Jamba

I know a lot of you are happy about the conference but I think I can put my disappointment down to franchise fatigue. I don't want my gaming for the Wii U to be rehashes of gameplay from the GameCube era and as quirky as W101 seems, I don't want to drop £40 on it. Nothing i've seen or heard makes me think that any of the staples are going to be different enough for me to warrant buying those. I don't feel like Nintendo are anything but miles behind in terms of services either which is what makes me look elsewhere. They have so much to catch up on and at the moment they are moving at a snail's pace.

Been having major trouble streaming anything from the hotel in Tokyo but sounds like it wad a waste of time. What the fuck is going on honestly? How long can Nintendo take over making the fucking stuff again and taking 3 years to do it? It's not the fact that there's no new ip, it's the fact that they're spending time making 5 times recycled games that nobody has much interest in anymore. Frankly with a showing as it's sounds, it's like they don't even want to be in the industry anymore.

Don't you get my hopes up like that dammit!

I'm in a similar situation to Murr, just not with the mortgage yet ;-) [Wedding next Saturday btw!] bluey and I feel similarly, like there are a lot of things that we want to do before we have kids that we haven't had the chance to do yet. Which includes learning how to feel happier in ourselves and simply having enough life experience to pass on. Neither of us feel ready but then everyone that I've met who has kids says that you never will do and actually the growing up that you do in the process is the important bit. On a COMPLETELY different note, I thought I should tell you about my cousin. She got married about 6 years ago and her mum dies of cancer shortly after which was shattering. The two of them started working for a christian charity and effectively became missionaries shortly afterwards, with all of their income being from people in their community that sponsor them. Which is FINE. Until they had kids... Now personally, I think it's a bit morally grey to bring up your kids on money that is being donated to a charitable cause. I think it's a misuse of that money and I genuinely feel that on some level they have trapped people into being ok with it as to withdraw support would be very unchristian. This was made much worse by her getting pregnant again straight after their first child. I thought that was taking the piss quite badly (especially as that meant only 1 of them was doing the actual work now) and supporting not 1 but 2 kids on other people's money. Roll on 3 years later, my Mum tells me that my cousin is going into hospital for some major surgery and that she really needed our support. Turns out that she had inherited an extremely dangerous precursor gene from her mother and given the family history she had almost 100% chance of having one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer there is, making it even worse as it killed her mother in a long drawn out way. She was going in to have a double mastectomy, which is one of the most aggressive operations that is performed on anyone, followed by reconstructive surgery. She was absolutely amazing and thought about the kids the entire time and now has a healthy life expectancy. Turns out this was the reason that she had had kids in cannon as she was working on borrowed time in a massive way. It completely changed my perspective on the situation and their choices. They are some of the best parents that I know and the kids are fantastic. Still don't like the way they are using other people's money but hey... very happy for them all now :-)

I'd be good with this. Transformed kicks ass and I've had a lot more fun with that then I did MK7.

When was the last good Star Wars game? Rogue Squadron II?

Totally agree. My finger in the air of what people want is that most are happy with their PS3 / 360 and that if a game could be made for the platform that they already own then they'd prefer it. Nobody is going to want to fork out £400-500 for a new system at the moment. I'll be looking out for the companies going down the pan like they did at the beginning of this generation because they have ridiculous expectations of their games' sales and have to sell 5m units to break even.

See my post above about money and print runs.

It's ok mate. Did put it in totally on purpose to piss in your salad.

Well done chap, especially considering the circumstances. I remember people dropping hints, really REALLY unsubtle ones that genuinely put me off asking. I actually found it pretty offensive at the time. Sounds like a lovely experience and glad that it was romantic... you know... like not hidden in a toasted cheese sammitch or something.

Actually going to be on my honeymoon in Japan... probably would end up getting a divorce if I did it anyway!

Will be interesting to see what kind of price point this drop at and how it performs as I think this is a bit of a first. From what I know about the production costs surrounding the print runs of these cartridges though, I think this is a fantastic idea that this is going digital. The initial print runs for any game on the DS/3DS is very expensive and doesn't lend itself to a scaleable sales model. So if a game does really well or really badly then there's usually little anyone can do. This is why Castlevania games were always pretty rare, as was Ace Attorney because there was never quite enough interest to warrant another print, which limited exposure/publicity. By being digital, the sales can be relatively ever green and will sell as much or as little as necessary. It will also allow interest to bubble by word of mouth, which games like this and Ghost Trick needed to do.

