Have we jumped the shark as an industry? Halo 4...A new-er PSP, a Wii-U/ipad controller.

I'm just not sold on the 3DS yet, and really can't see where the WiiU is going with their pad other than making angry birds or doing something similar to the GBA link thing the Gamecube had for Crystal Chronicles and Pacman VS.

And Halo 4 seems so tacked on. The story ended just perfect too :(

This is a really good cracked article about it
6 Most Ominous Trends in gaming

The Vita sounds pretty awesome and I love the direction Sony is going with their little ecosystem. I like that I can buy a PS1 classic game on PSN and play it on the PS3, PSP, or Vita no problem. Backwards compatibility for PSP games bought on PSN is a great idea. I just wish I could mail in a UMD and get the PSN version of a PSP game added to my account, but I can see where that could be a bit of a logistical nightmare along with not really financially feasible.

Aliens: Colonial Marines and the new Brothers in Arms games both gave me a serious stiffy.

Darksiders 2 looks and sounds great, but I hope it isn't as buggy as the first one was. Hit a game breaking glitch towards the end of the game, 14+ hours into it. Have to start over from scratch.

Remake of Halo sounds cool as fuck. Should only be $40, too. Hells to the yes. Halo was a pretty solid game but suffers from too many limitations of the era...it'll be great to see that sucker running at a smooth framerate and nice resolution with various continuity tweaks throughout (so maybe Johnson won't die multiple times throughout the game now). Man, I really hope they take this opportunity to fix the Library.

> Man, I really hope they take this
> opportunity to fix the Library.

Me too. Though unfortunately it seems more likely they're going to spend all of their effort on new visuals and online multiplayer (unless they just crib the lanplay from the PC port)

-nZero

Between the job,wife and kid, i get about a couple of hours a week with my PS3. Gone are the good ol' 4-6 hour gaming days. Ninja Gaiden Isgma 2 took me two weeks to finish...something that wouldn't take more than 2 days :P

Personally I agree with you. I also don't have nearly enough time as I used to to devote to gaming. (took me about 3-4 months to finish Fallout NV)
I'm a PC gamer though, haven't had a console since the N64, but I like following the trends in the industry and what not, but this year, I wasn't really blasted back by anything.
The Vita seems like a predictable evolution of the PSP, nothing groundbraking.
The Wii U seems like a pretty tacked on gimmick, more than the original Wii. They said this "Project Cafe" was supposed to get back some of the "hardcore" gamers that were turned off from the wii, but High-res gfx (which were not even marketed/mentioned to any extent) don't do that, a solid library of non-casual titles does that.
The excessive focus that was put on the motion controllers was also annoying, it just seemed to overhype the same casual trend that came with the Wii.
And I reffer to Something Awful to convey some of my thoughts on the general gameplay trends that are becoming way too prevalent nowadays: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/video-game-article/e3-microsoft-rails.php
The latest Call of Duty was one of the highest selling games ever, and I distinctively remember the first level, and the possibility of completing it by only firing ONCE. So as long as the rest of the people keep feeding this kind of shit with their hard earned money, it's not going away.

Alas, I agree with the point raised in the article you linked, the gaming industry doens't really seem to know where it's going creatively. They've got the money-making schemes down, but the gameplay innovations and REAL interactivity are still a haze. If we can have another 2 generations of consoles down the line, maybe then we'll see some really good and new projects come up.

All work and no play makes me..., well, you know the rest.

Kinect integration seems to be done right, useful for skipping lots of menu navigation, but not intrusive for the hardcore player. Also head tracking is a awesome idea for a racing game.

But i'm a sucker for racing games. I don't have much time to play nowdays, but i'm doing a third season of F1 2010 and playing Shift2:Unleashed (i'm at GT3 level). And so far i've been enjoying both of them.

One thing that i don't like is the "social" aspects of gaming, integrating social parts like clubs, teammates, rivals, etc, seems totally unnecessary to me, i may be the minority here, but i'm not a big fan of online playing. I like to have full featured good offline (single-player) games. If i want to multi-player, i would rather do split screen or something.

--
The Wii U seems like a gimmick, and i can't see a real use for the tablet-like controller.

