Moderator: Thanas
I'm loving the whole 'strategic dismemberment' bit and the fact that there are some enemies where 'BOOM HEADSHOT!' only makes things worse.CaptHawkeye wrote:Yeah, it was ok. For some reason, the only thing i'm able to really, really, like about Dead Space is the combination of The Thing and Alien themes in the premise of the game. Other than that it basically looks like BioShock in space. Another shooter with spells.
Which has what to do with my point?Hotfoot wrote:Oh, I'm sorry, that's right. The Game Gear and Lynx were technically SUPERIOR products compared to the Game Boy when it came to the types of games being played, rather like how the Neo Geo Pocket and Sega Nomad were superior to the only slightly updated Gameboy Light.Master of Ossus wrote:Your argument is that consoles have to play comparable games in order to be competitors. Neither console had competition in this regard. In any case, you are ignoring the point that even in an unregulated monopoly there is still a limit as to the price that the monopolist can charge, which is dictated by their profit maximizing point.
Again, what does this have to do with my point?There was no game that the Game Boy had that could NOT have been made for its competitors. The only reason they were not was because of Nintendo's strength of titles. The biggest detriments for the other portable systems was the lack of battery life compared to the technologically inferior Game Boy.
I disagree. Nintendo is a sufficiently close competitor to compete with Microsoft for console gaming.You're under some strange assumption that Nintendo held a monopoly in the 1985-1995 period. It did NOT. It had market dominance, which is entirely a different thing and you should well be aware of that fact if you know anything about economics as you claim to. Let us be clear, by removing Sony from the playing field, the only possible competition for Microsoft is Nintendo, which is quickly trying to forge a separate market from the current Sony/Microsoft field. If you continue your mad desires, Nintendo would itself be excised from the gaming market, leaving only Microsoft. Then it becomes a gaming monopoly, which is a bad thing.
Wait, I thought that Wii wasn't competing with 360 and PS3. Can you please try to remain self-consistent throughout an entire post?Well, if that isn't one of the most idiotic statements you've made so far. Let's look at the sales. Wii, the cheapest, is on top. The 360, the average priced, is in the middle, and the PS3, the most expensive, is dead last in sales, attach rates, and exclusives.
Oh wait, looks like competition DID punish someone for charging a higher price. Looks like you're WRONG. AGAIN.
The Wii is in competition with the 360 and PS3:For someone who has a degree in the subject, you sure seem to be a fucking idiot here. How many claims have you made that ended up being utterly wrong? I don't care what your degree is in, because you don't seem to be using even basic logic here. Your insistence that you could easily replace a PS3 with a Wii is fucking RETARDED and only shows that you know nothing about what their capabilities are. You seem to have this idea that two consoles are perfectly equal, when it is clearly not the case. Just as two cars with entirely different specifications are not equal, neither are the Wii and PS3 equal, you inbred little shit.
Jesus, a substitute good is something that is used in PLACE OF something else. Were I to list the features of the PS3 vs. the Wii, to say nothing of the available gaming libraries, it is fucking obvious to anyone that they are not comparable products. The only way, and I mean the ONLY fucking way anyone could argue otherwise is to say "They both play games", which completely ignores everything else about them and makes it so that a fucking NES is now a "Substitute Good" for a PS3. After all, they both play games.
You can know everything in the world about economics, but if you don't know shit about the industry you're analyzing, it's not worth a fucking thing, and it's becoming very apparent you don't know a fucking thing about the gaming industry.
Oh, please. You cannot pretend as if sports cars have NO COMPETITION from comparable vehicles. If major manufacturers started giving away minivans for free, do you seriously not think that this would have any effect at all on sales of sports cars?I didn't fucking compare hybrids to gas cars, you fucking idiot, I compared MINIVANS TO SPORTS CARS.
Jesus, do you not get the analogy? One is high performance, can do things the other can't in terms of speed, handling, and so on. The other is more utilitarian, more readily used by families, who need to carry multiple people or lots of things or mixtures of both. You cannot tell someone who needs what a minivan can give that they can do the same shit with a sports car, because it won't fucking work. If the only objective is getting someone from point A to point B, well then hey, both work, but that's incredibly simplistic and if that's all that we ever needed cars to do, well then we'd only need one fucking model of car, wouldn't we? Fuck, what do you DO? What sort of economist has this limited a view of reality?
