Latest Gaming and MMORPG Updates |
- PlayStation Vita Scorecard
- Gala Lab reveals FlyFF 2
- Eden Eternal (TW)
- Why Are Game Budgets So Secretive?
- Team ICO Working Hard to Make The Last Guardian’s Level Design Unpredictable
Posted: 13 Feb 2012 07:57 AM PST Launch Date: 02/21/2012 Price: $249.99/$299.99 MSRP (Wi-Fi/3G) What is it?: The successor to Sony’s PSP, boasting impressive visual capabilities, a large OLED screen, touch and accelerometer interface features, dual analog stick input, games available both digitally and via compact Memory Stick-style media, and optional 3G wireless. Recommended Games: Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Army Corps of Hell, Escape Plan, Gravity Rush. The PlayStation Portable couldn’t miss. It was going to stomp Nintendo, bringing an end to 15 years of handheld gaming domination by the Game Boy family. It was going to win. Sony couldn’t be stopped. Nintendo’s desperate last-ditch counter, a weird and underpowered device called the DS, only made this outcome more certain. In 2005, the PSP was the future. Seven years later, the PSP could hardly be considered a failure — its worldwide sales recently edged past those of the famous Nintendo Entertainment System — but that puts it at roughly half the units moved as the DS. And the bulk of its popularity has been seen in Japan, where a thriving community of Monster Hunter-obsessed gamers have sustained the platform’s reign at the top of the charts for years. Here in the U.S., however, the PSP never quite found that kind of traction, and the past 18 months have seen only a handful of game releases as the system desperately holds its ground against the double threat of piracy and disinterest. Now it’s time for Sony’s second attempt: The PlayStation Vita. Yet this new platform faces an even more complicated battlefield than its predecessor. The market has changed since 2005, and this time Sony has to best not only Nintendo but overcome the direct threat of the mobile market (spearheaded by Apple) as well. Does the PS Vita have what it takes to conquer its rivals and assume the handheld throne assumed to rightfully belong to PSP so long ago? Or is Vita doomed to obscurity? The HardwareWhatever criticism you may choose to lob Sony’s way over their performance in the post-PlayStation-2 years, you certainly can’t accuse them of being complacent. PlayStation 3 managed to pull itself out of the miserable hole it was born in to stand as a vital platform packed with great software, and PS Vita likewise serves as a direct answer to nearly every complaint ever directed at PSP. It’s an extraordinary machine: Powerful, rich in features, ideally designed for portable play, and even more gorgeous than its predecessor. The PSP hardware suffered a good many flaws, but those issues are largely resolved here — and, even more impressively, within a piece of hardware that doesn’t stray too far from its predecessor. The Vita is clearly the PSP’s child, but bigger, stronger, and handsomer — metaphorically speaking, of course. Let’s start with that screen. Oh, that screen. The PSP screen represented an impressive step beyond what gamers were accustomed to at the time, no question; at four inches across and boasting a resolution of 480×272 pixels, it was a tremendous leap over the Game Boy Advance’s visuals — to say nothing of the 8-bit Game Boy, which had only been retired a few years prior. Yet Vita’s screen leaves the PSP’s in the dust. It’s the first thing you’ll notice about the system, because everything looks unspeakably gorgeous on Vita, even from a distance and at oblique angles. While it’s not quite as pixel-dense as Apple’s heavily hyped “retina display,” it’s close. And while its resolution of 960×540 pixels offers only one-quarter of the full 1080p potential of an HD system, it’s also five inches wide; those half-million-plus pixels are more than good enough. We’ll see better portable gaming screens than this (and quite likely within the year on some smartphone or another), but for now this is as good as you can buy. The quality of the screen helps, too. Unlike the iPhone, Vita boasts an OLED screen that offers incredibly rich colors and pure, deep blacks and a wide viewing angle. Compare the same game running on a top-of-the-line model 3000 PSP against the same game on Vita and the difference is startling; the once-gorgeous PSP looks washed out and dull. The iPhone 4S feels surprisingly small and cheap next to the Vita; the best Android phones offer similar screen dimensions but lack Vita’s visual quality; and Nintendo’s 3DS is practically laughable. Of course, the DS looked laughable next to the PSP, and we all know how that battle turned out. There’s more to a system’s success than hardware design. To Sony’s credit, though, the hardware seems much better thought-out this time around, and some of the fundamental flaws that hobbled PSP have been wiped away. For starters, it’s a solid-state system. The PSP’s UMD drive has always stood as one of the dumbest features ever seen in a handheld console. The complicated moving parts required for an optical drive made the PSP far more fragile than the cartridge-based DS, not to mention more power-hungry. Vita drops the optical drive, becoming in the process more solid in the hands, less fragile, less susceptible to parts breaking down, and less likely to unexpectedly eject UMDs at the slightest sign of torque. At the same time, battery