October 06, 2006
Street Fighter: The Later Years
What happened to Zangief & Dhalsim after the world renown Street Fighter tournament?
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1711287
Posted by vhadiant at 09:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2006
PS3 price
I didn't watch the last 3 minutes of Sony's keynote at the E3. PS3 will launch in Europe and Australia 17 November 2006 for 600 Euros and AUD 999.
Posted by vhadiant at 11:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2006
Sony E3 Press Conference Aftermath
PS3 was unveiled just a few hours ago at E3 conference. You can download the full 2 hours of the press conference video from Gamespot. I watched it a few hours ago before going to gym and thus had a bit of thought about it.
To summarise the press conference:
1) PSP #2 will have an added GPS functionality. One of the incoming software is Planet PSP, a travel guide designed for PSP. I think this could be a winner if done correctly in a subscription based or per country based sales.
2) Sony will open its back catalog of PS1 games for download to play in PSP. Kaz Hirai demonstrated playing the original Ridge Racer on PSP. Maybe they copied the idea from Nintendo, but I'm not sure how good this will be. Old Nintendo games (NES, SNES) maxed at 4MB per games. PS1 games are CD-ROM based games and FF VII spans over 3 CD. It's obvious that Sony is betting on broadband penetration to be a lot higher in the near future. If this works, this can be Sony's cash cow for the next 5 years.
3) PSP and PS3 will work together using WiFi. In the press conference, they showed an F1 game in PS3 where you can use the PSP as the rear mirror. Cool but pointless, it'll be better if you can use the PSP as for the in-game minimap or something more creative. I'm sure Hideo Kojima can figure something out.
4) You will be able to download music from Sony's shop directly to PSP. Trying to play catch up with iPod?
5) Still no good news for better PSP games in the near future. All the previewed games don't look that promising.
6) Now on to PS3. Well definitely the #1 question is how much it's going to cost. Wait no longer, Sony has released the price USD600. This is the most expensive console price ever. Yes you can get the USD500 version but it's limited and it doesn't have high def output.
7) Can't really see how good the graphic will be because the webcast quality from Gamespot is not that good. However from the various reports on the web it's going to look just as good if not better than XBOX 360.
8) Nintendo fanboys are crying foul when Sony revealed that their controller too will have a "motion sensor". Different technology (gyro) but same idea indeed. Well, isn't this interesting. I have had experience with gyro mouse and they suck. I hope Sony can do a lot better job than the current generation of gyro mouse out there.
9) Sony will release an online service that will rival if not better XBOX Live - or so they claim. Currently PS2 online service is horrendous, they can't do any worse than this. Whether it can rival XBOX Live only time will tell. We need to remember that this is Microsoft's second attempt for online game service while Sony only did a half-arsed attempt last time.
10) As expected, PS3 will double as Blue-Ray player. The base model has 20GB and the USD600 will have 60GB hard drive.
So there it is. The web is buzzing with Nintendo and XBOX fanboys crying foul about Sony is ripping-off Nintendo, Apple, Microsoft or whatever company they can name. But regardless what features Sony copied from other companies the big question is will they succeed? Can they win this seventh generation console battle?
Hard to say at the moment but I don't think they will outsell XBOX 360 5:1 just like PS2 vs XBOX in the last generation battle. Especially with the extraordinarily high launch price at USD600 and Nintendo wii's expected launch price to be USD199 (Nintendo's magic number) PS3 will look less and less attractive to most gamers. People who have been waiting for PS3 now may have decided that it's not going to worth it and buy XBOX 360 instead. I predict a spike of XBOX 360 sales in the coming weeks.
However, Sony still have the support of the behemoth game company Square Enix. Which I believe is a major factor that contributed to Playstation total dominance in the last decade. On top of that, all the major franchises - Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid - all are returning to PS3. This is a major contributor for gamers like me, and my brothers to some extent, that will pretty much buy which console Square Enix are releasing their games to.
