9 responses so far ↓

• 1 Jonah Falcon // Jun 22, 2010 at 7:10 pm

  EA is Medal of Honor, Activision is Call of Duty. In fact, Call of Duty came to be because of disgruntled Medal devs. Portal 2 is going to have crossplatform play between PC, Mac, and PS3.

  Zelda was sort of… dull on the show floor. I wasn’t feeling it. Super Scribblenauts was cool.

  Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Brink, and Dance Central were amazing. The latter could be a system seller for Kinect, if Microsoft supports it with ad dollars and even bundles it.

• 2 Jonah Falcon // Jun 22, 2010 at 7:18 pm

  By the way, according to beta testers, OnLive works, but the graphics are not only sub-HD, but subject to occasional pixellation artifacts, even with a connection four times faster than recommended speeds for HD video.

• 3 Herr_Alien // Jun 23, 2010 at 5:06 am

  Derrick, liked how you got confused by the games 🙂 It kinda shows the dangers of having look-alike franchises.

  Interesting thing about Steam going on PSN. As for it being a virus? Well, lemme see, Sony used root kit technology in their DRM systems without the users knowing, and they got away with it. Steam is much cleaner, you decide to install it or not, and you can uninstall it withour formatting the HDD.

  Again, interesting move. The MACs and PCs at least have the hardware in common, so porting Steam and its games to MAC was something that was bound to happen.
  But PSN? Play Stations have a totally different hardware. That will require some development effort. I hope it pays off.

  @New 360 Slim has evil red eye:
  Don, you can end up placing the console on a thick carpet. Good luck with the ventilation then.

  @Onlive Gaming: the system does have quite a lot of drawbacks for it not to fly:
  – they didn’t storm the entire world. They have it only in US.
  – the market for it seems to be devices that don’t have any gaming muscles.
  – the infrastructure costs are too high. Both the bill the end user gets, and the bill the owners of OnLive will get, they will be too high.

  High costs, fairly small market. And I am not bringing up network latencies here. You do the math.

  @Portal 2: Valve has a pretty good track record. I didn’t think too much on Portal. But then I played it, and I was wow-ed!

  Love the show, you’re doing a great job.

  @Question of the week:
  The product that will be more successfull? The one that has more games for it.
  To me, this means Kinect, since Miscrosoft did a great job with marketing their XBox360, not only for the end users, but also to the game developers.
  If they do the same job for Kinect, I see it as winner.
  Don, high-five! We seem to be on the same page on this one.

  @3D television: Jennifer, I think they’re making the market. They’re not looking for an existing market, they make one. They did that in the past. Yes, it is a risky move, but if it catches on …

  No, I will not buy a PS3. Maybe a 3D TV, since it would basically be a high performance display that can be used at different stuff, not just 3D.

• 4 Jonah Falcon // Jun 23, 2010 at 10:22 am

  Question of the Week:

  You know I’ve already written an article on this at GS, but I will relay some of my opinions, one or two of which have been updated. I also have the benefit of having been hands-on with all of these devices.

  Nintendo 3DS: 3D video on it is pretty poor. It doesn’t look 3D – it looks blurry. However, 3D CGI object, aka videogames, look spectacular. Pikmin and Super Mario Bros, for example, had depth and clarity.

  Something you guys didn’t mention is the fact that the 3DS adds an analog stick. Don’t underestimate that gameplay factor.

  Nintendo handheld fans are like Apple fans. They’ll early adopt without hesitation. They’ll not only buy it on day one, they’ll buy three or four of them in a year.

  Move: The control works better than the Wiimote, but unfortunately, it still resembles the Wiimote. Sony not only had the bad sense to imitate Nintendo’s control, but to make the SAME. EXACT. GAMES.

  Something you failed to mention: many of the single player games require two wands, like Boxing. This is a bad thing for Sony, because imagine you’re the consumer. You buy the bundle for $100. You start to play, but the game informs you: “Sorry, you can’t play Boxing without a second control”. You play their sports bundle. “Sorry, you can’t play half the sports like archery without a second control.”

  I think there’s a term for this. Oh, yes. BAIT AND SWITCH. Sony better put a label large and loud that says “Requires Second Wand to Play” on some of these games.

  Kinect: It works. That was the first hurdle. It actually works and works WELL. The second hurdle is getting people to wrap their heads around the concept of gesture-based control.

  However, there’s one huge mistake you’re making regarding Kinect – that it’s an Xbox 360 device.

  It’s not.

  Microsoft may be launching Kinect on the Xbox 360, but they are developing a PC compatible version, and even more important, a SET TOP BOX version.

  http://www.gamestooge.com/2010/06/23/kinect-standalone-pc-compatible-models-by-2011/

  That’s right, a standalone version of Kinect whose tech will be farmed out to other hardware manufacturers – think Panasonic, Sharp, and so on. This is Microsoft’s attempt to enter the hardware electronics space.

  So Kinect will be successful, whether on the Xbox 360 or not, so it’s hard to qualify what a success is. The funny thing is if by this time next year, Sony caves in, and creates a Sony Kinect. Now you have PS3 owners warming to the idea of Kinect, even if it’s not connected (pun realized) to their PS3’s directly.

• 5 Jonah Falcon // Jun 23, 2010 at 10:29 am

  One last thing. I posted a video on YouTube of booth babes at E3 doing Dance Central.

  There was one comment that I think speaks volumes in a subtle way:

  “Never thought I would see the day? when booth babes wanted to play games at e3…. kinect may be on to something here.”