No opinion on any of the Sony stuff. I never even had a PS2, never played a PS3 or a PSP, so i can't comment on that.

> Have we jumped the shark as an industry? Halo 4...A new-er PSP, a Wii-U/ipad
> controller.
>
> I'm just not sold on the 3DS yet, and really can't see where the WiiU is going
> with their pad other than making angry birds or doing something similar to the
> GBA link thing the Gamecube had for Crystal Chronicles and Pacman VS.
>
> And Halo 4 seems so tacked on. The story ended just perfect too :(
>
> This is a really good cracked article about it
> 6 Most Ominous Trends in gaming
>

If only sony would stop changing fucking memory cards every time they release something:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/14/sony-playstation-vitas-removable-memory-looks-like-an-sd-card/

I won't be buying a vita any time soon... but this is a definite discouragement when I already have plenty of 8/16gb memory cards made by sony that would work just the same.



> The Vita sounds pretty awesome and I love the direction Sony is going with their
> little ecosystem. I like that I can buy a PS1 classic game on PSN and play it on
> the PS3, PSP, or Vita no problem. Backwards compatibility for PSP games bought
> on PSN is a great idea. I just wish I could mail in a UMD and get the PSN
> version of a PSP game added to my account, but I can see where that could be a
> bit of a logistical nightmare along with not really financially feasible.
>
> Aliens: Colonial Marines and the new Brothers in Arms games both gave me a
> serious stiffy.
>
> Darksiders 2 looks and sounds great, but I hope it isn't as buggy as the first
> one was. Hit a game breaking glitch towards the end of the game, 14+ hours into
> it. Have to start over from scratch.
>
> Remake of Halo sounds cool as fuck. Should only be $40, too. Hells to the yes.
> Halo was a pretty solid game but suffers from too many limitations of the
> era...it'll be great to see that sucker running at a smooth framerate and nice
> resolution with various continuity tweaks throughout (so maybe Johnson won't die
> multiple times throughout the game now). Man, I really hope they take this
> opportunity to fix the Library.
>

I thought Sony did well this year. The PS Vita looks great, and they had a nice line up of games to promote it with. In fact, other than the recent hack, Sony has been doing much better with their system over the last couple of years. The way they handle their PS One classics, being on the PS3 & PSP, and now PSVita is excellent, along with the ability to transfer saves and visual options. Not to mention most games are reasonably priced. I wish I could say the same for the Virtual Console, though. The lack of features and stretched images is frustrating on today's TV's.

As far as Nintendo goes, the Wii U announcement hardly revealed any hardware details, so I have no idea how it will stand up to the competition. The multiplatform launch titles will probably be in line with the 360/PS3. Whether or not the hardware will be more powerful, it'll fall inline with the lowest common denominator of consoles. But by E3 next year, we'll probably have heard about Microsoft's new console, and if it surpasses Wii U's power by a large amount, Nintendo might be in some trouble.

The 3DS has yet to interest me. Nintendo's first party games are always great, but I preferred the PSP over the DS Lite in respect to its functionality (not games, though), like music and videos, and PSOne classic support. I'm tired of the gimmicky features that nintendo offers. They can't get rid of the 2 screens because of DS support, so they're stuck with the old design. Given that the PS Vita is 249, something will have to change with the 3DS before it hits shelves.

Microsoft's focus is all on the Kinect. We'll see how it turns out, but i doubt it'll be fully utilized until next-gen anyway. Halo anniversary looks great. I still play the original from time to time, and it still holds up well even today. I just wish it was coming to the PC as well.

Farcry 3 announcement was nice to hear. I loved the sandbox gameplay of farcry 2, even though the rest of the game was flawed. Uncharted 3 looks excellent again. I've never been big on the Action RPG games, but Skyrim looks amazing.

> If only sony would stop changing fucking memory cards every time they release
> something:
>
http://www.engadg> et.com/2011/06/14/sony-playstation-vitas-removable-memory-looks-like-an-sd-card/
>
> I won't be buying a vita any time soon... but this is a definite discouragement
> when I already have plenty of 8/16gb memory cards made by sony that would work
> just the same.
>
>
I was hoping they'd stop with the proprietary shit and just adopt the MicroSD card like every one else. Disappointing to say the least.

changing up the storage medium isn't really much a problem since it's really just a one time purchase and you can easily transfer all of your old stuff right to it via PSN. I like that I can keep my old memorystick duo in my old PSP (where it's loaded up with stuff already like emulators and whatnot) while I'll be able to have a separate solution for the vita that contains my new games + whatever I download off of PSN.

