World's Worst Man

The former launch title and first good FPS that's not really an FPS for the Wii finally arrives in three days. New Previews~! IGN - http://wii.ign.com/articles/814/814436p1.html GameSpot - http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/metroid...ew_6177057.html I'm not so sure how different the game itself is going to be from the previous two Prime titles, but Wiimote controls should greatly enhance the experience, to a point where it won't matter if it's lacking in originality. I predict it'll be better than BioShock and receive lower scores. Edit - TV commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-CtXa6DMBU Gotta love goofball Wii commercials with people totally overdoing the wiimote gestures. Still, the game looks like a ton of fun.

The myth that BioShock was innovative is just a product of people who don't have experience with the genre. That's fine for regular folk, but you'd think professional reviewers would do some research before making those kind of claims, especially when the comparisons to System Shock 2 were constantly being made before the game's release. But, I've long since come to terms with the fact that PC gaming doesn't reach an audience nearly as large as console gaming, so titles that are a "poor man's versions" (ie. not as good, and made in the same style) of older PC games (Halo, BioShock) will get praised as being original masterpieces.

I beat the game a few minutes ago. Can't say I was impressed with the story or how it was told at all, but I'm an RPG/MGS fan, so I'm used to professional video game story-telling and cut-scenes. I'd say about half of the missions were really good, and half of them sucked. Just too much aimless wandering around and back-tracking in some of the missions. As I've mentioned, the co-op is horrible and seems to have just been a throw-in. There just doesn't seem to be any benefit to having a buddy playing a long, and the respawn system is rather frustrating. I didn't do any multi-player, but it seems like it would be awesome due to the amount of vehicles and weapons in the game (even though you didn't get to use them very much in the campaign).

Halo 3 might be the same formula as Halo 1, but it improved on many aspects of the formula. A better selection of weapons and a more interesting and varied level design being the first two things that jump out at me. How it compares to Halo 2 I cannot say, since I never bothered with it after the mediocrity of the original game. I'd say the bigger problem with the game is that it was seemingly made only for people who played the previous games. No attempt was made to explain the story from the previous two installments, or give hints on what you're supposed to do in certain situations. The plot was basically a sad attempt to put a serious, dramatic story into a campy sci-fi super-soldier game, so it wasn't a big deal. But not knowing how to approach certain situations early on kind of sucked. Comparing the MP3 and Halo 3 reviews is funny though, because I'd be hard-pressed to name one area where Halo 3 was better than Metroid Prime 3. If a reviewer is going to blast a game just for being similar to it's predecessors - without actually examining whether or not there were significant improvements - he should probably maintain that standard for all games though. I would say that would be a rather silly line to take though. Halo 3 and MP3 both had enough differences from their predecessors, or improvements on the formula, to be excluded from that criticism. This isn't a Zelda TP situation where the entire game, right down to the environments and combat, feels exactly the same.

Everyone is losing credibility for the Halo 3 reviews to be honest. The 1UP review accurately depicts a number of the failings in the game, but the guy gave it a 10/10 anyway. Some of the other reviews just ignored the issues altogether and gave it ridiculous scores. The stupid scores are ok if the review is actually worthwhile (ie. it addresses all aspects of the game), but to ignore clear flaws is rather misleading I would think. Although in the case of a double standard, it's possible that the reviews in question were done by two different people. I'm not sure that's the case in this instance, but it has happened before.

The Wii specs are pretty brutal, I'm not sure people are really under-selling its power. Expecting the graphics to improve over time is natural - developers will become more familiar with the hardware the more experience they have with it. But that also applies to the PS3 and 360, so it's not like the Wii is going to get any closer. That's fine though, the Wii is what it is.

Yea, I just started the game solo, on heroic difficulty, and it's much more enjoyable. I think the co-op just sucks; partly because of the idiotic 4:3 scaling it uses, and partly because there's really no tactical or strategic benefit to playing with another person. The campaign seems designed for one person, unlike say Gears of War where it was quite handy to have a human controlling the sidekick.

