Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - MagicCow64

Pages: 1 ... 42 43 [44] 45 46 47
1076
Nintendo Gaming / Re: E3 2012 Press Conferences - Day 2: Nintendo
« on: June 06, 2012, 09:59:51 AM »
I'm pretty bummed. I was holding out for something interesting to happen at the roundtable, but no dice.

As I see it the following concrete things needed to occur at the press conference:

-1-2 additional 1st party games. Not showing what Retro was doing, the work of another internal Nintendo studio, or even a Smash tease was baffling. Even if nothing is going to come out this fiscal year, the question remains of what the **** they've been doing all this time. Are they that behind the curve on developing HD games?

-Graphical fidelity. They needed to demonstrate that the WiiU is, if not future-proof, was at least a step up from current gen. As of now it's not clear if it could even run Watch Dogs or Star Wars 1313. Pikmin looked good, but I was secretly hoping that it had been underground for so long because Nintendo was doing something crazy with claymation motion cap that would be as comparatively stunning as Wind Waker.

-3rd Party Parity. Obviously they can't force intransigent studious to port to WiiU, but at this point if something is multiplatform is has to also land on WiiU, or the system is going to be inherently crippled.

This whole E3 is making me question why there are even competing consoles at this point. I think the logic has  expired. Would it really be that much worse if Nintendo made games for their tablet control accessory for the MicroSony Steambox?

1077
Can't see the Wonderbook taking off in any significant way. I'm not sure Rowling is going to be enough to make this device viable outside of a small luxury kids' set.

The Last of Us just kind of made me feel bad. I liked the teaser, but I don't think I want to play the murder simulator they demoed. (This is probably some kind of accomplishment, though, depending on how scripted the presentation was.) I wish the characters had at least tried to parley with the dudes in the hotel. As of now it looks like The Road: The Game.

1078
I am also sad about Dead Space 3. I think there was a way to evolve the game into something like Aliens as compared to Alien, but this co-op ice planet stuff does not look like my cup of tea. Based on EA's and Microsoft's press conferences, it's looking like we'll be waiting until the next gen (which hopefully WiiU actually is) for something interesting to drop. Which also might not happen if this full court press for every game having a co-op/online/military focus continues. C'mon, Splinter Cell, there ain't no lightbulbs in the desert. 

1079
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Pre-E3: The Wii U Games List
« on: June 03, 2012, 07:53:00 PM »
According to Game Informer, Timesplitters 4 ain't happening any time soon.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/04/30/timesplitters-4-not-in-development.aspx

The developers' note is pretty facetious, but I think it would be unlikely that they'd be lying about not making it.

1080
Yeah, I don't think they had much of a choice last year. But they should've showed real game footage, even if it was just a head fake, a la the infamous Space World Zelda video.

I think it's actually good if both Microsoft and Sony go whole hog on copying the tablet. This will lead to more third party developer support, and more fully fleshed out tablet features on the WiiU than might otherwise have been programmed. Plus, competitive innovation, all that jazz.

1081
Excellent work on Mappy. Spanky's Quest, anyone?

I loved Eternal Darkness back in the day, but I have a suspicion that it really wouldn't hold up if I went back and played it again. I would definitely be interested in a sequel, but it seems pretty clear that Silicon Knights does not have its **** together, particularly after that X-Men game. Was Nintendo particularly involved in ED's production, or was Silicon Knights just not able to adapt into the current era (sort of like what happened to Rare)?

1082
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Pre-E3 Ninendo Direct tomorrow...
« on: June 03, 2012, 07:14:53 PM »
I actually kind of liked the video, in that it's demonstrating an effort on Nintendo's part to get with it a little bit. It was obnoxious, but employed contemporary cultural irony, which might be a first for Nintendo (I guess that Mario Sunshine commercial might count). I feel like the 30 Rock crowd might enjoy it.

Everything's looking pretty slick. I doubt I'll make much use of the social functions they demonstrated, because it's almost certainly going to be easier to just go on the internet to look stuff up, but I am impressed nonetheless. The online screen sharing function looks pretty awesome; I've long thought that digital media needs to be easier to share, and swiping a Youtube video onto the TV is a step in a cool direction.

