Hardware Sales (in units sold)
Nintendo DS: 8.50 million (17.65 million LTD)
Wii: 6.29 million (7.38 million LTD)
Xbox 360: 4.62 million (9.15 million LTD)
PlayStation 2: 3.97 million (41.12 million LTD)
PlayStation Portable: 3.82 million (10.47 million LTD)
PlayStation 3: 2.56 million (3.25 million LTD)
Zero Punctuation has released the video review of Crysis on the PC and it is a positive one! Well almost.
I played the game on co-op with a friend and managed to finish it two nights ago. We both loved it. I was going to write a review about it but then read the only positive review i managed to find of the game on Shacknews. The reviewer loved the game as well and since i would never match his eloquence i’ve decided to link his review instead.
Shacknews review by Steve Gaynor
You haven’t heard the last of me regarding this game. Stay tuned.
Your PE teacher takes you and your classmates to the school’s basketball court, gives you a basketball and says “Ok guys let play some football!”. Stupid?
They should be holding spears or swords. It would then make sense. They should also give these weapons to the human player to arm his squad for that matter as when that same enemy charges you won’t need to keep backing off to get a clear shot with your assault rifle 10cms away.
All the information that follows was taken from the game’s booklet.
Name: Adam Marcus a.k.a Kane
Brief history: Kane’s son died at the age of two in an accident when he got hold of Kane’s police service gun. Kane’s wife blamed him for the death of their son and left him. He has not seen his daughter since she was five years old.
Years later Kane became a member of The7, the most powerful clan of Mercenaries in the world. A mission that went badly wrong led to the death of 25 Venezuelan citizens. Kane was the only survivor from the mercenary group and it is rumoured that he escaped with a vast amount of loot. Kane was arrested soon after his return to the USA. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and awaits transportation to death row.
Name: James Seth Lynch
Brief history: James Seth Lynch was found guilty of the murder of his wife and sentenced to death.
He was interviewed after he received the death sentence. Lynch remained calm throughout the interview, pointing out that he had only admitted his crimes in court on the advice of a lawyer and added that he was innocent. He presented himself as a perfect husband but when it was pointed out that this did not actually coincide with the crimes which he admitted having committed, he responded excitedly and forcefully that he had given everything to his wife “including the occasional beating”.
Lynch displays all of the common characteristics of schizophrenia.
to be continued
XBLA
Geometry Wars
Assault Heroes
Zuma
Bomberman Live
UNO
Catan
Sensible World of Soccer
Space Giraffe
PSN
Stardust HD
Calling all cars
Above is the list of games i have purchased from the XBLA and PSN. 10 games in total. But for how many of these can i truthfully say that i have spent time playing? Only Geometry Wars. That is just 10% of these games.
Why is that though?
I mean these aren’t bad games. Stardust HD is probably the best game on the PSN and while i loved playing UNO and Catan i then just stopped playing them after a few days. Bomberman is an absolute multplayer blast. But again, zero game time invested since those first few days.
Since i can see that they are great games then what’s wrong with them? What is it about these games that makes them fail to grab my attention for long? Is it the nature of these games or just me?
It’s both actually. It’s their repetitiveness and my preference to a story and variety of gameplay.
These are in general arcade games which have one core gameplay element which repeats itself over and over again while the difficulty factor increases as one progresses through the levels. The only repetive games i manage to play through are the ones which also have an actual story to tell. But most of these games don’t have one or at most the story is just there to give you a reason why everything is happening the way it is. For example the bad guy kidnapped my girlfriend or save the universe from a bad life form.
The fact that skill wise i am just average when it comes to these games (which usually require fast reflexes and good finger coordination) does not help either.
I fully support the advent of downloadable arcade games on consoles and the chance for smaller developers to get access to gamers and their wallets. This is an age of extremes with games of huge production costs such as Metal Gear Solid on one side and a one man’s Everyday Shooter game on the other.
But as i come to understand the nature of games in general i am also understanding my gamerself. There will always be the exception of a Geometry Wars every now and then but it seems that XBLA, PSN and WiiWare and what they are offering might just be irrelevant to me.
It has been a relatively quiet week despite some announcements at the CES 2008. But there are still some very notable links again this week. Here we go.
