Watch that video, it blows my mind. This surface computer could be the next big thing (not sure about hunching over a table for more than 10 minutes, but they'll figure it out...) Anyways, it isn't really cost effective for the home just yet (kind of like the PS3 eh Ken?) Anyways, the reason I'm posting this here is because the gaming possibilities are pretty interesting here. People on the dtoid forums are already talking about how great an RTS would be on the surface, no to mention Pong. I think this is a truly huge leap technologically and that it will probably change the way we compute in the future. Props to Msoft, a rare thing for me to say but man, that is bad! (in the best way possible)
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The most innovative thing out of Microsoft - ever.
Piqued interest: Pollen Sonata
4colourrebellion has opened my eyes to many things. Indie developers are one of them, in fact I think it's safe to say that these guys are all about Independents within multiple industries. Anyways, it IS a Nintendo fan site and so every now and then the worlds collide and an Indie developer is looking to develop for Wii or DS. Judging from the video I think the objective is to get the boy and girl together. You do this by controlling a pollen particle in what seems to be a Dewy's Adventure type gameplay style. A very intriguing video, great presentation, sentimental music, and seems pretty innovative in terms of story and gameplay (I think the wind is a variable here). Looking forward to it.
Monday, May 28, 2007
PS3 dies as MGS4 makes it's way to the 360, wii?
Pascuzzi try to be strong. Destructoid is reporting that Konami will be bringing the PS3's biggest exclusive to the 360, but also might be planning a Metal Gear game for Wii. Could my dream game: Raiden as Ninja on Wii, actually be coming? they'd be smart if it did. Hit the link, I'm pretty sure Ron Workman (writter of the original post) Works at microsoft (gaming division) so his seems pretty reliable, but no major news outlets are covering it. We'll probably have to wait for e3 to learn anything factual, that is if Kojima doesn't outright deny this tomorrow morning. Sorry if I scared you Pascuzzi, but would you really be surprised?
Friday, May 25, 2007
Geometry War coming to Nintendo platforms!
First Look at FF:Crystal Chronicles on the Wii UPDATED
As Promised Square has released the super short 'teaser' they showed at they're recent media event. The game has that same epic feel as all other Final Fantasy games and I'm really impressed by the change in art style. It definitely caters to a more mature audience artistically. While it is just a short look I can tell that there will be some great animation, special effects and some very detailed environments. But I can't help thinking that character models look a bit flat? probably just the lighting in the scenes. So why are you still here and NOT WATCHING THIS!?
UPDATE: Watch youTube version after the jump! (sorry about the lack of sound)
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Amazing new Rayman 2 teaser
Here is the beginning of my post.
As much as most of you probably hate Ubisoft for turning the Wii into a port box early on in it's life, you have to admit that Rayman: Raving Rabbids was a pretty entertaining game. The humour is some of the strongest in the industry (most in game humour comes off as cheesey or lame to me)and a sequel is definitely welcome, so long as they keep it fresh. Enjoy the Transformers spoof.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
DOXOPhobia First Impressions: Halo 3 Beta
Ready the man canon, I've got your first look at the Halo 3 multiplayer beta for this DOXOPhobia feature! New looks, new matchmaking, new weapons, same Halo gameplay!
Without any doubt Halo and Halo 2 defined the first-person shooter genre on a massive scale. On top of that Bungie hit the nail on the head when they decided to put Halo 2 on Xbox Live, which is now held under high regard with games like Counter-Strike, made by Half Life's Valve. Halo 2's matchmaking is one of the best around, the party up system has been copied, but never duplicated. So who else to actually improve on this method then Microsoft's own Bungie Studios, is it possible to make a great thing even better? Let's find out.
