OtakuSennen

I picked up the first volume of Viz's publication and I enjoyed it immensely. But before I buy any more of the books, can anyone tell me, without spoilers, if the series manages to keep its awesomeness throughout? I've started too many series only to get tired of it halfway through.

[quote name='50 cent']Oh this game I have seen a lot of this on g4 lately and it looks and sounds simply amazing. I really am looking forward to this game, and just the obstacale(sp?) to get ont he beast to find it's weak spot sounds fun and challenging. Also I heard that there won't be any other enemy's other than these beasts. So you search for them finding some items to heal your self I suppose then go and defeat them, but I do suspect for because just running around would be pretty boring after a while.[/quote]You heal on your own, and it's not like you have to spend an hour trying to find the Colossi- the game pretty much shows you where to go. The whole atmosphere of the game is built around isolation, and if you had to run around killing generic goblins for an hour inbetween each Colossus not only would the mood be killed, but the game would go from being "A breathtaking, epic, unique gaming experience" to "Another fantasy adventure game with cool boss battles lost somewhere inbetween."

It's not just a matter of "effort," there's also the issue of the limitations of the consoles' hardware. The reason that Tekken and Final Fantasy's opening sequences are so high-quality is because they're pre-rendered, like a movie file. Such things are not possible in-game on any current console. Metal Gear is always in-engine, so I don't know what you're getting at there. Some games need realism, but I would like to see more "artistic" games. Killer 7 and the upcoming Okami are good examples of different-looking games.

Haha, Charles, I didn't know you won off of every10minutes. How many caps did you enter? I was never really planning on getting a 360 at launch. Perfect Dark Zero and Elder Scrolls IV were the games that would get, but neither of those are actually system-sellers to me. Overall I'm just rather wary of Microsoft's early release strategy, since no majorly mind-blowing next generation-looking games have been released yet (I'm aware that there are some very lovely particle/smoke effects already, but that alone doesn't scream "worth $400" to me). Between an early release, shortages, so-so-looking launch titles and the occasionaly faulty unit, I guess some parallels could be drawn between the Playstation 2 launch and the 360's. And for that reason, I'm very, very glad that I'm just stepping back and waiting for some of the proverbial dust to settle.

Toy Day was pretty much Christmas with a different name, right? If that's the case with most of the holidays from the Gamecube version, I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Also, has there been any word of being able to send letters to people over DS Wifi without actually being in the town? Like some sort of private messaging system?

[quote name='Warmaster']Well, you said a title that "demands an immediate purchase." If you are an educated gamer, I'd say Oblivion fits the bill. If you're some CS-crazy n00b-pwner or a FF fangirl, then sure, maybe it's not the game for you. But, to anyone who knows, Oblivion is about as close as we have come to a truly immersive gaming experience. It's a must-play if you ask me.[/quote]A killer app is a game that damn near everyone excited and going "I must have this console." I, for one, am very, very excited about Oblivion, but like you said, I'm "informed"- the ones that make Madden and Halo sell so well are the ones that dictate "killer apps." As sad as it is, most people out there aren't interested in epic fantasy settings and complex skill charts. Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about Oblivion, but it just doesn't scream "Everyone will want this" to me (though by RPG standards it will certainly do well). I realize it's not a launch title (or even set for release in 2005), but I think Gears of War is showing the qualities of a killer app. It seems like it would cater to the Halo crowd, at least, and that would be enough to sell plenty of copies.

[url="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384537"][b]They're already making one.[/b][/url] Also, we already had a discussion about it going [url="http://www.otakuboards.com/showthread.php?t=49233"][b]here[/b].[/url] It doesn't "sum up" the games' stories though. As far as I can tell, it's a story focusing on characters unrelated to the games. The script might even be floating around the internet somewhere by now, but I'd rather just see the movie. The visuals will probably be a big part of it.

