GodModeEnabled said:

Dishonored rocked, it has a few niggling flaws but overall was a treat to play.

First person stealth sounds like it would induce massive levels of depression.  How does it work in reality?

edgecrusher said:

If they're saying its costing $85 it couldn't be the battery that fucked up...it has to be something in the controller itself. What battery costs $85?

Do I get a fresh warranty on the replacement or the repaired controller? Not that its very old, but still. A week is a week.

Lame. Lame. Lame.  Whatever happened to at least 30 day warranties for electronics?  I thought that was legislated in the States?

BB canada

edgecrusher said:

Well for me, its almost like checking out your turd in the toilet after you take a good shit.

Its just something that NEEDS to be done when you 1st get a new console, to make sure its running correctly and to figure out its normal temperature.

The only thing that has ever bothered me about the running of a console is the 360 fan and disc drive. It was like a vacuum cleaner, I actually have to turn the sound up loudly, which is not good at night.

gamingeek said:

This is crazy, the Nintendo CEO goes to Paris to interview the Ubisoft CEO to talk about Zombi U's developent.

Wow it even goes into how Guillemot set up Ubisoft with his 4 brothers and its expansion. Iwata is getting all the gossip.

http://www.nintendo.co.uk/Iwata-asks/Iwata-asks-ZombiU/ZombiU/1-Two-Zombis-And-U/1-Two-Zombis-And-U-676539.html

Two Zombis And U

Iwata:






Today, I’m visiting the Ubisoft1 headquarters in Paris, France and we’re in a meeting room up on the top floor. I’ve done about 200 Iwata Asks interviews now and spoken with lots of different people, but this is the very first time I’ve come to do an interview with a company in Europe like this. I hope to ask not only about the Wii U game Zombi U, but also about Ubisoft itself. If I may, I’d like to start by asking each of you to introduce yourselves. Yves, could you begin?

Yves:






I’m Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft. Thank you very much for coming to visit today. It’s an honour for us to have you.

Iwata:

HAL21 was named as such because each letter put us one step ahead of IBM! (Laughs)

WTF?

Iwata:



That’s something else I wanted to ask you. Why is a game created by French people set not in Paris, but in London?

Guillaume:



With the Olympics being in London and the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations this year, London was in the centre of the world’s attention and a city that everyone felt a connection with. That was one of the reasons for setting the game in London. But a more fundamental reason was that London is a city with a history of horrific things, like Jack the Ripper. We figured it was a suitable setting for the dark world of this game.

Iwata:


Come to think of it, London has that kind of atmosphere too…

WTF Iwata? Did he just troll my city?

Yes, he practically said Londoners are zombies!

gamingeek said:

WTF Iwata? Did he just troll my city?

Face-Off: Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition on Wii U from Digital Foundry.

Is better news that I expected given the internet lulz and frame rate furore.

Skimming it, they are saying that things are not as bad as they appeared on the internets. It's very close to the 360 version but isn't as improved as they thought it would be from E3. It has the post process anti aliasing but that gives some softness to things.

DF said:

So it's with a mixture of relief and slight disappointment that we can report that Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition is actually a pretty close match to the Xbox 360 game, from a visual standpoint at least. Those low-res shadowmaps from the now infamous screenshot? They appear to be confined to a pre-rendered video sequence, presumably dumped from the Unreal Engine editor, and are nothing more than an oversight. Existing renders from the Rocksteady work wouldn't be useable owing to the changes in character costumes.



But it's not all good news, unfortunately. There are still some LOD transition "popping" issues but the texture problems we've seen previously are all but resolved. In-game, image quality is a very close match indeed for the existing console versions. And that cuts both ways too - the changes we saw in the E3 media assets don't appear to have made it into the final game, so the rejigged LODs which brought out additional detail in some areas (and cutbacks in others) are gone - what we have here is pretty much the standard Arkham City experience.



The only real exception comes in the form of the addition of NVIDIA's FXAA post-processing technology. The original console versions of Arkham City operated at native 720p with no anti-aliasing employed at all so we might expect a welcome bump in image quality from the addition of the AA tech on Wii U. However, the arrival of FXAA is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, high contrast edges are smoothed significantly - a welcome addition. Unfortunately, on the flipside, the additional blurring detracts from the quality of the artwork, with specular highlights in particular dulled significantly.