So I played the first couple of missions of the campaign. I guess the first thing that struck me was how the split-screen is put into a 4:3 box - meaning there are black bars on the side of the TV even though I tried both 720p and 1080i. Suffice to say, the viewable area is incredibly small on a 32" TV. There didn't seem to be any setting that would fix that, so I really don't know what the hell they were thinking when doing the split-screen. The graphics aren't very good at all. That might be because I'm playing split-screen, but the graphics aren't even touching Gears of War or BioShock, the former of which I also played split-screen. Neither does the level design seem as detailed or interesting as those other games. The gameplay seems pretty weak. The point of the game seems to be to kill hordes of enemies that aren't very smart or difficult to kill, using weapons that don't seem to be a whole lot different from one and other. There's certainly nothing as cool as Gears of War's chainsaw gun, or BioShock's plasmids. I can't say I'm impressed at all with this game, especially in comparison to the greatness that was BioShock and Gears of War. But I am fairly early in the game, so perhaps things get better later. Edit - Mission 3 is much, much, much better. It's actually paced well, and the second half has an awesome environment. It was actually a challenge too.

I remember when TF2 was supposed to be a Quake 2 mod. Then a Half Life mod. Then a stand-alone game. Now finally it's coming out. The sad thing is, even though I'm an original TFer and was in the clan that was supposed to play in the first TF2 match, I really have little interest in the game right now. I think it's because I know my PC won't be able to run it well enough to play competitively, and there's so much competition within the genre. If my buddies are getting it, I may have to break down and get it anyway, so hopefully it's worthy of the TF name.

I'll be downloading it, and soon it looks like since it was released early. The co-op is the draw for me, and the game looked like a vast improvement over the first two installments, so I'm going to give it a try. Hopefully it has bots for local multiplayer as well, but I haven't really read much about the game so I don't know.

I have it. I played it for a bit and decided it wasn't nearly as good as GT3/4, so I haven't played it since. The two series share too many of the same tracks and cars to make it worthwhile to play the knockoff. I'm probably going to grab PGR4, because it seems to be a different kind of game, what with the street racing and such rather than the professional racing.

I actually really loved the music in Goldeneye. There really needs to be a new, good, James Bond FPS, if for nothing else than the single player would be awesome.

That was in response to DrVenkman. The single player was decent, but I think the draw of the game was multi-player. At least, that's what I got from hearing people talk about it. The reason I don't think it's aged well is that it's pretty much been one upped by many games since its release. Locational damage was done better by Counter-Strike - and others - with it's "true" locational damage (one headshot kills, 3 body shots, etc). Stealth was more in-depth in games like Thief, MGS, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex. Not to mention the games like the Half Life series, which aren't really the same type of gameplay, but probably hit aspects of the genre better than Goldeneye. I don't doubt that there's still playability in it, but in a critical sense I don't think it's held up very well.

Start the thread then. We can just use it to post witty banter and insider jokes, even though it's much more offensive than gross smarminess and an inability to deal with differing opinions.

Goldeneye was successful due to its multi-player, which was the first time a console FPS had multi-player of that depth. Obviously it was nothing new for PC gamers - Doom had already done 4 person multi-player, while Quake was doing 32 player online multi-player and revolutionizing PC FPS gaming around the time of Goldeneye's lifespan - but Goldeneye was reaching a different and probably larger group of gamers, so it didn't matter what the PC games were bringing to the table. It was more or less the same situation as Halo, and the same thing that's happening with BioShock, but that's just the nature of PC gaming I guess. It's not as widespread or popular as console gaming, even more so today, so a lot of those PC games fly under the radar - and when carbon copies of those games are released, many people consider them original and they receive a ton of praise.

I don't think it's laziness like I've heard mentioned elsewhere, but I think it's more that developers have trouble making games early in a console's life cycle because they don't have much experience with the dev kit. The Xbox 360 had similar problems with crummy graphics in some of their early games. You can also compare the games of any console from it's early to late life and see a rather significant difference in graphical quality, which is also a by-product of having more experience developing for the system.

There was a cut scene in the basement of the Nibelheim mansion that told Cloud's story from the Sephiroth fight at the Mako Reactor to his appearance in Midgar. It filled in the gaping holes in the plot - the only catch was you had to visit the mansion's basement on disc 3 or 4 or something, when you likely wouldn't think to go there. I guess that makes sense. I'm looking at it from a modern viewpoint, so I don't think it holds up nearly as well. That's just my way though, I generally don't believe in comparing games in the context of their time, although it does make for interesting discussion. I'm willing to give credit to games that were great for their time and maybe don't hold up so well today (various old RPGs, Doom, etc), just not in the same as way as I would if I thought they really were superior.

