3DGalaxy

Posts Mentioning RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  Chris Till 3:52 am on May 31, 2009 Permalink  

  PSP Go 

  It was a pretty big surprise to find last night that the PSP Go had been announced by way of clever marketing by Sony, or by an unintentional leak. The latest episode of Qore featured an interview with Veronica Belmont and John Koller talking about the PSP Go in some detail.

  It’s basically exactly what everyone predicted, no second stick and no touch screen, and with 16gb on memory. Plus of course the sliding screen. I have to say that even though I expected it to not have a second analogue stick, it’s like they’re teasing us by putting the start and select buttons where they are. I mean they could have easily put a second stick there and put the start and select buttons above them where they would traditionally be.

  Overall I’m impressed with what we’ve seen so far but at the end of the day, it’s still a PSP so there’s not a lot new to shout about here beyond the aesthetic changes and the lack of UMD.

  It’s pretty clear that Sony have learned from pricing themselves initially out of the market with the PS3 and as such are going with the cheapest hardware they can get with this release, while still making the biggest impact possible. I think they’re doing a good job of this. I also hope the price is around what Nintendo are doing with the DSi because any higher than £150 and I’m not really too interested. I mean I could buy a big memory stick for that price to go in my existing PSP plus a couple of new games probably.

  John Koller also announced GT for PSP (wahoo!) and a new metal gear game both of which are great news. But also interesting was that he mentioned having back end stuff that they are going to enhance the Go with. Does this mean better PSN integration and maybe even trophies? I hope so. I also hope they can squeeze in in-game XMB onto this system to give it something that the original PSP doesn’t have as a cool showpiece, as well as being functional.

  Finally, I hope that this premature announcement was intentional because if Sony don’t have any other surprises at E3 then they could find themselves in trouble. One final thing about the PSP Go. We know that they will continue to sell games on UMD, but what are they going to do about allowing people to get their current UMD’s and future ones onto their PSP Go’s? And what will they do to prevent people from renting UMD’s and copying them to their new systems? Or trading in UMD’s that they’ve copied to the flash memory. I’m sure they wouldn’t be dumb enough to allow either of those things.

  But I also hope that they come up with a workable solution, such as using the PC media manager to rip UMD’s to your computer via your old PSP, and from there to the PSP Go. If the solution is to use a kiosk at a store or simply to not allow old UMD games to be copied to or played on the Go would be very weak to me, especially as I own 10 PSP games currently and don’t want to re-buy them.

  So in conclusion, the stuff we’ve heard is very encouraging, if not a little obvious. But regardless, I’m excited about the system and those two games, and I’m hopeful that Sony will have yet more big announcements at E3 on Tuesday.

   
• 

  Chris Till 5:37 am on May 26, 2009 Permalink  

  E3 Wants and Predictions 

  This year’s E3 is going to be interesting, that’s for sure. All the main 3 companies will have some good stuff (yes, even Nintendo) and if you look on IGN and probably every other gaming related site, you’ll see lots of predictions. Mine will be very similar but I want to talk more about my personal feelings obviously. I’m going to break it down into sections from here.

  Sony

  Sony will have a big show, the biggest of the 3 without doubt. Here’s what I think they’ll unveil.

  PSP redesign: This won’t just be the PSP 4000, this is going to be an entire reboot for the PSP with some interesting concepts. No UMD is an interesting proposition. I hope they know what they’re doing and I hope it comes with plenty of storage on board. Two analogue sticks I want very much but I know it’s unlikely until PSP 2. There’s also talk of a touchscreen. Now that would be great, especially to cover all the bases and defend against apple with the ipod touch and iphone and nintendo with the DS. However, I think this new PSP (please don’t call it the GO, dumb name) won’t have a touchscreen. It will be as cheap as they can get it while still appearing fresh and new, which would be a cunning move by Sony indeed.

  I hope what they do about UMD’s replacement is to put an external drive for ripping all your games to the internal memory bundled in with the new system. The thing about going to kiosks to do it I don’t buy. I just think that would be a poor way of dealing with the problem. Even making me pay seperatly for a UMD ripping drive would make me happier than the kiosk idea.

