Atari CEO harshly criticizes Sony over PSP – Jun. 9, 2004
Interesting read. Bonnell thinks the PSP is going to cost $500. But he seems to be just guessing. Still he makes a lot of good points about how many things we really don’t know about the unit.
Does this make my determination to buy one waver in the least? Nope. I HAVE TO HAVE ONE! /drool
I picked up EyeToy Groove the other day and just gave it a brief workout. Looks like it’ll be fun. It’s pretty much what you probably expect: DDR played with your arms and body.
I like DDR but I don’t think my downstairs neighbors like it much, so this’ll be a nice change when I just feel like jumping around looking silly now and then. It certainly doesn’t give the cardio workout that DDR does, but after not too long my arms were in fact tired.
The only real negative I see so far is that the songs take a long time to load and there’s a lot of Yes/No menu questions between them, which really breaks up the rthym. And other little dumb featurs are missed, like it asks for your name to put in the high score list….every time you make a high score. It should just default to the last name that you entered, y’know? So little kinda polish things weaken it a bit.
I’ll have to drag a kidlet down and play some multiplayer and see how that goes.
Still, its pretty much what I expected, and I’m content. Really looking forward to the second generation EyeToy stuff, though, like that hoverboard game!
I finally fired this up last night, with Carmina (a dedicated Onimusha fan…I guess the male lead is easy on her eyes 🙂 ) watching on. It was late and we basically just get started, but already I’m hooked. Hell, the intro movie was worth $40 to me. It was stunning. The in-game graphics are really good too. Gameplay hasn’t changed much, but that’s fine with me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The voice acting is still kind of weak, sadly, with the exception of Jean Reno, who delivers all his lines in French, so its hard for me to say if he does a good job or not, but it lends an authentic feel to the game and I’m glad they went that route.
The technology that lets them map real actor’s onto 3D models is really astounding. I mean, in the CGI scenes, its sometimes hard to tell this isn’t a real actor. And in game they look really good, too. Very authentic.
Looking forward to spending more time with this one.
When asked in an interview in OPM, “Do you have any advice for aspiring game designers?” Wright answered:
Expose yourself to ideas, subjects, and design approaches from outside the games industry. There’s a world of useful stuff out there for you to discover, and by pulling from outside sources, you’ll contribute to broadening games rather than inbreeding them.
Substitute just about anything for ‘gaming’ in this and it still sounds like good advice to me.
Bugger. One of the few upcoming XBox games that I was really looking forward to just got scrapped.
Microsoft scraps highly anticipated game
Hopefully Level 5 will shop it around and someone else will pick it up.
So, I’ve played the Warcraft RTS, and I’m playing the World of Warcraft beta. There’s a fairly interesting and elaborate timeline behind all of this, and I wanted to learn more about the history of the world, so I turned to the 3 Warcraft novels:
Day of the Dragon
Lord of the Clans
The Last Guardian
First of all, if you’re not a Warcraft fan, skip ’em all. None of them is a particuarly amazing book.
For fans of the series, though, they’re all good fun. Its neat reading about the places and characters you’ve seen in the games. Dragon is the weakest of the three, Clans the strongest and most tightly integrated into the gameworld (it tells the story of the origins of Warchief Thrall). Honestly I couldn’t place the events of Guardian into my knowledge of the timeline, but the places certainly were familiar.
So for the past few months I’ve been beta testing World of Warcraft.
Even though Blizzard has made every effort to make the game ‘casual gamer friendly’ I still can’t seem to play it casually. In fact, I’ve pretty much lost myself in their world for quite some time: its that compelling. I expect the FDA to get involved and classify it as a narcotic once it releases.
When not in WoW, I’ve been tinkering in City of Heros. I think of this as a ‘lite’ MMRPG, though in truth I may be doing it a disservice in saying so. I so enjoy creating characters (the titular heros) that I’ve gotten none of them anywhere above ‘newbie’ so it may get more complex farther in.
E3 has come and gone and I haven’t really sifted through the news yet. I’m going to attempt some semblance of balance between gaming and life and hopefully that’ll free up time resources to catch up on news and such.
In fact, the average age of game players was 29 and the average age of buyers was 36, with men making up 59 percent of the playing audience.
Sony is showing off the new PSP handheld out at E3:
Sony unveils PlayStation Portable
Just found an interesting article on SWG from last month. I personally am an ex-SWG customer. I loved the game for a while but eventually it just started feeling…empty.
But this is more about the “Jedi Slot” than the concerns I had. Still an interesting read…
The Sage of Star Wars Galaxies