Gaming thoguhts... 5/2/11

Quite a bit going on game-wise right now, for me and in general.

So, the in general first:

Lots of new stuff about the Project Cafe by Nintendo has speculation running all over the place. Too soon to really get into any one camp about it, but I'm definitely curious where it will go. Hearing that it will have significantly more horsepower than the 360 and PS3 was interesting, but the controller rumors and how it will be integrated into the game play is a bigger curiosity of mine. Also, hopefully they'll get the online stuff right this time around. Speaking of getting online right...

Sony held a press conference earlier stating that they were working with the FBI and will be slowly bringing up their systems over the next few weeks or so. They're also running with the idea to give Playstation Plus users an extra 30 days free, while giving all PSN users a free 30 day run of Playstation Plus. I think that's a good idea for a few reasons:

- that will increase downloads and help them stress test things
- it doesn't really cost Sony anything unlike the suggestion to put funds in our wallets online
- it gives people a chance to try the service who haven't yet (raises a hand - that's me) - so they may even get some new customers out of the deal.

There was a lot of good sentiment to what Sony's offering and saying, but still question marks. The Playstation Store sounded like it could be down much of May. That makes it hard to take advantage of Playstation Plus - so when does that free 30 day trial start, exactly? Also, Sony has said there would be select free downloadables - I for one am curious what those are. Games? Themes? What if you have said items already - do you get alternates?

So far it doesn't look like anything bad's come of the vulnerable account data, but only time will tell. Losing the network access has been mildly annoying for me - I just picked up Mortal Kombat and couldn't really do much of anything with it online, but I know my time will come. The potential loss of personal credit information was much more bothersome, and I am keeping a close eye on that.

I just wrapped up my large Mortal Kombat series of reviews. I don't often get to review brand new games, that are only a couple of weeks old, so I wanted to get that one out there quickly. A few of my side projects are on hold at the moment. I wanted to do more 'best free games' but haven't had much of a chance. Also, my KotL - Summoner game is on hold for a bit. My trial ran out and I do plan on buying it and picking up where I left off - I've got about 45 minutes of play right now. I don't plan to make this a massive game, but hopefully 4-6 hrs worth of time, but I probably have to wait a few weeks before I can dig back into it anyway.

That gets me into my biggest game related project of late. I've been breaking down the Potato Sack from Steam. 13 games - lots there. I'll probably break this up into multiple posts over the next couple of weeks. While the deal's dead, the individual games are still on Steam for those who find something interesting. And many of these games wind up on sale from time to time - like Amnesia just in the last 6 months has been on sale for 2 or 3 different times and was included in this bundle.

I've also got a handful more reviews coming up soon - having recently beaten several games. So, what am I playing now?

Well, I've been playing King's Bounty on Sega Genesis for a retro. I've been playing FX Pinball as well on my PS3. I've been playing one of the Dragon Ball Z games on my 360 as well. Then there's the potato sack. God of War has gotten a bit of time too. Also as soon as I post this, I am ducking back into Star Craft 2 a bit - I've hardly gotten to play it yet, but really want to so that's next. What have you all been up to and have any thoughts about the general topics above?
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8 comments:

  1. "Lots of new stuff about the Project Cafe by Nintendo has speculation running all over the place. Too soon to really get into any one camp about it, but I'm definitely curious where it will go."

    I have an opinion piece in the works on the Project Cafe stuff...knowing my schedule, I'll finish it by the time Nintendo releases their NEXT console, in like 2020.
    I am interested to see what they show/say at E3, or if it will be a lot of vagueness...and sales puffery.

    Sony's online issues need to be fixed, like YESTERDAY. I understand sites get attacked, but I never would have thought it would take them this long to get it back up...however long that is actually going to be!

    Other than that though, I haven't played much since this past weekend...as I had lots of finals this week.