I'm going to start with the most important aspect of this beta. Halo 2's matchmaking is one of the greats, developers have tried to use the same method and improve on it, but haven't come close to what Bungie has done. In the Halo 3 beta, Bungie has revamped matchmaking. It's more customizable to make your Halo 3 online experience the best it can possibly be. If you're not to particular about people not being able to speak your language, you can change the settings so only people who can speak your language will be in your game. Want to play a game without having to worry about people pwning you? Change the settings so games can only be set with people at your level or close to it. This doesn't really apply to ranked matches per say, but in a social (training) match, you might want to consider this setting, since a training game will party any player searching for that game in Halo 3. Bungie has gone the extra step by adding in the new (and much awaited) "shut up button". No longer will little 12 year old brats or people who blast their tunes be a nuisance. You can easily mute these players during a game and it's done in less then a few seconds. While in a game, bring up the player's list, select the players' gamertag and press the X button, voila! That player is muted. Subtle things like this, make matchmaking an even better and more enjoyable experience.
Since this is a beta, the games types and the various games available are limited. I won't bore you with what we already know from Halo 2, but some new features in Halo 3 are, for the most part, found in Team Skirmish. The game types like territories, have been reworked to make it more of an attack and defend scenario. In the previous territories game type, a player would go and capture a specific key area on a map and gain time by defending it. Players from the other team can easily come in and take that back by killing player defending it. In Halo 3 this has changed, the attacking team has has 5 specific areas in which to capture. Once the attacking team has taken an area, the defending team can NOT take it back. Each team has two tries at capturing the 5 territories. At the end of the game the winner is judged by tallying how many territories you've captured, total.
A game type new to the Halo universe is VIP. Where one player on each team respawns as the VIP with an over charged shield. The opposing team must kill the VIP to get a point, once the VIP is dead, the next player to die after that is the new VIP. The game's limit is 10 and can only be found in Team Skirmish.
Everything else is pretty similar in the respect of game types. Halo wouldn't be Halo without their "specialty" games. In ranked matches unless it's an original game, meaning if it's a regular Team Slayer game, a game type of "Shotty Snipers" or Team Rockets will only go up to 25, as opposed to 50 in regular Slayer. Another sublte change to the game types is in Rumble Pit is instead of 8 players they reduced the limit by 2, to a total of 6 players. Like in Halo 2 you still cannot bring a party in a ranked Rumble Pit game, that about sums up the changes to Halo 3's matchmaking service. Keep in mind this is only the beat and changes can still be made.
A lot of people have been complaining about the graphics of the beta, saying they look just like Halo 2 and well, they do. Halo 3 wouldn't be true to the Halo universe if it had Gears of War graphics, it still keeps the Halo aesthetics, but at the same time improving on detail on the maps, weapons, explosions and the spartans. Everything in Halo 3 has a new shine to it, maps in the multiplayer, have an immense amount of details put in them. In Halo 2 things were flat and very square. In Halo 3 there's a lot more detail put in each maps from flowers in the grass, to leaves falling from trees. There's added physics to the game making it much more smoother to play, jumping and tossing a grenade never felt so good. A new addition to the physics would be the water in the game, yes I said the water. If you die and your things end up in the water, your guns and equipment along with your body will float down stream. Explosions have added effects to make it look even better, the weapons from the BR to the Rocket Launcher have all new animations for the shooting and reloading.
Sound is the same for the most part, everything sounds a lot beefier, explosions are louder and can be easily heard from across the map. Which brings me to the depth of the sound in H3. In Halo 2 you were able to hear shots being fired and if you were decent enough you were able to find out where it was coming from. In Halo 3, sound has some serious depth to it, you can still hear the gun fire, but pending where you are from the gun fire you can tell it's far away or very close.
There are some new additions specific for Halo 3. A major advancement to this is the equipment. You can pick up things like a Portable Grav-Boost, Bubble Shield, Trip Mine or a Power Drainer. The portable grav-boost is exactly what it says, you pick this up and if you wanna hop over a wall or get to a specific high spot, plop this down and fly high! The bubble shield is my personal favourite new piece of equipment, you drop this grenade into the ground and a shield comes up and protects you from any sort of projectile coming your way. Be warned that players can walk through the shield forcing a hand to hand combat situation. The power drainer will take out a players shield (friend or foe) and temporarily stall vehicles. Lastly, the trip mine is placed on the ground and mainly used against vehicles, if a vehicle goes over this puppy, consider that vehicle destroyed. Careful though, the trip mine goes by proximity. With this new equipment in place the default controls has changed a bit, H2 players will consider this a major change. To drop the equipment you have to press the X button which replaces the reload button. RB is now your button for reloading, entering/exiting vehicles and picking up weapons.
