There's a big attraction in Japan to buying games on day 1, so SO4 got most of it sales then.
Pretty impressive its managed to stay in the top 20 after release.
Around the Christmas period a good move for MS would be to release a bundle with all the major JRPG titles (Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Infinite Undiscovery, Last Remnant, Star Ocean 4).
This would get the day 1 sales spike again for people who haven't got a 360 yet, as launch days of bundles se...
Quality over quantity? If you're talking about games, they seem pretty even with quality titles that appeal to mass-market Japanese buyers.
There's always been the Japanese-made loyalty over there though. It wouldn't matter if the 360 was made of solid gold and given away in cereal boxes - there would still be a preference for Japanese-made consoles.
The fact that the 360 is still even viable in Japan is an achievement, selling reasonably enough for MS to not withdra...
I get what your saying about devoting articles to focusing on negative aspects of a game or what it lacks, but it's actually a valid viewpoint - after the release of a game what would you like to see improved later on as DLC or in a sequel?
Halo Wars is an awesome game I love, but there are things I'd really like to see added and this way experienced critics and people commenting can get their views public for the developers to look at (in this case, the new Robot Entertainment f...
I would have loved the flood as a playable race, but one other possibility is:
Heretics
The heretic covenant movement that was a major focus in Halo 2 could have been amazing, even as the enemies in a covenant campaign (since you'll notice even when playing the arbiter in Halo 2 you never actually got to fight humans).
It was never explained how far back the heretic movement started, so I think they could be a great new race even in a mini-campaign DLC f...
I saw them in a bookstore yesterday, was considering picking them up.
But definitely a covenant campaign would be amazing.
It might have come down to the reaction to Halo 2 though - many people weren't happy playing as the Arbiter and as such he was a side character in Halo 3.
Here's hoping there's a covenant campaign DLC in the works at Robot Entertainment (the start-up studio of ex-Ensemble employees handling future updates to Halo Wars).
The PS3 was much more spectacular in the microwave. The 360 didn't even have electrical explosions. =(
My vote for next microwaving:
The entire range of Gameboys from the original Gameboy "Chunky", classic, colour, advance and DS - which is the most microwaveable if you're ever stuck on a desert island with nothing to eat except your gameboy and a microwave.....and electricity....
Hey, it could happen......
It's on PC, 360 and PS3 - no exclusivity at all, actually.
The 360 version was simply mentioned in the article due to controversy over some comments one of the designers made last year about needing multiple discs for 360 version due to filesize limitations.
No matter what platform I think we're going to be in for a jaw-dropping game.
Really the exact numbers of PSN or Xbox Live users doesn't matter - we all know both services are very active. If you can easily find a game to play online there's no need to argue over details like multiple accounts, etc.
Microsoft and Sony will both always deny eachother's statistics and question eachother's data.
Killzone 2 does indeed look amazing, but Gears 2 does as well.
As you said Gears 2 looks 'cartoony' after playing Killzone 2 mainly because Killzone 2 goes for the more gritty, darker colour scheme with an overall ambient light colour for each scene.
Gears 2 uses a more high-contrast style with lights and specular point heavily emphasized to create high differentiation between light sources and darkness with little ambient lighting.
They're both just dif...
To be fair, Gears of War 2 actually has amazing texture work - some of the highest-resolution and most detailed textures ever in a console game - much more so than Killzone 2 even which is you look at it uses fairly basic blurred textures.
However, Killzone 2 has many graphical effects missing from Gears and uses a different visual style, while Gears 2 looks great specifically from its use of textures.
The problem with this sort of article is as he said he's a movie CGI artist.
Games are different. In games, it's not pre-rendered. You can't shove every graphical effect into every scene on every object or you'll get a framerate slower than a slideshow.
The puprose of the graphics in games is to help provide the ILLUSION of a world as you play, which Killzone 2 does very convincingly. If you don't need a certain effect to keep up the illusion, there's no point having...
After reading that a new patch was out that changed the controls, I played a level of Killzone 2 without internet plugged in so it didn't update to remind myself how the controls are.
I then plugged internet in and restarted the game and of course it popped up with the update which I let install.
The controls have had a pretty major tweak (in singleplayer) in the acceleration when looking normally compared to ironsights. There is no longer the very gradual build up i...
I'd give it about a 9.2/10 overall as well.
Despite it being much smaller than some other titles such as Oblivion and Fallout 3, Fable II has a charm about it lacking in most other games. There's something about it that really sucked me in and made me care about the world and random characters.
For the first time in a game I actually wanted NPCs to like me! Cue lots of lute playing, dancing and 'victory arm pumps'.
Seems to search faster and has good number of trackers in its torrents.
It's a shame that groups like MediaDefender do this stuff - torrents don't only carry pirated stuff. That's like saying all video files on the internet are pirated movies.
It's simply a great new way to transfer files without needing monster dedicated servers, and as with ANY method of passing data between 2 people it does have the possibility of being used for pirated materials but that's unavoi...
For everyone whose always wanted to be able to fight through a zombie apocalypse:
Looks like it'll be knocking on your door any day now...
If you read the first part of my post you'd see I was saying I'd explain it in non-technical terms - ie: not going into XDR or GDDR3.
XDR ram is incredibly fast but FEW DEVELOPERS USE IT FOR TEXTURES as it requires seperate coding which can limit the bandwidth when transferring it for GPU processing. The original question was (now listen carefully) why TEXTURES most often look better in 360 multiplatform games, and there's the answer:
It's easiest to stick textures i...
This article has nothing to do with Killzone 2?
Believe it or not people want more than 1 game to play in a console generation.
Usually the ps3 version of a game suffers from the slight white-washing effect however this time it appears to have better contrast than the 360 version.
A reversal on the norm for third-party games.
Oh well. I have a 360 and PS3 but I won't be getting it for either since I found the demo to be very average.
Happy to be proven wrong when I play it on release at a friend's place however. =)
I really like coffee and smoothies. Both of them have awesome new flavours being added all the time. Unfortunately my coffee once needed to be taken back but luckily I didn't need to pay for anything. My smoothies have always been fine but are more expensive, so it all evens out.
Unfortunately there seems to only be about 5 flavours worth getting in the ice cream, so I can't justify going there. The new 'MadWorld' flavour looks interesting though.