Butter and garlic are probably complementary.What next? You're going to tell me that butter and garlic are both easily substitutes for each other, because they're common ingredients in cooking?
I don't even think that's true, though. The chart, here, suggests that consoles peak in their second and third calendar years after launch. Both Nintendo handhelds peaked in their third year post-release, and the magnitude of the differences here suggests pretty strongly to me that the actual consoles all enjoyed peak annual sales in their second year. ISorry, slight misspeaking on my part, they sell more consoles their first year than on subsequent years, as a general rule. I'll take the hit on that one.
Well, I think you're being quite optimistic when you say that the price of games stays the same as under a more traditional sales model.Arguably, the obvious benefit of the loss-leader model is that consumers get more powerful hardware for a lower or similar price, while the price of games stays the same. Thus, the games you play are capable of being better overall. Classically, when someone has made a more powerful system and priced it accordingly (Jaguar 64, anyone?), it has failed miserably. However, a more powerful system can stay relevant for longer and produce potentially higher quality games.
I'll grant you this, but I do not view this as analogous to the situation with gaming consoles in that Microsoft had virtually no control over when new software is released, when advancements in hardware occur, and when new engines are constructed. In all of those, I can see that they have some minimal degree of influence, in that they can release new protocols or developer tools (or not), but this in no way approaches the degree of influence that a console manufacturer has over its developers and consumers.With Windows, it is the software, and in this case, the "attach rate" is how many systems have Windows installed, resulting in more money for Microsoft. The more they can do to make Windows the dominant OS, the better. They focused on making Windows better for gaming than other systems, and really, there are a lot of gamers out there today who would love nothing better than to forsake Windows entirely, but realistically can't.
It's not a perfect comparison, but it is an example of a choice without options. If you want to play games, you HAVE to buy a Windows-based system. The similarity here is that what you propose is that if you want to play console games, you HAVE to buy a singular system, which only relies upon itself to improve, and not competition from other forces. Look at Windows. It still stagnates overall PC development, especially on the gaming front. Until 64-bit versions of Vista and to a lesser degree XP, having more than 2GB of Ram was functionally impossible, due to the limitations of the operating system. While advancement has happened, that is largely due to the fact that Microsoft DOESN'T make the boxes. With consoles, that is no longer the case. This can only lead to problems later on.
Obviously not enough to get people to go to other OSes that people are less familiar with. In any case, though, I've never said there weren't costs associated with monopoly. I've said that one competing console manufacturer is a sufficient check to prevent these abuses while delivering most of the benefits of full competition, and that the difference between two competing manufacturers and one is not as great as exclusivity issues to consumers.And I'd say that the computing industry in general, and in fact industry in general has been hampered by having Windows be the primary OS. How many billions of dollars have been lost as the direct result of security vulnerabilities specific to Windows and its bundled Microsoft Software?
That's the state of affairs, right now, but there's little reason why that must always be the case.Games that can go on all three consoles are the rare case of overlap. I never said they were mutually exclusive markets, after all. 360 and PS3's big sellers tend to be big triple-A titles, like GTA4, Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, etc. Wii's big sellers tend to be party titles. Are there some "serious" titles on the Wii? Sure, but they tend to be more niche, and similarly there are party titles for the 360/PS3, but they tend to be cheaper games overall, and not as popular.
Conceded, although I haven't really seen any devs "graduate" from stuff like XBLA to "serious" games.Not at all. In fact, if you bothered READING what I wrote, I said that the 360 Dev Tools are being used to make cheap, simple games that ALLOW devs to move ON to bigger, better things.
Fair enough, but in a world with less competition we'd be getting more benefits from "exclusive" titles, but without the problems of leaving large numbers of consumers out in the dark because they bought into another system.They do look significantly better, actually. Texture details are better, animations are better, overall details...well, it just kind of goes on from there. In Gears, you certainly don't have phone booths suddenly appearing AFTER you've already hit the invisible hitbox. Can't talk about MGS4 specifically, as I've only seen HD gameplay movies compared to playing both Gears and GTA4 on a HDTV for extended periods of time.
