aspro said:

Archangel3371 said:

Oh man that Castlevania trailer was awesome. The game is now a mere week away and boy am I pumped to get it.

Trailer was good.  What are you expecting from it? Why are you excited? (I'm not questioning, I'm asking).

Punk Rebel Ecks said:

Steel I found your favorite band.

Well, well.

The White Whale.

I hear the Nintendo conference is at 1am EST whatever that means.

Agnates said:

So we can go sleep and see it early in the morning (I'm GMT+2, EST should be GMT-5).

I hear it's 7am UK time. I think that is 9am in Cyprus/Greece? Bugs?

Look at the clouds in this WiiWare game. Bloody ridiculous that a WiiWare dev can do better than 90% of other 3rd party Wii devs.

NEWS said:

Dead Space: Extraction, the Wii-exclusive spin-off released last year, might not have set tills alight, but for developer Visceral Games poor sales didn't matter – because of praise from critics.

Sales of the Wii shooter were described as "slow" soon after release, and reports emerged that it had shifted just over 9000 copies in the US during its first week on sale.

But Extraction was a hit with critics and gamers alike. Eurogamer awarded it an impressive 8/10 in its September 2009 review, and it's currently sitting pretty on an 82 Metacritic review average.

While Visceral admits Extraction's sales were a "surprise", it didn't let it get it down.

"I'm looking forward to checking out the next game I can get on the Wii because it's a really cool system," quipped Dead Space 2 executive producer Steve Papoutsis to Eurogamer.

"It's up to what type of experience players are looking for. Whether or not they want to play on the Wii or they want to play on their PS3 or 360 or PC.

"Of course it was a surprise. But it picked up steam after the initial launch. The thing with the Wii is that it's not like the 360 and the PS3 where in terms of sales you see this giant spike at the beginning and it tails off.

"Even with Nintendo games, you'll see games like Super Mario Bros. or Mario Kart, they have a longer tail as far as sales are concerned.

"All we can do is make the best game we can make. It was great to see from a critical perspective people enjoyed it and that made us very proud. It validated the hard work we had done.

"But the rest of it is up to players, the economy and what they want to get out of a certain game system. Those forces are at play and you can't control those. We're happy with the game we made and now hopefully even more people will get to try it on the PS3."

Papoutsis is, of course, referring to Extraction's PS3-exclusive port, which features improved visuals and PlayStation Move support.

But gamers shouldn't expect a huge difference when they get their hands on the Limited Edition freebie.

"One of the things with the PlayStation Move is it's a little bit more accurate," Papoutsis said. "The other thing is the visuals have improved since it's on a PS3.

"But in general it's similar. It's not a night and day difference between the Wii version and the PS3 version. I'm very proud of the game the team created. It's an excellent game. Now we get hopefully more people to experience it on a system they have.

"The other thing with Extraction on PS3, you don't have to have the Move. You can play it with the Dual Shock or Sixaxis.

"And there is a sensitivity setting, so you can crank that up if you want to get the cursor to work a little bit faster. But for the most part it was a pretty straight map over in terms of what the controls do."

Xbox 360 owners would love to play Extraction. Why can't they, Steve?

"I don't know! I don't think it maps over to Kinect."

You can use the pad, though.

"Yeah. Sony, it just seemed like a perfect fit."

That's that, then.

We're never going to get a fair comparison now. I want to see this game release at the same price as a boxed retail product on 360/PS3 and see how it sells.

Dead Space is a new property, it's not a Resident Evil or House of the Dead with years worth of nostalgia to bank on. It's sad that the game ends up as one of these failed experiments. It's a decent title.  

Agnates said:

He says it picked up after launch too though. Also, critics suck and don't know what makes a good rail shooter, DSC is pretty bad.

DSC? If you are talking about DSE, then I disagree entirely, I found it to be the best on-rails shooter I've ever played.

Right, DSE. It's only good for one playthrough and is basically a movie with shooting bits. It's very slow, there's no proper calibration to make it work like a lightgun like SEGA shooters and you can't skip the many, many cut scenes even on subsequent playthroughs which kills replayability and high score hunting (there's no good scoring either anyway). It's a rental at best. I guess you're not a rail shooter fan either if you found it the best one. The best rail shooters on Wii, or rather lightgun shooters as I don't consider them the same as something like Sin & Punishment 2 (which is awesome) are SEGA's arcade ports, HoTD3 and Ghost Squad. Overkill, not so much. The other companies' attempts don't even offer the basics, though some of them have novelties that are worth seeing (DSE for story, DSC for Retelling(ha!)/visuals/content, Overkill for the B movie feel, etc). But the genre's finest? No way!

Agnates said:

Right, DSE. It's only good for one playthrough and is basically a movie with shooting bits. It's very slow, there's no proper calibration to make it work like a lightgun like SEGA shooters and you can't skip the many, many cut scenes even on subsequent playthroughs which kills replayability and high score hunting (there's no good scoring either anyway). It's a rental at best. I guess you're not a rail shooter fan either if you found it the best anyway.

I agree with you on the replayability - or lack thereof. But I otherwise enjoyed it, it's high quality stuff. It is more of a guided experience as the devs pitched it. The slow pacing and long dialogue kills replay value. I would only play it again with a second partner.

Stop spoiling yourself, nothing is set in stone about the localisation, other Monolith RPGs have taken a year!

So far I'm not impressed, it's clunky and simplistic, especially after Darksiders with its DMC-esque fighting. But I guess you level up and get new stuff in this game also so, we'll see how I like it later. It seems like it opens up to be rather sandboxy later, though so far it's very very, very guided and all the bad parts of it stick out badly... The survivors wandering the safe house (more like teleporting all over the place, I meet the same handful wherever I go, lol) are thanking (with dumb canned animations and no lip sync) me whenever I approach though I've done absolutely nothing for them, the HUD has icons all over the place, the dialogues outside cut scenes are text only, the graphics aren't impressive like I expected after other Capcom games on PC... But it seems like the game will get good at some point after I learn its quirks and it opens up to the meat of it, I guess it's still a tutorial for now... But I've got other annoyances like having friendly damage for survivors yet no way to save them from a crowd of zombies other than smacking through it, which means they may defect and turn hostile if they take enough damage... And random zombie placement, the first time I went to save Doris it was impossible to reach her with that amount of zombies and my lacking gear, yet the second it was a breeze... Stuff like that... I guess I shouldn't really care who survives and who doesn't outside main characters if I want to enjoy it more but it can be annoying to know you can in theory do this or that but really can't due to some random factor and clunky mechanics...