General gaming

General gaming

Kinect Star Wars Review: Boldly Going Where Star Wars Didn't Need to Go

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 03:29 PM PDT

In today's world of dazzling high resolution graphics, the line between a great video game and a terrible one is often measured by the sheer ambition of the product. This trend of bigger and better happens so often in the HD era of games that it's easy to forget the power of restraint. Some of my fondest video games experiences came from limitations. Metal Gear, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil are all examples of games built around this philosophy during early days of polygonal video games. While the correlation between present day Microsoft Kinect games and early PlayStation titles may appear blasphemous to some, understanding the advantages of working within restraints and its impact can go a long way.

Kinect Star Wars misses this point completely, resulting in a collection of mini games that alternate between fun and frustrating, despite its charming attempts to enamor you with the loving characters of the Star Wars universe. A bulk of Kinect Star Wars' issues present themselves in the Jedi campaign, a mode that pits players into the role of a young Jedi in training, but every mode seems to suffer from a lack of visualizing the big picture and understanding that a Star Wars family game needs to appeal to all ages, yet be simple and engaging enough for anyone to play.

OP-ED: Why The Next Gen Will Still Play Used Games

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 02:58 PM PDT

Can it be that another crop of new consoles is just beyond the horizon? It seems like just yesterday we were talking about the Nintendo Revolution or the Xbox 2 or the PlayStation... 3. And yet, here we are, once again, letting our imaginations run wild about what the future holds. Details are sparse at best about the next Xbox and the next PlayStation, but there is one rumor that has gotten a fair amount of attention. That rumor is that neither system will play used games. I'm here to tell you why that won't be happening. Not this generation at least.

Firstly, it will be a technological kludge. Let's look at DRM as an example of companies using technology to achieve a goal. How long does it normally take some resourceful hacker to break an otherwise "unbreakable" DRM scheme? A few months? For every man-hour a company expends trying to write a piece of code, there are literally hundreds of hacker-hours spent cracking it. It's just a numbers game. If Microsoft and Sony implement a system that prevents their consoles from playing used games, it will be the mission of studious hackers to crack that system. Remember what happened to Sony when they got rid of the Other OS option on the PS3? The hacker community was furious and it ended up costing Sony quite a lot of time and money. Now, I don't advocate this sort of thing, threatening financial harm through hacking, but I am at least acknowledging that it's a real scenario that will play out. The simple fact is that setting up a system to prevent the systems from playing used games will be futile. Someone will figure out a way around it.

OP-ED: Wii U's Reportedly Underwhelming Hardware Unlikely to Matter

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 01:36 PM PDT

Wii U

A lot about the Wii U remains unknown. We do know it's coming later this year and many more details are going to be shared at E3 in June. In the meantime, a new report has emerged suggesting the system is less powerful than many expect.

Multiple sources have indicated to GamesIndustry.biz that the Wii U is less powerful than both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Nintendo didn't exactly go cutting-edge with the technology it used in the Wii, but we're now talking about a system being underpowered as compared with systems that will have been out for seven and six years, respectively, at the time of the Wii U's launch. That doesn't inspire confidence that Wii U will be anything more than a stopgap for when the "real" next-gen consoles come along a year or two later. But does this report actually make sense, and if it's true, does it even matter?

Posted by Shri Krishna

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