The game with the biggest hype of 2007 didn’t disappoint…most. The trilogy came to a solid conclusion, and it took you on some interesting twists and turns along the way. The beauty of Halo though can only be experienced by exploring the lore that surrounds it, which is masterfully expanded in books, comics and other literature. It’s especially well noted in the excellent advertising campaign for Halo 3 in which they depicted real life actors as veterans of the war in which the Master Chief fought in. The multiplayer modes are the richest and deepest we’ve ever seen on a console, and tools like Forge and the Replay Viewer are going to be new staples in console gaming. Did the game live up to the hype? No, of course not. No game could ever do that. But god damn was it a fun as hell ride.
I love Physics. I really love the Physics in Crackdown. I think that’s what makes the game so great. Sure it’s a great sandbox style game. But it’s the physics and the character interaction with those physics that make it such a blast to play.
Last night I finally got to put some serious amount of time into the Crackdown demo on the XBox 360. After playing a few solid sessions of Co-Op with a buddy I can honestly say this is a day 1 purchase.
The way the game plays out is as you do things, you’ll gain orbs that put experience into that ability. For instance, if you physically beat guys, you’ll get strength orbs. Throw lots of grenades and blow shit up? You’ll get explosive orbs. As you level up your abilities, obviously, they become more powerful. There’s no bigger rush than jumping 25 feet in the air over traffic, into a firefight, throwing a grenade and watching the entire area get destroyed in a blaze of glory.
The game seems to have tons of things to do, from agility races, car races, missions and just good ol’ fashion sandbox game fun.
Last week I visited Rockstar Games to check out their upcoming game Bully.
When Bully was announced back at E3 2005 to a small closed door group of press it immediately garnered a ton of attention. Unfortunately it was the wrong kind of attention with numerous groups and a lawyer that should not be named claiming the game was a Columbine
Simulator. These people went as far as saying the game should be cancelled and that it was irresponsible of Rockstar to make such a game. These people are also idiots. They were irresponsible for not getting all the information on this game before making these outrageous
claims. Bully is a caricature of boarding school life. Bully is no more a Columbine simulator than robotic crabs are a part of Japanese history.
Given different costs of living, the price of an Xbox 360 is not the same in San Francisco and Topeka. How do you deal with that?
Moore: It’s more expensive in Topeka. But we don’t just look at the console cost in isolation. We look at what it takes to be up and running and have the best experience. We call it “TCO,” total cost of ownership.
Now this is pretty interesting to consider. What if Game Consoles were priced according to cost of living in an area. I know some consumer electronics are SLIGHTY adjusted for this, but we’ve never seen it on consoles. The thing is now that console prices are so high there’s a huge difference between the cost for someone. $200 might not be a big deal to anyone, but $400 most likely is, and surely $600 is a big deal to everyone.
So why not adjust the price accordingly, even if just slight. I wonder if sales would increase in areas where it’s typically lower. I mean, cost is already different per region of the world and with a country as big as the US why not adjust cost per region in the country?
I recently got to go to Seattle to visit FASA Studios to check out Shadowrun. Of course the flight out there couldn’t be any more nightmarish. Iwas originally supposed to fly from Allentown to Chicago to Seattle. Iwould have left at 10AM Eastern and go there at 2PM Pacific. Insteadmy flight was delayed to Chicago and I would have missed my connection,so then I was sent to Washington DC, unfortuanately this flight wasn’tuntil 2PM Eastern. So I sat around in LVI for 4 hours waiting for myflight, hopped the plane to DC only to find out my flight from DC toSeattle was cancelled. So I stood in line at customer service for anhour, and magically got put on a flight to Las Vegas to Seattle. Ifrantically ran across the airport to the new gate and got on the planeto Vegas just as the door closed. But alas…the end was not near. When I arrived at Vegas my flight was delayed an hour and a half. Soafter 4 hours in the Vegas airport I finally left and got to Seattlearound 1:15 AM Pacific. $50 and a Taxi Cab ride later I was at thehotel and sound asleep at 2 AM.