Will I buy PS3? Yes. Will I buy it on release? Absolutely not. I will be in UK by that time and once again I'm pretty sure that UK will cop the higher-than-the-rest-of-the-world price.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 21, 2005
Street Figher 2 vs Mortal Kombat
Wow ... I saw this link @ Joystiq earlier today and I'm totally awed by the quality. Even if you don't play both games you'll still notice the amount of work that has been put to make the movie. But it's to the players that this movie is dedicated to. I think unless you play the games you wouldn't truly understand the attention of details, the signifcant of the moves and even the sound effect that were used.
Posted by vhadiant at 06:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2005
NES 20th Anniversary
Celebrating the venerable NES 20th anniversary (has it been that long? Geez I still remember the first day my NES arrived!), 1UP.com is running a full week feature. The first day is the history of the little machine that changed the gaming world itself.
It's a very well written and well thought of article chronicling the early years of NES in the US. It always intrigue me to read the history of successful products and what made it so.
Posted by vhadiant at 09:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 04, 2005
Revolution controller with FPS
I've never thought about it before, but in this interview Shigeru Miyamoto pointed out a very excellent point that the new Revolution's controller will be very good in FPS game. Actually if you think about it, it will work really good. No longer you need to use that awkward little thumbstick to point the gun, you just simply point the controller to where you want to shoot it. While the other part of the controller (on your left hand) will still control the movement. Perfect.
Posted by vhadiant at 11:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 28, 2005
Miyamoto is God
[Via Joystiq]
Posted by vhadiant at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 26, 2005
Worst decision ever
Back in 1983 Nintendo wanted to break to the American market selling their Famicom console which had a good run in Japan. At that time they weren't confident that they can compete against the American giant Atari, then the console leader with their 2600, 5200 and soon to be released 7800. So instead of competing head to head they approached Atari to license their name for the Famicom console. Atari told Nintendo that they weren't interested in their game system and the marketing hated the Nintendo controller because it doesn't have the joystick in it. At that time all Atari's controllers had the little joystick in it, while Famicom controller which derived from Nintendo's Game & Watch has the D-Pad. EGM said that this was also because an unrelated spat over an unauthorised home port of Donkey Kong. This was to be the worst flop ever in the video game industry, even bigger than Nintendo's mistake to abandon Sony's partnership.
Nintendo decided to go ahead selling Famicom in US re-branding it as "Nintendo Entertainment System" (NES) and the rest is history. It came and swept the US market and in its course sent Atari packing from the industry. Atari was eventually sold to Hasbro on 1998 for a measly USD5 million.
Granted Atari's demise was not caused by a single bad decision (one of the execs was reported to say "I could put [anything] in a box and it'd sell a million copies,"), but one could see that had Atari let Nintendo license its name, the income from what had been NES would have delivered millions into its bank account and probably saved the company.
[From EGM & other sources]
Posted by vhadiant at 09:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 19, 2005
Nintendo Revolution Controller Unveiled
So at long last the Revolution controller has been unveiled. The naysayers are out in full force predicting doom for the old Nintendo.
I hope not, I think the controller will be very fun to play with and with its new possibilities the game designer will put their creative hat and start thinking of new style of games. Besides, there will be an older style controller port so you can play GC games on it. You can tilt the controller horizontally so you can play those old Nintendo or SNES games. I'm seriously considering getting Revolution just to play those old SNES games. Yes I know you can do that using SNES emulator, but it's just not the same.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2005
It's a good time to be a gamer
Nintendo Revolution (that's about 3 DVD cases stack up together):
Posted by vhadiant at 07:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 08, 2005
Real XBOX 360 shot
Finally it's here:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000490042605/
Posted by vhadiant at 11:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 14, 2005
Gizmondo price drop, deliver adds
[via Joystiq]
Oooo a £100 price drop, but now you have to receive at least 3 ads on your Gizmondo. This will be content targeted as well, depending on the owner of the device. Now you have to make sure you change your ownership details in Gizmondo database if you buy this thing second hand, last thing you want to see on your Gizmondo is an advertisement targeted to a 17 teeny bopper.
