Whenever I talk about why sales don't matter I always say they don't matter to gamers. Business is business and so publishers will care but I don't see why I should.
I find it odd that in all those bloody idiotic articles detailing x things Sony needs to do to beat Microsoft (because Sony is a company of idiots so needs the advice of a 14 year old with a imac and a blogger account) they all say pretty high up "Sony needs to buy some exclusives" but now they have done it all the bloggers are saying they have been awful and should be strung up.
Find a track and stick to it people!
Here is a lesson about games for the Wii; most gamers don't care about your big name franchises because they have never heard of them. When faced with a compendium game like Carnival Games (shiver) with 30 games for under 20 quid or a EA sports game with one sport for £40 then they go with value. They don't read reviews, they don't know the franchises and your advertising budget means nothing.
How does replay value and more bang for your buck make the game better? If the game was good you would want to play it again anyway regardless of the trophies to be gained.
I have yet to be convinced that either trophies or achievements are a fundamentally good thing for games. They do add a certain degree of gloating elitism to fanboys, geeks and general everyday horrible people but I still don't see any way they have made games better. More competitive perhaps and maybe more open to replay but still not better.
While that remains the case, I can't see the point.
An interesting spin on the collapse of PS1 game releases. Another more rational and less inclined towards twisting the truth would suggest that the reason game releases fell so much in 2000 and 2001 was the release of the PS2.
This sort of game has been about in Japan for decades now, its not fitting with western cultures but it is Japanese culture so if it works for them.
Just remember, 15 years ago we all laughed at the crazy Japanese TV shows where people were eating animal genitals but now we make those shows and they are huge (and rubbish IMO). Media breaks taboos to keep interesting and fresh; Japan is just faster at breaking them than we are.
Rape, it aint clever and it aint entert...
I don't see what the big deal is TBH. If Capcom want to run an ad on TV then they pay the TV company for use of its airwaves, if they wanna run one on a website then they pay the site owner for its bandwidth. A demo or video is a form of advertising IMHO so it is only fair that Capcom/any other company who uses Sonys platform and server bandwidth to distribute said advertising should pony up the cash in the same way.
Seems a bit daft to charge the fee on games too but given this ...
I like the Wii, it has some great software and is far from the gimmick for kids and pensioners which many claim it is.
However, the extraordinary sales the Wii has achieved in the past few years were less about the console and I think more a trend towards a cultural phenomenon. It would have sold regardless but the lead it has amassed must to a certain degree be attributed to it being a must have item.
After 3 or so years though, the fad is changing to other thing...
Amazingly all current consoles have a similar button but it aint red.
Parents can press this button to stop kids playing games at certain times, it has 4 green/red lights around it on the 360, a touch sensitive button with a little green/red light underneath it on PS3 and a little blue light on the Wii; it is known as the power button.
Maybe parents should get the cohones to tell their kids no instead of getting multi-national corporations to install software to do...
You really failed to understand the point didn't you? I was using those games to illustrate the death of franchises in once popular genres when they became unpopular. Spyro and Crash could have easily be replaced by Gex or other assorted platformers.
And they say gamers are stupid, just ignorant as it happens!
Perhaps in a round about way there is a good point being made. I guess if 360 gamers are happy playing ever more instalments in the Halo franchise then they are fine but with the release of Killzone 2 I detect a bit of a backlash in the gaming community against FPS games in general. I think that many feel that the genre has hit its high points with Halo 2, COD4 and Half Life 2 and everything after that has been an attempt to replicate something from those games. This generation has already se...
Lamborghini on the Xbox should be on that list. I played the demo and it was amazing but was canned just after the demo was released and the engine was then folded into the heap of crap which was Juiced. A tragedy where a fully completed game never ever saw the light of day for business reasons (the dev went bust I believe)
I don't think that that many PS3 owners bought only for BD. IMO I think it is very much about the demographics of the consoles. The PS3 is largely (not exclusively) bought by slightly older gamers than the 360 (mainly because they can afford the outlay) and I think that the older gamers get the more it takes to impress and are similarly less likely to get caught in a web of hype and publicity which accompanied many of the games you list meaning that they are more likely to be picky and wait f...
I am sure it is a nice feature but IMO I would rather let Sony work on genuinely innovative features rather than continue to pump time and resources into emulating Xbox features a la gamercards and trophies.
One of my favourite features of Burnout on PS3 was its excellent choice of music which reminded me of some classic tracks which I had forgotten including some beautiful classical music. The music is just as important as the graphics and gameplay to the developer and in a wor...
To be fair, if you read anything about Greek legends they were also gloriously violent and so is an awful lot of Greek art of the time. The game is just being true to the mythology of the time and to try and rewrite the legends of 4000 years ago to suit modern queasiness about digital reproductions of violence is the equivalent of book burning.
I don't care about the score or in fact any score given by any website/journalist or the rampaging monster that is metacritic. My only problem with the Edge review was how low the standard of their journalism has fallen. I (unlike many I suspect) read the review in its entirety and cannot believe how poor the prose was. It served only as a reminder of why I cancelled my subscription to the magazine 18 months back due to its increasingly patchy coverage and poorly constructed arguments.
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This will be hugely controversial but I never took to Smash Brothers or the Final Fantasy series. They aren't bad games or anything but I feel that they get a disproportionate amount of praise for the gameplay on offer and they have not really changed in any meaningful way over their numerous iterations. I would also add Devil May Cry to that list (which are bad games IMO)
How about under-rated series? I reckon Sly Cooper would be very high up.
EDIT; I wish to add Sh...
I thought the demo was a great laugh, I had huge smile on my face. The mechanics and the gun loving of it all made me think of it as a spiritual successor to Black. As for the aiming, making you aim the gun is a good thing, I hate those little tricks like snap aiming and Halo jumping because it ruins the immersion for me.
But that's just me.
Damn that's one sexy looking unit, if true then my 60gb is heading to Ebay quick!
Sad it looks like it will have a external PSU (I hate power bricks) but it is a compromise worth making I think.