gamingeek said:

PS3 has become the Tales of platform of choice.

Juicy details.

While High Voltage admitted reviews were "fair", the developer was satisfied with the game's performance, and revealed its deal with publisher SEGA was, from the beginning, for two games.


"We were pleased with the first announcement of the sales," producer Keith Hladik said. "I don't recall exactly, but it was about 100,000 for the first few weeks. Coming from where we were at – we're an independent studio and this is our first IP – we had pretty decent sales and the reviews were fair.


"I don't recall anyone being down. We already knew we were going to make a sequel, so the fallout from that was we were determined to make the sequel way better than the first one."

Conduit 2 was already approved from the get go. Who signs up two games from an unproven developer with a new IP?

Anyone want this? And if so, where would you patch it?

You can get it from the US rewards website.

Also, more pics of this upstairs in the updates:

I keep coming across neat little things on this phone, I'm quite pleasantly surprised since it was so cheap. I just discovered it can open word, excel and pdf files. When writing messages or other text inputs (alarms, memos, stuff) you can keep it vertical for a normal keypad or twist it horizontally to enable a full keyboard, there's handwriting recognition and a doodling application but the touchscreen so far hasn't proven good enough to reliably use either, there are all sorts of nice drag and drop functions to navigate menus or use various functions, I discovered the stylus that I thought didn't come with it but was simply too well hidden inside the phone, being so tiny (it expands, it's a little too thin but works okay), and generally the only issues I have are silly limitations that shouldn't be there, like the inability to customise it beyond the wallpaper and what widgets and speed dials you set on the two "desktops" you can switch between, and that I can't delete a lot of the preinstalled crap, like the crappy Java games it comes with and one of the speed dial entries. The media player is great too, although too loud. I haven't tried video files yet, if it plays them, but music works fine with mp3s, shuffle and repeat options. It only has like 50MB memory but accepts Micro SD cards which should be super cheap if you really need space.

Edit: the series seems to have a decent hacking scene that can fix some of the issues, like the ability to use custom themes. I saw people have basically recreated the default iphone theme. I'll try to look into that stuff whenever I feel the need for a refresh, which won't be for some time I guess.

Anyway, if anyone here is on the look out for a fairly cheap phone that doesn't look like it came from the last century when it's placed next to the fancy stuff people tend to use these days, check out the LG Cookie range. Mine's a KP500, some newer Cookie models degraded the specs, like the camera (which is pretty bad anyway, you need loads of light to get something remotely presentable outside the phone's screen) and the battery (some take AA batteries, meh) so I chose that one, but if you look around you can probably find one that suits you. Oh, and the LG software sucks and barely runs on Windows 7 but you can still access file transfers and such by having the PC recognise it as a simple USB flash drive. I heard similarly good things about the Samsung Tocco phones as well, which are supposed to be cheap also, but none were available in stores here so I got this one instead.

The Microsoft Wireless Bluetrack 5000 mouse is fine as well, it glides smoothly and looks good.

gamingeek said:

...

Namco is all over the fecking place here. You would think that as a cel-shaded japanese franchise they would just put it on PS3 and Wii each time and be done with it.

I'm wouldn't think it would be that easy to make two versions of the game, so they are going with where it will sell best in Japan (so why not PSP?).  I don;t know, I've added Namco into the same basket of companies as Nintendo -- I can never accurately guess what they are going to do (for two very different reasons).

aspro said:

          I'm wouldn't think it would be that easy to make two versions of the game, so they are going with where it will sell best in Japan (so why not PSP?).  I don;t know, I've added Namco into the same basket of companies as Nintendo -- I can never accurately guess what they are going to do (for two very different reasons).

No, they make 1 game for both systems. It can't be harder than porting a 360 and a Wii game to PS3 after the fact. Tales is a cel-shaded game that can get away with the same visual style on both systems, sort of like De Blob 2. You make the Wii the base version as it has to work with the lower hardware, then you use that base and spruce it up a little on PS3.

aspro said:

Maybe they don't think Wii is a good sales platform for RPGs in Japan?  I know Xenoblade sold poorly.

I see your point though, start on Wii and then move up.  I'm completely ignorant of the tech involved.

That makes it sound like they were testing the waters with Tales on 360 and Wii. It makes Namco look really befuddled and up in the air. They should have just stuck with PS3 from the get go instead of hopping about so much. And like you said earlier, these sorts of games are cheaper to make and sell more on PSP anyway. And LOL, DS Tales never made it westwards either, what is the point of western fans even thinking about keeping up with this series?

If I cared about the series at all I would be pretty miffed that Namco expected me to own all 3 systems plus 2 hand helds in order to keep up with the series.

I would patch that Kirby on the inside of my boxers.

No. Nobody has played it. And you're going to get herpes because of buying it.

In the ass.

<3 Love you man.

So since Take2 had a stellar quarter and year I guess the CEO who quit to spend more time with his family actually meant it? (he was the guy who was going to Aisa with his family for a few years).