Burny

Taking screenshots as an OS-level feature would be absolutely igneous, if the image quality wasn't this nauseating. The compression in these images is so overdone that they make a rather beautiful game look bad. Hopefully these were either compressed by whoever transferred them from the Vita to the PC, or if they are indeed "vanilla" screenshots of the Vita, there is a way to take shots with less compression. Edit: Ok, it looks like it's not so much a compression issue with the screenshot feature, as an issue with the game running in a non-native resolution. These are Mahjong Fight Club screens and they look fine. These are more UC:GA shots and they look just as unattractive. Seems the game runs at a resolution lower than the Vita's 960x544 pixel. On the system's 5'' screen it'll probably look just fine. On my computer screen an image with that resolution has almost a 12'' diagonal, so that makes it look a lot worse than it is.

It's saying a lot about the game's success, when it's at this price so shortly after its release. I realize that I'm part of the problem myself. Skyward Sword was always going to be my only full-priced purchase for the end of this and the beginning of next year. I might still get it at some point, but Rayman didn't exactly stand a chance given the competition.

Who are Craftians? If they're one of those specialized kind of citizens of the other kingdoms, there will be one of them somewhere around your town square, after you defeated their king. You can recruit them there like any of your other citizens.

No need to worry about getting blind! I belief It doesn't blur on that distance anyway. Nintendo thought about the children, even if they cheat their way into the room:

Actually, there are some real standout-pieces. And there are some absolute classic pieces, too.

@kav82 Is the router's firmware up-to-date? Yours might be a totally different problem, but I know about at least one type of router, that had connection problems with the Wii, which were resolved after the router's firmware was updated. It's unlikely that you have the same router, as it is specific for a German Internet provider. If your router's firmware isn't up-to-date though, it's worth a try.

I'm waiting for the inevitable GotY version. I know one thing though: If there is no general consensus that these issues have been resolved when it eventually comes, it won't be the PS3 version, although that would've been my choice otherwise. This effectively means Steam sales. No, having to restart the console after any time won't do, as you're not able to control how long "any" is. Even shipping a game in such a state is a kick in the teeth for the consumer and you don't need to own the game to point it out. @Goafer: That was obviously a response to Sheikah's post. You absolutely should say that and just hope that you won't experience these issues as you progress. It's not like Bethesda are going to give a detailed explanation, after they shipped the game in such a state, so we're left to speculate either way. Curiously enough, Fallout 3 and New Vegas are said to have had similar issues on the PS3 and we now have an explanation from one of the New Vegas guys just why this happened in their case. That's more than enough basis for speculation, no? We also know that they improved them by removing objects from all versions of the game. Naturally, Bethesda's PR is denying that it's the same issue for Skyrim, but the symptoms seem to be the same nevertheless. Erm... No? You say it's some hours for you, Eurogamer says, it's about 30 minutes after loading for them. So neither of you have control about how long it takes for the issues to set in. It shouldn't happen under any circumstances.

I don't know if everyone was that impressed. It's technically neat, but also the possibly most uninspired use of the tablet controller imaginable. Directly followed by maps and inventories. Likely, even after the series producer says he thinks they cannot go back to the usual button controls? Not to mention that going by what Nintendo showed of the WiiU, the Wiimote will be the standard controller option for local multiplayer. As such, it won't exactly be an alien control method. It's still possible to use the controllers in conjunction. After all, the "tablet" doesn't need to be used for input, but can also be exclusively used for output. I'm sure they'll incorporate it somehow, but at it sounds very much like they're thinking about keeping the Motion+ controls a central part.

Well, yeah? As it'll probably be two or more years before any WiiU Zelda would even be in a presentable state and it wouldn't be as important to stress the console's unique selling point by then. It would be essentially like selling a game with a required addon and that's not unusual for Zelda. Skyward Sword itself doesn't work without a controller addon. Majora's Mask sets more precedence: it required the N64's expansion pack to even run.

You might just have learned the controls faster than others. I've had issues with a couple of motions, until I took the time to see how they work. After that, they became second nature. It seems some people would rather spend the time they need to figure out how something works with writing paragraphs upon paragraphs, complaining that it doesn't work for them. They do*. You aren't doing them correctly. :p What you describe is just what I've had trouble with at the start, but I wasn't doing it correctly. When the game did a vertical strike, that I meant to be a horizontal one, I had somehow put an angle in my movement. Repositioning the sword to one side in order to swing from there isn't necessary at all. Doing small swipes from a centered position is all you need. Given that a fast motion to reposition the Wiimote is essentially a swipe, the game will naturally translate it as such. When I meant to thrust and the game did something else, I hadn't thrust properly, but instead moved into another direction at the same time. Or unconsciously thrust the Nunchuck forward as well. *As long as Motion+ doesn't lose calibration, which doesn't happen, unless the game is prevented from automatically recalibrating. Meaning something interferes with the IR-sensor or the sensor bar is blocked.

Naturally, because you wouldn't have to thrust at all. You would get away with hammering "B" at the right time in every single encounter, like we did since 1998. That just goes to show how little thought you put into it. I agree that most things done with motion controls could be just translated to a traditional control setup and it would only be for the worse where aiming the bow or slingshot is concerned. And bug catching wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. Most things, that aren't related to sword fighting, that is. Nearly every fight has some additional layer of complexity though, that just wouldn't be there with Zelda's traditional control setup. Anything that requires precision in timing and direction would have to be redesigned in a way, where it would only require precision in timing, like in previous Zeldas. Asking for a standard-controller option essentially means asking for designing almost all enemies twice. So that's not going to happen once they settle on one control option. I'd really have welcomed more different types of enemies though...

