The Playstation 3 has now been cut to US$99 starting April 1. A new SKU has been released, the SCPH-10000. SCEA head Jack Tretton said “This price realignment has come about as our manufacturing processes have evolved. We can now produce a PS3 at a profit AND sell it a low low price. That’s what we’ve just realized. We were doing the ass backwards way before. No wonder we lost so much money.”
One feature return welcomed by many is the return of the ability to play PS2 games. Of course, as with previous cost-reduced versions of the PS3, some features have been omitted such as Six Axis controllers, wireless controllers, wifi abilities, HDMI, Hard Drives, Blu Ray support and online functionality. While the deleted features mean gamers won’t be able to play hot PS3 exclusive titles such as Lair, Heavenly Sword and Haze, there is an upside in that PS3 gamers won’t be able to play Lair, Heavenly Sword and Haze. Executive editor of Game Man magazine, Lasse Figstromme told controller1.com in a laggy Skype interview “Thank fuck, those games sucked more ass that rectal leaches in a Uwe Boll movie.”
Of course this is a crushing blow to Microsoft and its Xbox 360 because it means now there are dozens of exclusive game playable only on the new PS3 (and all PS2′s). Figstromme continued “Why would I want to play Mass Effect or Gears of War when I can now play Downhill Domination on my PS3?”
Why indeed.
Just a quick post today. Spelling is a useful skill to have. Maybe its not as useful as using your quadcore PC with two graphics cards in SLi config to play Quake III in 2009, but it does do one very necessary thing (apart from making clear what it is you are writing/typing). It separates the tards from the rest of us. Sure, we’ve all accidentally typed ‘teh’ instead of ‘the,’ but there are thousands of guys who do it deliberately so we know how cool they are.
You can also use this list to explain these terms to your Wiimote waving grandparents.
Pwned is an interesting word. (I know because its in my online handle ClivePwned). Its pronounced owned, as in the hacking term. On a Qwerty keyboard, P is next to O and so pwned has become the internet’s way to saying “Oh gosh, I’ve won this rally. Jolly good show.”
‘Should of.’ This is one that flies under many people’s radar. Instead of using should have as in “I should have paid attention in school” or used the contraction should’ve, people are now typing should of. Despite this making no sense, it is now commonplace, just like AIDS. Just as the spread of AIDS makes it a reality to those who haven’t contracted it, so too does the use of should of instead of should have as a reality for those literacy level is greater than that of
Rediculous. Despite the existence of spell checkers, predictive text and education, people add a superfluous letter E to replace the primary I in the word ridiculous. Why is this a big deal? Because the concept of ridicule only works if the ridiculer is able to articulate an argument belittling the object of intended ridicule without undermining the argument with spelling errors. Saying “this recession is rediculous” completely undermines your argument because you cannot spell. If you wrote “this recession is ridiculous,” then I would wholeheartedly agree with you. wat?
Prolly. This is a bastardisation of the word probably. This is what happens when Probably goes out and gets a little bit too drunk for her own good and wakes up the next morning with a hangover and a $50 bill wrapped around a bottle of morning after pills on the nightstand.
There is/are Now this is a weird error that almost everyone makes everyday. I’m one of them. There is: used to describe one thing. There are: used to describe many. “There is many ways to do this is wrong.” It should be “There are many ways to do this.” It is abused by us all.
1337 speak has faded a lot since its heyday at the turn of the millennium. There is probably still the odd fuckwit writing R0x0R in emails. Do you say LOL out loud with other geek-minded friends? I used ‘LOL’ ironically once in front of someone I’d just met at E3 one year and got a quizzical look back at me as if I were a main character from an off-Broadway production of ‘Of Mice and Men’ and I was standing over the freshly squeezed corpse. Of course I’m using English spellings on this blog so you may ROFL at my use of non-US spelling conventions.
We could get into the proper use of its and it’s, who and whom, and of course passer-bys or passers-by. But this is a videogame blog dammit and all your base, yada, yada, yada. What gets your goat up about the way people write these days? Pointless articles like this, anyone?
Anyway tomorrow we have something more relevant to gaming and less relevant to Spelling Nazis, Grammar Gestapo and other people with assorted levels of StickUpTheButtedness.
Edited: because Clint found an error. Owned is not a wrestling term, its a hacking term. I bow to the master.