You have to feel sorry for Sony. After delaying the PS3 launch from Spring 2006 to Fall of 2006 one couldn’t have imagined a any further delay. Unfortuantely that’s not the case with Sony announcing today that they will delay the PAL launch (Europe, Australia, Africa) until March of 2007.
And if that wasn’t bad enough it looks like launch estimates for the US and Japan are downgraded from 2 Million units to 500,00 units. On top of that Japan only gets 100k units with the US getting the rest. IGN has some stats comparing this to the PS2 launch. It looks like Japan is getting 1/10 the number of PS2s!
By way of comparison, the PS2’s US launch saw around 500,000 units hitting shelves on day one (the figure having been revised from an expected 1 million units by Sony the previous month following supply shortages), with Japan recieving just shy of 1 million units.
But wait…there’s more. Sony’s European Ad campaign had to be shelved due to the delay. Something that will cost them around 10 million euros! OUCH.
Can it get any worse? Yes unfortuantely for Sony fans it does. Apparantly there will be no 1080p Games for PS3 At Launch. For those of you that don’t remember…Sony touted 1080p has TRUE HD and that the Hi-Definition revolution doesn’t begin until they say it does. Apparantly they aren’t ready to say it does.
Legendary developer Peter Molyneux believes that gamers may be too lazy to truly enjoy Nintendo’s upcoming Wii console. He believes one of the reasons games are so popular is because they ARE a lazy activity. Interesting
… laziness inherent in games would need to be preserved to keep gaming popular:
“I’ve realised I’m an incredibly lazy person when I play games, and actually slouching back on the sofa, playing on my beer belly, is my most comfortable position. When I have to get up, it’s painful. I make noises and start grunting.”
I know a lot of people really think the Wii is going to be incredibly popular. But the more I’ve talked to some of my more casual gaming buddies the more it seems people have no interest in this style of gaming. It looks like this could end up being this niche’ gaming market that Nintendo picks up on. All in all, it may not be the Revolution Nintendo originally intended.
Danny Ledonne created the controversion Super Columbine Massacre RPG! The game is sick and twisted, yet somehow it’s brilliant and engadging. Why? It explores the horrible tradgedy from alternate perspectives very much like Film.
People have made films about the Columbine incident and they’ve won Oscars and film festival prizes [most notably Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine - Ed.]. Clearly this is at least in part about the medium chosen and not the content of the work alone. I think, based on the subject matter, a videogame is a unique way to explore the subject in an interactive way unlike films or books. Ours isn’t a culture that has yet viewed videogames as an academic, scholarly, or truly artistic field and instead regards interactive electronics primarily as an innocuous plaything. I think Super Columbine Massacre RPG! challenges this.
I think this is a very good point. It’s a way of expanding our knowledge of an incident as well as applying some personal influence into it while we play the game. That is something that can’t be said for a movie, TV Show, or even a book.
And you wonder why Sega is no longer making hardware? It’s because they tried shit like this. The funniest thinga bout the video (hit the link) is the game shown (Eternal Champions) was one of the first Genesis games to use all 6 buttons on the new game pads. The activator only supports 3 buttons. Whooooops!
…the number one crappiest peripheral ever created. The Sega Activator was an octagonal game controller for the Sega Genesis that used infrared beams to interpret movements. The Activator is placed on the floor, and the player stands inside the octagon. Each face of the octagon corresponds to a direction or button on the Genesis control pad. Breaking the infrared beams activates that button. Every time you restarted the machine you had to calibrate the Activator. This involved having to stand 3 feet away from the device, quite tricky in most kids’ bedrooms.
interpret movements. The Activator is placed on the floor, and the player stands inside the octagon. Each face of the octagon corresponds to a direction or button on the Genesis control pad. Breaking the infrared beams activates that button. Every time you restarted the machine you had to calibrate the Activator. This involved having to stand 3 feet away from the device, quite tricky in most kids’ bedrooms.
