The Gaming thread

Yeah, the story was about the only bad thing for the game, IMO, and it was kind of short. I just rented the game, but before my 5 days was up, I had pretty much done all the story stuff, and I am usually an slow-to-average game player. Of course, I still had a long way to get 100%, but that was just going to mean doing a lot of repetitive things that I didn't really feel like doing, although I've seen worse.

But besides those things, I loved it. The combat system was awesome and I love the way they put in the web slinging system. There were plenty of different missions, although like I said, after stopping the 48th mugger and 39 armored car robbery, it gets somewhat boring.It was a really fun to play, for the most part, which really got love from me.

 

I would like to get other opinions on the topic of graphics and how they will look during the next-gen era. I, personally, am unsure of exactly how they will look on the new consoles since they have evolved so much on the consoles we have now. Just look at some of the detail developers have put into some of these games.(Kind of big, though. Sorry)



Here are two images from Ace Combat 5, a game on the PS2, which is based on hardware SEVERAL years old, yet they look pretty good.




These are images from the popular GT4 and they look like they can't get too much better, IMO.

I think that one of the best indicators of how the graphics will look on the new systems is the Unreal Engine 3.0. IIRC, it really won't be used for a game until the 05-06 time period, right around the time for the consoles. Here's an image from that engine:


I just love the lighting effects in this image, and, IMO, it seems reasonable that all the consoles should be able to put up something similiar to this even at their weakest. The PS3, which seems to me to be the frontrunner in being the most powerful console of the next-gen, should easily be able to produce graphics like this even if the Cell is not as great as they made it out to be. In fact, assuming 3-5 times this amount of detail would be reasonable for predicting the level of detail that the PS3 could do, IMO, again, if it was not all that great as advertised. However, the other consoles could produce similiar results as well, although if Xenon does release rather early, and if Mircrosoft kind of attempts to make it a little less powerful for cost reasons, it may only be able to do this amount of detail and maybe a little more.

If you also factor in the use of HD-DVD and Blu-ray that I mentioned in my original post, games could look phenomenal. I once thought that seeing graphics like those seen in the Square movies (FF:TSW, Matrix short, and FF7:AC) in a game would be a while to go, possibly close to it by the PS4 time period. Yet games are looking quite good at the moment in THIS generation and it is hard to predict what will occur in the next-gen, although I tried it anyways. I remember seeing FF8 and thinking things couldn't look better. And then I saw FFX, and thought the same. So, what will graphics look like in another few years?

Um...the only one out that I can think of is Morrowind, but that's been out a while. If you wait a little longer, the much-hyped Fable should be out, which should be good. Although if your unfamiliar with these games, they aren't quite like KOTOR or FF. While those games focus a lot on story and party members, Fable and Morrowind like to stick you in a world and let you do whatever you want.

There isn't real good support for the XBox in Japan, where is seems like most of the good RPG developers are at, which may explain why a lot of the good RPGs are released on the PS2 or GC and that the RPGs released on the XBox seemed to be made by American or European developers. Although I'm not all that familiar with the XBox library, so I may be leaving off some FF clone made by a huge developer in Japan that I forgot about.

Still, the RPG is growing stronger in the XBox library with Jade Empire and KOTOR 2 also on their way.

 

Yeah, it probably is unlikely that they would look that good during the race. Those are probably just replays of the race. Although there is that one mode where you take pictures of the cars, or something like that. They look even better in there. I don't think that they in-game graphics should look much worse than the pics I showed though. The GT4 guys seemed to have spent a lot of time on it, and have gotten close to taking advantage of everything the PS2 has to offer. I think they said something like they may have like 15% more power that they could use of the PS2.

However, my point with the images was to show how games look on hardware made from 2000 looked like. Just imagine what another 6 years with billions of dollars in research and development could produce. Then add in new DVD formats and better game engines. There will also be some kind of war of programming tools with Mircrosoft's XNA and what appears to be something OpenGL based with Sony, basically meaning better support for developers.

Wow! I had only seen images from the engine since the only clip I saw was of the one at Fileplanet, and I didn't feel like waiting in line for 40 minutes and then spending 3 hours dowloading the clip. (wish I had broadband) However, after watching the smaller clip in the other links, I am now waiting in line. That looked AWESOME!

I love the little things like the effects of the lights. It may not look like much at first to the casual viewer, but not along ago, the most complex shadow was just a circle under a character.

Everything I hear about it sounds great. I would have had fun just going around town and killing people (that sounds bad). But then I hear about some kind of complex health system. Eating is a neccessity, but eating too much makes you overweight, hurting your physical abilities, while eating too little makes you a wimp. Some sort of exercise system also works with this. I could see myself working out, then going to a pizza hut, and on the way out, I beat somebody up for looking at me the wrong way (again, sounds bad). Seems like an already addictive gameplay could be even more addictive.

 

Anybody hear of Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone? I just saw it on X Play on G4TechTV and thought it looked pretty cool. It is made by the guys who made LOTR:The Two Towers game and is based around the D&D world. It is a hack-and-slash game, but it looks like it has some RPG things in it. It lets you play as one of three of the characters involved in the story: A warrior type, a rogue/thief type, and a sorceror. You pick which one to play as anytime you want while the AI uses the other two to battle your enemies. (pretty smart AI from what they said) The graphics looked pretty good and the story seemed like something that I would like, although it is one of those "We have to save the world from demons" stories it looks like.

It is supposed to come out on the PS2 9/14 and on the Xbox on 11/16. I may check it out since it looks like a good blend of action and RPG style elements along with good graphics, good AI, and a story about dungeons...and..um...dragons, as well as other things.

Oh, just a reminder, for any big game fans, G-Phoria, a game award show, should be on G4TechTV soon. I think a pre-show thing is supposed to be on it a few minutes and the show itself is supposed to be on at 7 PM central. Along with awards, they should show footage of new games. For those Halo fans, Halo 2 is supposed to be playable at the event, along with the "Halo-killer" Killzone. Other playables include HL2 and the CS for it, NFSU 2, God of War, GT4, and Jak 3.