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calijazz said:
To adults, yes. To kids, no. My little brothers love the Wii and I can't stand it except for a couple of games.
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Well, it's not because of the graphics, it's because it's perceived as a gimmicky, kids' machine, so a lot of developers make ****** games for it because they know parents will buy anything and kids will play pretty much anything.

As an adult, I could care less about a game's graphics. I still play Final Fantasy games from the PS1 era on my 42 inch TV at home. It looks like *** but it's all good because they are still great games. Anybody that says something to effect of "this game is good/bad because it's graphics are good/bad" really doesn't know much about quality video games, so consider their opinions to be rather untrustworthy.
 
unluckyseventeen said:
Well, it's not because of the graphics, it's because it's perceived as a gimmicky, kids' machine, so a lot of developers make ****** games for it because they know parents will buy anything and kids will play pretty much anything.

As an adult, I could care less about a game's graphics. I still play Final Fantasy games from the PS1 era on my 42 inch TV at home. It looks like *** but it's all good because they are still great games. Anybody that says something to effect of "this game is good/bad because it's graphics are good/bad" really doesn't know much about quality video games, so consider their opinions to be rather untrustworthy.
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I still play ps1 games every once and awhile and even NBA Live 2000 on my PC. But the wii is just to underpowered. I love the motion controllers and always wanted a powerful system at the same time that could play FPS like call of duty. The medal of honor that came out on the PC in 2002 (that i still play) has better graphics than COD 3 on the WII and runs alot smoother. Thank god for the PS Move :) Cant wait to see how they are used in 2K11.
 
reignman40 said:
I still play ps1 games every once and awhile and even NBA Live 2000 on my PC. But the wii is just to underpowered. I love the motion controllers and always wanted a powerful system at the same time that could play FPS like call of duty. The medal of honor that came out on the PC in 2002 (that i still play) has better graphics than COD 3 on the WII and runs alot smoother. Thank god for the PS Move :) Cant wait to see how they are used in 2K11.
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Motion-sensitive control is going to be a gimmick for a long time - no good games are going to come out with motion being the primary method of control. All of the Wii's best games barely use the motion sensitive controllers even though it's supposed to be the backbone of the system, and there's no good game on the Wii that couldn't be ported to another console, easily.

But the Wii's issues are still not a matter of graphics, it's the fact that the Wii is a gimmicky, 2nd-tier system because of their marketing strategy. They wanted to make a cheap console that appealed to women (casual gamers, Wii Fit sold like 30 million copies or something crazy like that) and children, that was largely untapped. Women in the marketplace are where most retailers make $$$ and the fact that Nintendo targeted them so hard is the reason they're making so much money. Their sales are almost double the next closest console currently on the market. But the games still suck because game designers realize the market for them and don't put much money into their games, and still return a lot of profit.

Even games on the PS3 that use motion-sensitive control use it hardly ever or don't make it do anything. It's just not a technology that is ever going to catch on outside of gimmicky consoles and casual gamers. Graphics still don't have much to do with it.. they are a side-effect of the Wii's marketing strategy.
 
Very good points but the one thing that wii doesn't have is a camera that tracks your body. So we will see what they can do with it.
 
I tried to play the other Ratchet and Clank games - no dice. I guess I'm just not a sequel guy. I loved the first new era Prince of Persia games....have no interest in any of the others. Loved Madden '96....can't really get into any of the others. Loved Zelda:OoT.....haven't really felt the same about any of the others that have come after it. Metroid Prime might be my favorite game ever....not feeling the others. Same with GTA, Uncharted, Halo, Resident Evil, Metal Gear, God of War, Devil May Cry, Silent Hill(though 2 was especially good) and on and on.
 
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unluckyseventeen said:
Shadowrun is still better than Reach. Reach is pretty fun, though. I'm not sure if I'll buy it. Good thing I have that gamefly buffer.
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Shadowrun was better than most class-based multiplayer shooters but it was criminally underplayed. You cannot, in this day and age, charge full price for a game that doesn't feature a true single player component, and was pretty lacking in the amount of content on the multiplayer side. Microsoft and FASA dropped the ball on that one. Put the game out at a $30 or $40 price point, and spend more time developing content and less time trying to get the cross-platform multiplayer to work, and there's a good chance the servers don't get shut down and FASA is still in business.
 
Bought Demon's Souls the other day and just started playing it yesterday and so far, wow it is actually difficult compared to Oblivion and Dragon Age.
Like the fact their is no difficulty settings, it is what it is and you have to deal with it and right now I'm being dealt with. It does take sometime to get used to and that it isn't holding your hand going from one mission/quest to the next to guide you through it, that may change but so far the only one I've seen is the first one you get after talking to the Monumental.
 