My prediction? Same fate with Nokia's N-Gage.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:02 PM | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
The Distillers on Gran Turismo 4
Gran Turismo 4 has been released in Australia and is currently devastating the sales chart. I don't need to post yet another review of it (it's awesome!), but I was pleasantly surprised to hear The Distillers' Drain The Blood in the soundtrack. It was a bit of a surprised really when I first heard that, who would have thought :)
Well, someone somewhere in Japan must be listening to the Distillers, yeap the game's score has just gone up on my own personal rating, now currently at 11 out of 10 :D
Posted by vhadiant at 09:21 PM
April 06, 2005
Microsoft is pulling all the stops on XBOX 2
Well after Hironobu Sakaguchi left SquareEnix to start his own company making games exclusive for XBOX now 2 more legends, Yoshiki Okamoto and Tetsuya Mizuguchi are going to work making XBOX 2 only games.
Ah Okamoto-san, I will always remember my misspent youth spending hours and hours (and hours) in front of Street Fighter 2 machine.
After the total failure in the lucrative Japanese market, MSFT seems to be pulling all the stops trying to entice more and more Japanese games developer to make titles for XBOX. I’ve always said that XBOX in its current form, despite its relative easiness to make pirated games, will not make it in both the Japanese and Asian market. Japanese and Asian prefer different types of games than the American, it has always been and I can’t see this to change in the foreseeable future.
It’s hard to explain the different between Jap/American/European games flavour unless you play a lot of games yourself and have tried the different type of games. I personally prefer the Jap style games, Euro games second and I hate most of the games that come out from the US. Don’t really know why, I guess how you grow up with your games has a lot to do with this.
The Asian market has always been leaning to the Japanese games since donkey’s age, luckily for us there are enough American who like those Japanese games to warrant conversion, especially the popular one. Having said that I still couldn’t forgive Square for not porting Final Fantasy 2, 3, and 4 to English version.
Anyway, around late last year the sales figure for PS2, XBOX and GameCube respectively were 70m, 15.5m, 14m. My prediction, seeing all the efforts that MSFT is currently doing, XBOX 2 will be closer to PS 3 and that will make GameCube a distant third on the next generation console. I don’t think XBOX 2 will take PS crown on the next gen console, but it’s looking very dangerous. I’m a PlayStation bigot so I will buy PS3 regardless, unless SquareEnix moved to XBOX exclusively. They’ve done this before moving from Nintendo to Sony when they were SquareSoft, it was the greatest coup in the gaming industry (ever, if I may say so), then you know it’s Game Over.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:21 PM
April 03, 2005
Blurring the reality and fantasy
This news is a bit old:
[snip]
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12700815-23109,00.html
A SHANGHAI online game player stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily said today.
The incident creates a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons.
[/snip]
Heh I guess this incident will also creates a dilemma in Australia where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons :)
Seriously I think the border between reality and fantasy is getting thinner. When kids first experience with pets are with Tamagotchi, they’ll probably will have serious problem about handling real life pets later on.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2005
WoW hits 1.5m subscribers
Blizzard announced that WoW broke 1.5 million subscribers. Wowzaa .... now that's way beyond anything that I predicted. Okay I knew it was going to be big but never thought it was going to be that big.
Probably time to join Mr. E* @ Theramore.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:43 PM
March 20, 2005
Boys like to play girls ....
Ben from Joystiq said that Game Girl Advance found that there are a lot of boys that play as a girl in MMO.
Ben and Game Girl, the #1 law in MMO (not necessarily RPG, in all MMOs), and I dare say in any web forum, BBS, IRC on the internet is:
"everyone is male unless proven otherwise".
PS: Oh and I always play as a male.
Posted by vhadiant at 05:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
