phantom_leo said:

Wow. It's nearly the holiday season. There's new systems right around the corner... and the news is deader and duller than a typical week in July. All I see is sequel, sequel, sequel of all the usual suspects and really nothing else of note. This generation is dead, but, problem is, next gen isn't looking too promising either.

I am bored right now in terms of gaming as well. Nothing interests me outside Mario and Zelda. I dont want to buy anything, Batman, meh, AC, meh, shooters, meh. I got sonic out of some obligation I have. I will get PS4 launch games cause that is what you do.  I thinK GTA took all my hype for the rest of the year. Its weird for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgLl0_mqLtc

Titanfall on PC it is!

Dvader said:

Awesome AC4 reviews. The GS review has me all giddy, it talks about how amazing exploring the open seas is.

If you played 3, you wouldn't be giddy.

Dvader said:

Target doing Buy 2 get 1 free on PS4 launch day. ALL PS4 GAMES are B2G1!!!! You can get any game on any system if you want as well.

So now I am getting KZ, NBA and um... who knows.

What? AC4, Ghosts maybe? Knack....

Dvader said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgLl0_mqLtc

Classic.

Dvader said:

Wii U retail report. I went to buy Sonic Lost World at Best Buy and they didnt have the game out on the shelves. Meanwhile there are a million AC4 and BF4 for the big two, no AC4 Wii U. I had to ask for them to find Sonic, it took them 10 minutes to realize they have it in a cage in the front, only two copies. This is not a rare event, most of the time you cant find new Wii U games on shelves, they just dont care to put them up. Oh and the Skylanders section is about 3x as big as the Wii U section in the store.

This is not just happening locally, I am right now out of town and see the same thing. I see it at BB, at Kmart, at Target, Wii U is practically dead.

Some insight into why Wii Sports on Wii wasn't online?

“When we thought about how we want people to have fun with Wii Sports on the new hardware, the Wii U console, there was no way, given the expectations, that we couldn’t prepare online gaming. So as we began development, we set online gameplay of Tennis — the representative sport of Wii Sports — as our first goal. [We wanted to] pour our energy into how we could make [online gaming] fun.”

“In a typical online game, the information of the button presses are sent to your opponent, and the inputs are synchronized between the players, but for this game you have to send complex information from the gyro sensor and accelerometer of the Wii Remote Plus controllers, in addition to information from the buttons, which was a brand new challenge.”

- Nintendo EAD Takayuki Shimamura

So I played more LA Noire last night, didn't really take to it.

Virtually empty pointless city with nothing to do, awkward controls, half decentish stories. Solved a case. Don't really like the interrogations that much, press X for doubt, Y for lie etc. It's sort of like Phoenix Wright but unlike those games you cannot re-read the whole testimony before deciding where to press or not. You have one chance. Fail and you fail the interogation and get kicked back into it for another go or the story just moves on. So it either feels like trial and error or you feel like you've missed something. So it feels like the game is sometimes using obtuse logic and bypassing you.

So I moved onto Sleeping Dogs. Makes a good first impression, great graphics.

Fights are pretty decent, works like Batman a lot but more involved it feels. Love ramming someones head into a wall or using the context sensitive situations. But they have spamed me with four or 5 mass brawls in a row within the first hour, I hope the game isn't padded out with this shit?

It just feels nice to play a game in a conteporary setting not set in America or Europe. Although the US voice actors are irking me. They have actors speaking Cantonese, they have people with asian/east asian accents. And yet the main two characters sound like they just stepped out of GTA. If I were an American I would feel mildly insulted that game makers think the market is so shallow that they would refuse to play a game if it didn't feature US accents or characters.

Still the atmoshphere is great even if it uses classic Chinese tropes like drumming sounds, lanterns, fireworks etc. Its true the Chinese do lighting better than anybody, they light up their streets like it's Christmas.

Visuals are pretty great, makes LA Noire look like a PS2 game. Back to LA Noire for a moment, I don't think the facial animation is that well done or ground breaking, if only because of the camera angle. It's filmed like a film in the 3rd person compared to other performace capture games like DSExtraction or Goldeneye those games are in the first person so you get a bigger more centralised view of a persons face. It's just easier to see and more immersive in first person.

BTW what is with the depth of field in Sleeping Dogs? It's some of the worst I've ever seen.

I was also playing more Deus Ex, great game, very glad I picked it up. I didn't play the original and no one seemed to be able to accurately describe how this game played so I just ignored it assuming it was unfriendly. It's like Splinter Cell crossed with a 1st person shooter with bits where you walk about and talk to people, so it's a mix of my favourite things. I was using the annotate maps feature for the first time - soooooo useful. Although it's been used in DS games before, famously Phantom Hourglass it's an epic feature and should be standard in U games I think.

Game is done really nicely on U, although it could use the features better in some areas most of the functionality is very well done and the gamepad feels like a proper in game gadget, a sometimes 4th wall breaking ebook reader, a useful annotated map sometimes, other times a brilliant real time map that is mega useful, as well as being an info log, you can easily use touch screen tick boxes to mark objectives for instance. Also inventory management and you can even make your own infologs with your own gyro controlled camera pics and voice recordings via the mic to share via Miiverse.

And it even has a full game guide and directors commentary built in as well as other stuff. Even the touchcreen hacking is fun. All in all seems like a great version of an already great game, think I would 9.3 it so far.

Once you're done with Deus Ex, give Batman a shot, GG.  I'm surprised no one else on here is playing it yet.

Siliconera has posted a write-up of of NHK’s “Professional—Style of Work” program that aired earlier this week, where Pokemon president and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara shared the first details about the new Pokemon game starring Pikachu as a detective partner. You can find a few more bits below, as well as images above.

- The new Pokemon game is a huge project


- Solve mysteries and use deductive reasoning


- Pokemon devs are working on new ideas to separate the game from other titles involving detectives and mystery solving


- Will be made so that a younger audience can enjoy


- As mentioned previously, Pikachu will talk


- First time Pikachu will speak


- Pikachu will have lines that are more suited for an adult


- Example of the above: “…Oh, they’re just beauties [girls]”


- Pikachu will also have other hard-boiled lines to fit a detective persona


- Example of the above: “If this keeps up, we’ll have a bag made from Pikachu…”


- Having Pikachu talk was a decision Ishihara and the other staff members spent a long time mulling over


- They first thought it would be impossible and a risky proposal


- Ater telling them “let’s make this happen,” Ishihara and the others decided to go with it


- The staff are surprised in the possibilities of all the different facial expressions motion-capture affords


- Motion-capture is being used to have Pikachu show more personality

Microsoft builds a GIANT Xbox One in Vancouver.

Nintendo financials are in, they sold about 300k wii us worldwide in three months. Europe was at negative 20000 units, they are returning the consoles.