About time I gave my thoughts on the matter.

Do I hate these two things? Well, yes. That's pretty inevitable. They're stupid, gimmicky attempts to jump on Nintendo's stupid, gimmicky bandwagon.

Do I hate Sony and Microsoft for making them?

Not really, no.

You see, the Move and Kinect haven't changed the consoles. The 360 got a new UI which still works with a regular controller. The PS3 hasn't really changed at all (to my knowledge).

I can still play my 360 with a regular controller, and regular controllers are still the norm. Yes, everyone's rushing to make Kinect and Move-supporting games, but if they weren't they'd probably be making crap games anyway so, in this case, it doesn't affect me.

Nearly every 360 and PS3 game that I'd actually want will still be being made with the controller first in mind.

Additionally some magical weakness hasn't 'forced' Microsoft or Sony to lower the graphical capabilities of their consoles to accomodate motion controls.

So really, the motion controls haven't affected the consoles at all. As well they shouldn't. I haven't been forced to buy a Kinect, my graphics aren't inexplicably inferior, I don't have to put up with a tiny, fragile controller with a tiny amount of buttons.

So as much as I hate them and almost any developer who uses them, unlike the Wii, they can suck on their own without affecting me. If the Wii had've just been the PS3 + Move, with its next-gen graphics and now-standard 2-stick 12-button controller, I probably wouldn't have hated it. Maybe I would've even bought it.

Move vs Kinect?

The Move is probably the better piece of hardware. It's more precise. You COULD use it for shooters, though I'd rather use a controller or, better still, a keyboard and mouse. So really the Move only works better for things I wouldn't want to use it for.

Kinect on the other hand, I wouldn't mind moving menus around all Iron Man-like. I wouldn't mind voice-controlled menus either. And if Steel Batallion is going to control the way I'm hoping - that is, like the original, but with Kinect picking up your movements so the controller costs $10 instead of $100 - then it may actually be the first good use of motion controls I've EVER seen.

Furthermore I can think of some ways Kinect could be used in very small volumes in games to improve them. For instance, in a squad-based shooter, everything could be done with a controller except for squad commands, which could use both hand movements and voice sensing. Horror games could pick up when you jump in your seat, say if you're hiding you might accidently knock something over. Fighting games could pick up when you throw your controller and automatically disconnect you from the game like the cheap **** you are.

And let's be honest, there is not a single game, in history, made or yet to be made, online or offline, that would not benefit from the ability to flip people off.

So Move is better for normal games. Probably. But I wouldn't want to use ANY of them (motion controls) for normal games. For non-game-related applications and some miscellaneous, not-full-control uses, Kinect is the better idea.

Am I going to buy it?

lol no.

But that's the beauty of it. I don't need to. And not buying it is not going to impact my gaming in any possible way. It is a casual accessory that has absolutely no affect on the console unless it is plugged in. It's what the Wii should've been, and has absolutely no excuse not to be.

I've long been one of the harshest critics of (a great many things, including) gaming. I hate Nintendo, I hate MMOs, and I have particular hate for a number of specific developers, many of them among the most popular developers in the world; Blizzard and Square Enix spring to mind, as well as the aforementioned Nintendo.

A common fear among us game cynics is that gaming is dying, but I wanted to actually sit down and wonder out loud whether it really is. And if it is, how, and why.

Now, of course, most people will argue that it is not dying. Most people think the Wii is paving the road for all kinds of new things. Most people think World of Warcraft is a fantastic game, let down only by how addictive it is, which is more of a compliment than anything else. Most people think accessability is a good thing.

A more accurate but less succinct title for this journal, then, might be 'Is niche gaming dying?'.

The major problem here is that games have just become so damn expensive to make. Even a simple game can take millions upon millions of dollars, and very few publishers are willing to fund something that everyone knows is going to be a cult hit at best. Even if they do manage to find a publisher, there are just so many games, and they're so expensive; people won't shell out $60 for a game in the hope that it'll be good like they'll shell out $14 for a movie, or $20 for a book. The small guys can't afford advertisement.

In particular I'd like to highlight a semi-recent game release called Nier.

For those not in the know, I'll try to make it quick despite my usually long-winded self. Nier is an action-RPG developed by Cavia and published and licensed by Square Enix. It touted itself as a departure from J-RPG archetypes and formulas, challenging players with unique ideas, realistically tragic themes and very alternative music.

However, while it succeeded with these claims, it failed to sell. Even in the RPG motherland of Japan, sales were small. In Japan - where sales were highest - it sold under 200,000 copies within its first two months on shelves.

Comparatively, Final Fantasy XIII sold over a million copies on its first day in Japan, and went on to sell over 5.5 million worldwide.

Nier failed in sales so thoroughly, in fact, that Cavia has since been absorbed and subsequently disbanded by AQ Interactive.

So we have an interesting little example of whether gaming is dying or not, here.

On the one hand, even in this era of extremely expensive games where niche simply can't survive, we have a clearly niche game.

On the other hand, the creator of this niche game may as well have gone bankrupt as a result.

To make things worse, Cavia practically had to sell the game to Square Enix - the game box has a single mention of the game's actual creator in the smallest font on the bottom of the back of the box, the intro sequence shows their name third, the end credits have 'SQUARE ENIX' printed in giant text and are far more eager to tell you all of Square Enix's QA Testers than Cavia's coders, graphics designers and planners. Square even owns the license despite the idea coming from Cavia.

Despite this utter abuse from the larger company, they still did not have the money to give the game cutting-edge graphics, nor to save themselves from death.

So is this what we can expect? Is the only way we can get a beautiful game, through the sacrifice of a developer's pockets and pride? I almost feel guilty, that this developer essentially martyrd itself purely to create a wonderful game. More guilt when I realize that my purchase sent no money to the now-defunct Cavia, but instead the large company that absorbed and then disbanded them, and the other large company that effectively stole their work.

