Well, even that was just following what they'd tested with the DS - control rather than graphics. With the Dreamcast you had different kinds of control thanks to its peripherals AND undoubtedly the best graphics of the time.
"The goal of Alan Wake is create an intense experience for the player, and though 'psychological thriller' might not be a genre we are used to applying to games, Alan Wake is definitely not something you've experienced before."
I think anyone with a brain knows that we'll probably have played 'something' like it before. If they are implying that your enemies will be as much in your own brain as externally then there will be similarities to Max Payne and, maybe, Silent...
darkride66, I'm happy to enter in to a debate. First of all I just want to address a few other things:
Hiroshi Yamauchi spoke some sense as far as I'm concerned. He said that online gaming isn't important to customers. Remember when online gaming was first fully launched with the Dreamcast? There's no doubt that the Dreamcast is fantastic and it was worth putting online in to secure its place in history alone but it didn't seem to help to make that console sell enough did it? T...
Well the original Xbox was just an entry level PC in a huge box. I'm still ashamed to have that hulk of American 'engineering' in my house. No matter how nice some of the games looked, they weren't significantly better looking enough than the Dreamcast to warrant such a huge machine - and they certainly weren't as innovative. It was all puffed up 'macho' (ha) rubbish.
They did things better with the Xbox360 (apart from the RROD) though. But give me the elegance of Japanese cons...
Nintendo are on rocky ground when talking about no suprises. Most of their own surprises seem to come from teams lead by just 1 man- Miyamoto. The Wii is a Gamecube version 1.5 (and arguably not as good as the Gamecube in some respects e.g the proprietary discs of the Cube were more distinctive). Other consoles e.g. the Dreamcast and PS2 had already tested party gaming and more custom-made peripherals.
Why is there a picture of Resident Evil 4 in that article but it's not one of the 7 choices themselves?
Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast is game of the decade for timeless graphics and gameplay for me. It epitomises not only Sega's brilliance at an arcade feel but also their capacity for surpising depth.
I wish that some theme park would build a custom-designed rollercoaster or dark ride around a videogame character.
Really I wish that there was a whole theme park with custom designed rides of videogame characters but I don't think that it's going to happen. If it was ever seriously going to happen they'd have started planning it in the early to mid 1990s when gaming really entered the mainstream.
The reason that various sites are comparing these 2 games is not because they think that they are of exactly the same genre. It's because, if you like a game that has the hallmarks of Heavy Rain, the closest equivalent that you will get on the Xbox 360 is Alan Wake and if you like Alan Wake the closest equivalent that you will get on the PS3 is Heavy Rain.
They are both mysteries of a kind- modern 'throwbacks' to point and click and old school survival horror.
Let's take off some rose tinted glasses for a second as I have recently played the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure.
The game is often better to look at than to play. The most famous sequence is probably when the killer whale jumps over the pier. That whole part is essentially on rails. No doubt some of the graphics were very good for the time - a great tech demo for stores - although the technique of drawing some background scenes in as you travel does look dated now.
I never played Kid Icarus. Back when the NES was belatedly launched in the UK many gamers were enjoying the brilliant graphics of the Amiga and couldn't understand why shops were charging the same price (£40) for a NES cartridge as they were for a much better loooking Megadrive game. It still doesn't make sense other than confidence in Nintendo's worldwide market share at the time.
If Kid Icarus is a bit like the Metroid series then it makes sense to give it to Retro Studi...
It probably all started going Pete Tong around 1996 when the Playstation was released with Lara Croft's mahoonas.
More internet use meant that the expected angle of a review morphed. In to what I cannot in all preciseness say.
Then Sega stopped making consoles in 2001 and the Xbox was launched with its uber-masculine marketing. The journalism followed.
The early to mid 1990s seemed to have a certain charming irreverentness as the 16 bit age saw gam...
Sarah Palin as Cat Woman? No.
Mirror's Edge immediately came to mind. What about Max Payne 2? You have to clamber on top of an exploded lift.
Is it as good as Crash Team Racing on the PS1 though? Unless it has a proper hub world connecting the races, the answer is probably no.
'I mean, some of you are still screaming that Super Mario Galaxy doesn't deserve it's spot at the top, and I can empathise with you.'
No, no-one's screaming that since you didn't put it at the top spot or on ANY spot.
I think that Super Mario Bros 3 over-rated so I'm not bothered about not seeing that there but I think that Super Mario World should be there.
What about Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins?
At the end of this day, thi...
The reason that Heavy Rain and Alan Wake are being compared is probably because both games are mysterious looking with the strength of the story being quite important. Also, although they may not be the same genre, they remind us of genres in previous generations that there are no good examples of in this generation.
i.e. Heavy Rain may be a bit like Shenmue and Alan Wake may be the closest we'll get to that old fashioned, uncluttered, feel of survival horror this generation.
I'm trying and failing to work out what would have been in this for Sega. Anyone who wanted to keep playing their Dreamcast games would surely rather do it on the elegant looking Dreamcast than the bulky Xbox. The Xbox ended up getting some great Sega games, e.g. Jet Set Radio Future and Outrun 2 (and Artoon, composed of ex-Sega employees, created Blinx The Time Sweeper). The Xbox too believed in the potential of online play and used off the shelf PC parts. But Microsoft weren't completely in...
That's brilliant Somipotent. So if they use the degrees in a triangle instead of in a circle for the next Xbox what do you get? - Xbox 180. But that sounds less than the Xbox 360 so add a O in and you get Xbox 1080.
I doubt that the next Xbox will be called the 'Xbox 720'.
I understand why people say it. Bits used to double- Playstation had 32 bits, Nintendo 64, the next generation 128.
The number '360' was probably chosen for a few reasons. The first number puts it on a par with PS3 whereas 'Xbox 2' would have seemed to put it behind. As it's the number of degrees in a circle, it also suggests a revolution (coincidentally the codename of the Wii). And a circle suggests a gl...
Devil May Cry 4 had something like a 25 minute install I think and there are a few other games that require the same.
Heavy Rain looks great yes. But I'm sure that if Sega had still being making consoles they could have got that game running on a much smaller machine and looking just as good, with or without Blu Ray.