg heads finally came to the realization that "Oh crap, we are not going to win the graphics/storyline war."
So what did they do? The focused on gameplay... the problem was that they apparently didn't think that through at all. What they've done with the Wii is about a fraction of the potential the Wii had. Imagine 1 on 1 sword fights by linking Wii systems and using the controller as the hilt of a sword. That is what I envisioned the Wii would create...
In the end I bit the bullet and took the $150 trade value for the Wii and bought a few games for the Xbox. I hope some 8 year old out there is being emotionally scarred by the Mis I came up with right now!
Was it a lot of smart thinking, or no smart thinking? Sounds more like they had a breakthrough CONCEPT, and no thinking behind it. (As my brother sits in the same room as me playing the Wii... thank God for Smash Brothers Brawl, else I would never touch the thing.)
frostytheplebe
Seventh Part of the Seal
Hmmm... perhaps good strategical thinking. No I still say they started on the right path to AT LEAST keep Nintendo consoles on life support. Its the lack of follow through that messed it up for them.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
They didn't *actually* focus on gameplay, though -- anything but. They introduced a gimmick and let all their developers know they were stuck with it regardless of game design. This has been Nintendo's strategy for quite a while now; sometimes it works (Wiimote, second screen on the DS) and sometimes they don't catch on and we pretend they never happened (quick, whip out your GameBoy e-readers and your GBA wireless dongles!).
And just like every generation of Nintendo product you have a handful of first party titles that use the special device in a neat way (b. Duck Hunt, d. Wii Sports) and a lot of others that either flub apart their design to integrate it (hey, kids, capture Pokemon by drawing circles around them!) or just ignore it as much as possible (see: 99% of DS games and pretty much any Wii game where you're really just using the motion control as a thumbstick, which is most of them).
Nintendo has done a really good job of hiding the fact that the motion control doesn't actually control that much. The reason there's no swordfighting/lightsabre game three years in is because the Wiimotes don't *really* gauge the kind of information needed for such a thing. No one seems to understand this because they were able to move those rackets back and forth in the pack-in game, gosh darn it. The lasting legacy is going to be that the concept it promised forced Microsoft and Sony to come up with technology that will actually let you do that stuff.
Re: BROKEN CONSOLES. I've lost an early generation PS2 and an early generation Xbox 360. Neither of these incidents colored me against that particular gaming system, although the Xbox was a heck of a lot easier to have replaced.
And just like every generation of Nintendo product you have a handful of first party titles that use the special device in a neat way (b. Duck Hunt, d. Wii Sports) and a lot of others that either flub apart their design to integrate it (hey, kids, capture Pokemon by drawing circles around them!) or just ignore it as much as possible (see: 99% of DS games and pretty much any Wii game where you're really just using the motion control as a thumbstick, which is most of them).
Nintendo has done a really good job of hiding the fact that the motion control doesn't actually control that much. The reason there's no swordfighting/lightsabre game three years in is because the Wiimotes don't *really* gauge the kind of information needed for such a thing. No one seems to understand this because they were able to move those rackets back and forth in the pack-in game, gosh darn it. The lasting legacy is going to be that the concept it promised forced Microsoft and Sony to come up with technology that will actually let you do that stuff.
Re: BROKEN CONSOLES. I've lost an early generation PS2 and an early generation Xbox 360. Neither of these incidents colored me against that particular gaming system, although the Xbox was a heck of a lot easier to have replaced.
Frosty
a full fledged GF
Messed it up how, though? I harbor a lot of nerd rage toward the Wii but the fact is it exploded Nintendo's sales in a way the far less gimmicky Gamecube never did.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Gamecube's impressive array of first- and so-called second-party games represent a total and laser-like focus on the quality of play, but Nintendo was clearly dissatisfied with the profits, so they took basically the opposite direction and ignored that completely.
It frustrates me that they were proved so right to have done so.