[QUOTE=Warmaster]Well, then, I'm really glad we're getting a lot more than shiny walls, and you should be glad, too ^_^ In fact there are shiny walls in a lot of games already! No current-generation console can run Oblivion, with its multitiude of independently running scripts, as well as very detailed and realistic areas. And, even ignoring the fact that "upgrade" and "new generation" do not have to mean different things, considering the level of *immersion* that a multicore system has the firepower to provide, what you are really limited by at this point is the effort that game developers are willing to put in. Immersion counts for a lot in a video game, which anyone who has played Resident Evil 4 will agree with. If the future consoles push the limits of it even further, then they will have done plenty for $400. Heck, a top-of-the-line graphics card, which is definitely an "upgrade," will cost you $500. I find it amusing when everyone is eagerly anticipating the next "Ocarina" or "Halo 3" (and when I think about how well the GTA series do), and yet also pretends that the game industry really needs innovation. I suppose, when GTA and Halo titles stop breaking sales records, I'll have to agree ^_^[/QUOTE]And you found my weakness. Oblivion is one of the games that uses the 360 to a higher level of potential, but are 512MB of RAM and a multicore processor enough incentive to change anything? I read a while back that even Gears of War, one of the prettier upcoming 360 games, has been running on only one of the three processors. If a game runs that well on one processor, than why should the average developer bother to use these items? What is Dead or Alive 4 bringing to the table that's different? What about Perfect Dark Zero, Gun, Madden 2006, Quake 4 or Tony Hawk's American Wasteland? Apparently physics are all that some developers are looking to put out, and current-generation games have been capable of doing such things as well. Maybe things will improve, but at this time a multicore processor seems to be more of a burden than a gift to programmers, and the thought of PS3's nine-core Cell is just hell for some. The Revolution, like the DS, is most likely not going to destroy the competition in the video card department, but it will have its own niche of unique and enjoyable games. Zelda's core gameplay concept has remained the same since OoT, true, but Nintendo has already stated that Twilight Princess is going to be the "last traditional Zelda," and Halo has only been around long enough for two games, which is hardly enough time to throw in some sort of 180-degree gameplay revolution. How many franchises do that in one console generation anyway?

Think about what the competition (Sony and Microsoft) are bringing to the table. A bit of an update in the graphics department, but what do you have after that? In the case of Xbox 360, some pretty and functional menus and online play, and in the case of Playstation 3.. Well, we're not quite sure yet. My point is, aside from extra polygons and overused bump-mapping, the competing consoles aren't that different from what we have now, at least as far as games go. Hell, both controllers are practically the same now- four face buttons, D-pad, two analog sticks and four shoulder buttons- and if the only benefits you get for your $400 are shiny walls, you're paying for more of an "upgrade" than a "new generation." The Revolution is doing something different, something that would be completely impossible to do effectively on current hardware setups, and that's something to look forward to. It's like MS and Sony are going from stick figures to oil paintings while Nintendo is going from stick figures to sculpture. Besides, then we have the controller "shell" that will allow it to work traditionally as well. Though dreaded "use the controller to mop the floor!" tech demo launch titles are probably inevitable, I'm confident that developers will figure out how to handle it. The DS lineup is overflowing with unique and[i]worthwhile[/i]titles. It certainly wasn't that way at launch, but now that developers know what they're doing, we're getting some grade-A titles. You have a point, though, Warmaster. There isn't much to debate over game-wise at this point, but speculation is the essence of game forums. :P