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On PS3, Xbox 360, PC. Developed and published by Capcom
C1 regular Lisvender weighs in with his thoughts on Street Fighter IV…
Hidden somewhere on Green Emperor Way, where tower touches midday sun, there’s a perverted church to Street Fighter. To enter it, you must stand before its doors and perform a double fireball motion followed by three punches. The altar is a stone effigy of John Choi. The congregation is a swarm of obsessive little worshippers who fell in love with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and then immediately abandoned it when the Second Coming, also known as Street Fighter IV, arrived.
Street Fighter’s story is tragic. It birthed the genre that is now controlled by its zealous, anal fans. Like Japanese RPGs and space shoot-em-ups, fighting games are meticulously vivisected and judged by fans who complain when the games show any motion toward modernity. Thus we see the backlash that resulted when Dragon Quest IX was announced as an action game. Thus we continue to get King of Fighters games, even though no one really cares. Thus we get the Street Fighter strategy guides that detail frame-counting and space controlling, like we’re learning freakin’ chess or something.
And thus, we get Street Fighter IV, a fighting game that won’t adapt to work with modern controllers that use four face buttons, analog sticks and triggers, and then we get complaints that the controllers suck for not being made to work with Street Fighter.
Street Fighter IV is not that great. It’s the same one-on-one, six-button fighting game that we’ve been playing in various incarnations since 1991. You choose a character and duke it out with another character. Every fighter has three different punches and kicks operated by single button presses, special moves that require weird controller motions followed by single button presses, and super moves that require irritatingly long controller motions followed by multiple simultaneous button presses. Super Moves are just souped-up special moves that do a lot of hits without any additional input, and that inflict a win-guaranteeing amount of damage.
You can link certain attacks to create combinations, and if you’re really good (or really anal), you can perform combos that start with regular punches or kicks, continue with a special move, and then end with a flashy super move. The game is about adjusting your position and timing your attacks so you can catch your opponent off guard and capitalize with those combos. Oh, and you press Up to jump and move away from your opponent to block. It’s nothing we haven’t done before.
It’s certainly pretty, what with its fancy 3D graphics and particle effects, and its nifty art style that’s both cartoony and surreal. I like the weird, ink-splattered look, and the exaggerated expressions that the characters make. One of my favorite things about the 2D Street Fighters was that you could see Ryu’s trip-face, or Blanka’s bulging eyes, or Cammy’s bouncy boobs in sharp relief.
I really don’t like Cammy’s bouncing boobs, but they are pretty hard to ignore.
I was worried that such details would be obscured in 3D, what with all the visual effects, increased animation, and the varying angles. Not so. The characters make all the great, goofy grimaces, grins and guffaws that I remember from the early days of Street Fighter II, and I really enjoy them. Capcom does some terrific facial animation.
What I don’t understand, then, is why they added anime sequences to the game. Whenever you select a character in Arcade Mode, you’re treated to a 2D cutscene that reveals that character’s motivation for entering the Street Fighter tournament. I don’t much care about the storylines of fighting games, but I could have been swayed if they were presented with as much skill as the game’s 3D animation. Unfortunately, these anime scenes are dull and poorly drawn. You can skip them anyway. So what’s the point of them, other than to appease the uberfans? My guess is that Capcom wanted to make the game feel more “fleshed-out,” so as to justify the sixty-dollar purchase of a threadbare product. See? It’s not just a simple arcade experience we could have sold over Xbox Live Arcade! There’s a STORY!
I can’t argue that the 3D graphics don’t look great, because they do. I wouldn’t feel right, though, if I didn’t describe one of the problems caused by this new look.
Judging distance is a pretty important skill in Street Fighter, as you need to know the ranges of your attacks, the arcs of your opponent’s jumps, and how to adjust the speeds of your projectiles in order to maintain control of the battle. To do this, you need to have a steady, side-on view of both fighters at all times.
Well, Street Fighter IV wants to be fancy, so it presents fighting stages that curl and twist as the fighters move back and forth. The camera will rotate slightly at times to adjust to this, and that causes your perspective to be temporarily skewed. When you’re viewing Ryu slightly from the rear, you’re not going to have a perfect idea of how far he is from Ken, and therefore you won’t know if your jump kick will reach him. You have to wait for the camera to align itself to the proper side-on viewpoint before you can make your attacks effectively. It’s not a constant problem, but it happens often enough to be irritating, and it’s such a fundamental issue that I’m disgusted Capcom didn’t notice and rectify it.