I started Mass Effect 2 a couple of days ago and it's starting out kinda slow. I hate the dialogue and the voice overs. I'm about a half hour into the game. Does it get better? It's supposedly the best 360 game ever made.
 
Archie Moses said:
I started Mass Effect 2 a couple of days ago and it's starting out kinda slow. I hate the dialogue and the voice overs. I'm about a half hour into the game. Does it get better? It's supposedly the best 360 game ever made.
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It's an RPG, so it's kinda slow the whole way through. It's a fantastic game though, and there are plenty action scenes to keep it from dragging too much. Think of it like a movie and a video game all in one.
 
honz said:
It's an RPG, so it's kinda slow the whole way through. It's a fantastic game though, and there are plenty action scenes to keep it from dragging too much. Think of it like a movie and a video game all in one.
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Yeah, I'll try that. I usually tell my wife that video games are like TV shows/seasons. You have to play it all the way through to get it or see if you like it.
 
Archie Moses said:
I started Mass Effect 2 a couple of days ago and it's starting out kinda slow. I hate the dialogue and the voice overs. I'm about a half hour into the game. Does it get better? It's supposedly the best 360 game ever made.
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You really think Mass Effect 2 starts out slow?

*Spoiler Alert*

You really think your ship getting blown up and potentially losing contact with every single person from the first game in the first 5 minutes is a slow start?


You also really need to play Mass Effect 1 before you play 2 in order to get the gravity of what is going on. It's not really appropriate for a casual gamer to jump into a series like Mass Effect 2 in the middle and expect to feel the same thing as somebody who played and enjoyed the first one.

Keeping in mind that Mass Effect 1 is probably my most favorite game of all-time, ME2 actually improves on nearly every problem the first one had. It's definitively different than ME1 in terms of setting and mood, but that's what they should have done. The environment of the game was the only thing I struggled with because it's so different, but it's still a great game.
 
JJ Rage said:
Shadowrun was better than most class-based multiplayer shooters but it was criminally underplayed. You cannot, in this day and age, charge full price for a game that doesn't feature a true single player component, and was pretty lacking in the amount of content on the multiplayer side. Microsoft and FASA dropped the ball on that one. Put the game out at a $30 or $40 price point, and spend more time developing content and less time trying to get the cross-platform multiplayer to work, and there's a good chance the servers don't get shut down and FASA is still in business.
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The fact that it still has an online population this far after it's release shows that at it's core, it's a very good game. The competitive community for Shadowrun will always be there. I actually just won a draft tournament for it on gamebattles about a month ago. :D

But yes, Microsoft's eyes and marketing gimmicks got ahead of making a quality game, and the consumers responded appropriately. It figures, the one game I like this much gets shut down and is an oddball in comparison to other FPS on the Xbox. Shadowrun is just so satisfying in so many ways, and the ONLY game I've played that has what I would call perfect competitive balance.

I'm hoping that at some point, somebody takes the idea and develops it further. The added mobility via teleport, alone, makes it a completely different game compared to anything you've ever played before. The fact that you've already seen it's influence so much on newer FPS' at least gives me hope that another similar game will come along that can mimic what the first one did.
 
I think he means the game play is a little slow, which it is. The story is fantastic though, which is why I told him to look at it like a movie. I agree that one should definitely play ME1 before they move on to ME2 though...it definitely makes for a more personalized and rewarding experience.
 
Archie-

FWIW, I actually liked the first Mass Effect better than the second. The second may surpass the original on some technical levels, and is certainly more streamlined (perhaps overly much, in fact), but I can honestly say that I got a lot more out of the first than the second.

One of the biggest problems for the second game is that it suffers from the dreaded "middle installment of a trilogy" syndrome. The whole game is basically building up a crew to fight the big baddies... and then when you've got your crew, the game is basically over. Collecting everbody and doing each person's little loyalty mission is 80% of the game. I have a feeling the third and final game will have a lot less foreplay and more actual interesting story.

So yeah, I'd have to agree with unlucky that you probably should have just bought the first. It would have been cheaper anyhow, and you'd be getting a game with a more compelling story, one that would enhance the experience of the second game.

//r00t 4 Jazz-

Ah, another one for Demon's Souls! Always makes me happy to hear that someone else has picked it up. Make sure you make use of the Demon's Souls Wiki if you're having real problems, there's no shame for that in this game. There's also a great level-up spot at the beginning of level 4-2 (Shrine of Storms - Adjudicator Archstone), where you can grind a bit if you need a little more power.

I actually just got back into this game a bit when I was helping a friend play through it. Even though there are no online lobbies or chat, my brother and friend and I all called each other over Skype and just chatted that way as we were playing together... worked out pretty well. We just had to make sure we were within a certain level of each other.

There was a great article on Crispygamer about Demon's Souls that has since been taken down, but I saved it since it was so hilarious and described the game experience so well. I'm pasting it below for anyone interested. Very humorous read.