IGN has the actual preview video up now. Check it out [url="http://cube.ign.com/articles/651/651334p1.html"]here.[/url] [quote name='RiflesAtRecess][font=trebuchet ms']I think that the X360 and PS3 need to pull some crazy stunts to get people (namely me) to care about them right now. As far as I can see now, this would be the system I would get if I were faced with the choice right now. It's a really cool idea. Now if I had a hologram projector, or a helmet that reads brainwaves, then I'd be in gaming heaven.[/font][/quote]That's not how a lot of people see it, though. There are people- namely, 80% of the Halo/GTA crowd- that would just see this as "less buttons, crappy shape, "gimmicky," "don't fix what's not broken" and so on. But there are some people who will always deny the unconventional. After thinking about it for approximately seven hours straight, I'm thinking that my only real controller complaint is the small button count. Yes, there are technically four buttons on the remote, but two of them are at the bottom, and would be more or less inaccessible if you're trying to keep your hand up by the D-pad (plus, it looks like they're labeled as A and B just like the other buttons, so they presumably do the same thing). It's a similar problem that Nintendo 64 had with the analog stick and D-pad placement. I would be satisfied if they simply put two more buttons around the top A somewhere. Then we would have A, B, X and Y, and two triggers (via the analog). Close enough to conventional. [center][img]http://otakusennen.250free.com/Rev3.jpg[/img][/center] [left]Something like that, I guess. It maintains the ambidextrous feature of the controller, and I would imagine it would work out well enough. For a rough example, try picking up your TV remote and hitting 2, 5 and 8. [/left] As for the "traditional" controller.. That sort of reminds me of the Xbox 360 hard drive issue. If it doesn't come pre-packaged with every console, developers might not want to put the effort into it. And I don't see why they couldn't just keep producing Gamecube controllers and make people use those, unless they want to make games that use both traditional controls and the remote's gyroscopes, or they plan on throwing a ZZ button on there to please the Dualshock crowd. I, for one, can't wait for the inevitable third-party lightsaber-shaped remote. That would be monumentally nerdy. EDIT: How do you think traditional fighting games will work? Smash Bros. wouldl be pretty simple, considering how can technically play Melee with three buttons and an analog stick (or D-pad, I guess), but what about games like Street Fighter that require six buttons? Maybe they'll release a peripheral just for that.. Hawt. :heart:

