Microsoft was an idiot. They've basically reversed roles from the last generation. Their major pitfall was investing in publishers and media giants while placing the importance on games and gamers second.
They've kept the same crappy system in place for Indie devs where they need to find a publisher to pay for a spot for them to get onto the marketplace. Meanwhile, the PS4 will allow for indie devs to self-publish directly.
I don't know how Microsoft thought they could get away with this idiotic DRM scheme. Or shoving the Kinect onto everyone as a basic system requirement. Not even Master Chief could save them this time.
Edit: Sheesh.
Maybe Microsoft should have designed two devices - one for gaming and one for entertainment - with a way to link them up for an all-in-one experience.
Really not impressed with the details coming out. I don't mind the idea of the 360 being an all in one entertainment system but all those features should be optional. Sometimes I just wanna play games.
doubleofive said:
E3 and this thread is on Page 2?!
So how about them apples? Microsoft made a huge mistake going first, I think.
As a non-pirate who doesn't deal in used games who is always online, I didn't have a problem with what they were planning with XBO, but Sony laid it down.
As for the price difference, remember that the Sony version of Kinect is sold separately at about $70 and Sony owns Blu-ray, so they probably give themselves a discount.
There has been so much news regarding video games as of late, I think a lot of us have been discussing it more in the real world leaving less desire to talk about it here. I know that is the case for me, usually I don't talk gaming much at all in real life, but lately it seems the topic of the next gen and current developments have been coming up a lot in conversation lately.
I've been a pretty big Xbox "fanboy" the last few years, because the 360 is a truly great system, I find my PS3 being used for very little more than playing BD movies and streaming TV shows and music from my computer. I have very little desire to play games on it, gaming just feels a lot better on my 360. At times it has been tempting to switch over to my PS3 for online multiplayer games to save money on my XB Live, but I still find myself grabbing the 360 versions. However, the PS4 is shaping up to look pretty solid. I have a feeling that if I buy another console in the next few years, it'll be a PS4. For now, I feel like my current systems have a lot of life left in them, there are still a lot of great games out there I have yet to touch, and there will still be new titles on the way for a little while yet.
CP3S said:
Anybody play State of Decay yet? It looks pretty amazing. Thinking about buying it, it is only $20. Trying to figure out if I can justify an extra twenty bucks on video games this month, since I am going to be blowing $60 on The Last of Us next week.
So, less than an hour after posting this I broke down and bought it. Only had a chance to play a little here and there before today. Whoa, this is one of the best games I've played in a long time. It is almost hard to believe it is a $20 Xbox arcade game and not a full sixty dollar title.
I think I am even going to hold off on The Last of Us for a few weeks, since I am enjoying this one so much. It is probably hands down the best zombie game I've ever played. It has so many little features that I have always lamented zombie games of the past not having. I also love and hate that there are real consequences in the game, taking your favorite character out on a supply run and nearly losing them forever makes you really think hard about what you are doing. Every time you die and lose someone, it feels like a real loss.
Seriously? Nobody else here has been playing State of Decay?
Lame.
We're still playing through all the other zombie killing games.
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Woah! $60 for a 360 game??? Ouch.
They are the same price in the UK for new games.
New games cost 40 quid in England, that is about the equivalent of $60, give or take a few bucks with exchange rate fluctuations.
Played The Last of Us at a friend's place last night, then finally dropped by Gamestop to pick up my reserved copy this morning. Absolutely gorgeous. Can't wait to play more of it.
CP3S said:
They are the same price in the UK for new games.
New games cost 40 quid in England, that is about the equivalent of $60, give or take a few bucks with exchange rate fluctuations.
Played The Last of Us at a friend's place last night, then finally dropped by Gamestop to pick up my reserved copy this morning. Absolutely gorgeous. Can't wait to play more of it.
Yeah that does look very good. Looking forward to Battlefield 4 and Watchdogs personally.
State of Decay is only $20 bucks. Everyone that I know who's played it has said it's amazing and would have been worth a $60 dollar purchase. Currently it's the fast selling Xbox Arcade game of all time. I'm kind of interested in it but I'm also tired of zombies. It's supposed to be coming to Steam so I'll probably wait and see.
Tobar said:
State of Decay is only $20 bucks. Everyone that I know who's played it has said it's amazing and would have been worth a $60 dollar purchase. Currently it's the fast selling Xbox Arcade game of all time. I'm kind of interested in it but I'm also tired of zombies. It's supposed to be coming to Steam so I'll probably wait and see.
I was saying that when I first started playing it. Now that I am really close to the end, I would have been really disappointed and annoyed had I payed $60 for it. It is definitely worth $20, and with some polish and some fleshing out, it would be a very worthy full price game.