The fancy 3D style also causes certain moves, moves that only require one bit of input to create a fancy attack, to be presented in a “cinematic” style. When Zangief or Abel grabs you with one of their special spinning throws, you’ll be treated to a lengthy, stylized closeup of your character getting tossed and slammed into the ground. Like the fabled summon spells of Final Fantasy games past, these attacks look cool the first time you see them in action, but when the computer uses them on you again and again and again, you’ll start to wish that Capcom hadn’t been so eager to show off.
In fact, the 3D show-offery slows the whole game down. When a fighter is knocked out, the KO image stays on the screen for far too long, especially when it’s a super finish. Before every match you get introductory cutscenes of the two fighters, where the characters run, jump, or stand around taunting each other. When you near the end of Arcade Mode, you have a “Rival Match,” which pits your fighter against someone he or she supposedly has a special vendetta against. The introductory cutscenes for these matches are even longer than the usual ones. They look good, and some of them are even funny, but they get old fast, and before long you’ll just hit Start to skip them so you can get on with the fighting already. Why can’t you turn them off? Why are they even there?
Like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, another overhyped cash cow fighting game, Street Fighter IV tries to show off its value by forcing you to unlock many of its characters. You have to beat the game with specific characters to unlock them. You can set the game to Easiest difficulty, and make every match a 1-round win, and then blaze through the Arcade Mode to do this, but it’s still a lengthy and unnecessary pain in the ass. And yes, Seth, the game’s final boss, is still a jerk, even on the Easiest difficulty, because the AI has failed to evolve over the past ten years. The computer knows how to interrupt your every move with something faster, more powerful, and more annoying. The AI does this with all the characters, but Seth is especially bad because he has several moves that do ridiculous amounts of damage, and a whole lot of the aforementioned “cinematic” moves that involve watching your character getting thrown, kicked, spun around, sucked into a vortex, and then smashed into your TV screen. You need incredible patience to put up with the blatant cheating that this game throws out.
Online play? Oh yeah, there’s that too. You can accept fight requests from random online players as you slog through Arcade Mode, though I don’t recommend this because you may not get stable connections. For some strange reason, Street Fighter IV’s matches are more prone to lag than those in the recent SF2HD, so you’re better off manually searching for matches with high stability. Make some time in your schedule before you settle in for online fighting, though, because the match searches in this game take an extremely long time. By the time the match list appears, odds are that the lobby you select will be full. We’re not talking Gears of War 2 wait time, but it’s still pretty bad.
The matches themselves remind me of Gears of War 2, though. Whereas in GoW2, players eschew the fundamental cover-based shooting in favor of charging up and pounding each other with shotguns, in SFIV, strategic play is thrown out the window, and the two fighters just bounce around poking.
In Street Fighter, every attack has a level of priority that determines what happens in the case of simultaneous strikes. If one fighter throws out a high priority attack at the same time that the other throws out a low priority attack, the high priority attack will hit, and the low priority one will be interrupted. In the case that two attacks of equal priority are thrown out simultaneously, both characters will be hit.
A poke is an attack that has very long range and very high priority, which makes it difficult to get around. Constantly tossing out pokes is a low-risk, high-reward strategy that many gamers adopt and never let go of. Vega the bullfighter, Sagat the kick boxer, and M. Bison the dictator have tons of these moves, so a majority of your online matches will be against these three characters. So much for skill!
I enjoyed playing Street Fighter IV when I first played it. I really did. Then I spent some enough time with it to discover that, in spite of what Capcom and the big gaming websites want me to believe, it’s just another fighting game. I know this has been a long review, so for those of you with ADHD, here’s the tl;dr limerick version:
After ten years, here’s Street Fighter IV
It’s got 3D, but then not much more
If you want punches and kicks
Just get HD Remix
And shove Street Fighter IV out the door.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Lisvender
Its one of those weeks. I just don’t feel like playing Single player games (Peggle aside) right now. So I’ve been playing a variety of multiplayer games online. Killzone 2 was not enthralling enough to keep hooked so I went back to a few old standbys. Its pretty barren for new games over the next few months so its a good time to indulge in MP shenanigans.
Firstly on 360, I picked up the map pack for CoD WaW, which offers three multiplayer maps and one new map for the awesome zombie Nazi mode. The maps are very nice and are a blast to play. No tanks which means one of the more common complaints is not as much of an issue as is in the main game. For a game that supposedly meant to be from Activisions ‘B’ shooter team, CoD WaW manages to offer very playable maps.