And here we have the v-sync issue again:

On Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, we're given the standard Unreal Engine 3 performance profile. In-game, frame-rate is capped to 30FPS, with screen-tear manifesting when the engine is under stress and failing to meet the target. This helps to sustain controller latency, and while image consistency is compromised to a certain extent, the nature of the artwork makes the impact minimal. The set-up changes somewhat during cut-scenes, where input lag is not an issue - here, v-sync is employed (though we do see the odd torn frame crop up at the top of the screen when the framebuffer refresh kicks in a little late).

It's all change on Wii U though - and not for the better in our opinion. V-sync is employed throughout, working in combination with what appears to be an unlocked frame-rate. The result is messy - the consistent pad response from the Xbox 360 and PS3 games is lost and the game is plagued with judder as frame-rate zooms above - and below - the 30FPS target employed on the other console versions. Image consistency is obviously improved through the implementation of v-sync but the trade-offs in playability are not worthwhile.

Also note that on open-world cut-scenes and areas with plenty of characters on-screen, once again we see disappointingly low levels of performance, though we suspect that if the Wii U version employed the same "lock at 30, tear below" approach seen on PS3 and 360, the open-world elements at least would be closer to what we see on the Sony platform. The big problem with employing v-sync rigidly is that the GPU effectively stalls when a frame runs over the rendering budget, as the new image has to wait for the monitor refresh to begin.

Overall, it's fair to say that performance is the Achilles' heel of this new Armored Edition. Frame-rate varies significantly, resulting in an experience that is nowhere near as smooth or as consistently responsive as the existing versions of the game. We're not quite sure why Warner Bros.' conversion team simply didn't stick to the template laid down by the existing games - there's a reason it's in place, and it's not surprising that a similar scheme is also employed by almost every other Unreal Engine 3 title out there on current-gen console.

I'm calling it now, this is the main problem with these ports and the framerate issues from what I have read. BLOPs 2 U has ZERO screen tear compared to other versions, neither does ACity because they are not locking the framerate and using v-sync with no compromises. Whereas these games drop v-sync on the other consoles which allows the frame rate to stay consistent (but you get screen tearing mostly near the top and bottom of the screen). Maybe UE3's U software forgot to add the option to dynamically drop v-sync on U or developers are just blanketly applying it assuming it won't cause any problems.

DF say AC's U's framerate slows in combat with more NPCs but soards to 40 FPS in cutscenes. IMO they should patch it to make it work like the other versions and see if there are frame rate improvements. At the moment, I would class it as developer error. Maybe even give you the option in the settings to turn things like FXAA on or off? Some people prefer a sharp picture with jaggies, others a softer jaggy free image.

Archangel3371 said:

I can somewhat understand cutting GC support for the Wii mini but cutting Internet support is pretty lame.

It looks cheap and nasty

Seems to have a lid, not a slot loading drive. Seems they stripped everything and put it in the cheapest case possible to get the price as low as possible. They say it's $99? Is that Canadian?

So 99.00 CAD = 62.21 GBP

99.00 CAD = 99.71 USD

Pretty decent TBH but no existing owner should want one.

There are some pretty interesting comparison shots of Arkam City U vs 360. Shows what FXAA anti aliasing does. I'm not sure overall which is better. FXAA is softer and you lose some vibrancy but then it really does smooth out the rough flaws you see in the 360 shots without aliasing.

360 courthouse

U courthose

Difference is bigger here, look at the neon signs:

360 signs

U signs

Full screen is better here^

Well this is weird:

GAF said:

I have now seen many, many persons on Miiverse claiming that all framerate issues in this game (Arkham City) disappear if you set your system to output at 720p. Has anyone tested this further?


(Since my TV is 720p anyway, that's what I've been using across the board on Wii U. I wonder if that explains the lack of any difficulties for me thus far, with fast transitions, zero locks, and never a framerate issue to date, though I've been only on 1st party games so far.)

U owners, now you know that background downloads can affect in game performance have you disabled it?