That's the point, isn't it? The game does track all these things in safe files. If you pick up a candle holder and put it down one foot from it's original position, it'll just stay there. In order to do so, the game has to save the changes you made to the object. Apparently something about the way saving and loading such data is handled results in problems of varying degrees. Sou you do experience slowdowns you shouldn't. The amount of time the PS3 has been left on shouldn't have any impact whatsoever on the game's performance. According to the article, they left the game running for 30 minutes before taking the footage. What point is there in downplaying other people's proven issues, just because you are lucky enough to not have experienced them at this level of severity or don't care if they occur after some hours of playtime? These slowdowns shouldn't happen at all. After 30 minutes no more than after 5 hours.

What I meant was: Did you read the article? Did you watch their recording? It doesn't get more unplayable than 0 frames per second, proved by captured footage, so that's not an exaggeration at all. They've got a bigger save than yours (12MB) and a longer history (65+hours). It apparently takes some time for these stutters to set in after the save has been loaded. They also note that the recent patch somewhat improves the issue, but doesn't solve it, as their second video shows.

Anybody here into GoG? They're having an extended Christmas sales and virtually everything is 50% off. The Witcher 2 is currently 24$. They're also giving away Empire Earth Gold free until sometime tomorrow (?).

You might want to have a look at the digital foundry article I linked above. People don't make this up.

And that rather disappointing moment for me, when I realized that I couldn't go anywhere in it, after I had just spend a whole game on underwhelmingly small islands. It's what I loved about Skyward Swords world. I don't mind the disconnected areas. The sky is just a differently textured Hyrule Field as far as I'm concerned. But the actual areas need to be somehow interesting and I loved the intertwined main areas in Skyward Sword.

That would be the link you're looking for. They didn't bother to tell PS3 owners that they were buying a game that degrades until it becomes partially unplayable, although any extended testing would have revealed the issue. Naturally, they would deny anything that makes it look like the issue is in fact not a bug, but a design flaw, that can't be quickly fixed. Edit: On top of that, what the PR guy twittered is rather unbelievable, given the symptoms. The issues the New Vegas guy brings up is how the game's engine saves information about things that change. Now that PR-guy claims that they made changes to the engine, which would result in it handling this differently. ("Solved in terms of how this new engine handles those issues.") As long as still every object stays at the same place / in the same inventory where you left it and doesn't disappear in Skyrim, that changes probably won't be all too drastic. They can't save these information with magic and fairy dust. So whatever they changed - if they changed anything in the first place - did factually not solve the problems at hand.

Don't hold your breath for a "fix". Going by this, it seems unlikely there will ever be one. Basically: The whole design of the save system leads to inflating save-files, which will eventually clock up the system's RAM, which isn't as flexible on the PS3 as on the 360, and take longer and longer to load the more history you've got in any place.

Are you actually believing that yourself? Yeah, it's a grown man in green tights with an elf fetish and a talent for cartography. There is no way a Western voice actor could ever represent a character like that. This is complete rubbish. Zelda isn't in any way so specifically Japanese, that a Western voice cast couldn't represent it adequately. More importantly, it is beginning to become painfully obvious how the game is torn between trying to be cinematic and being held back by the tradition of having no proper voice acting, that originates from long since overcome technical limitations. There isn't a single cut-scene in Skyward Sword, that wouldn't feel more appropriate, if the characters spoke. After all, they already move their lips. Thankfully, Aonuma doesn't just stubbornly insist that voice acting "isn't int the cards", but thinks at least about ways of integrating it.

Claiming that western voice acting would automatically be inferior is delusional, I think. I don't know about the Japanese treating voice acting any more artistically than say, Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney treats it in their movies. There's plenty of examples where absurd figures are voice acted just perfectly in western movies. I know one thing though: If Nintendo is going to literally animate lips again without having understandable voice acting, I'm going to be disappointed. And making up some "Hylian" language is not an option, as it only makes things more complicated. It really is all about effort (money + time) involved and actual acting. Hire an unmotivated, underpaid, sub-par cast of amateurs and the voice acting will be bad. Put in the effort to find a cast of actors that represents the characters well, hire them, have them act the characters and you have good voice acting. Take the Xenoblade cast, I wouldn't even want to listen to the game in Japanese. Which, if you listen to it as someone not able to understand Japanese, isn't all that artistic in the first place. You can hardly fault a Japanese voice cast for not being motivated, but even if you don't understand what they're saying, but you can make out that their "motivation" far too often results in a lot of high-pitched yelling.

It can all be turned off on a homebrewed Wii, together with the "new" item-notification.

@Grazza It really is. Smartphones are extremely versatile portable computers though and have the added advantage of being "life style" objects on top of that. When they come with a contract, which basically subsidizes the phone, the impact of their price is also far less immediate than say, paying 400-600€ up front for a pure gaming machine - without a game. The problem is how some console gamers are expecting to get high-end machines under value. It's not an option for Nintendo, as they can't survive on enthusiasts alone. I'm personally fine with Nintendo going for moderate hardware, as long as they don't overprice it, like they did with the 3DS. I'd rather have a "cheap" Nintendo console and buy an expensive gaming PC on top of that, than an expensive powerhouse from Nintendo, that sinks as hard and fast as the N64 and the Gamecube, as it doesn't distinguish itself enough and/or misses the "comfort zone" for parents. The balance between having reasonably priced moderate hardware and not being completely underpowered for the 3rd party's needs will be difficult to achieve. It's probably still better to lose some 3rd party high-end games for Nintendo, than to miss their audience though.