  Oh and PSP trophies would be an unlikely but welcome announcement. Not to mention the new PSP having bluetooth so you can use any headset with it on games like resistance retribution if you wanted to.

  PS3 Slim: The rumours surrounding this seem entirely plausible to me at this point. And while the ceace and decist letters could be a prank or something else, I don’t know why, I just think it’s real and hopefully Sony have figured out a way to lower the component and manufacturing costs so that this new system if there is one (and the old one!) are brought down in price significantly. IGN expects to $299 which to be honest sounds like too big of a jump to me.

  The problem is that Sony are stuggling selling the PS3 to people who don’t understand that the system is actually worth more money than the 360. This is because of many reasons, but most notably, the blu-ray player, the built in wi-fi, free online play, plus the controllers can be recharged out of the box.

  However, the average parent walking into a store with their kid won’t care about any of that, nor the fact the 360 is the most unreliable console in gaming history, even if it does have a decent software library and very good community features, but Sony are quickly catching them in both of those departments.

  Lots of games: Sony will surely be all too pleased to show people more of GT5, God of War 3, Uncharted 2, all the cool upcoming PSP games including maybe a gran turismo game I hope. MAG, Heavy Rain and more. Plus they’ll highlight all the PSN games coming soon like Fat Princess and PixelJunk Shooter among others.

  Community Stuff: Hopefully they will use this time to announce things like VidZone, which was announced here recently. It’s a music video streaming service on the XMB and sounds kinda cool, especially for free. I’m sure they’ll talk about it.

  More importantly though, the PS3 needs better intergration online. Better game launching in home and from the XMB. They need cross-game parties and cross-game voice chat. It would shut a lot of people up and make everyone’s time easier finding and playing with friends online.

  Microsoft:

  I think microsoft are going to have some interesting things to show. Not a lot is known so they might be holding back something big. However, they might be holding back nothing big and therefore have a pretty tame show compared to Sony and Nintendo, and they really can’t let that happen. So with that said, let’s get into the predictions.

  Xbox 360 Slim: Could this be the year of console hardware revisions? I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them ditch the current 360 for a sleeker, more stylish version (that hopefully doesn’t break and has wi-fi built in). It would really help to trump Sony’s offering if in fact they do announce a slim PS3.

  Xbox / Zune / handheld: This is probably just as much of an outside chance if not more so than the slim 360. Personally I hope microsoft don’t cross these brands over and keeps them seperate and instead, if they actually do bring out a handheld, make it a pure Xbox gaming machine, not a Zune or a phone.

  Some kind of motion controller / camera: Honestly this doesn’t excite me one bit. Motion isn’t the future I want to see for harcore gaming. It’s fine on the wii for the most part, except in mario kart (I use the classic controller) but not on PS3 or Xbox 360. It doesn’t matter how well it works or anything like that, it’s never going to be cool, and Microsoft need to admit they’re never going to capture Nintendo’s casual audience and just deal with it and move on.

  Games: They will talk Halo 3 ODST, Forza (I think 3 is the latest, but if they try to trump GT5 with that, it would be like fighting a tank with a pea shooter, not that Forza isn’t a good game, but you know what I mean). Probably something from Peter Molineux. I saw him say in an interview at Lionhead that theres another team working on something he wasn’t allowed to show, so that’s a pretty safe bet. I’m sure they’ll have other exclusives I can’t remember and parade a bunch of 3rd party games like Modern Warfare 2 as if they were exclusives too, just like last year. Maybe Beatles: Rock Band too, and the many coming Guitar and DJ Hero games.

  Nintendo

  I think Nintendo will be the most straight and to the point of all the press conferences, keen to make up for last year’s casual-fest. This year they will probably go straight to the hardcore stuff, announcing big new games and talking about things like wii sports resort more and motion plus, and how it ties into these big new games.

  Big new games: Zelda, Mario, Pikmin, maybe (but if it’s cancelled not so much) Kid Icarus.

  Lots of downloadable games: lots of DSiWare talk. Big first party games and some wiiware love too.

  New Wii Bundles: New colours and / or bundles. Possibly with Wii Sports Resort and motion plus or wii fit.