life is decent enough. The system can snooze in sleep mode for a month without need for a recharge (yes, we’ve tested it) and is good for about three-and-a-half to four hours of high-performance play with a game like Uncharted: Golden Abyss running at full screen brightness and Near’s networking features pinging away in the background. That’s not precisely amazing, but it’s the standard for a portable device these days and puts it on par with most phones and the 3DS. We’re well beyond the days of Game Boy’s 40 hours of play time from two AAs, and the only device you can expect better life from is a tablet like the iPad (which is basically a giant battery with a screen attached). In sleep mode with Near searching for other connections, the Vita is good for a couple of days before needing a recharge — much better than the 3DS, which needs to stagger back to an electrical outlet after about 18 hours of Street Passing. Pretty screens and portable longevity are great, but on a strictly gameplay-oriented level the most important change to Vita over any of its portable predecessors is the addition of a right analog stick. Technically, Nintendo beat Sony to the punch by a few days with the Circle Pad Pro, but that thing’s kind of a mess, and its long-term prospects are anyone’s guess. Vita has a right stick built right in, which means developers can design for it and be certain that everyone will have the ability to use it. One could argue that portable games shouldn’t just be scaled-down console games, and that’s certainly true… but we’ve seen enough portable games over the years that would have benefitted from a second stick for camera control (or even for, say, ease of rolling a katamari) that Vita will almost certainly be most developers’ go-to platform for handheld 3D action experiences, hardware power notwithstanding. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
Posted: 13 Feb 2012 01:55 AM PST
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. Incoming search terms:
|
Posted: 13 Feb 2012 01:27 AM PST
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
Why Are Game Budgets So Secretive? Posted: 12 Feb 2012 07:55 PM PST
Before asking the question above to a bunch of people at this year’s DICE conference, I assumed everyone would agree with me that the game industry doesn’t like talking about how much games cost to make. It turns out I was mostly right, but not entirely — some weren’t aware of what I was suggesting, though almost everyone had a unique take on why things are the way they are. Check out all the replies below, and we won’t complain if you want to offer your own take in the comments at the bottom of the page. Promise. Brian Reynolds, Zynga Marc Merrill, Riot Games Don James, Nintendo Mike Capps, Epic Games Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software [1UP: What does Borderlands 2 cost?] I think by the time all is said and done, we’re somewhere in the 30-35 million dollar range. We’re still going, so we’ll see what happens, but yeah the publisher took a lot of risk in that. What’s neat about this is because I take my own risk too, nobody gets to know how much Take-Two risked on that.” Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward Tim Sweeney, Epic Games Michael Condrey, Sledgehammer Games Matthew Lee Johnston, PopCap Amir Rao, Supergiant Games David Jaffe, Eat Sleep Play [1UP: If I was to ask, would you tell me?] I wouldn’t because it’s not my place to, but not because I wouldn’t want to tell you. I would love to tell you. Umm I don’t know. I could probably speculate, and it would probably be some right, some wrong. Maybe it’s that they’re public companies? Though the movie studios are public too. I would have no problem with people knowing how much the games we make cost and what it means to break even. Why not? I don’t care.” Tomonobu Itagaki, Valhalla Game Studios Danny Bilson, THQ Ted Price, Insomniac Games Todd Howard, Bethesda Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
Team ICO Working Hard to Make The Last Guardian’s Level Design Unpredictable Posted: 12 Feb 2012 01:26 PM PST Shadow…Posted: 2 days ago by GodHandCooper came out of nowhere for me personally, ICO was a cult classic among those who played it but I never had. SotC was not really covered like crazy as most games are now. The Last Guardian gets coverage where it can, but the devs will be sure not to spoil anything significant i’m sure….
I am a huge follower of upcoming game news and I had literally not heard anything before Sony sent me a Demo Disc direct(i had no idea it was coming, I must’ve been on some list from the Underground days or something) with nothing but the SotC demo on it. We had no idea what to think, we tried it, it taught you how to ride a horse, then how to climb, then we went out and BAM there’s a colossus, go for it…. It took us about an hour to realize you actually had to climb the thing, it’s like you “you have a bow, and a sword, shine your sword around to find weakpoints, now kill it.”
It really was one of the most gripping gaming experiences I ever had, and me and my friends immediately took turns playing the demo over and over again, pretty much until the game came out. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
You are subscribed to email updates from Gameforumer.com: MMORPG Reviews | Gaming News | Gaming Community | Gaming Directory and more To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 |