General gaming

General gaming

OP-ED: It's Too Soon for a PlayStation Vita Price Cut

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 04:43 PM PDT

Vita

PlayStation Vita has now been available for two months in North America and Europe, and twice as long in Japan. In that time it's failed to make any sort of significant splash as far as sales go -- in Japan, where we receive weekly updates courtesy of Media Create, the system sold less than 9,000 units in each of the first two weeks this month, and it wasn't as if it was doing gangbusters prior to that. Software has done poorly as well, rarely making the top 50 sales charts in Japan; in the U.S., only MLB 12 has been seen in the NPD's top 10, and that is with sales of the PlayStation 3 and Vita versions being combined. All of the Vita's games are also available through the PlayStation Store, so it is unfair to judge the performance of software purely on sales charts that only account for retail. The amount of hardware that has been moved so far, however, does feel like cause for concern.

Sony is in a less-than-desirable position right now, as outlined in a recent New York Times piece. Vita not exploding out of the gate is relatively low on the list of problems for the company, which hasn't turned a profit in years. But with new president and CEO Kaz Hirai recently pronouncing gaming as one of the pillars upon which Sony will turn things around, bigger things have to be expected from Vita. A middling success (if it can be called that) is not enough.

Republique and the Price of Bringing PlayStation's Spirit to iOS

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 04:09 PM PDT

République, the recently revealed debut title from ex-Kojima Productions and 343i designer Ryan Payton's new studio Camouflaj, takes a refreshingly different approach to game design than the usual iOS fare. Rather than going for an ersatz 8- or 16-bit spirit or trying to cram a complex genre like first-person shooters onto a platform with a buttonless interface, Republique instead takes a page from the PlayStation era to take advantage of the processing power inherent in Apple's iDevices while respecting the actual design of the machines it'll be running on. The graphical style at work here hearkens back to the likes of the 32-bit Resident Evils and Final Fantasies: Detailed polygonal characters and objects exist within pre-rendered environments, static despite having been animated to simulate liveliness, depth, and interactivity.

Prototype 2 Review: Why So Serious?

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 02:13 PM PDT

Prototype 2 allows you to indulge in the amazing fantasy of embodying a Superman-esque protagonist with a massive chip on his shoulder. Instead of protecting Metropolis from the forces of evil, you are the embodiment of chaos whose sole goal is to cause as much violence and destruction as possible, which would be great if the game didn't trap you within the confines of a boring and uninspired playground.

Anyone who played the original Prototype will utter an immediate groan when they realize that this game suffers from the ancient sequel flaw of stripping away all the abilities that the player earned throughout the first installment and forcing you to relearn everything piece by piece. There isn't a deus ex machina in the story a la Death in Symphony of the Night, but rather a new anti-hero who has to tread the same ground in learning the neat tricks and mutations that the player already knows. This time around you control James Heller, an Iraq War veteran who comes back home to find his family dead and New York City in the midst of biological warfare. Heller blames all of life's problems on Alex Mercer, the protagonist of the original installment, and spends the game navigating his way through various conspiracies in order to get his chance at revenge.

prototype 2

Finding an Edge Against Steam

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 01:03 PM PDT

Impulse

Steam is top dog when it comes to the digital distribution of PC games, and for many people it's the one and only way to purchase PC games. Although it was maligned by most everyone when it was first released and made playing Half-Life 2 at its launch a real hassle, Valve was smart to enter the market when it did: it's had the better part of a decade to figure out what does and doesn't work. And being as early as it was, it's become the definitive example of how digital computer games should be distributed.

That puts everyone else at a fairly significant disadvantage. Because it's not as if Steam was merely the first; it is, in many ways, the best option available as far as these sorts of services go -- as long as you can look past the inherent DRM of using something like Steam. As other companies launch competitors, they have to worry about getting the fundamentals right. While they're doing that, Valve is free to spend its time developing things like the Steam Workshop that make the competition look bush league by comparison.

The Hysterical History of Portable Consoles

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 11:04 AM PDT

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The Hysterical History of Portable Consoles

A recollection of the game industry's awesome yet baffling attempts to take home systems on the road.

By: Ray Barnholt April 20, 2012

Not to sound like an old fogey, but -- oh, what the hell: kids these days are spoiled, what with their Nintendo 3DSes and their iPads. The best portable games are now only a notch or two below the quality of console and PC games, to the point where the average person probably couldn't tell them apart. In the '80s and '90s, though, handheld gaming was a luxurious novelty, on par with staying up late on weekends and birthday parties at Discovery Zone. While Nintendo's Game Boy was a somewhat affordable system that had plenty of good games and eventually dominated the market, some kids had to wrest them from their parents' hands. Many just didn't have one at all, and had no choice but to settle for cheap, dinky LCD games from Tiger Electronics and its contemporaries.

But those early days of portable gaming were also when a grand fantasy started to become real. Gamers with wild imaginations dreamt of portable systems that could play their console games -- NES, Super NES, Genesis, and whatever else -- and instantly leapfrog the Game Boy. Wild as it was, some manufacturers decided to give it a try, shrinking home consoles down into handheld units with color LCD screens that would, ostensibly, provide the same quality of entertainment, only on the go. Though they all failed in their own ways, the idea (and the technology) slowly advanced through to the present day, when games of the '90s are now "retro," and carry the same sense of novelty as portable-only games once did. This is the story of the utterly weird evolution of the so-called portable console.

Pardon the 'Express'ion

The Five Things Silent Hill Downpour Got Right

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 10:32 AM PDT

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The Five Things Silent Hill Downpour Got Right

The latest Silent Hill wasn't entirely bleak.

By: Whitney Chavis April 20, 2012

March 2012 became known as Konami's "Month of Horror", with three major Silent Hill entires set to spook series fans and newcomers alike: Silent Hill HD Collection and Silent Hill: Downpour on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, and Silent Hill: Book of Memories for the recently released Playstation Vita. Unfortunately, March turned into a "Month of Disappointment" for many fans with Book of Memories' release pushed back to a vague "Spring 2012" while the much anticipated HD Collection turned out to be a technical downgrade instead of the high-definition upgrade fans were promised. But some would say that being disappointed by a release isn't anything new for Silent Hill fans; for many, it's even expected.

These fans believe that the quality of the Silent Hill series has been in steep decline ever since development moved out of the hands of Konami's in-house, Japanese "Team Silent" and into the hands of American and European developers after Silent Hill 4: The Room. Many claim that the new developers don't "understand" what really makes a good Silent Hill title, pointing out that Silent Hill: Homecoming's horror was less cerebral and more "typical Hollywood," suggesting that the developers took too many cues from the 2006 Silent Hill movie. Couple that with the recent re-imagining of the original game in the series, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which many felt failed to provide even the most basic scares, and you begin to see many fans now feel the series has become a mockery of its former glory.
Posted by Shri Krishna

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