  Ok I think that’s pretty much everything I can think of. Maybe if I think of something else between now and E3 I’ll make some additions but otherwise I’ll be back after the big event to see how much of this (I know at least some of it will happen, but the rest is by no means confirmed). We’ll just have to wait and see, and hope we’re not deeply dissapointed by having our hopes raised too high.

   
• 

  Chris Till 1:52 am on May 16, 2009 Permalink  

  Swords and Soldiers first look 

  I’ve been following this game for a while now and it came out today. I wasn’t sure if I should spend the money or not, but in the end I did and I’m glad I did. Ronimo games are the small team who created the original de blob, before THQ bought the rights to it and released their own version for Wii and DS. Swords and Soldiers is a WiiWare exclusive downloadable RTS game which is quite unique in terms of it’s visual and gameplay styles, and is certainly something that WiiWare has not seen until now.

  Strangely for an RTS, the game is 2D, but this works beautifully on Wii. You use the pointer only to control the game and the idea is to protect your base while destroying your opponents’ on the right of the screen.

  The game seems simple at first but you quickly realise that there is actually a lot of depth to be found hidden away. The upgrade system is fairly simple and creating units is quick and simple. Most RTS’ have a lot of micromanagement where you tell every unit what to do individually but that is not the case here. Once a unit is created they move and attack by themselves and it’s your job to monitor their progress and use spells to assist them by healing them or damaging opponents, or even mind control opposing characters, among other things.

  There are three armies in the game, the Vikings, Aztecs and Chinese and all 3 have quite different and fun gameplay styles. I haven’t played enough to really go into it yet, but so far I’m enjoying Aztecs play style the best. But I have yet to try the Chinese, and the Vikings are fun too.

  I’ll be playing the game more but all you really need to know is that if you have a wii and even the slightest interest in this kind of game, I think you’ll enjoy this title. Even if you’re on the fence about the game, there’s enough here to satisfy a lot of gamers. The split screen multplayer I wasn’t a huge fan of but now that Ive played the game and realised how fun it is, I can’t wait to try it multiplayer.

   
• 

  Chris Till 1:41 am on May 16, 2009 Permalink  

  Killzone 2 Steel and Titanium Impressions 

  I said in the last post that I would come back to the topic of DLC if and when I got the Killzone first pack. Well, after taking some good advice in the forums to change my control sensitivity to max on the x axis and low on the y, I started enjoying playing the game considerably more, so I decided to check out the DLC pack.

  Now I haven’t played a lot of either map, less on the wasteland bullet map. But from my initial time with both, I do like them. I feel as if the price was a little high but it’s by no means the worst offender in terms of price or content quality. This pack is 2 maps for around £5 which is just over half the price activision have been charging for their call of duty map packs. Those offered 4 maps so it does work out similar, but I wish they just reduced it a little more to make it more of an impulse buy, rather than having to think about it more. However, these maps live up to the billing as in my opinion the best maps in the game, so they did a good job.

  I do like the Vektor Cruiser map more though, and this is mainly because of the fact that it’s not a dark map. I always feel like when a game has supposedly great graphics, I want to be shown those great graphics with amazing uses of colour as well as technical quality. I just feel like when you make something at night or in a dark place, it takes away from the visual appeal. There is a place for those kind of maps, but in killzone 2 it feels like the majority of the environments are like that, which is a shame to me. I hope the following DLC maps move further away from this and do something radically different.

  When I checked out wasteland bullet for the first time, the feeling of being on a moving train is definitely cool. I just wish it was during the day. I guess the reason behind it being a night level is because lighting it up might make the background look cheap and feel less authentic of an experience. I know gears of war had a moving train level but I’ve never played it,. This is surely similar, but it feels good nonetheless. The other thing I felt when viewing this map for the first time is that upon first look, is really small, probably the smallest map in the game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely felt like it was a bit crampt. Because of this, I also felt that I was likely to get attacked if I tried to jump between the trains, if I wasn’t taken out by the environmental hazards. Regardless of those issues, it definitely feels like an epic level and I’m interested to go back for more soon.

  Vektor cruiser is a larger level. Probably in the middle in terms of all the maps but it feels good, and it really shows off the graphics of the game well because of the brightness, even if the environment itself is a bit bland.