I just wish that they'd teased an actual game for even a second (Wii Sports 2 and NSMBM notwithstanding)

1083
People have missed the most salient reason consoles are made in China: all electronics supply pipelines are in Asia. At this point labor inputs aren't the deciding factor in offshoring this kind of manufacturing, so much as the infrastructure and raw components being native to the region determine the outcome.

Good lorry, I wish E3 was here. 

1084
TalkBack / Re: Wii U Logo for E3 2012 Confirms the Name Is Final
« on: May 27, 2012, 01:06:55 PM »
They could have called it the Nintendo Tittybomb and it wouldn't have affected the "core" gamer crowd one iota. While there could well be people who claim they'd never buy something called the WiiU, these aren't the people that were going to be persuadable by Nintendo anyway.

The only thing that's going to win over that crowd is if the tablet controller is actually an important leap forward in functionality. Will you need a controller screen to be the best at Black Ops 3? If the answer is no, and the experience isn't transformative, then things will keep muddling along the way they have been with Nintendo viewed as the family console. Which is fine, it's a durable branding association, kids need safe products, and it can keep Nintendo alive for another gen, hopefully.

1085
Nintendo Gaming / Re: E3 2012 Predictions
« on: May 22, 2012, 01:57:19 PM »
I think for smash brothers they might do something like they did with the initial Skyward Sword announcement, show a still image render of Mario punching Mega Man in the face or whathaveyou, just to confirm the game is in development and keep the fires of speculation burning.

I sincerely doubt there's going to be any 3D Mario, but there could well be a 3DS Zelda tease.

1086
TalkBack / Re: Metroid: Other M Review
« on: May 22, 2012, 01:48:42 PM »
Controls were indeed bizarre. I have no idea why Nintendo doesn't reliably consider the Wiimote + Nunchuk the standard baseline that all users will have.

Not to dogpile, but I also thought Other M looked like crap. The art design ranged from bland to terrible (lava men?!), and the overall graphical fidelity looked GameCube era.

I agree that on the technical merits the game was a 6-7, but the narrative and aesthetic made me hate it.

1087
Quote
However, even that wouldn't compare to the Wiimote and Nunchuk, which is the most comfortable controller I have ever used largely due to its disconnected design.

This isn't mentioned enough. The button layout on the Wiimote isn't ideal for some games, but being able to sit and hold your hands however you want is great. I will miss that.

1088
I also hate the Dual Shock. I have big hands and they start cramping almost immediately. This is one of the reasons I would not consider getting a Sony Console, until they change the friggin' controller.

In general, though, the "standard" control set up for consoles has only been around since the PS2/Dreamcast. There's plenty of room for evolution and re-designs. The Dual Shock set up should be considered the Model-T of controllers. If anything the Wii U tablet screen might highlight the arbitrariness of the the current standard with customizable touch button layouts.

As far as Sony creating dual analogue sticks, this is technically true, but from what I recall most PS1 games didn't do much of anything with the second stick (much like most PS3 games don't do anything with the gyroscope). The PS1 couldn't really output 3D, and sprite-based FPSes were pretty much done. I am remembering this wrong? If not, the credit for actually utilizing the sticks should probably go to the Dreamcast.

1089
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Wii U
« on: May 17, 2012, 02:05:07 PM »
Yeah, the general non-specialized game reporting trend of completely ignoring Nintendo continues.

Interesting article, though. My takeaways:

-The PS4 and NeXbox are not, as of now, going to be graphical titans, based on Epic's anxiety about the next gen not pushing the envelope far enough. This would seemingly assuage worries about the WiiU becoming obsolete quickly, and makes it more likely that it will occupy a PS2-type technical space in comparison to its competitors.

-The real leap with UE4 is the real-time game editing feature.

-Most of the article praised the new level of realism of lighting effects, dust, ember, etc. Which leads me to believe that UE4 will continue the UE tradition of producing highly textured non-interactive hallways to walk down.