Well, they have officially shown the Nintendo Revolution controller. Here it is: [center][img]http://otakusennen.250free.com/Revolution.jpg[/img][/center] [center][img]http://otakusennen.250free.com/Rev2.jpg[/img][/center] So yeah, that's the controller. The remote. As you can see, they seem to be going with white as opposed to the black that was shown at E3.. Very iPod-inspired. [quote=IGN] [b]Main Controller Features[/b] [list] [*][b]3D Pointing.[/b] Sensors understand up, down, left, right, forward and backward. [*][b]Tilt Sensitive.[/b] Controller can be rotated or rolled from side-to-side. [*][b]Buttons Included.[/b] Has a trigger on its backside, face buttons, and a D-Pad. [*][b]Multifunctional.[/b] Has an expansion port which can be used with different types of controller peripherals. Analog stick with two trigger buttons planned for left hand. [*][b]Wireless.[/b] Totally wire-free. Currently there are no details on the max distance, source or power, or otherwise. [*][b]Rumble Built-in.[/b] Included as a standard in all the controllers.[/quote] [/list][quote=IGN] [b]Demo #1: Point and Shoot[/b] Like a laser pointer, the main controller was used to move a simple cursor on the TV screen and shoot square blocks for points. It was simple, merely colored lines in 2D, but effective. It was easy to get a feel for just how sensitive the device is -- it responded to all the movements quickly and smoothly. We did feel the need to use two hands, however, to steady it and improve accuracy, but that only lends to the idea of just how sensitive it is. [b]Demo #2: Fishing[/b] Much more advanced than just a simple cursor, this revealed how the controller can navigate a 3D space, moving an object on the TV screen not only left, right, up, and down, but also forward and backwards with depth. Users simply use the hand cursor on the screen to pick up a fishing pole and dip its line into a pond full of fish. Like nearly all of the demos, this was very crude, so don't go imaging even fishing on the Ocarina of Time level -- this was like a coloring book with flat fish in the water. The visual medium wasn't the point, though. It was pretty intuitive to just reach forward with our virtual hand, pick up the rod, and then dip the hook into the pond and dangle it there. When a fish finally bit, the remote rumbled, which was the cue to tug back on the controller to catch it. As it was only a prototype controller, it was wired because rumble was not in the wireless versions yet. [b]Demo #3: Shock Stick[/b] Like the first, this was to show how you can point and move something. It was a bit like the board game Operation, only instead of navigating tweezers you navigated a rotating stick through a two-dimensional cave. The skill was to keep a steady hand, collect coins, and don't hit the walls. Small springboards on the side would change the direction of the spin of the stick, which aided in creating a strategy for navigating around things. [b]Demo #4: Air Hockey[/b] This blended basic pointing with something new: twisting. As you might imagine, players hit a puck back and forth by maneuvering their "hockey sticks" with the controller. The catch was that by twisting your wrist, left or right, you could angle the stick to send the puck in another direction. Twisting, in addition to hitting was actually pretty difficult in this demo. It worked to a point, but it also lacked the intuitiveness that a real table would have. It seemed mainly aimed at familiarizing us with the notion of twisting the remote to turn things. [b]Demo #5: Basketball[/b] Again, this focused on laser pointer style controls. The game was to simply move a basketball around on the court, not by bouncing it, but instead dragging it by pressing the B-trigger in back of the remote to create an indent. The ball rolled into the crevice, and you could drag it towards the hoops. Then, with the A-button, you could reverse the indent, creating a hill and pop the ball upwards toward the hoop. It was a simple two-player game, but worked to show off the sensitivity of the cursor and how it was interacting with another player in the same space. Surprisingly, it was easy to keep track of where you were on the court, allowing for blocks and steals. [b]Demo #6: Toy Plane[/b] Set in the watery hub of Mario Sunshine, this demonstrated that not all controls are created equal. The remote could be held like a toy airplane, fingertips support its base, which allowed the player to tilt it forwards to dip down, back to gain elevation, and twisted left or right turn. The objective was just to steer the plane through rings in the sky. Of course the first thing that came to mind was Pilotwings, so it's easy to see how these simple applications of the controller could be grown into something more complex. It was pretty intuitive to pull off dips and quick turns. Miyamoto joked that you could have a controller peripheral shaped like a toy plane to really make it interesting. [b]Demo #7: Where's Pikachu?[/b] One of the crudest demos, the screen displayed a flat map with many Pokemon characters crowded together on it. It was a spoof on Where's Waldo, the famous find-the-needle-in-the-haystack illustrated book. The controller lent the ability to look left and right by just pointing the cursor across the map, but also zooming in by moving towards the screen (or zooming back out by moving away). One can imagine how a sniper rifle in a first-person shooter might take advantage of those kinds of controls. [b]Demo 8: First Person Shooting[/b] So, we lied -- not all of the demonstrations were completely crude graphics. For the final demo, the one that most represented how a game might feel with the Revolution controller, Nintendo displayed what was apparently a test by the team at Retro Studios for what they could do with Metroid Prime 3. They stressed it was just a test, quickly thrown together in just a few weeks. For this, the analog control stick peripheral was used. We held it in our left hand to control the forwards, backwards, and side-strafing motions, as well as having access to triggers in back for scanning; meanwhile, the right hand used the main Revolution remote control to behave just like a mouse on a personal computer. It was a very natural application and felt pretty smooth, but since it wasn't a polished game it did feel a bit awkward at times, making us wonder what kind of things a developer could do to calibrate these kinds of controls for users. Nonetheless, the potential is huge for the FPS genre. [/quote]So it looks like all of those people who were screaming "gyroscopes!" were right. From what I can tell from tech demo descriptions, it sort of works like a three-dimensional, in-the-air mouse. There's an A button on the front, and a B trigger on the back, as well as an A and B near the bottom. But I don't know if anyone really called the "remote" thing. A one-handed controller where you can plug in peripherals that will be used in the other hand. The analog stick pictured above is supposedly pre-packaged with the console. Also, if you turn the remote sideways, you end up with a very futuristic-looking NES controller. [center][img]http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/7922/revcont3re.jpg[/img][/center] As far as actual games, very little was shown. There was the Metroid Prime concept demo, and references to other first-party franchises ("Wave the controller around to swing Link's sword" and such), but no actual footage of anything. As for my own opinions, I am certainly surprised. I expected a couple of the features (add-on peripherals, and of course, gyroscopes), but the idea of using what is essentially a two-button remote and add-on peripherals to play games has me boggled. I only have two major concerns: The general lack of buttons on the main controller, and how most third party developers will embrace it. The first one is sort of solved through the add-on peripherals and the fact that you can just plug in a Gamecube controller, though, and Ubisoft, Square Enix, THQ, Konami, EA Games and Sega have apparently given praise to the concept. I will admit that I was skeptical of the Nintendo DS when it was first announced. I thought of the touch screen as incredibly gimmicky, and that it would never be implemented well, but here I am a year later, with four incredible DS games in my posession (Jump Superstars, Nintendogs, Advance Wars: Dual Strike and Meteos), and more upcoming DS games that I want than all other next-generation consoles combined. Through games like Nintendogs, Nintendo has managed to capture new demographics, and if they can pull it off with a touch screen, I would say that they can pull it off with the remote. At the very least, it's more of a revolution than I had expected. EDIT: God damn you, Charles. God damn you to hell.

