I think that too much is being made of Alan Wake's graphics. The Resident Evil remake on the Gamecube still has beautiful (pre-rendered) graphics and character animation but there wasn't so much hype over it. Alan Wake's graphics only looks relatively solid in a GTAIV kind of way - there may be set pieces where things look brilliant but it doesn't seem to be consistently Uncharted 2 type amazing in its looks.
Excellent work on the Uncharted series. Please can you get the rights to Crash Bandicoot back and make a proper PS3 sequel to Crash Team Racing?
"I think a hallmark of Nintendo is that we are constantly trying to innovate. I think we would have been embarrassed to do what our competitors are currently doing."
Nothing, except for Super Mario Galaxy, has interested me as much this generation as Bioshock, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Heavy Rain and Alan Wake. Sony and Microsoft have made some mistakes but Nintendo might feel a bit embarassed that their line up isn't half as exciting as in the N64, or even Gamecube...
Are the people who disagreed with me from America? Surely you must realise that Naughty Dog are far more important to Sony than any other studio.
Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is the first and last Insomniac game that I have played. It did nothing for me. I didn't feel that there was anything in there that hadn't been done earlier or better. The rail grinding and enemy fighting, for instance, had been done in Sonic Adventure 2 in 1999. And the futuristic environment felt like a cliche to me. Maybe that's what they were going for but some cliches are better than others for me. I just don't like the art style or characters - th...
I knew that somebody would bring up Bubsy. Bubsy II and Bubsy 3D (neither of which I've played) have their critics but I thought the first game Bubsy the bobcat in claws encounters of the furred kind was pretty good - it seemed heavily inspired by Sonic the hedgehog and the fact that you die from just one hit in a game that makes that one hit sometimes easy to come by can make it initially challenging but it had huge levels and some nice little ideas, speech samples and music I thought.
"Project Natal is meant to complement, not replace, the experiences [for this audience] on Xbox 360.
I'd say that cancelling Rare working on Perfect Dark 2 and Kameo 2 is replacing certain experiences with more mainstream oriented experiences.
I couldn't get in to Portal. No explanation for why I was there or why I should want to get out of there. Twitchy controls. Average/poor graphics (I know that's pretty much a given for puzzle games of this nature though). If I do something here it has an effect there - potentially a great idea but it didn't hook me in because I got confused with why certain things were happening that I hadn't apparently instigated.
In the old days their voice was almost purely their games. I still think that there has never been a more reliably great studio for a console than Rare's output on the N64. But I also think that some people who criticised Perfect Dark Zero couldn't give good reasons why they didn't like it! The game got 80%+ average reviews when it came out. The flaws it had, like poor script, story and voice acting were almost endearing because they were so blatant (maybe I'd love Haze too?). Donkey Kong Cou...
It sounds like the mulitplayer was much better but all the single player game did was give you a taster of different kinds of games - an introduction to a Goldeneye-type dam level, an introduction to a Perfect Dark-type Bladerunner level, an introduction to a Chicago themed level. The single player game wasn't nearly big enough. It had some character in a kind of creepy, goofy, way though. And some of the themes of this game seem to have been taken up by Bioshock to some extent, which made th...
From fresh faced chunk to washed out hunk.
Putting a game exclusively on one console does give the game and the console a certain prestige. For a time at least the game becomes synonomous with the character of the console that it's on. It creates the sense of belonging to a select club and of true ownership (which can encourage fan war of course).
It still leaves questions though. Are they testing what the reaction is to the focussed Xbox version before considering making a slightly more open world PC version? Some peop...
I hope that people's hopes aren't too high because, despite its 5 year development, I've always thought that if it turns out to score anything more than 7/10 it'll be a bonus. You see, I don't think that there haven't been many truly landmark survival horror games of this nature since the first half of the 2000s and it might feel a little antiquated to some people. We know it'll have some atmosphere in parts - it's made by the makers of Max Payne after all and hopefully there may be room for ...
Alone in the dark: the new nightmare used a torch/flashlight to fend off monsters before Luigi's Mansion did. Their heart's in the right place trying to find connections between games but Alone in the dark: the new nightmare is more of the same genre.
This news could mean that Microsoft think that Alan Wake has turned out very well, for them to want to keep it exclusive (at least for a time because there are never any guarantees) to the Xbox360.
If anything, with the Wii, Nintendo possibly copied Sega.
Look at some Wii Sports games - bowling, controlling a character trapped in a bubble. Many of them look inspired by Super Monkey Ball.
The difference with the Wii is that they made Super Monkey Ball-like games without the hardcore difficulty.
The concentration on add on peripherals that the Wii has may have been belatedly inspired by the Dreamcast's many accessories. Nintendo hadn't had such a great...
I think that, for the first time since the NES, Nintendo may be the first company to release a console in the next generation of consoles.
That's because Microsoft have decided to stretch out the life of the Xbox360 by launching Project Natal with its current console, rather than to launch its next console. I also think that this may work out well for Microsoft. They may wait for the buzz around the Super Wii / Wii 2 / whatever it is called to die down and then launch a double threat -...
Although Sega haven't historically given the Playstation their best goods, perhaps because of the Dreamcast's lack of sales being partly due to the impending PS2 launch, it would certainly be better to put it on a Playstation console than an Xbox console. Xbox sales have shown time and time again that many Xbox gamers ignore niche games. The Xbox controller only really feels good with FPS games.
Unfortunately, I think that, even on Playstation, it wouldn't sell greatly and the ...
It doesn't exactly seem representative of what most of the graphics in Fable 3 will be like to use this hand drawn concept painting of a king being waited on hand and foot. As far as I can tell, Fable 3 isn't going to look like Okami generally speaking.
One minute they're calling it like 'all your favourite TV shows', the next as 'cinematic'. Make your mind up Remedy / Microsoft.
All the best horror games that I've played (e.g. Silent Hill series, Resident Evil) have been neither like any TV show I've watched nor any film I've watched. They really are a personal journey. Max Payne did that so the game should hopefully be better than these rather blandly usual pronouncements.
Max Payne 2 may not have been quite a...