Month: May 2006

A friend of mine pointed out that my RSS feed was busted. It has since been fixed. It was pointing to a non-existant file for some reason. If any of you have any problems, please bring them to my attention.

—Sense

Kaz Hirai was recently questioned about the high price of the PS3 on CNN Money. He defended the price saying:

“I think when you look at what we put into the box – Cell, Blu-Ray, backwards compatibility, the ability to go online – I think it’s a very compelling package.”

He also spoke about the cheaper SKU saying:

“The only difference is HDMI – and at this point, I don’t think many people’s TV’s have that.”

What? Wasn’t “True” HD the whole point of cramming Blu-ray into the PS3 in the first place? Sony’s marketing is addling my brain…

—via Gamasutra

 

I grabbed the demo off of XBLM yesterday. Right now, I’d say that Lost Planet serves as the perfect example of what I’ve been talking about lately. I saw the trailers for it before, thinking it looked okay, but not great. Now that I have actually played the game, I can tell you it’s pretty fun. There are two missions available. I’ve only played one, so I can’t tell if you play as opposing factions of humans or if you can play as both humans and aliens, which would be sweet. As it stands, Lost Planet is a third person shooter. It’s of the old-school variety, which I like. There are lots of insect enemies popping out of pulsating holes in the ground. If you want to stop the flow of insect baddies, you have to destroy the hole. It gives the game a Gauntlet-like sense of urgency to it. Adding to this Gauntlet theme is your ever decreasing life bar. There isn’t any documentation with the demo, but I believe this is your life support slowly draining. Why is it draining you ask? Because you’re in a frozen wasteland silly! There is also a temperature monitor on the HUD, which I think affects your energy’s rate of decline.

 The gun play is standard stuff. Mildly ineffective machine guns, one-shot-kill shotguns, and the ubiquitous rocket launcher. There’s also a grapple which I didn’t get much time to experiment with. But the big daddy of them all is the chaingun wielding mech. This bad boy can jump, dash, and of course lay ruin upon the land with a big damn gun. I could swear I was also prompted to “pick up” something while using the mech, but I was forced to eject before I could find out.

The game is a lot of fun, but the demo lacks checkpoints, so I’ll have to go at it again tonight. I’ll give you a full report when I finish the whole thing.

I’ve added a page with my LIVE info (Gamertag, Gamercard). Check it out:

The page is listed in the sidebar, now and forever.

   

I’m not typically one to express my joy through popular internet acronyms, but I must confess I was tempted to type “OMG” upon seeing the new Smash Bros. If you have the time, I suggest you ingest this. It’s the newly opened official site for Super Smash Bros: Brawl for the Wii. It has a lot of info that’s worth reading if you’re into Smash. Tasty bits include more screenshots, music, development stories, and a delicious trailer (which you can also find here). Newcomers include Pit (Kid Icarus), Meta Knight (Kirby games), Zero Suit Samus (I really should play Zero Mission), and Wario. And there’s one other special character I won’t spoil for you if don’t already know. Just make sure you watch the whole trailer. Be sure to click on the thumbnails above for enlargenated versions.

Can this week get any better?

Please note that I still trust Silicon Knights to make a good game, but I’m worried about Too Human. I downloaded the trailer last night, and I’ve seen the offscreen gameplay video circulating the internet. Right now, it doesn’t look too compelling. I’ve read decent—if brief—accounts that say it’s pretty good, but the trailers definitely don’t show it. I fear this may be the developer’s inability to make a good trailer though. Just like movies, great games can have bad trailers and vice versa.

That got me to thinking last night. You always hear people saying that trailers or commercials should show more gameplay. That’s BS. If you want proof, just look at any message board mentioning MGS4 and see what you find. There hasn’t been a single screenshot of actual gameplay yet, but people are frothing at the mouth to play MGS4. Why? Because the trailer sets the mood. That’s more important than most people realize. Check out the original teaser trailer for Too Human. Now watch the new gameplay trailer. Tell me which one you’d rather play.

I realize this is just semantics. It’s a good game or it isn’t. I personally believe that Silicon Knights are going to make a kick ass game. I’m just talking about mood here.

I just watched Cliffy B’s E3 playtest of Gears of War. I have to say I wasn’t impressed. For the 360’s supposed “killer app”, Gears of War just wasn’t doing it for me. It may be fun to play, but it was boring as hell to watch. It didn’t help that Cliffy B. appeared to have God mode turned on. Watching the main character’s blood spatter repeatedly with no consequences wasn’t exactly thrilling. Not to mention the incredible amount of lead pumped into each enemy before it fell. Cliffy literally went through clip after clip to dispatch single enemies. Even with a shotgun at close range the baddies took two or three hits.

Headshots seemed to make no difference whatsoever. In a game that’s supposed to methodical—rather than run and gun—that makes no sense to me. Granted, this was a demo and I’m sure certain things aren’t in place, but I saw nothing that really grabbed my interest here. I suppose the actual act of taking cover looked nice. There were plenty of options from cover, including peek shots, blind firing, and just vaulting over low cover. That was actually pretty neat. The gunplay left something to be desired though.

 I don’t know, maybe the graphics are mindblowing in the real world. I just wasn’t seeing the fun part. I guess I’ll find out when a demo hits.

Considering my recent SEGA rant, this announcement is like edible gold. A new Golden Axe is set to debut next year on the 360 and PS3. Maybe SEGA is finally seeing fit to resurrect all of its sequel deserving properties (Eternal Champions, please). Little was mentioned of the game, though a trailer is to be shown tomorrow at E3. I will be there (virtually) with bells on.

Alright, this will likely be one of the last posts for a bit, unless I see something mammoth pop up. Frankly, E3 just has way too much information to be covered by one man—especially one who isn’t actually there. Although I do have to mention the new Golden Axe, which is coming up right after I’m done writing this post.

Now that the keynote speeches have come and gone, what are we left with?

Continue reading “E3 Keynotes: Afterthoughts”

It’s raining outside, but it’s all sunny New Mombasa in my head. I finally laid eyes on the delicious trailer. I kept myself from watching it online at work yesterday, just so I could see it on my TV in HD. Sure enough, I got goosebumps. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can stop reading now.

First off, it’s gorgeous. The demo is real-time, using the current version of Bungie’s Halo 3 engine. Simply amazing. The music is haunting and inspiring, as we’ve come to expect from the series. It even has its own American Beauty-style piano riff now. All I can say is I’m damned excited. Say what you will, but I am a Halo fanboy through and through. I’ve played the games, devoured the books, and the Master Chief himself is currently watching over my DVD collection. I can’t wait for the next book and the upcoming Halo graphic novel.

This trailer raises all kinds of questions. Is that the Ark we see at the end of the trailer? I read a post yesterday that said the trailer proves that Cortana is going rampant. While I don’t doubt that she is, I don’t really think the trailer proves it. Whatever the case, it’s at least seven months and twenty-two days before we’ll know for sure—and that’s if the game came out New Year’s Day 2007.

Oh, it can’t come soon enough.