Everything about it is a matter of taste. There's no absolute truth about what constitutes good gameplay. Someone could say they think the less skills and strategy that an RPG has, the better it is, and there's nothing you can say to prove them wrong. To me, very little variety in skills and no control over character development constitutes a negative in regards to gameplay. I never professed that my standards were the only way to judge things, only that my issues with the game are well founded. I don't know that the speed matters at all when other contemporaries (like FFVI) were certainly speedy themselves when using the highest speed setting. I will also point to FFX-2 as being as fast if not faster than Chrono Trigger, and employing a vastly superior number of skills and a larger amount of strategy in battle. So basically what you're saying is that you don't care that the battle system is limited because of it's speed? I can't say I agree at all, but I'm also not going to dismiss that opinion, because it's simply a matter of taste. It seems like we're both seeing the same game, just that I don't like some of what I see, while you don't mind it.

The Edgar and Locke points are interesting. With Edgar, what you've mentioned is a nice subtle character trait, but I'm not sure that really substitutes for some of the more in-depth character development you see in modern RPGs. With Locke, the back-story seemed like more of an afterthought than anything. A case of having character development, just not doing a very thorough job of it. The character development was certainly "alright", but relative to modern times, I wouldn't call it a strength of the game. I'd argue that having to go through tedium to flesh out a character's story isn't a ringing endorsement for a game, especially when other games will have similar amounts of character development without having any such gimmick. I mean, people complain about FFVII's story being incoherent even though there was a hidden cut scene to tie things up - that cut scene not being difficult at all to reach. I don't know that you really addressed the Kefka criticism at all. I gather that people like him simply because he's "evil", rather than because he had any sort of depth of character. Liking a character because he's evil is entirely subjective and not something that can really be measured at all. I'll take evil with some sort of significant motivations, rather than evil for the sake of evil. Nothing you mentioned really constitutes a large depth of character, so I still believe don't believe he was a great villain, and certainly not the "best ever".

I don't consider a very limited amount of skills (combination or otherwise), even fewer which are useful, to constitute a positive. In fact, given how it compares to other games, I'd say it's a negative. There's also the general lack of control over how your characters develop, which I consider to be a rather large shortcoming in an RPG. The battle/character system is just incredibly lacking for those reasons, and for a genre where a large chunk of time is spent fighting/managing characters, it's a pretty big blow to the game. Everything else about the game is top-notch, not that I ever said otherwise. So like I said, if you don't care about the limited battle/character systems, I can see how one would think it's one of the best RPGs of all time. But I do care, and I know that countless games have had more character customization, a larger amount of skills and more strategic battles than Chrono Trigger, along with a few cases of hitting the other aspects of the genre just as well - or better. Therefore I don't consider it to be an elite game. And by elite, I'm talking top 10 or there abouts.

Ah, so you're just too emotionally attached to a game to listen to any criticism, I see now. There are clear, objective issues with Chrono Trigger that have already been brought up. Funny how you didn't say anything then. But anyway, you may not consider incredibly shallow gameplay to be a negative, but to totally dismiss a contrary opinion when it makes valid points is probably the height of ignorance, stupidity and childishness. I'm not imagining someone laughing hysterically, but I am imagining someone standing in front of a mirror screaming at themselves because another person had the audacity to claim a flawed game wasn't "elite", and instead was simply very good, perish the thought.

Yea, nevermind.

Obviously context is lost on you. Someone made a comment about an old game that didn't hold up to the test of time, and asked for opinions on why that might be, I responded. Random idiot makes sarcastic comment, I respond in a similar manner. But that's a nice TSian attempt to get me to post a long, drawn out post, even though you have neither the intention nor ability to do the same. Oh, and nostalgists are quite clearly in the minority, even if they tend to be the smarmiest, whiniest bunch in the gaming community. So my opinion isn't dissenting in the grand scheme of things.

Why would I waste my time making a long argument in response to what basically amounts to nothing? The clown above certainly didn't post anything worthwhile, and while you like to take the counter position to every post I make, your posts amount to token counter-arguments just for the sake of being contrary, with no solid content at all, so there's no real debate to be had. No, I'm content to respond to sarcastic, smarmy one liners in kind.

Clearly a quality poster like yourself, with such a well thought out and powerful argument, is fit to make such judgments.