  Overall I would say that if you’re playing killzone 2 online a lot, or even casually, I think you will enjoy these maps. It’s unfortunate that they don’t do as good job as infinity ward and treyarch as far as intergrating the maps into the regular map playlists, but that’s not something that will hurt the experience too much.

  These packs definitely beat the MGO ones in usability, style and uniqueness. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the game next, especially since they announced vehicles would be making their way to multiplayer.

   
• 

  Chris Till 2:17 am on May 14, 2009 Permalink  

  InFAMOUS: Thoughts on the demo 

  So today I got an email from Sony saying that I had a code to get my hands on the inFAMOUS demo so I went ahead and downloaded it. When I played it a couple of things struck me. As I tend to do, I was playing on easy difficulty (because I like to enjoy the ride as some games say) and the number of times and how easily you can die in the game is surprising. It really only takes a couple of hits by the enemy to kill you so it’s definitely dissapoiting that there isn’t more room for error. Apart from the difficulty I felt the game was very cool. The animations were fluid and the fact that you can shoot from anywhere you are grabbing onto is really stunning looking.

  However, I have decided to cancel my pre-order for the game because I just simply felt like in the end, it’s not going to give me enough fun, or provide me with the gaming experience I want. The game is great and while I can see where it is similar to spider-man 2, another game I enjoyed exploring and just chilling out in, I don’t think I can do that with this, which is a shame.

  I am getting to the point where gaming is so busy and huge with so many releases, that I have to be so selective about what I choose to buy because a lot of the time, games are sold on hype, and demos a lot of the time actually cause me to be less excited and not buy games. It’s funny how they can be counter productive for the game developers but it’s kinder to my wallet at least.

  So in conclusion, great game but just not for me. I hope it sells well as it is a PS3 exclusive, just like all the others, and this deserves to be a big seller. Maybe some online multiplayer or co-op would have sealed the deal for me. It’s certainly possible. But as it stands now, my money will be better spent elseware, regardless of how good inFamous is.

   
• 

  Chris Till 11:16 pm on May 12, 2009 Permalink  

  MGO vs CoD 4, and DLC Talk 

  I got MGS4 when it came out and of course, I liked the single player game a fair bit for what I played, which was the first chapter. However when I went online I just felt as if it was such a missed oportunity and paled in comparison in so many ways to the main story.

  When the first DLC pack came out I bought it, from the konami store because they for some reason couldn’t make it onto playstation network. I really don’t know what the deal was with not being on PSN but I think it was some decision of konami because they felt they were better off with their own service, which clearly wasn’t the case.

  While you could say that there’s nothing wrong with the game, I would say contrary to that, that there are many small issues that could have been avoided, had konami bothered to put more effort in. I think in terms of shooters, these days everything will be compared to Call of Duty 4. It is the most simple and easy to play game while offering a fast and streamlined approach to matchmaking and gameplay. Also, if you’re new to CoD, you don’t really get excluded from the fun, and while you may get killed a lot at first, you will still have a fun expeirence overall, barring rude people online, which is always a possibility, but it’s out of the hands of the developers. Plus you can always mute people.

  With MGO, the matchmaking clearly is poor. It takes forever to find a game, and then once you get into a game, like I did earlier today, basically everyone in the game wanted to kick me because I was a low level. I ended up having to leave because they wouldn’t press start to begin the game. The experience left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Especially seeing as in CoD you don’t have to press start and people can’t kick you, but I felt as if I was being told I couldn’t even play a game online, when I’ve bought the DLC maps to play plus the original game.

  What call of duty nails is the speed of matchmaking and the overall ease of use. It’s so fast to jump into a game and have fun. The gameplay itself is also almost unquestionably the best of any console shooter, and I would say the best including PC games, but I’ve never been a fan of mouse and keyboard control.

  Another thing CoD4 gets right is DLC. They’ve only done 1 pack, the variety pack, but it’s fantastic and certainly lives up to its name. The maps in this pack are definitely worth the purchase price, and are in my opinion, some of the best maps in the game, especially broadcast and chinatown. The other two are passable but these are the absolute best including the maps that come on the disc in my opinion.