Bungie didn't have much to improve on for Halo 3 except campaign, but that has yet to be seen. For what Bungie has done for this beta has well surpassed what people have said in reference to graphics, if they still say they look EXACTLY like H2 then you know they haven't played or seen the beta on TV. It seems like Bungie has done it again, lets just hope the campaign is just as strong as the multiplayer.
Smash Bros. Site goes live, reveals little.
After an anti-climactic countdown reached '0' (and some would say -1) the site went live, but only a portion of it is running. There are a few new screenshots, and some interesting musical information. Hit the jump for more of my almost baseless speculation...
When coming onto the site you'll notice that there are many links that are not available to us yet. I would assume that Nintendo will be blowing the lid off of Brawl (as well as Metroid 3) today and that the site will be filled in soon. Interestingly if you look at the 'how to play' link the graphic they chose to use was a Wii remote on its side. Now they had said that the game was going to use gamecube/classic controllers. I never really thought Nintendo would let them do this, considering they want to push their own innovations. So could we be playing Smash Bros. with the remote in classic position? Could be, but I hope not.
Another thing I wasn't too excited about, but many may find interesting is the composer list they put up. It's an impressive list, thats for sure:Akihiro Honda
(Konami Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd.)Metal Gear Solid 4
Guns Of The Patriots /
Metal Gear Solid Portable OPS Arata Iiyoshi Pokémon Mystery Dungeon /
beatmania II DX Asuka Ohta (Nintendo) New Super Mario Bros. /
Yoshi Touch&Go Hajime Wakai (Nintendo) Pikmin series / Star Fox series Jun Fukuda
(grasshopper manufacture inc.)killer7 / contact Kazumi Totaka (Nintendo) Animal Crossing series /
Yoshi series Keigo Ozaki
(GAME ARTS Co.,Ltd.)PROJECT SYLPHEED Kenichi Okuma Melty Lancer series /
Welcome to Pia Carrot!! 3 Kenji Ito ROMANCING SAGA series /
CULDCEPT SAGA Kenji Yamamoto (Nintendo) Super Metroid /
Metroid Prime series Kentaro Ishizaka
(HAL Laboratory, Inc.)- Koji Hayama Cho Aniki / Ape Escape 2 Koji Kondo (Nintendo) Super Mario Bros. series /
The Legend of Zelda series Masaaki Iwasaki MOTHER3 / Chelnov (Genesis) Masafumi Takada
(grasshopper manufacture inc.)killer7 / GOD HAND Masato Kouda Monster Hunter / Devil May Cry Michiko Naruke Wild Arms series Minako Hamano (Nintendo) Metroid Fusion Motoi Sakuraba Golden Sun series /
Mario Golf & Tennis series Noriyuki Iwadare GRANDIA series Ryoji Yoshitomi (Nintendo) WarioWare, Inc. : Mega Microgame$! Seiji Momoi METEOS / The Glory of Hercules III - The Silence of Gods Shogo Sakai
(HAL Laboratory, Inc.)Super Smash Bros. Melee /
MOTHER3 Shota Kageyama Luminous Arc Takahiro Nishi
(GAME ARTS Co.,Ltd.)GRANDIA series /
PROJECT SYLPHEED Tomoko Sasaki (TOKIOHEIDI) NiGHTS Toru Minegishi (Nintendo) The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Toshiyuki Sudo (Nintendo) Everybody Votes Channel Tsukasa Masuko Star Force / Magical Starsign Yasufumi Fukuda Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 Yasunori Mitsuda
(PROCYON STUDIO CO., LTD.)CHRONO TRIGGER / XENOGEARS Yoko Shimomura Kingdom Hearts series Yuka Tsujiyoko Fire Emblem series Yusuke Takahama
(TARGET ENTERTAINMENT INC.)Digital Pinball series Yutaka Iraha
(GAME ARTS Co.,Ltd.)SYLPHEED series Yuzo Koshiro (ANCIENT) ActRaiser / Street of Rage
What I DO find interesting though is the possible teasers within the list here. It's obvious that Akihiro Honda who worked on MGS4 is working on the music that surrounds Snake. Probably his theme as well as the music for the Metal Gear themed levels. Now, take a look at that list- there are a ton of well known series being covered. Anybody see anything that could mean new characters? I've read that Yuzo Koshiro did the original Sonic music (not sure why they wouldn't include that here) so could it be that Sonic IS making an appearance?