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https://www.crispygamer.com/feature...day-too-easy-or-is-demons-souls-too-hard.aspx

Demonic Difficulty: Are most games today too easy, or is Demon's Souls too hard?

A popular complaint of gamers I would like to call seasoned (though younger gamers would probably just call them old) concerns the relative ease of contemporary games. Now that I am closing in on the halfway point of my life expectancy -- about which I feel fine, thanks -- I think I can talk about the games of my youth without seeming too insufferably wintry. And many of the questions surrounding difficulty in games are, surely, generational.

Twenty years ago, there was no gaming community for most of us. When I was a kid you barely even saw commercials for games. Back then, if someone had handed me a Prima-style game guide for Super Mario Bros. or Kid Icarus I would have lost consciousness from sheer gratitude. Older gamers are able to remember when game cartridges were solitary portals into other, wholly self-contained worlds. When we could not figure something out, which was often, the closest thing we had to the Internet was talking to our friends during recess -- and most of the information was just as bad. Many of us still flush with the recalled indignity of having to beg our parents to allow us to call the Nintendo hotline because we were stuck somewhere in Metroid or could not figure out how to beat one of the bosses in Punch-Out!!. Most of the games we grew up on were as stingy as Great Depression survivors: OK, kid. Here are a few lives. Be careful with them. Once they're gone, the game is over. Have fun.

Looking back on them now, the game experiences of my youth do not seem like much fun, and I am not certain they were fun, exactly. As experiences, they were far harder to define. There was, in fact, something weirdly lab-rat-ish about playing older games. You were asked to make attempt after attempt to figure something out with almost no positive input from the thing itself. Playing those games was like pushing a lever that mostly made you miserable but sometimes produced a small, gray, tasteless pellet. Today's games, by contrast, excrete mango ice cream and whipped nougat at carefully spaced intervals. So, yes, games back then were harder, much harder, but they were also, in my view, a magnitude less enjoyable. We played those games so avidly because they were the only games available to play.

That said, there is something oddly soulless about how modern games approach the question of difficulty. Tutorials are, by and large, rigidly conceived and frequently absurd, having to necessarily oblige the thickest, least-skillful and most-stoned audience members. Some tutorials are so slobberingly accommodating you practically want to leave money for them on the dresser once they have had their way with you. Or think of a game like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. During its puzzle sequences (and, really, these are "puzzles" along the lines of keeping straight the crucial differences between a square and triangle), if you cannot figure something out due to your recent stroke, the game drops a broad hint. You are then given a moment to act on it. If you do not, the game pretty much tells you exactly what you are supposed to do. While playing Uncharted 2, I sometimes had the distant thought of how much I missed the days of being trusted to figure out stuff on my own.

I have now played the famously difficult and famously frustrating and famously withholding Demon's Souls for around 40 hours, and can say I no longer miss those days. Indeed, I finally had to stop playing the game because of the toll it was taking on my relationship. I knew things were bad when my girlfriend updated her Facebook status to read: "I blame Demon's Souls. For everything." She is tremendously accepting of my gaming, and even plays a bit herself; but this game, and what it was doing to me, proved intolerable. My personality changed when I played Demon's Souls, shading from my loving, magnificent, normal self to what she describes as a "tense, jerky dickwad." Unfortunately, I know she is right. After a couple hours of Demon's Souls I was like a one-man talk-radio geyser: self-righteously ranting, frothing, issuing mission statements, debating strategy, attacking the motives of others, declaiming on the relative merits of the mace. It is a brutal experience, this game, and it is like nothing else out there in terms of the vicious and unforgiving manner in which it punishes mistakes and misjudgments. Demon's Souls is stern the way really hard math is stern, the way Yahweh is stern. (And yes, I have read the message boards, the forums, and the blog posts, in which seemingly sane-sounding people say things like, "I don't know why everyone says this game is so hard. It should be harder." I wonder what such people would consider hard. Brain surgery? Conquering Afghanistan? Alchemy?)

In my defense, though: Sweetie, don't you know not to attempt to kiss a guy goodbye IN THE MIDDLE OF A BATTLE IN A GAME WITH NO PAUSE? Yes, my girlfriend did that, and yes, I freaked out. For those of you who have not yet played Demon's Souls, you read it right: There is no pause. What if your dog has a heart attack? No pause. What if a fire starts in your kitchen? Sorry: Defeat the broadsword-swinging skeleton first and deal with the fire second. "Well," you might be thinking, "surely bringing up the PlayStation 3 network screen pauses the game." Nope. "What kind of person," you are most likely thinking now, "would design a game in which you cannot, under any circumstances, pause?" Pale, dead-eyed sadists, is my guess. Admittedly, there are numerous "safe" points in the game, in which you are more or less protected if you stand absolutely still, but this will not save you if your game is "invaded" by another, living gamer maniacally impelled to kill you. Again, yes -- Demon's Souls allows other gamers to come into your game and kill you, even if you do not want them to and are in the middle of an assault on the Shrine of Storms as intricately planned and complicated as the Normandy landing. I have been invaded approximately 200 times by now, and have tasted victory exactly three times, once against someone who inexplicably stopped fighting in the middle of the battle. (His dog, I suspect, had a heart attack.)