Moreover, the benefits of the system does not just mean overall processor power. Multiplayer games benefit from being on the 360, because they actually went through the trouble of making a solid matchmaking service that they force on all the titles in their library that go online. Sony games get slightly better performance because it's overall better hardware, but also they can be bigger because of the Blu-Ray native tech. Meanwhile, the Wii can really utilize that funky motion sensor stuff, or at least they could if they buckled down.
So far as I can tell, they've been talking a lot with the qualifier of "third-party sales," which is a convenient way of throwing out Wii-Fit, Mario Kart Wii, and Smash Bros. Brawl in the year that they all released (as well as a whole bunch of other Nintendo titles that are still selling). So, basically, by excluding most of the competition's best games, they have been outselling the competition's software in America.Hey, I'll see if I can dig up the stats used by G4, but they mentioned it multiple times today in their E3 coverage. Meanwhile, the 360 still has a better attach rate than the PS3 or Wii.
I think you're attributing to competition what can be more reasonably attributed to advancement. It's profitable to release new systems, after a while, and there's good reason to advance them at a pace roughly commensurate with technological advances. Also, MS Live would have to be improved periodically just to try and get more owners to use Live.But let's consider what I've said thus far: Competition breeds advancement. From advancement comes things that only your brand can do. To take advantage of that spurs your competitors to copy your successes to their products and come up with their own improvements. Wii's motion sensitive technology is something that could become more mainstream in the next generation of consoles, just like Microsoft's Live system could become more commonplace.
I don't know what you're getting at with the 1920's food example, but I think you're attributing way too much of the advancement in consoles to competition. X-Box Live would still exist without Sony, and would probably be about as good as it is, anyway. I suppose that it's helpful for multiple companies to be able to generate ideas separately, but that can be achieved within a single company, too, without the duplication of efforts problem that influences consoles today. I also don't see how Nintendo would be so far removed from Microsoft's systems that innovations in things like on-line gaming presentation, controllers, etc. would not migrate back and forth between the companies.Features, be they games or otherwise, that are exclusive are what makes one system better than another for any basic task. A car that has a more efficient engine than another of the same class of car has an exclusive feature: There's no reason they should share that engine technology for free, it's bad for business and when companies making competing products are forced to share technology and become carbon copies of each other, the consumer is generally the one that suffers in the long run because there is less incentive to advance the technology in the first place.
In essence, your view is terminally short-sighted, thinking of nothing but immediate gain for the consumer, without consequence of the long term benefits. I'm sure cheaper food for everyone seemed great in the late 20's, but I'm not sure it was so awesome in the long term.
You argued that the NES and Game Boy had no competition. I listed multiple competitors for the Game Boy that were in fact, SUPERIOR PIECES OF HARDWARE.Master of Ossus wrote:Which has what to do with my point?
Again, you're being fucking retarded. This is literally you saying that minivans will take over the market of sports cars.I disagree. Nintendo is a sufficiently close competitor to compete with Microsoft for console gaming.
It's not direct competition, like I've said NUMEROUS TIMES. The consumers that buy Wiis and that buy PS3/360's intersect, but one does not wholly consume the other. Christ, have you never seen a Venn Diagram?Wait, I thought that Wii wasn't competing with 360 and PS3. Can you please try to remain self-consistent throughout an entire post?
Those three consoles shared very similar performance, and in fact shared a great number of similar titles. This generation is very different. While Xbox and Playstation lept forward on the technological level, Nintendo merely slapped two gamecubes together and threw in a fancy widget. At this point, you're comparing two monster gaming computers to a modestly fitted tablet PC. What next, you're going to tell me that THOSE are substitute goods? Jesus, do you listen to yourself? How the fuck did you graduate if you abuse the terminology that much?The Wii is in competition with the 360 and PS3:
In the first two years of PS2's run, it sold 25.5 million consoles. In the first two years of their respective existences, the GC and X-Box had each sold about 10 million consoles. By then, the PS3 had sold nearly 55 million consoles. I think that even you will agree that the PS2, GC, and X-Box were in more-or-less direct competition.