• 6 Jacob // Jun 23, 2010 at 6:38 pm

  I think the 3DS will sale more than anything. I play ps3 more than xbox and I wont be buying any of the move stuff because.. well it’s just an add on sure it will be fun for the first few weeks, but when i game I play BFBC2 and some CoD and that uses the fingers. And I love getting on the mics and talking with my friends, but with the wand it’ll make it feel more of a burden to use it rather than the controller. I think the key will be to use the wand on some games, but not have it there for everything. Along witht he 3D tv, Philly D of youtube, Sxephil. He already stated that 3D porn will more than likely cause of the 3D tvs to sell. But I’m a first time responder I look forward to Tuesdays because of this and Thursdays for Painkiller already, a Podcast by gamers, mostly consoles, for the gamers. They have a more of a following on youtube.

• 7 squid // Jun 24, 2010 at 1:42 am

  What a great E3! Well, for Nintendo fans at least (like myself).

  Microsoft was disappointing. They really only had Kinect and some Shooters, neither of which I’m interested in.

  The games of E3 that I’m most looking forward to are: Civilization 5, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Portal 2, Rock Band 3 and (most of all) Paper Mario 3DS! 😀

  @QOTW
  Well, since it has a massive amount of Third Party publishers behind it already, since almost all journalists were really excited by it and since it has the massively successful DS name behind it, I’m voting for the 3DS. I might be a bit biased though, since I’m hyped about it, too 😀

  I think Kinect will come second, followed by Move in last place. Kinect actually has some originality to it, and a kind of ‘wow factor’ to it that casual gamers and the media will love. Move, however, is just a glorified Wii, and doesn’t bring anything new or original.

  I just don’t understand Sony sometimes…

• 8 Onyersix // Jun 24, 2010 at 12:09 pm

  I think its only a matter of time before you relabel the podcast in your intro to say “we intend to speak about news, history etc, but we’ll ramble on and go off-topic, and that’s what gives the show its awesomenessness.”. (Extra ness in there simply to add to the weight of how awesome, and it sounds like the sort of thing Derrick would say!)

  @ my “Sitting on the fence” comment, it was in reference to the previous week’s podcast where you were talking about people sitting on the fence, about the PSP if I remember correctly.

  @ QotW – I think Kinect will be the big seller / success story. The main reason, people have been talking all year about Natal (and most of last year). Shops (certainly in my town) are already advertising pre-orders. Its the big name. 3DS (and this is my own personal opinion) just sounds lazy, and not exciting. Don’t get me wrong, I think Natal was a better name than Kinect, which sounds like it should be a Sony product name.
  I also think Nintendo are getting a bit close to saturating their own market. I know that most Japanese people apparently have 2-3 DS versions each, but we had DS > DS Lite > DSi > DS XL already. The concept seems to have been lets make the DS smaller, then add a camera, then….wait a minute, why don’t we now go and make it frickin’ huge???
  Virtual Boy still lingers in the background as the biggest Ninty failure (unless you want to put forward the argument of your Robot again?) and sure technology has improved over the last 15 years, but I am still wary that it might just cause confusion amongst gamers.

  @ Move – Name sucks. Cost sucks. Even if it is more precise than Wii, I don’t see anyone except super rich hardcore fans (that rules me out by the way) buying it. Most gamers already have a “Wii60” or a “PS Wii” and won’t admit to turning on their Wii for little more than 2 hours a week, or at parties. Sure the kiddie graphics turn off some of us, but I personally don’t like having to pretend THAT much that I am hacking someone’s limbs off with an axe by demonstrating the motions, just like Jennifer doesn’t want to play Killzone 3 in 3d to actually feel like she’s being shot at with real bullets.

  3DTV – Meh. Just bought my 1080p HD. No way I am possibly going to buy a new one until this one dies, so I couldn’t even care about the n sparkly features of the market.

  I’ll also save you the bother of reviewing Red Dead Redemption since I have now completed it. (Feel free not to read this out in the podcast, but if you do leave it out, please read the “Left day” section.)
  I don’t think its really that fair to call it GTA Wild West or something similar. The sandbox size is much smaller. It does retain the idea of quest givers suggesting they can reveal information about your bounty targets, but only once you finish all their quests, and you begin to take it for granted that you will be morally screwed over.
  You quite often get strangers approach you to help save their wife who is being hanged, or shopkeeper who was robbed etc. These are amusing as you can choose to capture or slaughter the robbers, as well as just stand back and watch a firing squad kill a wagon owner.
  Co-op online has just been released and is cleared quickly enough, and ruined by the idiots who think throwing a molotov on the floor of the groups raft is funny as team kills are always on.
  The game suffers quite heavily from glitches though. Many have youtubed videos of things such as a woman with a horse with a woman’s body (on 2 legs) to the usual men stuck in walls. There was also the “left day”. On 23rd June the servers bugged meaning that no enemies spawned on the gang hideouts. This meant the game thought you had instantly cleared the level. By selecting left on the results screen you would retry the level, again clearing it in seconds. By doing this many gamers (such as myself) were awarded trophies and achievement points for getting “perfect” games with no deaths etc, as well as experience boosts. Thanks Rockstar!

• 9 Jareske // Jun 27, 2010 at 10:02 pm

  The 3DS will be massively successful. Nintendo’s got this one in the bag. Especially since it will be a handheld, Nintendo has never messed up a hanheld since the gameboy (excluding if you consider a Virtual boy a handheld)
  Kinect is a first generation of tech, Microsoft didn’t show off anything that amazed me showed me that this is innovation. So far they showed me controller-less Wii games. Once developers know how to use the hardware it will be sucessful. Until then, i’m going to wait until that killer app is made.
  It’s actually my hope that Kintetic tech and motion control tech is inntergrated into the next gen consoles and controllers.

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