The graphics are about on par with GTA IV, but are a little ugly for 2013. I've heard lots of complaints about glitches involving clipping, items falling through the floor, zombies passing through solid objects, that sort of thing. Personally, after spending a shameful near 30 hours on the thing since its release, I haven't run into too much of that, and when I did it wasn't really that big of a deal.
The real thing that makes it not worth much more than $20 bucks is that it is short, the world is small and lacks variation, and the mission system is more or less broken. For example, I spent over four hours playing the game today, and I was only able to beat two short story missions. One was on the map when I first started playing, and I had to wait around hours to get another one to pop up, then waited hours more for another one before finally deciding to quite and come back later.
Some extensive searching online seems to indicate that there is no surefire way to trigger them. You just have to wait around and keep playing the same redundant zombie hunt missions, survivor rescue missions, and moral missions over and over and over again. These are all essentially the same, one of the survivors from your group goes out and gets over run by zombies and call for help, then you save them. Or someone from your group is determined to kill some special mutated zombie and calls you on the radio to help them. Or someone in your group gets depresses, discouraged, angry, or some other emotional meltdown, and you make them go for a walk with you and kill a few zombies together so that they feel better. After doing each of these over a dozen times each, they get downright annoying.
In the four hours I played today I did pretty much nothing. The two missions I did play account for less than half an hour of playtime. Earlier this week I had my base setup perfectly and well fortified, my survivors live in good conditions, and we have more than enough of everything. I've explored the area thoroughly and am ready to progress the story, but the game only seems to give you that opportunity when it damn well feels like it. I am sure this is intentional, making it a little more realistic where exciting events don't always happen back to back, making you wait several in game days between events. But I feel like if someone wants to grind through the missions one after another, they ought to be allowed to. Not everybody has endless hours of playtime to waste at a time.
It is starting to feel like the Sims + Zombies now more than GTA + Zombies like it initially did. I am getting tired of having nothing to do but worry about my teams emotional states.
Still, for all of its flaws, it is pretty awesome and totally worth the $20 tag. It is basically the demo for its eventual MMO sequel, which I am very interested in.
As for being tired of Zombie games. Yeah, me too. This still managed to suck me in. It seems with every zombie game I've played I've always thought, "This is fun, but it would be really great if you could do this or that." Playing State of Decay for the first time was like playing that zombie game I had always wished I was playing while playing every other zombie game I have ever played.
Beat State of Decay. It makes sense now that they give you so much padding between offering you storyline missions, there really is only a small handful of them.
I think I found out that going around and clearing out hoards and infestations makes the next mission popup. Perhaps having too many hoards and infestations stops the main storyline, or perhaps it is coincidental and going out and killing hoards and clearing infestations did nothing more than cause me to stop watching the proverbial pot while waiting for it to boil.
Final verdict: Very much worth every single one of those 2,000 pennies I spent on it. I was kind of disappointed that none of the achievements were any kind of a challenge to get. It seems with Xbox arcade games you either get every achievement just for beating the game, or they give you achievements that are impossible or really time consuming.
SPOILERS
I feel like the game threw all these plot threads at me, then didn't resolve them. What are the Judge and the Sheriff up to? Restoring law and order to the town. Okay, let's see where that goes... Oh, nowhere. Second courthouse mission the place gets over run and they both die off screen, end of storyline. How about the Wilkersons and their ruthless ways? Ah, I see, that ends with us realizing that they are ruthless, but can be friendly to those who help them. For some reasons I was expecting some twist where it wasn't really them that were terrorizing the other survivors. Maybe I missed a piece of their story somehow? I feel like it stopped giving me Wilkerson missions with the plot just dangling there, but I got the achievement for completing their story.
It felt like a lot of detail and mystery was put into each of the story lines at the start, enough to get you intrigued and to want to look into them, then they all just fizzle out and go nowhere after two to four short missions
It would seem that big M have decided to take things seriously and get rid of the stupid online requirements and trade-in restrictions of the Xbox one.
Maybe they did the math and realized what a mistake it could be. Maybe they could call it the Xbox 180.
I'm starting to take an interest in the system now that it seems to be aimed at people like me. But I still think it's a bit early to launch the next gen systems - there's still fun to be had with the current gen.
It will be interesting to see SONY's reaction to this since they seemed to be winning over a lot of people annoyed with M's choices. Now the playing field has been levelled off a bit..
The DRM is big but they're still priced a hundred more than their competitor. A competitor whose system is smaller and more powerful than theirs.
Not to mention the Kinect integration.
The next console I'll be purchasing will be a PS3. There's a few exclusives on the system I've been wanting to play for a while now.
Johnny Ringo said:
Maybe they could call it the Xbox 180.
*giggles* Well done.
The blue elephant in the room.
Johnny Ringo said:
But I still think it's a bit early to launch the next gen systems - there's still fun to be had with the current gen.