Demand has gone down, by and large, since we are in a depression at this point, people are less likely to buy luxury goods like gaming systems. One of the primary reasons the Wii has sold so well is because it has tapped a very different market from the usual console staple of the 14-34 year old male. There will always be that market demographic, and they will commonly demand games like what the 360 and PS3 have offered, but there is a NEW DEMOGRAPHIC involved here, one that doesn't give a shit about the high-end gaming systems.360 launched about 3 years ago, and since then has sold less than 20 million consoles. The other two consoles launched about a year later. (For purposes of comparison, I'm ignoring the various staggered launches which harm the previous generation). So in the first three years of last generation, about 75 million competing consoles had sold. If you discount the Wii, then in three years since the launch of the generation PS3 and 360 have sold less than 35 million consoles--half of what the PS2 generation pushed to consumers in the same time period (and, for much of that, the PS2 was unavailable). So unless you're saying that demand for gaming consoles has been cut in half from last generation, you can see reasonably clearly that the Wii does, in fact, compete with the other two consoles.
I think the bleaker picture you're looking at is for the economy in general. I mean, we ARE in the middle of a depression here in America, and Japan's economy has been pretty shitty for a while as well. But hey, let's blame the game industry, clearly they are sucking out loud. Wait, what does this have to do with anything? Oh, right, nothing.Indeed, even counting sales of last-gen consoles since the launch of the 360, we see that without the Wii, console sales have not quite kept pace this generation with last generation since the launch of the first console. Comparing first and second year sales of the PS3 and 360 against the GC, PS2, and X-Box present an even bleaker picture for this generation.
All you've got is sales data, which, while nice, does not show a causal relationship for anything without something else behind it, and you just don't have it. Again, I go back to my automobile examples. The market relationship between sedans, minivans, trucks, sports cars, and SUVs is not one of direct competition. A Ford sedan vs. a Toyota sedan is direct competition, THOSE are substitute goods. A Subaru Truck vs. a Kia Sedan or Coupe is NOT, because they do not provide the same services.All data, though, indicates that console gaming got MORE popular throughout last generation, suggesting that console gaming in general is growing. So where are these missing console sales? With the Wii, which shows that it competes with the other two consoles. (All data from VGChartz.com).
Ignoring the depression, ignoring the vast new demographics purchasing the Wii, ignoring the capabilities of the Wii compared to the other consoles, ignoring the library of the Wii compared to other consoles, only then can you shape the data to fit the conclusion YOU WANT.Sales totals would indicate that without the Wii, at best console gaming has been totally stagnant since last gen, even though we know that this isn't true. Therefore, the Wii must be drawing sales away from the 360 and PS3, which makes it a substitute good.
Barely any. People who buy sports cars want them for specific reasons, the power, the handling, the glitz and style. While they may take a ridiculously offered minivan, their next move would be to sell it to help pay for a fucking sports car.Oh, please. You cannot pretend as if sports cars have NO COMPETITION from comparable vehicles. If major manufacturers started giving away minivans for free, do you seriously not think that this would have any effect at all on sales of sports cars?
Ah, but they are both additives for food. Using the same level of simplistic analytical rigor you've used thus far, "both move people" and "both play games", it matches. So which is it, Mr. Consistency? Are you applying more rigor to food than cars and electronics?Butter and garlic are probably complementary.
Handheld sales and console sales are commonly different from each other, but hey, looking at the chart you've shown, you can clearly see that after the first year and a half, the console sales have peaked.I don't even think that's true, though. The chart, here, suggests that consoles peak in their second and third calendar years after launch. Both Nintendo handhelds peaked in their third year post-release, and the magnitude of the differences here suggests pretty strongly to me that the actual consoles all enjoyed peak annual sales in their second year.
So...about 1.5 years after launch? I'm not overly surprised. Like I said, early initial peak followed by steadily declining sales over time. That I was off by a few months doesn't really damage the point I was making, which is there are more sales early on than there are later.When I went through that same site's tables, I found that the X-Box, PS2, and GC each peaked in their second calendar year (going one year out and then two years from release). <snip rest>
Oh really? The biggest increase in price we've had for games in the last ten years is $10 for HD games, and that was only in this generation. It's not even that new, as $60 PC games have debuted in the past.Well, I think you're being quite optimistic when you say that the price of games stays the same as under a more traditional sales model.