The Composer for 'Chrono Trigger' is listed. Do I think Crono will be in the game? no. Do I wish that he was? yes. Also note that the 'Fire Emblem' composer is listed and so maybe Marth and whats his name do come back. NiGHTs is on the list, hope he isn't in the game though. I don't want this to turn into a total advertisement (NiGHTS never appeared on a Nintendo console until now, with Wii) Also some of Grasshoppers composers, could Viewtiful Joe be making an appearance? That could be pretty cool but do all these relatively new characters belong with the classic Nintendo characters?
Monday, May 21, 2007
DOXOreview: Spider-Man 3 (Wii)
I'm just going to come out and say it, there isn't much good about this game. It was clearly a rushed effort and the final product...well I wouldn't go so far as to call it final, considering it isn't finished. The game makes it obvious that publishers were consumed by the black symbiote themselves, and by Symbiote I mean profit. Hit the jump for the full review.
Aesthetics 2/5
Unfortunately this game looks like an awful mess. Plain and simple Vicarious Visions was rushed to get this game out in time with the movie, as was Trey Arch in fact, and over all most versions, save for the DS, have suffered greatly. With that said the time limit is still little excuse for just how terribly unfinished this game is. Why not delay until the DVD release? I know the sales may not be as impressive but, call me old fashioned, I like buying games that are finished. The big problem with the graphics is the …well, just about everything is bad. While some of spidey’s animations are fluid but the environments make this one good aspect forgettable. The city is flat, to say the least. Textures, while remaining crisp even close up are none too inspiring. The buildings look like cardboard models, its horribly primitive. The worst thing about the city is that the textures disappear and things aren’t always drawn before we can see them…Yes, that means that buildings suddenly pop up. The game is clearly not finished.
Sound: 1/5
The game is about as aurally impressive as it is visually. There is nothing really worth hearing, Tobey’s delivery of Spidey’s quips seem even worse this time around and things are overall very repetitive. One interesting quirk I found was that I would sometimes save women with voices that changed after I put them down, occasionally even to a man. Its pretty bizarre. The sound effects are bland, but the classic ‘thwip’ of the webbing coming out of the remote is a nice touch. Music seems to sporadically come in and out just like it did in spider-man 2.