I’ve been playing a bit more PC CoD 4 Modern Warfare multiplayer and alternatively getting frustrated and enjoying myself. It basically sucks enjoyment out of a game if you just want to have some fun and you play with serious players. Apparently its considered cheating to use either the rifle grenade or the Juggernaut (extra strength) perk. The Last Stand and Martyrdom are also often frowned upon. Its not cheating children, its not even a ‘sploit. Its just that people who have level up can’t stand being killed by anyone with a lower ranking. I even dipped my toe into some Hardcore and found I played better that normal servers. Is it because I’ve been playing a lot of Day of Defeat as well?
Day of Defeat Source is such an old game with such little depth. I am still intrigued why updates to TF2 also mean updates to DoD:S but either way this is a game that has a grip on a select few who play every day. You don’t level up but choose a class and yet the in game chat isn’t full of cries of noobs with rifle grenades and rocket launchers. I mean, yes people complain about being owned by snipers and machine gunners but it’s generally restrained. There’s so much anger in CoD 4 players.
And I’ve been playing Peggle. I like Peggle. It is fun. You should play Peggle on whatever platform you have access to.
I’ve just bought World of Goo as part of MacHeist so I expect to give that a spin over the weekend. Also, there’s the Modern Warfare 2 (note no CoD) teaser and even cooler, the original Call of Duty is coming to PSN and XBLA soon. Day 1 purchase! It will be really cool to have access to all of the major Call of Duty games on Xbox 360 (since I also have CoD, 3, 4, and WaW on 360)- and 1, 2, 4 and WaW on PC as well. That’s nothing, I have one colleague who has CD 4 on PC, PS3 and PC.
CoD be praised!
GDC has thrown up some interesting and unusual bits of info. But funnily enough, nothing really to whet your appetite. Let’s have a quick squizz at what the net has been buzzing about.Bear in mind, I’m only reading this stuff from the same sources as you are but you came here for some controller1.com perspective and controller1.com perspective is what you’re going to get, whether you like it or not. What? they’ve gone. Oh well, for those of you still here, here’s something for both of you.
-Nintendo have announced a new Zelda game for the DS. In it, cel-shaded Link (a la Windwaker/ Phantom Hourglass) plays Casey Jones and rides a train. There’s a Rock and Roll Climbing game using a new peripheral, the Wii Ladder. The Wii can now take SDHC cards. Apparently the extra space is needed to store the new upgrade 128 digit friend codes.
-Controller1.com was not at GDC despite our employers saying they were sending no-one this year.
-Mainframe gaming returns with onlive, a new system to stream games from a central server in rea…l ti….me. Lag free. orly?
-Controller1.com did put in a request to go last November with an outline of the benefit the company would receive if we were in attendance. We even pointed out the discount on admission fees had we booked before Mid-December.
-Modern Warfare 2 was teased. No mention of Call of Duty in the title so far. Suspicious?
-Even though when we put in our application to attend, there were no sessions listed on the GDC website. They said the sessions would be up early November, but they still weren’t up in January.
Had these sessions been outlined earlier, we might have a stronger case to attend.
-At a panel discussion, a designer from Bethesda made a remark about setting of nukes in Japan in response to a Japanese developer on the panel talking about setting a game like Fallout 3 in Japan. And awkward silence was felt until someone lightened the mood by mentioning Pearl Harbour.
-Some people did actually attend, like Bob from Team Deathwish. Bob started at the company years after I did. Bob’s a bit of a brown-noser it seems.
-There was talk that God of War III would not feature any physics system and would run between 30 and 60 frames per second.
-I showed Bob the ropes when he started and that fucker gets to go to GDC. Who do you have to blow around here to get a ticket?
-Nintendo announced they will be bringing select Namco and Sega arcade games from the 80′s to Wii.
-I think Bob steals cutlery from the kitchenette.
-Microsoft have a new debug 360 with fancy metallic blue highlights and double the RAM of a standard 360 for debugging applications
-I hear, and this is just scuttlebutt from around the office, Bob may be doing drugs
That about wraps up today’s GDC coverage. We hope that you enjoyed it and that that asshole Bob dies in a fiery place crash.
The controller1.com focus test returns with a look at Killzone 2. This goes to some unusual places so be warned
Today, in this era of global economic tomfoolery, controller1.com wears its fiscal responsibility on its sleeves by publishing its financial results for the year ending March 2009.These costs are presented in the interests of transparency and fiduciary duty so that all visitors to this site know what goes where and comes from whose pocket where and how.
Our fixed expenses are many:
Webhosting: $60 a year
Domain name: $15 a year
Subscription to Edge: $170 a year. In order to get enough sass and cynicism, c1 reads Edge.