1090
TalkBack / Re: Xenoblade Chronicles Excluded from April NPD Results
« on: May 14, 2012, 02:12:39 PM »
It doesn't really count as an ad campaign, but I went into a Gamestop to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles (a week too early, it turned out) and I saw a full segment about the game on the internal Gamestop promo channel they play constantly.

1091
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Wii U
« on: May 02, 2012, 01:38:12 PM »
The Wii's graphics really only got to me after I got through playing a few games back to back on my 360. However, **** like Gears 3 suffers from industry browning, so nice, colorful art styles were still pleasant to look at. I was never too bothered until I got a bigger TV to play games on, but wow was Wii Sports never the same.

Yeah, I was initially impressed by the graphical leap of the 360 after only having a Wii for years, but after about six months of Gamefly churn I was really sick of the Unreal Engine mud aesthetic. And all of those neat lighting effects and textures lose their glamor when barely anything in the environment is interactive. I have component cable for my Wii plugged into a 20 inch 720p monitor, and it looks fine, except for when the games themselves are ugly.

1092
General Gaming / Re: Sony's Smash Brothers clone? Title Fight?
« on: April 30, 2012, 11:39:14 AM »
Well, such is my reward for not sign-posting irony.

1093
General Gaming / Re: Sony's Smash Brothers clone? Title Fight?
« on: April 27, 2012, 07:08:49 PM »
It's like Sony is trying to cater to the tourney losers who demand that they rain over everyone else's fun with "No Items, Final Destination."

I'll remain cautiously optimistic about this game, but companies have tried cloning Smash Bros. before and no one's succeeded yet.

Ha, oh man, I met some people last year who were into Smash Bros., and I went over to their place to spend an evening drinking beer and playing Brawl. But the first thing they did was turn off all items and stages except for Final Destination. It was boring as ****. And I was treated like a leper for suggesting that this was overly restrictive and hyper repetitive. If that's tourney play I never want to encounter it again. To top it all off, these dudes used the C stick like nobody's business. Now that's horseshit.

As for the Sony game, I have a hard time seeing this taking off. Granted, I'm not a fan of their menagerie of focus-group tested exclusive characters, but I don't feel like there's quite the same bursting desire to see these icons matched up as there was for Nintendo, Sega, Tekken/Streetfighter, or Marvel/Capcom.

1094
Some items have a red "!" mark on them others have a white "!" on them. Some items have this white X on them and some don't. I can imagine the "!" mark is for story purposes but what about everything else?

The exclamation marks denotes that material or collectible will be used for a quest. Red for a quest you have undertaken and white for a quest you have yet to take. If you are at the point where you have the maximum amount of materials (happened to me after 40-50 hours) or collectibles (that hasn't happened to me yet), then it is probably safe to sort by price and sell a page or so of the lowest valued items.

If you're thinking of selling collectibles, consider using them as gifts between party members to raise affinity. It takes a lot of gifting to raise affinity through collectibles gifting.

Lithium: I feel you on the overwhelming factor. I also don't find the tutorials all that useful. It took a couple of hours of determined trial and error for things to click all the way, as I kept getting my ass kicked by mild groups of same-level enemies. I still don't understand how the gem crafting system works, nor do I understand the skill tree linking thing between characters. I'm hoping I can ignore about 10-20% of the game's complexity and still blunder through (at some point in the future).


I am very familiar with the MMORPG/World of Warcraft combat system that Xenoblade Chronicles is highly reminiscent of. The tutorials made a lot of sense to me when I read them, and I'm sad that I can't imagine how they aren't making sense to you.



Gem crafting isn't immediately obvious, but pretty fun once you get the hang of it. In order to start the process, you need at least two crystals, cylinders, or a combination of them. You don't need to get the qualities to 100% so you can start crafting to generate stronger cylinders. If you do reach or exceed 100% in any quality, then you must start the crafting process.

