Kinect for Xbox One coming to PC
Xbox One does not provide any built-in DVR capabilities
Xbox One increases friends lists to 1,000
Xbox One achievements dynamic, not limited to single games
Weekend Confirmed 123 - Outernauts, Ratchet and Clank, Dynamite Jack
by Jeff Mattas, Jul 27, 2012 11:00am PDTWhile Garnett is away in Seattle on business, the two Jeffs (Cannata and Mattas) are joined by Insomniac's James Stevenson and Shacknews Daily contributor and video guru Ryan Calavano to talk about this week's gaming news, as well as some stuff they've been playing during the summer wait for mainstream releases. Insomniac's recently-launched Facebook game Outernauts gets some love, and the new Ratchet and Clank HD collection and upcoming downloadable installment, Full Frontal Assault get some hype. Mobile iOS goodness, including Dynamite Jack and Great Big War Game, get some of the spotlight as well, before the crew brings it home with another batch of Finishing Moves.
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 123: 07/27/2012
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Weekend Confirmed comes in four segments to make it easy to listen to in segments or all at once. Here's the timing for this week's episode:
Show Breakdown:
Round 1 00:00:49 – 00:27:29
Whatcha Been Playing Part 1 00:28:49 – 00:55:55
Whatcha Been Playing Part 2 00:56:38 – 01:27:37
Listener Feedback/Front Page News 01:28:38 – 01:59:07
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Comments
For me, personally, the risk/reward-factor in today's games has become so laughably low, that I'm bored by practically all of them (with very few exceptions). If you're never really at risk of losing progress, there's no reward for playing anymore.
For a while I thought I was becoming bored of videogames as a whole but then I realized, that games that have become way too hand-holdy and forgiving are at fault, not me growing up. The Souls games ignited that special spark again that I felt when I was conquering video games in my early youth.
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Considering the gaming press regularly gets on its knees for Valve, I'm not surprised.
The Wii actually sold faster than the PS2 at points I think, and has sold a more comparable number of units, but it was also a remarkably unstable platform, relying almost solely on hardware contained experiences, like Wii Sports and Wii Fitness. The 360 and PS3 meanwhile are at 50-60 million units, half the PS2's install base, and they don't really have different audiences.
So right now I think we're kind of getting the worst of both worlds. Two consoles that are very stable expensive an incredibly homogeneous. And one platform that was wildly disruptive, cheap, and now basically dead.
I also think the way PSN and XBLA games are angled in the market, kind of cannibalizes the ability for developers to push out new titles. A lot of the ideas that would make imaginative late gen titles are now being put into digital and free to play.
When I look at a game like Deadpool, I don't really see something that would be impossible to launch on new platforms. I see something that kind of fits in with current design trends, and if anything cynically plays to the middle aged male comic book geek demographic. As Andrea pointed out there will be jiggling boobs, and they will not be all that innovative.
Also have to say that Outernauts has some awesome music for a Facebook game.
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What's the difference between Spec Ops violence and the violence from the rest of the games from E3?
You chastise one and give the rest a free pass when they're all equally as violent.
So weird.
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Most games don't even really need bosses, but have found few or no other ways to have climatic events. Why couldn't Prince of Persia games just end with a really tough puzzle or platforming section? Why couldn't Assassin's Creed just end with a place that's really hard to sneak into?
Half-Life 2 did a pretty good job approximating "boss" battles to its own mechanics. The game's only real "boss" is a helicopter that hounds you for an entire level. You also have the climactic fight in nova prospekt which many agree is the hardest part of the whole game (I still can't beat it without using exploits). In my opinion HL2's real climax was the battle at the horse in City 17. The episodes also do a good job with battles that still feel climactic without being conventional "bosses".
But the one modern game I think did the best job of twisting conventional boss battles to its own mechanics was Metal Gear Solid 3, which used them to illustrate its mechanical themes.
The End is currently one of the most popular bosses ever because in order to beat him you had to actually use the stealth skills you learned up to that point in the game. One thing to note is that this boss occurs pretty much exactly halfway through the game. It's also the last jungle area you encounter before moving on to the mountains and the more urban-style secret base. That fight is sort of like a final exam for jungle stealth. And then they bring some of that back for the final battle against The Boss, which also required mastery of the skills you use the most in Metal Gear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9K_aSV8UpI
Yeah...pretty much ready to call it the best Zelda game of this generation, 2 weeks before even playing it. Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait. :D
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A game shouldn't be a chore to play and if it is, it's either heavily flawed or it's had boring elements purposfully baked in to encourage micro transactions.
If you have to pay for double xp or skill unlocks that are short cuts, that's a REAL worry. Shouldn't a game be so much fun that you wanna keep playing it? If you need a bunch of xp to rank up, shouldn't the act of playing to rank up be fun to be begin with? Shouldn't devs be ashamed if people are willing to pay to skip sections of a game rather than endure the undesirable alternative of playing. It'd be like saying "hey guys, we just released our game but just so you know there's a lot of boring parts and parts that are super repetitive and not a lot of fun but the good news if's you can pay us some money and we'll remove those elements for you".