Writeoffs: 2 year subscription to EGM taken out 8 months before the magazine folded with those cock sucking parasites Ziff Davis not offering even a partial refund.
Review copies of HD games $1500 approx
Platform Breakdowns
PS3 Mirror’s Edge, Battlefield Bad Company, Army of Two, Burnout Paradise, Metal Gear Solid IV, Little Big Planet, Resistance 2, Killzone 2, Singstar Vol 2, Singstar ABBA
Xbox 360: Rainbow 6 Vegas 2, Stranglehold, Call of Juarez, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars Force Unleashed, Prince of Persia, Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts, Gears of War 2, Fable II, Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Guitar Hero World Tour, Lego Indiana Jones, Fallout 3
Wii: Boomblox (unopened)
PC: Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty World at War
PSP games: $L0L
DLC:
Marketplace: Duke Nukem 3D, Call of Duty 4 MW Variety Map Pack, Penny Arcade Episode 1, Poker Smash, Braid, Guitar Hero World Tour, Fallout 3 Operation Anchorage DLC,
PSN/ Singstore: Queen Songs.
PC Upgrades = $OS X
Wiifit= Blame
Dead Hardware write-offs: Xbox 360 PSP 1000
Income to the site is as following:
$0, jack,bupkiss, nada, zip, zilcho
In these uncertain economic times, even the formerly recession proof gaming industry has to adapt to protect itself. After the success of Mario and Sonic at the Olympics, many other publishers are attempting to get in on the act, cross pollinating genres and characters into new concepts. Below we have an example of three of the sort of games you’ll be playing in 2009.
Cooking Mama has been a big hit for minor publisher Majesco and now they are teaming up with Microsoft, fresh of taking Halo into the TRS genre with Halo Wars. One of MS’s stated aims is to broaden the 360′s audience so their first attempt should be looked at in much the same way we look at Web TV, Zune and Windows Vista.
Cooking Masterchief offers plays to not only coop cooking lessons, but enables you to compete in 16 player Multiplayer cook-offs on Xbox Live. Create your own recipes in the Forge and share them with other players.
Sony, not to be outdone has taken two of their iconic characters and put them together in a brand new title.
Snake and Kratos in the Modern Pentathlon sees some beloved characters compete in fencing, shooting, sneaking, loving wenches and codec quicktime events. With over 30 hours of cutscenes directed by Hideo Kojima, this is one game that could only be made on a Blu Ray disc.
and lastly, Madden NFL 09 may not be on PC but there is at last one new Madden title on PC. Madden Flight Simulator
Despite his mortal fear of flying, John Madden has put his full weight behind this project. Your job is to get John to the game by hook or by crook. In order to prepare himself for the possibility of flying, John attempted to board a flight to Las Vegas but his phobias got the better of him, causing an ‘incident’ onboard. Luckily the moment was captured and has become the cover image for this innovative title.
Unlike many, I have resisted the lure of Peggle. But the recent deal on Pop-Cap games meant I was able to buy a copy for $3. Somehow I ended up with two copies due to a timeout but for $6, i don’t care. This has already supplanted many PSN/XBLA/Wiiware games as far as I am concerned.
If you’ve never played peggle, its weird to explain. You have a ball firing gun that pivots long a short arc and you have to hit certain coloured pegs before you run out of balls. Its like Pachinko, Pinball, Bust a Move, Breakout, etc. And there’s a unicorn in there.
Normally games like this bore me after about five minutes, but Peggle is just hard enough to challenge you, but not too hard to frustrate you into never ever playing again. After months of Fallout, Resistance 2 and Killzone 2, I had been looking to something colourful to provide sharp relief, contrast if you will. Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts is not a relief. Peggle is.
I got to the final boss in Killzone the another night and spent a while trying to beat it, but to no avail. Fuck this “wave after wave of my own men” shit. I might try and give it another go on the weekend, or I might go back to PoP. But the CoD WaW maps are out and I have enjoyed that game, despite lag. Some call it lag, others call it my incredibly dull reflexes.
I have been looking forward to killing Killzone 2 so I could enjoy some game-free time (which usually just means I play multiplayer for a while) on the weekends as I plan my next movie (watch our videos on the Clive Pwned Video link).
I know that every year I need about 3-4 weeks, spread throughout the year, where I am not playing videogames at all. Usually this coincides with travel so there’s no problem there but occasionally I just want to spend a weekend doing absolutely NOTHING!