When you start the crafting process, you will choose one party member to be a shooter and another to be the engineer. The shooter has a character-specific affect to the crafting such as Shulk having a higher chance to go in to a crafting fever or Reyn generating higher percentage gains when the engineer produces a strong flame. The engineer produces one of three flames (strong, medium, and gentle) during a turn. The descriptors of "Strong Flame: average" and "medium flame: good" refer to the odds of that particular flame being used for a crafting turn. For example, Reyn as an engineer is great in strong flames and poor in medium and gentle flames. That means he is more likely to produce a strong flame for a crafting turn than a medium or gentle flame.

Once you select a shooter and engineer, the crafting process essentially turns in to a gambling machine as you watch the gem qualities or green cylinder rise. How many crafting turns you get depend on the affinity level (yellow, green, blue, purple, magenta) between the shooter and the engineer. At the maximum affinity level, a pair can have 10-15 crafting turns.

What happens during the crafting turn:
The shooter will shoot... something in to the furnace and the engineer will produce a flame.
A strong flame will greatly raise the percentage of one gem quality. This is very useful in pushing a quality over 100% (where it will produce a gem), 200% HEAT, (where it will produce a gem one rank higher than the materials your are using), and 300% MEGA HEAT (where it will produce two gems that are one rank higher). The strategy to take advantage of the strong flame is to select materials in an order that will get gem qualities as close to 200% as possible, to have as few gem qualities being crafted as possible, and to have a crafting pair that will raise the percentages the highest (this pair is Reyn's Strong Bonus and Dunban's Strong Flame: Good).

A medium flame will raise the percentages of all gem qualities. The percentage gains aren't as high as with a strong flame, but you do have the medium flame raising the percentage of all qualities in the mix.

A gentle flame raises the green cylinder gauge located to the right of the gem quality readout. At the start of the crafting process, the cylinder gauge result with be at one. The number represents the number of cylinders you can create out of gem qualities that failed to reach 100% or higher at the end of the crafting process. If a gentle flame is produced by the engineer, the cylinder gauge will rise and eventually increase the result. Normally, you wouldn't worry about this number since you should only be crafting two or three qualities at a time, but it is a number to look out for if you plan on creating a lot of big cylinders in one go.

During crafting, the pair may go in to a fever state where one turn becomes many shots. It happens at random, but you can increase the chance by having Shulk be the shooter or raising one of Shulk's skill tree to an "All" skill that increase the fever chance. If you have increase the affinity of the entire party to each other, they may randomly support the crafting pair with an extra turn.

There's a lot more to the crafting than this. Play around and go for those HEATs! One strategy you can employ is to create high quality cylinders with Melia and Sharla or Sharla and Riki. Then you can use Reyn and Dunban to craft those cylinders to hit HEATs or MEGA HEATs.



Skill linking is comparatively simple. Skill links allow party members to share skills. The number and types of skills allowed is determined by the affinity level between two party members. Higher affinity levels increase the number and type of slots available in a skill link. For example, Reyn has the Heavy Armor skill with a sun-shaped slot early in one of his skill trees. When Reyn has acquired that skill, he can link that skill to another party member who has reached the affinity level with Reyn to have an open sun slot. Shulk opens a sun slot early in his skill link tree with Reyn. Now you can use thirty affinity coins to have Shulk be able to wear heavy armor, something he can't do in his own skill trees.

Ah, affinity coins. You earn those for your party by leveling up and defeating unique monsters. You use affinity coins to set skill links. Those coins are fully refunded when you remove a skill link so don't be afraid to mix and match skill links. For each party member, there is a separate skill link tree per every other party member. It is best to think of skill linking as having an additional 2 or more skill trees to a character's regular three.

Get more party members, raise everyone's skills, raise everyone's affinity between each other, and then you will have a huge pool of skills choose from.



*Side note about a character's regular skill trees.*
All acquired skills are always active for a character. Acquiring Reyn's Heavy Armor skill in one tree and then switching to a different active tree won't deactivate Heavy Armor. What is getting activated and deactivated? Each of the three skill trees has a passive bonus such as +10 to Strength or +3% to Critical Rate. That passive bonus is what is being activated and deactivated for a character. You will notice later in the game that your maxed strength skill tree gives +50 to strength while the agility skill tree you're thinking of switching to only has a +10 to agility. Do not despair! Getting more skills is more important. Also, the passive bonus of a skill tree increases as you acquire more skills in the active tree. Worry about which passive bonus to have active after you have acquired all of a character's skills.


