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lazygecko

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Posts posted by lazygecko

  1. Don't think I've ever really been hyped about an upcoming console. I just get one once it has accumulated a decent enough game library. Starting after the decline of the Dreamcast though my interest in console gaming was rapidly vanishing. The last console I even owned was a Gamecube and that didn't recieve a lot of play time apart from a few first party titles.

    With the 360 there was a paradigm shift in the console industry as western, former PC devs moved on to the platform and pushed out the Japanese dominance to near irrelevance. Now most of what's being offered on consoles are just watered down versions of what I used to play on PC over 10 years ago. I mainly enjoyed consoles on the side because the Japanese games offered a genuinely different experience, but as they regressed to the domestic market most of them have just turned too niche for my liking. So I don't see any point in owning a console any longer.

  2. Microsoft shut down Xbox Live for the first Xbox even when there were still games with sizable online communities for it. Not to mention no longer having access to DLC people paid for. I wouldn't be surprised at all if XBL was shut down for the 360 sooner than you'd think.

    And that's one of my main problems with these consoles only allowing online functionality through their own iron-fisted services. Even if there are games that rely on official middleware for online play on PC, the nature of the platform allow users to device alternative solutions. So you can still play games online that are well over a decade old. Not so in the case of, say, Halo 2, which was still fairly popular when MS shut it down.

  3. If all the major PC DRM/Authentication fuckups are anything to go by (Ubisoft, Sim City, Diablo 3) it's their own servers you should be more worried about than your own connection. If there's a problem on their end it won't even matter if you have internet or not. And I have no doubt their servers are going to be compromised out of sheer spite, as there are already precedents for that happening.

  4. I have a general problem with games that try to sell themselves on spectacle rather than the merits of the game in itself. Pretty much all the press for this game was centered around the protagonist being female, which set off a few warning signs for me. Seems like most of the reviews agree on the sentiment that it's an average, by-the-numbers title mechanically speaking.

  5. Used games for consoles are part of a larger ecosystem. All the average, console-focused game consumers I'm familiar with largely finance their buying habits by re-selling their old games. I'd bet that without a second hand market, overall game sales would decrease significantly. Game prices going down thanks to no reselling seems like an overly optimistic outlook. I don't think publishers nor retailers would start thinking about that before some serious damage is done to them.

  6. I think it was Sony's entrance into the industry which started the trend of selling powerful hardware at a loss and viewed it as an investment to get a foothold in the market. This strategy was never going to last forever. Especially after Nintendo went with their usual cost-effective approach for the Wii and instead focused on reeling other demographics in, I think this caused a paradigm shift in the industry.

  7. I think that the consoles really aren't focusing on the games as much, which is the most important part...?

    It's not any more. The previous generation has been established for nearly a decade now, and a lot has changed in consumer technology during those years. Even back then you could see where things were heading. Approaching the console market with the same mindset and expectations you had over a decade ago is just going to lead to a barrage of disappointments.

  8. The writing has been on the wall for years now over consoles (as we define them) going out of fashion. The brand names may carry on, but they're not going to be the products you're looking for. The growth and convergence of media technlogies has reached the point where gamers are a niche audience, but most of the people you see bitching over this stuff on forums are still lacking that perspective.

  9. Low-end frequencies are a tricky thing for sure. What makes matters worse is that the majority of monitors and speakers aren't able to reproduce bass frequencies accurately without distortion due to the frequency curves. I also have a hard time believing that segment on music played in clubs having frequencies below the human hearing spectrum. Most (probably all) dance music is mixed and mastered in such a way that lower frequencies are cut, allowing the higher frequencies to be compressed even further. Hence there shouldn't be any energy down there.

  10. Unless you're intent on creating authentic chip music compatible with the original hardware, it much more comes down to how you do it rather than what you use. I stick with FLStudio or other DAWs even though I know how to use trackers. Of course, I'd still recommend dabbling in trackers and checking out other works in them to understand the structure of the sequencing, which is much more important to the chiptune style rather than just using raw oscillators.

  11. This. Not to mention, Mega Man has NEVER been about shooting. It's a fast, twitchy platformer. Shooting is the easiest part of the game, just line up horizontally with the enemy and fire. The gameplay was about overcoming the obstacles in your path. Some required you to shoot them, some required you to be light on your feet, some required slow, thoughtful calculation.

    In the end, Mega Man has always been a glorified obstacle course. A first-person shooter would place the emphasis on aiming and shooting, which as I stated before, has never been part of the Mega Man formula.

    I think it was a great deal about shooting. Only projectile-based shooting which connects with the movement aspect.

    At the start of the video they make their intentions pretty clear though with the hitscan-based machine gun weapon. First person shooters used to be a lot like Mega Man with the projectile aspect, but as it found further mainstream success on consoles the game design has heavily shifted since gamepads are too clumsy to navigate in 3D around enemy projectiles.

  12. I'm glad this game is at least sparking some healthy debates on gameplay and how we can bring the medium forward from a mechanics & design perspective. This seems like a culmination from games like Uncharted where they are ambitious in plot and scope but the actual game design feels hopelessly stunted in comparison.

    While I'm not a fan of David Cage's games and how they play, at least his heart is in the right place on this matter which is more than can be said for most mainstream game designers.

  13. It's a reflection of the playerbase at large when reviewers would rather concentrate on the spectacle rather than the gameplay. Much like how most music journalist try their darndest to discuss anything but the actual music.

  14. Best one I saw was a SNES handheld... with a Super Game Boy in it. Now you can play your Game Boy games on the go!

    Other than that, years ago I saw an image of a repainted SNES and Genesis with their opposing color schemes which looked really awesome. I've googled for the image a few times but never managed to find it again.

  15. I was specifically talking about sound quality. Musical qualities are separate (although intertwined in some cases) and of course I enjoy a lot of modern stuff purely on its musical merits. But it frustrates me a lot that I can't get more out of it. If the uber-compression of today is some misguided attempt to emulate pre-CD music they're way off the mark since it's physically impossible to engrave those types of brickwalled signals on vinyl. That's the often mentioned irony that the increased dynamic resolution of digital formats paved the way for much less than what vinyl was limited to. This is also probably the biggest reasons why vinyl listeners today claim that vinyl sounds better than digital. It's not something inherent to the format itself, it's simply that people actually have to restrain themselves on the master processing when putting the music on vinyl.

    On that note, this has also resulted in a big issue for historical archiving when it comes to music. If you want to find a copy of something from the 50's or 60's or whatever, it's almost impossible to find something that hasn't been tampered with thanks to routine mastering practices. This notion that you can always improve the recording by adding some compression/limiting and EQing, along with lack of provided information that it has been processed (and in turn, one of those processed re-releases may very well end up being remastered again for the next re-release), is making it very difficult for people to hear the old recordings as they actually sounded originally, which gives a warped perspective of the past.

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