The Escapist has introduced a new feature or column if you like where readers of the site and hence gamers, post their stories and articles which revolve around videogames. It is called Everyday Gamer and I have read a few of these and they are great stories which any gamer can relate to. My favourite one is Games are for kids by Mark Patience . Link
Next, it’s the review at Zero Punctuation of Silent Hill: Origins on the PSP by Yahtzee Croshaw. I have played the game and his review nails my experience with good humour. Link
Dubious Quality has written an article regarding the console war and people’s predictions with regards to 2007 (and how accurate they were) and now for 2008. It is a long one but worth reading. Link
The final link is about the person who designed my all time favourite game, Civilization, Mr Sid Meier. He will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards this February. Mr Meier was also the second person (after Mr Miyamoto) to be included in the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame, which is an an elite group of interactive entertainment industry legends. Link
Have you ever played a bad game? I mean a REALLY bad one. To be honest i never have. Although i bought a lot of games, i had always done my research first so these games were well above average. Therefore I have decided to live the experience of playing a really bad game. My game of choice is Hour of Victory. This game got 38/100 on Metacritic based on 32 reviews. The highest score was 60/100 while Gamespot and Edge gave it a 2/10. So everybody is pretty much in agreement on this gamet.
I am a man on a mission. A mission to learn what it’s like to play a crap game.
What was the worst game you ever played and what was it like?
PSP
The PSP might not be the juggernaut of sales that the Nintendo DS is but it still managed to establish itself in the handheld world with a respectable market share and a very solid games lineup. This despite Sony’s blunders with the UMD format and controls design. In fact it is my favourite handheld console and with games like Patapon and God of War coming this year it will only get better.
The PSP community showed Sony that with regards to movie playback no-one was willing to purchase titles on a UMD format, which is slowly becoming obsolete as everyone predicted. Instead they were being downloaded or copied on the console’s memory stick. In the CES 2008 which is taking place since Sunday Sony demoed how Blue-ray discs can be copied first on the PS3 and then on to the PSP for playback on the go (PC World article). This comes just after the announcements regarding the use of Skype by the slim version of PSPs and also a new 16GB memory stick.
Sony is slowly giving consumers useful applications and also appears to be doing it in a logical and a more consumer friendly manner. Not to mention the realisation of the hard fact that the PSP’s future also depends a lot on its interactivity with its big brother the PS3.
Do all these, plus a great game lineup, mean that Sony is finally getting it right with the PSP? I really hope so.
Blu-ray Vs HD DVD
After Warner Bros decision to side with the Sony camp and release movies exclusively on Blu-ray it appears that Paramount may be about to abandon the HD-DVD sinking ship according to the Financial Times:
“Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.”
This means that the end of the format war is very near unless HD-DVD has some wild card up its sleeve. Although i don’t think that the blu-ray is the future (downloadable content is) it is good to have this thing over with for the benefit of the consumer.
I finally started playing Mass Effect a few days ago. About 5 hours into the game and i have some mixed feelings about it. Things started to go wrong from the start.
Let me explain. When choosing your character’s class you are given 6 options. But after reading some reviews and listening to podcasts it was clear to me that apart from the Soldier and Vanguard classes the other 4 were somewhat broken. It made finishing the game from normal to extremely difficult and frustrating. To be honest if i had not known about this i would have chosen either the Engineer or the Infiltrator. Instead i chose the Soldier. I find it incredible that a role playing game can miss the balance of classes so much so that it makes the game harder instead of just having a different experience.
Once i made the remaining choices in my profile off i went to be finally impressed. I love the dialog tree from Bioware and although not revolutionary it is a great touch combined with the fact that what you choose is the basic context of your conversation and not the exact words. It makes the whole conversation feel more real.
But then there is the actual combat. It feels clumsy and so very gamey. While it is a nice touch to have to use cover, when shooting the controls feel imprecise. Plus, the AI of my squadmates is ridiculous. They keep dying on me and even though i place them in safe poistions, they keep moving on their own and getting killed in the process. Worrying about them takes more of my time than the actually killing of the bad guys.
Then you have your technical issues with the frame drop being an issue throughout the game and the pop ups especially just after a screen has been loaded. I mean come on Bioware…
My last grievance has to be the inventory system. This is one of the most unfriendly RPG inventories i have encountered. I usually like to mess around with the equipment or other items i pick up but to be honest in Mass Effect i hesitate to enter the menus because i have to scroll through all the items i have, even when in dublicate, to find what i want. In addition visually the difference between equipment is not the most accessible it could have been. I am not sure whether it’s the colour or the way these are presented but it just not user friendly.
I might be giving the impression that i am not enjoying Mass Effect. On the contrary, i am enjoying it but when compared to other titles this year (well of 2007) , Mass Effect is doing so many things wrong. I can not accept that it is because it is so ambitious.
Having a decent AI is ambitious? A simple, easy to use inventory is ambitious? An RPG which is restricting your choice of characters due to the inconsistency of difficulty is because of its ambitions? Bad impressions indeed.