Gameplay: 2/5
One of the only satisfying things this game offers (if not ‘the only’) is the swing mechanic. I have to say that it works pretty well and the motion control feels really natural. This isn’t to say there is no learning curve, no, it’s a pretty steep climb but after about 20 minutes you’ll get the hang of it. Unfortunately though, this one aspect of gameplay doesn’t make up for the awful combat system. Total wag fest, I felt like I was tempting a dog to fetch the whole time. Motion does nothing to help the combat, it actually seems rather unintuitive and becomes more of a mini game where you have to get your timing right, just not good. There isn’t that wide a variety of combo’s either which makes fighting all the more boring. I think if they had implemented a fighting engine much like that of the Godfather: Blackhand Edition it would have been much more successful. Webbing is actually pretty tight during combat the motion control works well (bring hands up to fling somebody over your shoulder), but the variation just isn’t there to keep you interested. The nunchuck controlled camera seems like it could use a whole truck load of revision. Dodging is also handled by the nun chuck , when your spider sense goes off give it a quick flick, you’d think it would work well but leaves much to be desired. I would have liked to the direction of the flick play a role in the dodging, as it is any direction will trigger the same dodge which is dependant on the analog stick. Sloppy. The cineractives (interactive cut scenes ala RE4) stunk horribly of after thought. Not one of these ‘mini games’ offered an intense moment of anticipation like RE4 or GoW, in fact they were often too short to pose any sort of challenge and the fact that motion was involved just felt uncomfortable, luckily the motions were recognized rather well. You would think that I would talk about the black suit but frankly, I never really used it. It makes you stronger, supposedly fast and requires going through another of those cineractives to take off…maybe that’s why I never used it. Truth be told the suit made combat slightly less of a chore and I think that’s mostly due to the fact that fights are over faster when in the suit and in this game, the less time you spend fighting the better. Another couple things that annoyed me was the fact that there was no sprint button was an awful oversight, running and climbing was really slow and this would have helped immensely. Spider-sense seemed somewhat ignored, sure it flashes above your head prompting you to pump the nunchuck but its hardly intuitive, why no slow-mo? That was a great mechanic in Spider-Man 2 and the 360/PS3 version of the game. Missions were few and far between, and there was little variation.
Immersion: 1/5
While swinging around does feel pretty good the graphics just aren’t convincing, I’m no HD junky but I don’t like my cityscapes disappearing. Further more the story is just an awful mess- I know what your thinking - I loved the movie- this is not the movie, this isn’t even X3. The game borrows little from the movie and instead focuses mostly on the Lizard, Morbius and Shriek which I wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t for the dumbed down presentation and rushed story telling. The game is short and so not much gets developed making it all feel like missions rather than a living narrative. The cut scenes are terrible. Some of them are comprised of 360/ps3 in-engine (And actually are taken right from the other games) while some were created by Vicarious Visions. This doesn’t SEEM too bad since it’s true that both games do follow the movie but also that both games have unique story lines as well. Well it IS bad, the difference in artistic design is jarring, so much so that it begins to cheapen the integrity of the product, and just takes you out of the story (just as if they had cast two actors for each role in a movie and played half with one cast and the other half with the others.) What’s worse is that Vicarious’ cinematics were less impressive than the 360/PS3 in game stuff (though I did like their rendition of venom over Treyarch’s) The voice overs added very little to the game despite some of the actors lending their talents, or rather, what was left of it after doing the movie. It seemed that the actors really weren’t too concerned with the game, voice acting was almost lifeless at times and often cheesy. The lines were also FAR too repetitive, and the longer the fight, the more you notice all three of those lines aren’t funny after the 400th time (heck after the first time they aren’t funny). I found myself playing through the game not because I was interested in it but rather because I am such a huge spider-man fan, and that I should play it. It was almost a chore., though swinging feels pretty good after a long day at work.
Recommendations:
If you just need to be spider-man I’d highly recommend Spider-Man 2 or even the 360/PS3 version over this. Alternatively I hear Crackdown is a pretty fun sandbox game with some super hero elements.
Bottom Line:
The Symbiote has obviously corrupt Vicarious Visions, they pull an Eddie Brock in trying to play this off as a real game.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
The heavenly, heavenly sword videos
SURE maybe i could of picked a better title for this post, but I just woke up and well....if you find it funny then ur into cheesy humour. Anywho As i was looking through games presented at the sony gamers day was a few days ago and in my searching on ign.com I found some Heavenly Sword video footage of the game at Gamers Day. I have never played the game and i most likly will never play it before it comes out but wow these videos look amazing the combat system looks really kool. The main character Nariko has a great voice actor and the animations look very smooth. The games been quoted at the "goddess of war" so lets see if it will stand up to that hype. I sure hope it does PS3 needs a strong exclusive like this.
And here is the rest of it. HA HA HA made u look!
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