And even with Microsoft's fantasyland Natal project, none of that stuff looks fun. Sure, that breakout game looks neat and I'll bet it's great fun for a couple hours, but when I'm done I'll probably just put the Fallout disc back in and play that for another hundred.
Burnout without a controller is a hilarious demonstration of how smart the thing is, but it's a stupid way to play when you can just go to the store and buy a wheel controller. And that creepy child locked in the TV was potentially an amazing demonstration (depending on how the voice and conversation actually work,) but how do you make a game from it? How long would it take to expose the inner workings of that and reveal how simplistic it really is? An hour? A minute? And then what have you got left? Just a gimmicky parlor trick that doesn't add anything to the game at all; it's just glitter.
It probably has a lot of applications in multiplayer avatar games. Amping in 1 vs 100 is funny in a silly way, but if I could directly control my avatar's limbs I'd probably just give everyone the finger. That would be a lot more entertaining.
The point is that if the game knows I'm waving my arms all crazy doesn't mean it's any better than if it didn't.
Sony as a manufacturer is notorious worldwide for fragile electronics prone to early failure. The Playstation 2 is several times more failure-prone than any era of Xbox 360. Everyone should remember that.
Of course, I'm on my third 360 and they've all been replaced for free and relatively quickly. I can't complain, and it doesn't really have any bearing on the quality of the experience you get when you actually use the thing, anyway.
ELTEE
Vice Admiral
I know you're kidding. You just HAVE to be - no one would seriously say that. How would you propose they change it for GT5? Hovercraft in space? oooh, F-Zero was so early nineties.
Re: Wii. I really enjoy mine, actually. I think alot of adults enjoy them too. When I say adult here, I mean people who otherwise wouldn't ever consider having a video game experience. This, I would submit, is a large part of why the Wii is successful.
Example: My company recently exhibited at a tradeshow, and we included some Wiis hooked up to a flatscreen at our booth. I couldn't stop laughing because there was an actual line of these middle-aged sales guys all waiting to get their hands on this thing. We had to force players to move on after 5 minutes or risk mob violence!
As for the Xbox, I have nothing against it at all - I just don't own one... yet! (Also, for whatever reason, I notice the Wii is always sold out at our local Gamestop and independent dealer. Is that just because Nintendo keeps supply low?)
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I was telling Trelane last night that I think the most fun thing about the Natal is the voice activation and the menu navigation, and I really hope that's the focus. I don't want a super active fitness dancing game that mimics my real movements nearly so much as I want an awesome system for turning on the console and picking out a Netflix video to watch without having to pick up a controller or remote. Natal looks awesome for this reason alone; XBOX ON!, move-dashboard-with-hand, *fin*.
I don't care overly much about motion games, especially the level available on the Wii (my favorite Wii game right now is Bethesda's cheapo Star Trek release, which is Wing Commander Armada with the serial numbers rubber off and the combat sim portion removed)... but I will admit that there are some places where it could be pretty cool. RTS games, which still suffer on consoles, would be just about perfect if you could group units and order them about by waving your hand. (Really, more than anything, though, I want Natal for my Tivo instead of my Xbox. How sweet would that be? Or Tivo for my Xbox maybe...)
I guess I like the idea that it can be a popular option rather than the focus of *all* development for a console... and it sounds like the Xbox and the PS3 are going to work that way (the PS3 already does, to a point; it has just as much motion control as the Wii already... it just doesn't focus on that). The Natal is going to be big and neat and futuristic and the PS3 wand is, if anyone buys it, probably going to be a perfected version of the Wiimote that lets us play lightsabre games for a while.
1v100 is clearly going to benefit from Natal -- avatar motion with the camera, voice recognition for the question-answering.
It *hasn't* exploded software sales, though, which will be important in the long run. A huge install base is meaningless if they're all just showing Wii Sports to their granddaughters.. (right now the impact is somewhat lessened by the fact that Wii games are much cheaper to develop, so you don't have to sell as many units... but second and third party devs are hitting a wall right now even with that in mind.)