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  2. @Coffee - ROFL@ the schedule remark. Yeah, I'm curious too e3 could help or hurt their cause. Bet this whole mess with Sony has them evaluating just how to handle the online stuff :P

    And yeah, the Sony stuff is crazy, and then their SOE servers came down too. It's kind of an unbelievable mess overall. And that seems to be a theme - I'm noticing a lot our of 'blog ring' friends are feeling the finals pinch - cutting into that game and blog time.

    I SO do not miss college... lol - good luck with the end of your semester!

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  3. Definitely curious where cafe goes and what exactly we're going to see at E3. The mass of conjecture, rumor and commentary is kind of fun to listen to, but it's difficult to get too excited about until we know more.

    While I'm not overly concerned with the horsepower, they should at least keep up so inclusion in multi-platform releases is pretty standard and not the utter shock it is with Wii. They also really need to get storage, online and the download/shop stuff right this time.

    Ok, one comment on the rumors: 8GB flash. Awesome upgrade from 512, but really that's what the Wii should have been without the wonky SD business. Not that I'm always maxed out, but download a few WiiWare demos and it can get alarmingly close.

    I still can't believe all of this PSN mess and how it's still going on.

    Fired up goldeneye and mega man 9 a bit this week, but have mainly been all over Metroid. It's been a nostalgic blast going through areas I sort-of remember and re-discovering them a bit. Not having to write down those @!#$80 codes with the suspend feature has been great. :)

    Trying to at least get through one playthru before I get distracted by another game or worse, work...

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Robert

    Yeah, I'm glad to see the storage size is higher, but honestly? My 20bg 360 and 40gb PS3 are almost always near maxed out so this has me at least slightly concerned as well.

    Gah, the codes... the coooodes. Yeah, I so don't miss those, lol. game save states are such a wonderful and taken-for-granted thing now.

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  5. I'm not surprised to hear about you maxing out 20 or 40gb on the other consoles. Game devs certainly find cool ways for us to use that space. :)

    I know it's easy to play armchair quarterback, but if the Wii had 8gb (or heck, even 4) that makes me wonder if they would have changed the maximum size of a WiiWare game. It's only 40mb now and that has dramatically limited our game selection.

    Two examples are SuperMeatBoy and Braid. Neither are very large (~250mb, ~114mb), but are two stellar indie titles that would have been great on the Wii. Team Meat really tried, but could never make it fit without turning into complete garbage.

    Just popped in a clean 4GB SD card tonight and have been downloading as many demos as I can. I forgot that they remove them from time to time, although it seems that you can still re-download the ones you previously downloaded.

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  6. @Robert - Yeah, I read about the struggles with getting Meatboy on there, and I suspect that you are right - if they had more space to begin with, their maximums would likely have been different.

    Shocking to me how much space some games chew up. Like MLB The Show 10 on my PS3 was using up more than 5,000 mbs of saved data. I've lost track of how much Little Big Planet is chewing up on my PS3 due to all of the downloadable items my kids have acquired - and that's just the free stuff.

    Some PS3 games save disc data to the hard drive as well, just to play the game - so that can chew up space too. I also like my downloaded games, and that's where most of my space has gone.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Whoh, that is shocking. I can understand local HDD installs or downloadable games, but 5GB for save data? That's insane!

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  8. Yeah - it's huge, and sure - I had lots of customized data (some career modes, etc) - but I think the expectation was just that everyone has tons of hard drive space.

    Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas has a lot of people complaining about the glitchy 'pause every 30 seconds' thing that can happen when moving around outdoors after you've been playing a bit. I saw a lot of people complaining about this for the 360, and the most common response from people was to install the game to your 360 hard drive and play it off of that. Also a big investment in terms of file size - I wouldn't have been able to do it - I only have 2.2 gb free currently.

    I also did an inventory of all the Little Big Planet files my kids have. This is a combination of save states, saved custom built levels, download packs, etc - almost 9 GBs.

    ReplyDelete

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