It's not a perfect comparison by any means, but at this stage of the game, Microsoft is in the position to dictate when we use tech and how we use it. If they don't feel like conforming to some new piece of tech, they don't have to, and there's nobody in the PC gaming industry that can make them. If gaming falls completely under the dominion of Microsoft, we will see more stagnation in the general gaming market than you could possibly imagine. The general dearth of fun and original titles today will seem like a god-damned cornucopia of awesome and win if we ever have a total gaming monopoly like you're suggesting.I'll grant you this, but I do not view this as analogous to the situation with gaming consoles in that Microsoft had virtually no control over when new software is released, when advancements in hardware occur, and when new engines are constructed. In all of those, I can see that they have some minimal degree of influence, in that they can release new protocols or developer tools (or not), but this in no way approaches the degree of influence that a console manufacturer has over its developers and consumers.
One competitor is never enough. Look at ATi/Nvidia, at AMD/Intel, at 3Dfx/Nvidia, and so on. Most notably, look at 3Dfx/Nvidia. Once Voodoo stagnated from its own success, Nvidia got so far ahead of them that the company failed, leaving Nvidia the undisputed king of video cards until ATi came along. If ATi failed to remain competitive in this iteration of video cards, it would have fallen into obscurity as well. AMD and Intel have a similar problem, with Intel currently beating the living shit out of AMD. At this point, AMD is going to have to give up going head to head and just try to carve a niche into budget processors and pray Intel doesn't kick their ass there as well. Look at Sirius and XM Radio for another example, they got tired of competing with each other and just merged instead.Obviously not enough to get people to go to other OSes that people are less familiar with. In any case, though, I've never said there weren't costs associated with monopoly. I've said that one competing console manufacturer is a sufficient check to prevent these abuses while delivering most of the benefits of full competition, and that the difference between two competing manufacturers and one is not as great as exclusivity issues to consumers.
Other than that different hardware and applications for each system belie different strengths, leading to exclusive titles, which lead to general advancement of consoles overall, which leads to the search for new innovations...you know, the usual stuff.That's the state of affairs, right now, but there's little reason why that must always be the case.
Well to be fair, it does take time. We're only now beginning to see the fruits of the XBLA Dev Tools.Conceded, although I haven't really seen any devs "graduate" from stuff like XBLA to "serious" games.
Eh, I don't think that would be the case. With less competition there's less drive to improve your product in some way. After all, you don't need to make your system better in some way than both X and Y, just X. Necessity is the mother of invention, and you don't need to come up with some new gadget to keep ahead of the pack, you generally won't. Consider a race. The more people in the race, the more you have to worry about being overtaken by any one person. If there's a geriatric in the race, you're not worried about them, you're worried about the lean, muscular guy coming up behind you. Remove enough people from the race, and there's a greater chance that all you have to worry about is the geriatric dude. It's a rough example, but hopefully it gets the point across. Once your main competitor slips, all you have to do is stay one step ahead of them and stay there, simply waiting for fatigue to finish him off. We gamers like to talk big about brand loyalty, but at the end of the day, we can be just as ruthlessly practical as anyone else.Fair enough, but in a world with less competition we'd be getting more benefits from "exclusive" titles, but without the problems of leaving large numbers of consumers out in the dark because they bought into another system.
Haven't noticed that qualifier, but if so, then yes, that's bull.So far as I can tell, they've been talking a lot with the qualifier of "third-party sales," which is a convenient way of throwing out Wii-Fit, Mario Kart Wii, and Smash Bros. Brawl in the year that they all released (as well as a whole bunch of other Nintendo titles that are still selling). So, basically, by excluding most of the competition's best games, they have been outselling the competition's software in America.
I was referring more to the level of online function that XBL offers, which is to date unmatched by the PS3 or Wii. People bitch about paying for it, but so far nobody's offered anything better. The point is that something like XBL isn't really based off of technological advancement any more than the Wii's controller is, the tech has been there for a very long time, it's just that now it's being properly utilized to grant a competitive edge over rivals.I think you're attributing to competition what can be more reasonably attributed to advancement. It's profitable to release new systems, after a while, and there's good reason to advance them at a pace roughly commensurate with technological advances. Also, MS Live would have to be improved periodically just to try and get more owners to use Live.