I watched Lost pretty religiously on TV during its first run. The only one I haven't seen completely is the first one (I had no interest in it before it actually aired- my mom and brother were entranced by it, and I got sucked in as well).. We went out to get the box set today, but my mom decided that $45 at Suncoast was too expensive, so there is no sexy box in my posession yet. I hear that you can see some interesting things in the background, if you watch it frame by frame. [spoiler]People on Penny Arcade forums were saying you could get a very close look at the monsters that attacked the plane if you slow it down a bit.[/spoiler] I doubt I'm going to take the time to do such things, but it would be interesting to see what they've left for the hardcore fans to uncover. I really, really hope they will stop the show when it needs to end, and not milk it for years and years, crippling the show's awesomeness.

I recall reading an article on IGN that had a quote from the writer (Roger Avary, co-writer of Pulp Fiction), and he seemed to be a fan of the Silent Hill games, so hopefully things will remain faithful. They began shooting a while ago, in Canada. A quick Google search turned [url="http://photobucket.com/albums/v299/theatmaweapon/silenthillmovie/"][b]this[/b][/url] out, which are supposedly pictures from the set of the movie (They were linked to on IGN as well). Some guy on some message board said that [url="http://www.resident-evil-community.com/host/shlogo.gif"][b]this image[/b][/url] was released at a recent Konami press conference, and that this is the movie's official logo, but I don't see any credibility in it (it looks nice, yeah, but it could just be a Photoshop). At least Uwe Boll isn't involved, eh?

[quote name='Charles]Remember, it only supports [b]limited[/b'] backwards compatibility. You're only able to play "best-selling" Xbox titles chosen by Microsoft.[/quote] Not only that, but you'll need the hard drive as well. I really hope that Microsoft expands their playable Xbox library as time goes on.. I didn't get in on Xbox this generation, either, and though there aren't that many games I would be interested in purchasing, it would still be nice to skim through the past generation without being confined to first-party titles and best sellers. I was very excited about Xbox 360, up until the dual SKU announcement, and now I'm not so sure. I was always interested in the original Xbox's hard drive inclusion, and enamored by the idea of online game downloads. And now that the hard drive doesn't come with every console, I'm worried that this feature will get less attention than I had hoped. I'll probably wait a bit until after launch to see how things pan out, unless I somehow manage to gather the $510 for console, game and Live subscription by November. But I doubt that will happen.