There were animation problems all over that video.

Witness does look really nice, reminded me of Myst a lot. However I'm off to bed now... I think the rest of the show is likely to be trumpet blowing anyway.

Glad to see it's not easy to touch a nerve with you. I'll agree that Quantic Dream and Naughty Dog are excellent developers but team Ico have nothing to show after an entire generation. ThatGameCompany are also no longer tied to Sony. I won't go into the quality of particular 1st party franchises apart from to say that some of them aren't as strong as they used to be. As for GTA, that will go wherever the money is as Rockstar have always wanted it to be a blockbuster and is very much in the realms of a multiplatform series now. Kojima productions is one of the only big 3rd party franchises that stays loyal to the platform, which I expect to change once the numbers stack up. All of this is irrelevant anyway as the main point of argument still remains: Sony are still financially pretty fucked.

I could disagree with you more, if that would help.

Not sure if you're trying to misunderstand my point on purpose? I meant that I don't have much time for Crytek's philosophy towards games aside from them being a necessary evil as an engine developer. But games are not just graphics and Crysis 3 failed at being a game.

Back to the discussion at hand. For me the most likely culprit to go would be Sony. Their financial position is and has been terrible for a long time and developing a whole new system seems like a difficult stretch. The problem for Sony is that they still don't have enough strong 1st party content. Sure they have some great 3rd party support... which has mostly walked away and I've loved some of the indie work on PS3 but it's not going to keep a system afloat like say Nintendo's content.

Visually perhaps but that game reviewed like backside because it's a game. If that's what the crux that the PS4 or Durango have to offer then count me out.

Totally agree with this. The only exception I've seen to my general "don't do remakes" has been Perfect Dark on XBLA and that's mostly because the game was ahead of it's time and online makes everything better.

Does anyone think that there might be a time when we don't play as "the one and only Link". Maybe part of the hero collective instead or people just inspired by Link? I'm thinking through how, from a character perspective that Nintendo might make this multiplayer type of things work.

When the big feature of your game needs to be completely overlooked, despite it being half of the game, to get to the good bit then you have a serious priority problem. Big the Cat levels were a silly (in a good way for me) departure that you could play at almost any point in the game. You can't avoid the Werebollox. Don't get me wrong about Generations and Colours. Not played them myself but meant to be great games and Sonic being back on form.

Sonic has a serious issue constantly when it comes to gameplay balance. It's called unfair death syndrome and it was rife in Heroes. I've never played a Sonic game that I have refused to ever play again apart from Heroes and I hated after about 15 mins of playing it. Sloppy camera work, completely broken gameplay and just generally awful and cringe-worthy. I'm worried about this game, the fact that Unleashed has been linked to it does not bode well despite Colours and Generations being mentioned. Frankly the whole thing sounds like SEGA still not having a clue where to take this series. Everywhere from his duplicitous character writing to ridiculous inclusions of silly irrelevant gameplay. You know what everyone remembers from Unleashed? That the Werehog sections were complete crap on every level. Stop it with accessorising the experience and make a substantial and entertaining game. Adventure 1 is great with some important downfalls but the majority of the actual game bits of the game were excellent because they were distilled and focused. Can't believe they are still pulling this crap....

You could just put the NFC tech in the card which would hardly raise the production cost at all. But yeah, I'm very surprised that they bothered to put the reader tech in (expensive!) and not be using it at this stage. I doubt the devs even have access to it yet.

I find it difficult to talk about games that I'm bored of because I don't really feel that many games at all are much of a fresh idea any more. It's not that I don't enjoy them (hell I eat bolognese at least 1 every 2 weeks and it's always great) but I've only played 1 series in the past 5 years that has really made me say "Yes, that's how you do it!" which was Portal and it's sequel. Yes Uncharted was impressive and epic but frankly not that much of a game and at worst could be accused of simply doing the things that all generic action games have been trying to do ever since 3D showed up but doing them well. I think back to games that felt like they leapt forward and opened things up to the point where I wanted to explore the inner world of the game for hours. Like when I first played Goldeneye, I was intrigued by how much I could do and what the limits were. Today I just don't care because I know where those boundaries will be already. Within minutes of the games starting I can see how they are going to increase the difficulty or mix up the situations and I just don't care. Also, I find games rely far too much on defeating AI, which leads to feeling like you have just outwitted the computer rather than having mastered a puzzle. I know it's problem solving of a different kind but it's just not satisfying for me.