EDIT: I think may have wrote too much. Ah....

Thanks for the guidance, the skill tree linking now makes sense, and I now have some idea of how gem making works, though damn, it still sounds convoluted for a casually introduced side mechanic.

1095
Yeah, this might be a wait for WiiU situation. (Don't think anyone I know who has a Wii laying around at this point.)

Lithium: I feel you on the overwhelming factor. I also don't find the tutorials all that useful. It took a couple of hours of determined trial and error for things to click all the way, as I kept getting my ass kicked by mild groups of same-level enemies. I still don't understand how the gem crafting system works, nor do I understand the skill tree linking thing between characters. I'm hoping I can ignore about 10-20% of the game's complexity and still blunder through (at some point in the future).

1096
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Wii U
« on: April 23, 2012, 06:13:10 PM »
Olimar is still silent, though. I depart from the mainstream of video game appreciation at this point, but I generally agree with that developer who called narratives and video games like combining chocolate and tuna fish. http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2012/02/10/david-jaffe-video-games-and-movies-go-together-like-chocolate-and-tuna-fish/

As much as reviewers bitch about movies feeling like video games nowadays, I think video games trying to feel like movies is a much bigger aesthetic crisis. The protagonist of a video should be a mostly silent avatar for the most part, excepting adventure-type games like Monkey Island and Layton. People who identify with Master Chief or Marcus Fenix's "personality" are fooling themselves or have issues with emotional stuntedness. 

Other M screwed the pooch by trying to make Samus into a fleshed-out character in the first place, though it certainly didn't help its case by taking the worst tack possible. (Also didn't help that it sucked as a game). I forget the term the guy used, but I read an essay about the strange place LA Noir occupied in the video/game narrative spread, and though the writer ultimately endorses the game, he brought up what to me is the salient problem with narrativized games: the disjunction between narrative portrayal and character actions. In LA Noir, your character is presented as an upright lawman, but in the game you're free to run over pedestrians and cause unlimited property damage. Nathan Drake is a presented as a likable rogue in the narrative, but in the game he's a mass murderer. Ezio is an honorable assassin who will stab innocent pedestrian's in between the ribs. There's fundamental disjunction that can only be resolved by making the gameplay so restrictive as to be moot, making the narrative so flippant and crass as to be repugnant, or by reducing the avatar's character so as to be a blank occupied by the player.

I favor the latter approach. I would point to Half Life 2 as an example of a good balance between narrative framing/incentive and player perspective, and one that a future Metroid title could emulate to breath more life into the game world while leaving Samus inscrutable. In Other M, we were fed awful cutscenes with Samus acting deferential, scared, crying, paralyzed, but during the actual game she runs through any assortment of terrible monsters and aliens without blinking, and we have past knowledge of her stoically facing down scenarios in past games that she now reacts to in a traumatized fashion. Not to mention the ridiculous narrative justification of the weapon restrictions.

Found the article, worth a read, though I fundamentally disagree with Bissell about video games as the next step in the evolution of story telling. http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6625747/la-noire

1097
Thought I'd chime in with my experience:

Was initially overwhelmed by all of the different systems introduced (arts, Monado arts, gems, inventory, quests, collectibles, premonition battle events, team attacks, status effects, affinity, skill trees, etc.) having not having played a JRPG since the SNES, but after getting ruined by the tentacle boss on Bionis' Leg I spent three and a half hours going back, doing side quests, leveling up, and generally figuring out how the game actually worked (you can level up your specials! you're supposed to use your arts in battle non-stop, not just wait for one or two to refill!), and got completely hooked. I returned to the Mechanis tentacle boss and proceeded to wipe the floor with him, and anticipated forty more hours of a JRPG good time unmatched since the Final Fantasy 6/Chrono Trigger days. Then, right as the boss was on its last tentacles, the game froze and my Wii went to the black screen disc read error.