Oh and Grandia and Wild Arms are going on there FO SHO.

I always said that if they implemented head tracking with the kinect for a racing game, I would buy the stupid peripheral. I didn't think anyone would actually do it because I didn't think the device was capable of the necessary resolution, but it sounds like they pulled it off and it's awesome.

About damn time this stuff started getting introduced to the mainstream and on consoles. Fuck, I really hope it catches on. It's really the one area where I think the kinect totally outshines every other motion peripheral.

> Kinect integration seems to be done right, useful for skipping lots of menu
> navigation, but not intrusive for the hardcore player. Also head tracking is a
> awesome idea for a racing game.
>
> But i'm a sucker for racing games. I don't have much time to play nowdays, but
> i'm doing a third season of F1 2010 and playing Shift2:Unleashed (i'm at GT3
> level). And so far i've been enjoying both of them.
>
> One thing that i don't like is the "social" aspects of gaming, integrating
> social parts like clubs, teammates, rivals, etc, seems totally unnecessary to
> me, i may be the minority here, but i'm not a big fan of online playing. I like
> to have full featured good offline (single-player) games. If i want to
> multi-player, i would rather do split screen or something.
>
> --
> The Wii U seems like a gimmick, and i can't see a real use for the tablet-like
> controller.
>
> No opinion on any of the Sony stuff. I never even had a PS2, never played a PS3
> or a PSP, so i can't comment on that.
>
> > Have we jumped the shark as an industry? Halo 4...A new-er PSP, a Wii-U/ipad
> > controller.
> >
> > I'm just not sold on the 3DS yet, and really can't see where the WiiU is going
> > with their pad other than making angry birds or doing something similar to the
> > GBA link thing the Gamecube had for Crystal Chronicles and Pacman VS.
> >
> > And Halo 4 seems so tacked on. The story ended just perfect too :(
> >
> > This is a really good cracked article about it
> > 6 Most Ominous Trends in gaming
> >
>

Well for the 3DS it made me happy to see it's just the beginning of a fantastic year starting Sunday finally with Zelda. 3rd parties though I'd like to learn more as I know things are coming because it sucks if Nintendo just carries it.

Wii...kirby, zelda...voltron?(if it doesn't suck) otherwise dead.

PS3 and 360 going strong, PS3 in particular has some insane shit coming this year (Ico/SotC, Uncharted 3, etc) including them bailing on PSP hard with HD versions of MGS Peacewalker and both God of War games on 1 disc.

And well the Wii U which I know little tidbits more about and it appears it could be fantastic, hardware wise it's over what's out there now by a good little jump. It is going to need to sell itself on third parties and get back people pissed at Wii for giving em the finger for granny. They'll also need to sell the ipad type stylus and control pad in one set too.

Vita...hard to say, but they're not making a good impression with expensive memory cards to save games to when they already got memory cards with games(hmm 3DS doesn't make you have more stuff to save, it came with the card.) And also, PSN psp stuff supposedly Sony of Japan it saying will not work on the new device which is a slap too. I sold my PSP but the licenses I still have mean nothing because I can't re-download to vita so that hurts my interest.



Billy Connolly - Statement of the Century
"If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, how come they can't have a headache and sex at the same time ?"

I typically replace my portable with a new one... I don't like having multiples. Hell, who am I kidding though... I lent my PSP out to a friend to deploy for a year because I don't use it that much anymore... so really it's all moot huh

> changing up the storage medium isn't really much a problem since it's really
> just a one time purchase and you can easily transfer all of your old stuff right
> to it via PSN. I like that I can keep my old memorystick duo in my old PSP
> (where it's loaded up with stuff already like emulators and whatnot) while I'll
> be able to have a separate solution for the vita that contains my new games +
> whatever I download off of PSN.
>
> Oh and Grandia and Wild Arms are going on there FO SHO.
>