The Great Depression. Food was so plentiful that prices plummeted, which in turn meant that farmers could not afford to keep their farms, which in turn led to them LOSING their farms, which of course led to a food shortage and one of the major factors which caused the Great Depression.I don't know what you're getting at with the 1920's food example,
The Xbox would likely not exist if not for the overall success of Sony, Sega, and Nintendo, because they helped to keep the console market alive and profitable, which led to Microsoft entering the field in the first place, to try and get a piece of the pie. Microsoft also knew that they needed an angle, and going back to the overall success and strengths of the PC gaming market, brought in online components.but I think you're attributing way too much of the advancement in consoles to competition. X-Box Live would still exist without Sony, and would probably be about as good as it is, anyway. I suppose that it's helpful for multiple companies to be able to generate ideas separately, but that can be achieved within a single company, too, without the duplication of efforts problem that influences consoles today. I also don't see how Nintendo would be so far removed from Microsoft's systems that innovations in things like on-line gaming presentation, controllers, etc. would not migrate back and forth between the companies.
Meh, apart from some few hotly contested points, we're moving more into civil discussion of the finer points of E3's consequences, though it is more a debate on the consequences of a gaming duopoly, I suppose.PS. Again, can a neutral mod please split this long tangent?
Uh...Link to FC2 going console exclusive rather than also on the consoles?Bubble Boy wrote: First it was "Battlefield: Bad Company", then "Star Wars: Force Unleashed", and now another one I'd love to play, Far Cry 2.
And rather obviously, they're doing this for the money:The next question was regarding the technical limitations of DVD media as opposed to Blu-ray, and how that would impact the visuals of the Xbox 360 version. The response was that while nothing’s been decided yet, they were planning to optimize compression for the disc-space hogs, which are pre-rendered cutscenes and voice work so the quality would not be adversely affected.
Back to non interactive storybooks...So while this isn’t technically the first Final Fantasy on the system, they say that for this installment they wanted to make it available to as many fans as possible. They recognize that there are many fans floating around out there with interest in the game who do not own a PlayStation 3. We inquired if there were any tentative plans for 360 achievements for the game, and received the somewhat cryptic answer that they didn’t want the gameplay experience to be noticeably different between the two versions, but that there would be details where they would diverge.
Left 4 Dead wrote:Left 4 Dead doesn't use a traditional campaign structure. Instead, there are four "scenarios" players can choose from. Our most recent look at the game from back in April had us trying to escape "the infected" (read: zombies of varying speeds and strength) through the woods. But this time around, we got to flee from them through an abandoned hospital. The ultimate goal is to make your way up, floor by floor, until you reach the roof, at which point a helicopter will come through and airlift your group to safety.
The action itself scales depending on how well your team is doing. If they're hurting, you might not see as many zombies coming at you, but if you're plowing through the level, the game is going to throw more enemies at you. It's not randomized, but rather the game's artificial intelligence which decides how and where zombies will sneak upon you. They might pop down from the air vents, bust through doors, climb up elevator shafts and so on. Faliszek says he's been playing the game every day for months and he's still on his toes thanks to this intelligent zombie wave system.
They've basically reached the point where Sony can no longer pay more for exclusivity rights than the projected earnings from simply going ahead and releasing on the 360. They had to get there eventually. Even Kojima at one point stated the only reason MGS4 was a PS3 exclusive was because of contractual agreements between Konami and Sony, this was before the PS3 was even released, IIRC, and they were growing impatient with the PS3's delays.Ace Pace wrote: And rather obviously, they're doing this for the money:So while this isn’t technically the first Final Fantasy on the system, they say that for this installment they wanted to make it available to as many fans as possible. They recognize that there are many fans floating around out there with interest in the game who do not own a PlayStation 3. We inquired if there were any tentative plans for 360 achievements for the game, and received the somewhat cryptic answer that they didn’t want the gameplay experience to be noticeably different between the two versions, but that there would be details where they would diverge.
Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know, the piper's calling you to join him
Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers. The title really does say it all. In the game you play as a bikini-clad woman and kill zombies. See, it's not just a clever name.