1983 introduced us to the first SEGA and Nintendo consoles, 1988 and 1990 we got the Genesis and the Super Nintendo, 1994 brought us the Playstation and 1996 the Nintendo 64. 1998 the Dreamcast, 2000 the Playstation 2, 2001 the Gamecube and Xbox. 2005 the Xbox 360, 2006 the Playstation 3 and Wii.
The major players of the last few generations (which covers my life span) have trended on five years, give or take a year or two, and each generation was a pretty big leap. Compare Xbox, Gamecube, and Playstation 2 games with games for the 360, Wii (eh, never mind), and Playstation 3. It is a pretty incredible leap. If you count this generation as having begun in 2005, we are pushing a ten year gap between systems, graphics and capabilities have improved a lot during this period, but not in the leaps they have between other generations.
These consoles are using archaic technology, as far as the world of electronics is concerned. More and more people are switching to PC, for many reasons, but one of the main ones is the capabilities. Battlefield 3 on the PC vs. Battlefield 3 on the consoles is almost a shameful gap, you can barely even compare them. Games that are PC only tend to do things a console couldn't imagine. Fortunately for consoles users and unfortunately for everyone else, consoles are a large market and games are continually developed with porting to this old technology in mind.
The time for the next generation of consoles has been here for a while. Sure, there are still a lot of good games on the 360 and PS3, and more still on the way, I won't be upgrading for a long time, if ever, and I still have enough unfinished games left to play to last me a few years. But the field has been held back by stagnant technology for too long now (economy seemed to be a major factor in stretching this generation out for so long). It is passed time to see what developers can do with some more modern hardware.
I like the idea of every Xbox One coming with a Kinect, as long as every game doesn't feel they have to use it. Let us shout at it, sure, but don't fall into Nintendo's trap of "WE HAVE A NEW WAY TO CONTROL GAMES, ALL GAMES MUST BE CONTROLLED BY IT!"
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Most sensible people wait for a while with a new console before purchasing until the price comes down and ample titles have been released. Microsoft are really taking the piss with the XboxOne price and Sony are taking the piss aswell. Although nowhere near as much as Microsoft admittedly but its still extortionately high in my view.
Taking the piss, maybe. But they'll get that much for it. Never underestimate the desire of some to have the latest and greatest. Fine with me, let them help cover the R&D costs. Years down the line when the console finally starts turning a profit and has substantial price drops, guys like you and I can enter the scene and pick one up. By then the most common hardware failure kinks will be worked out too and we won't have to muck around with sending our units in to be fixed all the time.
CP3S said:
tired of Zombie games
Added to my list of potential band names in case I ever start a band.
TV's Frink said:
CP3S said:
tired of Zombie gamesAdded to my list of potential band names in case I ever start a band.
oh, you do that too?
Haven't been playing much, Haven't had much free time this week. My copy of the last of us has been collecting dust - might fire it up later.
Invested in a surface Pro tablet. Reading up on [PC] games that it will run and rifling through my collection. haven't actually installed any yet though..
I didn't really get the tablet for games but I'm curious to see how things run - it's more powerful than my Desktop computer.
There are a few titles out soon that I'm interested in - GTA5 [looks massive], Diablo 3 [for 360 - Never played it], Wolfenstein: The new order..
I guess I should probably get stuck into my pile of shame before then. My tomb raider is still half raided, I don't think Ill ever finish MW3, and the last of us of course.
Had a bit of a tinker during the weekend with my Surface Pro tablet. Installed Rage and had a bit of a play - it ALMOST runs smoothly at 1080p - just a slight bit of screen tearing but otherwise I think it runs better than on my desktop PC - the texture loading was definitely better - I almost never noticed texture pop-in, which I see fairly often on PC. - oh and this was running on an external USB hard drive too, So I was pretty impressed with that.
I also installed Portal 2 [mainly for the level editor] and that seems to run nice and smooth. I did have a few level ideas but I've started over from scratch now. Anyone here got any maps they've made to share?
Also been playing a bit of Shadowrun returns. I can lay in bed and play it just using a stylus which is cool. It's a bit slow at the start but i've been enjoying it.
Just played Grim Fandango. Awesome game.
Played the first act of Kentucky Route Zero. Fantastic atmosphere.
just grabbed Halo: Spartan Assualt. Haven't played much but it looks to be a good bit of fun.
Played through all of Aliens: Colonial Marines on the weekend - co-op mode with a friend. the game is fucking terrible.
I wanted to like the game but the story contradicts the films and doesn't even bother to do a decent job of ret-conning the storyline. overall the writing was very sloppy and it hardly even bothers being a story worth telling.
The issues during development of the game are well documented, and it's obvious while playing. there's no polish, it's all just slapped together.