Me either, I don't think there's anything wrong with being allowed to wander away from the main quest or objective for a while, it's very relaxing.
I spent hours driving around in GTA IV, I had to go for the "Liberty City Minute" achievement just to get myself to stop messing around in sports cars and actually go and shoot things.
:o :(
Is there any particular reason? N4G might actually see a constructive debate for once!
Thanks for the live blog, I always enjoy these and it's nice to see what certain writers will focus on in the space of twenty word by-the-second updates and what they won't.
Microsoft look like they're about to have a very good year, I hope to reap the benefits! *pats his Elite*
HMV do indeed do used games now, as do Amazon. Seems everyone wants a slice of the GameStop pie.
HMV once gave me a thousand Microsoft Points for pre-ordering Lost Odyssey, bless 'em.
I can't stand retail purchases of videogames nowadays. HMV staff have no clue what they're selling half the damn time and GameStation staff are four miles up their own arses.
GAME seem to have got it fairly right though, their prices are fair without selling us or them short, and their exclusives and trade-ins make them a personal favourite, especially after they took a new copy of GH:Aerosmith off my hands.
I think GTA and Assassin's Creed were really good examples of the scale of environments we can render with today's gaming technology. Assassin's Creed was my personal favourite, as there wasn't anything on a city map that had to "fade in", and there were no Mass Effect-esque texture loading times, which in my opinion really ruined the immersive experience they hyped so much.
Infamous seems to be branching out a lot in the terms of gameplay, though there are indeed some sandbox elements, little bits that will make you explore or re-explore. The "recharge near an electrical source" will be a good way of getting players to move towards areas they would normally ignore in their quest to finish the game's storyline.
Phwoar, these matchups are getting harder and harder to decide on.
Wow. A more blatant WoW clone than I've ever seen. Shameful.
@SL1M DADDY:
Go to GamerNode.com, and go to Jason's column. He doesn't have spots, he's not a nerd, and you can shove that arrogance up your backside with a name like "slim daddy", because last time I checked, you were commenting on a game news aggregator, not a pimp tips forum.
Check out GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, the sequel if you must, Conker's Bad Fur Day, etc. They've made around fifty titles (rough estimate), and a fair few are far from childish. Their kiddygame work is good, but I think that -- like Pixar -- their "kiddy" games have a level of adult humour to them, like the self-aware game characters in Banjo Kazooie titles.
What he said, do your fact-checking. Nintendo have had Final Fantasy from the beginning. Where did you think games like FF and Crystal Chronicles originated? Because I'm fairly sure the PSX wasn't around that long ago.
Teenage sleepovers full of gamers should start recording themselves, I swear I've broken the 40 hour mark at more than one point with only four other people, tops, hehe. All we needed was the release of Super Smash Bros Melee, a GameCube, and a lot of sugar.
This had nothing to do with journalism. You simply talked about how you lived in Washington, and you were replacing a summer vacation with an E3 trip. That and the article was aimed at gamers and the gaming public (hence the "E for All" stuff), which, and I'll let you absorb this one, probably aren't reading this for the absent bits on journalism.
You fail at journalism. Do your research before branding a product a failure.
It's actually the first HHG article I've read that made a fair amount of sense, I agree that if they're never really using that much power, it might be an idea to lower it a little and see if they can dent the mammoth cost of the big black beast.
The actual journalistic skills sadly, are completely absent, but the points he makes are fairly valid, if voiced fairly poorly. I think someone who manages to make gaming sound boring needs to take a step back from writing for a little...
I completely agree. Viva Pinata's great, but the rest just feels so half-arsed.
Good for you for posting a solid opinion on N4G. It's rare someone will do that that isn't HipHopLamer.
As for Fallout and Oblivion, personally I felt Fallout 3 just wasn't really what I could define as sandbox, for some reason. Sure, it ticked all the boxes, but it was just so huge in scope and so easy to play out all 20 levels of your personal progression in one tiny, far-off corner of the map that it felt like one step away from being a true open world.
In WoW it takes hours to run from one end of Azeroth to the other on foot, and it was similar with Fallout 3, just staggering...