The game's not yet translated to English, but the introductory cutscene makes the situation pretty clear. Two sisters, Aya and Saki, are in their apartment. One is watching television and the other is very naked, taking a very steamy shower. She must be really into hygiene too, because she doesn't miss a spot. A breaking news story flashes onto the screen: zombies have overrun the city. Concerned about the safety of humanity, the duo get into their skimpiest bikini-schoolgirl-cowboy-type outfits, grab some swords and head out to save the day.
Little Big PlanetWe were too busy utilizing our "Force Grip" power (the right trigger button) to lift up screaming enemy soldiers and flinging them through the air. You can use this power simply by turning to face the object (explosive barrel, enemy soldier, or whatever else isn't nailed down), which brings up a small translucent cursor over the item to target it; if the cursor is red, you won't be able to lift it because it's too heavy or bolted down, but if the cursor is blue, it's yours for the telekinetic taking.
Fortunately, with your amazing Jedi powers, it's easy to avoid most damage from regular grunt soldiers anyway, since you'll automatically deflect incoming blaster fire from the front with your lightsaber, though getting shot in the back or whacked with a melee weapon will still hurt.
In the narrow corridors of the factory, we had plenty of opportunities to play Stormtrooper bowling by levitating and then hurling crates at rows of enemies, knocking them off their feet (and in the case of corridors near deep pits, off the edge). The X button lets your character jump--your standard jump is already very high, and you can double-jump with another button-press, as well as use the left trigger to dash forwards while airborne. This less-than-exciting sounding ability actually gives you excellent mobility and lets you close the distance with faraway enemies very quickly.
Oneechanbara!Ace Pace wrote:Thursday morning link edition. Some weird stuff.
Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers....Wait WHAT? ... Yeah.
what the hell is it?weemadando wrote:The greatest trailer to come out of E3
Cmon, admit it. It's magical. It's amazing. It's beyond your wildest dreams.
It's a mirage.Zac Naloen wrote:what the hell is it?weemadando wrote:The greatest trailer to come out of E3
Cmon, admit it. It's magical. It's amazing. It's beyond your wildest dreams.
At their E3 press conference, Activision revealed a few new details about the upcoming Call of Duty: World at War. Chief among them was that the game will support four-player online co-op, as well as two-player split-screen local.
Wow, finally. I was surprised that CoD4 wasn't coop (even just local).Ace Pace wrote:CoD5 to include Co-op
At their E3 press conference, Activision revealed a few new details about the upcoming Call of Duty: World at War. Chief among them was that the game will support four-player online co-op, as well as two-player split-screen local.
A way to distract people from the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is never being released?Zac Naloen wrote:what the hell is it?weemadando wrote:The greatest trailer to come out of E3
Cmon, admit it. It's magical. It's amazing. It's beyond your wildest dreams.
It'd be hilarious if they spent all those years just creating this trailer. This is seriously the funniest thing I've seen all day. Especially the crotch shot.Resinence wrote:I kept watching it, expecting gameplay footage "any second now", 4 fucking minutes of the same bitmaps scrolled 50 different ways... wow.
New Tomb RaiderBut it was didn't take long to realize why: it's really just Chrono Trigger. The dialogue has been tuned slightly and the second screen displays some new maps and battle info, but for the most part it's a straight port of the SNES game with the added cut-scenes from previous re-releases.
Mortal Kombat and DC universeIf nothing else, the developers have got the opening punch just right. After so many years of dark, dank tombs and tight, confined spaces, Lara begins her latest adventure stranded in open water. The demo opens with a stunning view of absolutely nothing: something that's not easy to get right. It's funny, but it actually really impressed me: you're in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea where, deep beneath the water's surface, secrets lie in wait. It gave me a sense of unease being so clearly in the middle of nowhere. The feeling of open water is wonderfully frightening.
With the door open, the game reverted back slightly to its former cavern-dwelling roots, but the new environmental puzzles are pretty sweet. This cavern featured a huge kraken in the middle of it, which I had to work around by turning gears and moving doors to first crush its giant arms before finally traversing the entire structure to drop a giant spiked platform down on the monster's head—which I took a picture of with Lara's digital camera. The camera lets you take in-game pictures and send them to friends over Xbox Live.