Maybe this does not sound so bad to you. Maybe you think it would make in-game death a visceral, heart-pounding event, unlike almost every other modern game, in which dying is about as affecting as a parking ticket. The complicating wrinkle here is twofold. First, when you die and revert to soul form you lose all the precious experience points ("souls," in the game's parlance, and the game world's only currency) you have been collecting. You can only get these lost souls back if you reach the point at which you expired, but you do not regain your physical body. And, in the meantime, all the enemies have respawned and you now have to do the same thing with half as much health. I can only imagine the conversations behind this design decision:

DESIGNER #1: You know what would be really cool? If we made an incredibly difficult game, and then made it even harder.

DESIGNER #2: You mean like with respawning enemies that have 10-inch-long health meters and boss fights that make grown men weep and no pause?

DESIGNER #1: That's certainly part of it. But what I'd really like to do is design levels so tough that they're virtually impossible to get through with full health, and then, when the player dies, ask them to do the levels again with half as much health.

DESIGNER #2: That's a really good idea. Maybe there's some way we could design actual death rays to shoot out of the PlayStation 3. I bet that would make it even harder.

It is true that some concessions have been made by Demon's Souls designers. (It is also true that Hitler made some concessions.) As you can be invaded by other players, you can also request the help of other, more charitable players, and this is where I love Demon's Souls the most, even though you cannot chat in-game with your comrades and mostly communicate via courtly bows and, failing that, by leaving runic, glowing, pre-rendered message hints written on the floor. This straightens the learning curve somewhat, and creates a welcome sense of ghostly connection amid some of the most oppressively lonesome environments in all of gaming. And, as many have pointed out, the game world's enemies do roughly the same thing over and over again. Thus you can, with patience, eventually learn how to deal with Demon's Souls' difficulty, if not ever come to terms with the game's shocking preponderance of one-hit kills.

Some aspects of the game's design, however, come off as rock salt mashed into a gaping wound. The unforgivable number of dodge-roll-necessitating battles on narrow ledges, for instance, or the fact that the mind-boggling inventory screens appear to have been only partially translated from Japanese, or fun little tidbits such as the fact that, late in the game, one non-player character begins to murder other, uniquely valuable NPCs from whom you need to buy important stuff like spells and equipment. This was, in fact, the point at which I nearly destroyed the game disc. Because Demon's Souls saves approximately every 3.5 seconds and allows you only one save file per character, you can never go back and undo anything. If the fault is my own, fine; I grimly accept this, just as I accept the fact that I will one day die. But the murdering NPC killed my spell-and-miracle merchant when I was not even there to prevent it. I went off adventuring, came back, and they were gone. That's funny, I thought. I wonder where they went? Have fun, guys! Catch you when you get back! They never came back. Only when I consulted one of the many Demon's Souls forums (which read like cross between an AA meeting and a Dungeon Master seminar) did I learn what had happened. Demon's Souls offers so little internal guidance that the single most disastrous thing to happen to me late in the game was not even explained to me within the game itself. It is like having a film's key plot points explained during the credits. Of another film. In a different theater.

And yet, I love Demon's Souls. I do not want to, but I do. I love its milieu, which feels as though David Lynch and J. R. R. Tolkien had a Japanese baby who converted to Satanism and grew up to design videogames. I love its windy and torch-lit and strangely upsetting environments. I love how every aspect of the game (even when you are merely switching a weapon from one hand to the other) feels simple but always has precise and complicated ramifications. I even love the negligible story -- because its negligibility is the point. The real story of Demon's Souls is the one you experience yourself, with very little handholding, as you fight for ground and souls inch by sanguinary inch. I love it despite its difficulty. Viewed singularly, Demon's Souls is easily the most frustrating, rewarding game I have played in years. But when I take a step back and view Demon's Souls as a historical object, it offers a terrifying glimpse of what gaming in general might have become had a crueler and (one might as well say it) more Japanese design philosophy prevailed.

This is to say I am very happy that Demon's Souls exists, but I am even happier that game design has evolved to spare us from an existence in which its brand of difficulty is the exception rather than the rule. Demon's Souls, then, is probably too hard, and modern games are probably too easy. If we lived in a world in which this dynamic were reversed, I strongly doubt that anyone would be talking about Demon's Souls. I also suspect that 90 percent of us would have stopped playing games years ago. Everyone else? Lost souls.
 
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