  MGO DLC in contrast in my opinion is a waste of money. For one thing, I found it hard to even get into games with the new maps, which is not a problem in CoD. When the map pack first came out you could select to play a playlist with only those new maps. No such option in MGO. The maps also didn’t really grab me that much, and I just felt like I had wasted my money. One of the main advantages of MGO’s DLC packs is the addition of new playable characters from the main MGS4 story, like Meryl, Johnny, Raiden and Vamp. This is cool in theory, but I still have yet to figure out how to actually play as these in a game. I think possibly you have to host a game to do it. But either way, it’s not made easy enough in my opinion.

  So in conclusion, I feel as if I’ve been cheated out of my money by MGO, but that CoD4 DLC is absolutely worth the money. Obviously MGO is probably one of the most hardcore games on PS3 and definitely not noob friendly, if you want to use that term so a lot of my unhappy feeling towards that game may come from that, but I think CoD does a great job of appealing to a much broader audience.

  I think DLC in general has a place in gaming, but I think increasingly developers are using it as a way to be lazy, and exclude features from discs and then charge for them later. But thankfully that doesn’t happen too much, and usually when it does, it’s stuff which isn’t really worth buying most of the time anyway. For example, RE5’s versus mode which was essentially a modified version of mercenaries mode was included on the disc but had to be unlocked for a fee. That content ended up being pretty poor anyway, so it’s interesting how things work out that way.

  Obviously Resistance 2 and Killzone are high profile shooters on PS3 with DLC and while I’m not very impressed with the R2 maps, I’ve yet to get the Killzone one, so I don’t know how I feel about that yet. If I do pick it up soon, I’ll make my thoughts known here. I would still put the online components of both those games way ahead of MGO regardless. They are much faster, much more casual friendly (to an extent) and have better gameplay mechanics in my opinion, although killzone’s aiming controls are pretty difficult, but I hope they patch them soon.

  For one last example of how a great community and great DLC (for the most part) can help a game’s longevity, check out burnout paradise. Developer Criterion Games have done a great job of prividing free DLC for a while, and have recently released a slew of paid content. Some of the paid content could be considered a bit overpriced, but I’ve had fun with most of it (legendary cars, toy cars, boost specials and the recently released cops and robbers game mode and updated cop cars. The upcoming island pack promises to be among the best so far too.) The only content I wouldn’t reccomend, except for trophy hunters and 100% completionists is the party pack. It’s ok for a bit of fun with some friends but it’s not really challenging enough or fun enough to make it worth the price tag.

  This post ended up being a mashup of a lot of my thoughts recently about gaming, and it goes far beyond these particular games. There’s still a lot more to cover that I haven’t talked about on the blog. And I have a lot to say so I’m looking forward to getting some more of my thoughts out there soon.

   
• 

  Chris Till 1:01 am on May 8, 2009 Permalink  

  Wow, it’s been a while 

  It’s funny how I just get into the swing of posting game reviews and articles on that kind of stuff and then just suddenly stop. I’m not sure why but since I just had to pay quite a bit to keep my hosting going I realised I probably should be using it for something rather than just let it sit idle.

  Ok so one of the things I’ve just done is totally disable comments. Honestly they’re way more harm than good. I really appreciate the people who really took the time to comment me. Some of them were really interesting, not to mention long and detailed in some cases, and I was shocked that people would spend the time replying to someone as insignificant as me with regards to this kind of stuff. So thanks, not that you’ll ever come to my blog again.

  As far as how to contact me I would say if you really want to then look me up on facebook or something. I’m going to try to make it as difficult as possible to recieve any spam whatsoever so I’m disabling the contact form too. I was surprised that I haven’t had anything (spam or otherwise, and thats a good thing) through there for a very long time, so if I’m not receiving even anything good then why bother having it there.

  I really feel like I want to go back to basics as it were.

  With regards to content. I’m going to make a concious effort to post my feelings on mostly game news and other things that recieve my attention, definitely more regularly. It’s truly baffling when I think about all the things in the gaming world and the world as a whole since I last posted. Some truly huge things. The problem is I don’t have the time or the fingers to go back and post all that stuff, but I may summarise the last year in gaming. That might be a fun thing to do.

  Ok thanks very much for reading and have a good one.