It now won't read any discs at all. I have a first gen Wii, which has been getting louder and louder over time, but it finally kicked the optical bucket. This is particularly troublesome, as I had no plans on playing any other retail games after Xenoblade. This was to be the swan song, and I now I'm in the position of paying to get it repaired to finish the game or just letting it die. $50 on Xenoblade lost (- resale potential - experience of playing game) or and addition $70+ to resurrect my senescent Wii long enough to finish it?

1098
General Gaming / Re: Fez. (XBLA)
« on: April 21, 2012, 11:54:22 AM »
I like the game quite a bit, but I "finished" it yesterday and came away with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth at the end of things. I eventually broke down and looked up the solutions to the last 10 or so anti-cubes/secrets I couldn't figure out, and I'm glad I did, because there was basically no way I ever would have figured them out aside from blind chance. I didn't bother decoding the alphabet (aside from one of the final secrets, I don't think you need to to solve anything), and from some of the translations posted online there doesn't seem to be much of use. And really, the final three puzzles are basically impossible, the last one literally so from what I'm reading (outside of a horrifying level of brute force). The completionist in me bristled against this designer hubris. 85% of the hard stuff in Fez is doable, probably Riven-level adventure game fare, but the extra rind went too far.

1099
General Gaming / Re: Mass Effect 3: Space Chat! (SPOILERS)
« on: April 20, 2012, 01:45:28 PM »
I was expecting the ending to be terrible, and it was kind of dumb and rushed, trotting out overly familiar sci-fi stuff, like magic universe spirit boy and Adam and Eve imagery, but I wasn't outraged or anything. I went online to check out the other endings out of curiousity and was pretty taken aback by the identical nature of each final choice. (I have the feeling this had something to do with selling future DLC, but damned if I know how post-game content is supposed to work in any case.)

What they should have done was have three different tiers with more or less the same narrative content. Like, destroying the reapers should have been the lowest tier, led to by a certain combination of choices in the game (not curing the genophage, e.g.), where you stay on the ground on Earth and have to accomplish some major goal to activate the citadel. Making a better tier of decisions should have gotten you inside the citadel and led you to the confrontation with the Illusive man, which leads to taking control of the reapers. And then the third tier should have gotten you behind the Matrix door with the star child, leading to blending organic and synthetic life, which really seemed pitched to be the transcendent ending the thematics of the games have been leading to anyway (and Joker and EDI get to do it that way!).

1100
TalkBack / Re: New Super Mario Bros. Mii Is the Mario Bros. Wii U Game
« on: April 17, 2012, 12:14:24 AM »
Last year's demo wasn't just NSMBW upscaled. It was already running at native HD resolution with higher-res models and completely new levels. Much like when NSMBW and SM3DL were shown at E3, I expect some of the levels we saw will make it into the final version. Yes, they could improve the graphics some, but I'm not expecting significant changes. Though I do hope we see some more interesting use of the Wii U functionality, it's hard to say what they'll do with this game since the demo's only official purpose was to show the game cloned onto the remote screen. From a practical standpoint, the NSMB series proved to Nintendo that they don't have to make drastic changes to and it's still guaranteed to fly off the shelves. Yeah, I wish they'd do more stylistically, but I don't mind too much as long as the levels are well-crafted. NSMBW had this, but NSMB did not.

That's a good point. I strongly disliked NSMB DS, but I had a good time with the Wii iteration. The level design made up for the art design. Something about it still didn't quite hit home all the way, though, and it feels like that was the part that will allow for the Mii integration. The co-op on the Wii game was fun and all, but it still worked as a single player game, and I fear that the Mii-ed up sequel will push the co-op angle too hard and make it moot as anything but a multi-player game (a la Four Swords). No one I know plays games to any real extent anymore, so if a game is multi-player oriented I'm SOL. (This is also why I don't give a **** about 90% of Xbox software).

Pages: 1 ... 42 43 [44] 45 46 47