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Jeff kept sayin "gigabyte per second" when he meant gigabit per second. Which I did hear someone else say. I'm sure you guys know the difference but my god, I've had friends who are like "dude I get 20 megabytes per second, I can download like 4 mp3's in 1 second. I'm such a supreme Internet badass! Har hee haw!" Then I ask them what provider they use and figure that they have like ~2.2 megabytes per sec and explain it to them that 20Mbps is equal to ~2.2MBps. Then I get called an ass and that I'm probably wrong and they keep on keepin' on.
But yeah, google fiber is still like 125 Megabytes per second which is so fast that none of this bytes and bits nonsense I'm talkin about matters. I would eat paint chips for those speeds. I do think that ISP's advertise in bits to perhaps trick people into thinking they are getting something they're not. And when I download things in chrome or steam it always tells me how fast it's going in kilobytes or megabytes per second. So confusing!!!
Anyways, Love the show guys!
A service like this might allow Sony to make a stratified platform system, without eating away at their main console business, in the vein of the Ouya running OnLive. Basically make a "free to play" micro transaction based Playstation, with minimal local hardware at $99. Perhaps with build in Facebook functionality so developers like Zynga can publish on it. But also pack in a steeply priced streaming model that can appeal to people who don't have the time to make full investments in high end games. Perhaps pay $5 for one hour, to $20 to play 10 hours of Skyrim streaming, and so forth.
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On SWTOR and Future MMOs...This genre is desperately in need of new combat and quest mechanics. Everyone should be well aware of this by now. We need action-RPG combat that is actually fun and deep. Demon Souls, Fallout 3, and the failed MMO Tabula Rasa are all example of games with combat that was vastly more entertaining than SWTOR.
But how do you generate enough content to keep fans sated when 1 year's worth of development yields only 1 week of gameplay? Not with PvE (player vs. environment, fighting NPCs basically), I think WoW has shown the limits of what can be done with this model. PvE in MMOs has ALWAYS been boring, and relies on a complex reward system of loot and xp to keep players interested. Future multiplayer games need to focus on PvP-based content, that is the only way to keep gameplay varied and interesting for 1000s of hours. So far PvP in MMOs has been very brutal, developers need to find a way to make it more accessible to casual players. There should be multiple ways to play, appealing to different kinds of players. Quests need to involve players in PvP while making it meaningful.
Monster Hunter in all its iterations is a game made up of entirely boss encounters. The mechanics of that game are designed for fighting gigantic mutable unique monsters, and the 'filler' monsters that exist on the levels are just that filler. The bosses also have weak points that are a part of the fight if you want to exploit them but in a large part are completely determined by player skill.
I think Demon & Dark Souls are built from the same structure, in that the random undead in a stage is not where the mechanics shine, but it really comes together when you utilize the tools at your disposal to defeat insurmountably large enemies.
Shadow of the Colossus functioned in the same way.
Blizzard to me has always been the 3M of video games. All the pieces of what eventually made WoW existed in Everquest, DAoC, Anarchy and FFXI. Even those games are built on the bases of Lineage and Ultima Online. Blizzard came in and did what they always do, you give them a handful of game pieces & ideas and a preexisting setting(even Warcraft & Starcraft are almost blatant WH40K), and they will polish, polish, polish it down to a science operating on their crack formula and it overtakes everything else.
Which I think is part of the reason whatever their next MMO is hasn't arrived because they personally created such a vacuum of new ideas in the space (barring a couple exceptions) that there is nothing interesting out there right now to pillage refine from. Or they are beta testing their future games with the expansions of their current game.
Unfortunately it is just a casual facebook game with what I feel is a broken pay model. I was asked to pay five dollars for one ability slot for one of my many captured beasts. Just imagine how quickly that adds up. If you dont pay you have to delete skills permanently from your beast.
The other things that make it nowhere near a 'core' game are that you rarely see a window pop-up with a close or OK option - you have to 'x' out because they all want you to share the crap. Finally it uses the energy model of
What I heard in the discussion this week is that there are facebook games that do these kind of things and then there is outernauts. They are actually the same.
Funniest moment in the show Jeff people do remember old games differently them they were. The transition between I played Ghost and goblins it's not that good. Too remember Maximo that game was great!!! That made me laugh maybe you should go back and play Maximo;)
I don't know anyone who likes getting spammed with game updates.
Also, between the Insomniac guy and Garnett doing phone games or whatever he's doing now, are we going to have to put up with a half hour of someone shilling their casual game every week?
The facebook discussion was incredibly dull.
And these are the best moments of Mario galaxy 2, the best game of this generation hands down;) say hooray to boss's.
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I'm being vague because I'm trying to stay spoiler free in case you haven't played past that part.
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