Can we really blame anyone but ourselves? Look at the reviews for Nier. Look at the general reception. Look at the message boards leading up to its release. The graphics had a huge role in killing that game - in killing Cavia - but did they have a choice? Even knowing that dated graphics is the only option for niche games, are the people who enjoy niche games still going to demand cutting-edge?

Looking further through comments, most people seemed to find the game boring. The plot, the characters did not engage them. People seemed unable to associate with he main character, a 40-something not-attractive father, and a massive departure for gaming obviously.

Why?

I'm 21, I haven't had a girlfriend in 7 years and the idea of having a child makes me want to buy a rifle, I'm jobless and have no desire to enter the 9-5 workforce. I'm as immature and un-adult as they come, and yet I can still associate with this character, I can still understand the love it takes him to eat his daughter's awful uncooked food that she made because she loves him, I can still understand his heartbreak and fury as she's carried off by the antagonist.

So, to put it bluntly, are people just too stupid? Even people into RPGs - a genre that is openly supposed to be about storytelling - seem incapable of accepting anything new, instead running back to their angsty effeminate 19-year-old protagonists.

Anything with something new just gets shot down, awaiting bankruptcy. But this generation, things are even worse.

Last generation, a game developer had a choice. Make something niche and unpopular, make something cheap and unpopular, or make something expensive and popular. But now, thanks to both the Wii and the surge of XBLA/PSN games, we have games with incredibly simple development selling millions of copies. So now companies have the option of not only making something expensive and popular, they have the option of making something cheap and popular.

Franchises have already succumbed to this; Monster Hunter 3 was a Wii-exclusive title, the obscenely-rich Monster Hunter branch of Capcom citing development costs as their reason to opt as Wii exclusive, while on paper, the 'sequel' had immensely less content than its predecessor and only marginally more content than the franchise's beginning on the PS2. And yet, it sold more than any previous entry.

Less work for more profit? This is annoying because Monster Hunter Freedom 2 was one of my last examples of another kind of game; a game that had an immense amount of niche properties, but various additions that made it accessible to the mainstream. In the case of Monster Hunter, it was its brutal, unrelenting difficulty in solo play and its comparatively accessible difficulty when in multiplayer.

What little niche games are popular, they always seem to succumb in just a short number of titles. Bioshock was immensely popular despite being a very different and very idealogical game. While I had hoped for a storyline more original than the close formula of System Shock 2 that Bioshock followed after the game's success and thus the lining of the developers' pockets, we instead saw Bioshock 2 become something that followed the original like a shadow, terrified of losing whatever element had secured the mainstream purchase.

Do I think gaming is dying?

Not really. I think it's in an intense recession. I think we're in the dark ages.

Years ago, game development was cheap, which made up for the niche audience. Things were simpler. I don't think games were better back then, in fact I think they were significantly worse. But it was still easier for developers.

The PS2 was the era of great gaming. As much as I loved my Xbox, the PS2's low specs and ease of development saw rise to so many niche games, it was wonderful. For every predictable, formulaic RPG, there was another one to fill its place, to create a complicated plot, to create some art.

Now though, we've almost peaked graphics, and that's expected of games. Photorealism is almost possible even in gameplay, but it's still amazingly expensive to do anything even remotely modern.

A few consoles down the track, top-of-the-line graphics will be easy, and cheap. The Unreal engine for example is moving in leaps and bounds, and just constantly makes game development easier and easier, cheaper and cheaper; even Square are using it nowadays.

But for now, it's depressing. I feel for Cavia because they were people, same as anyone else. Somewhere out there is a person - a genius - who thought up that game's plot, who designed that game's characters. He put his success on the line - he had money, he had contacts, he had workmates, and he had a choice, between making predictable rubbish or taking a risk. For this fantastic, beautiful gift that he has given everyone who loved Nier, he has been rewarded, with the dissolution of his company and probably the loss of his job, not to mention a general public response that everything he did was crap.

No matter how angry I am at crap like Nintendo and Capcom wasting their development skills on the Wii, it doesn't come close to how sad I am, that the person who thought up Nier - and the people who thought up every other risky game that prioritized what they thought was great over making money - has been screwed.

So I'm going to - for once willingly and consciously - completely derail my own topic. Far more important than whether gaming is dying, is my thanks to every developer - whether you be the producer, or a lowly graphics designer or writer - who has made a decision that they consciously knew would make their game less likely to sell. To the person who decided to make God Hand hard as all hell. To Daisuke Ishiwatari for Guilty Gear 2, no matter how much I hated it. To Molyneux, for basically everything he does that the public loathes him for. To whoever insisted that, no matter how much people whine, a lock-on feature will never be added to Monster Hunter. To some guy at Capcom, for making Chris and Wesker the new flagship characters of Resident Evil even though RE5 bombed compared to RE4.

Just... Thank you. Without these people, gaming would be dead.

And just to keep up my cynicism, a gigantic, polar-opposite **** you to every developer who made a decision that prioritized money over making something great, even when they had enough money to not need to. I've already mentioned the companies responsible for this crap so you can work that one out yourselves.

Contributions, yeah right.

Someone called me out the other day on one of my old reviews being terrible, namely my Shadow Hearts: Covenant one.

Reading back over it...

Yeah, you're exactly right, that review was ****ing awful.

"Forgettable music"? What the HELL was I thinking?

Then again I also complimented Japanese horror, and Tales of Symphonia. It's obvious I was still coming off the final throes of my weeaboo rehab.

For people who can't read between the lines: Don't use crap from over two years ago to insult me. I was a very stupid person (inb4 idiots say I'm STILL a very stupid person) in my younger days, and it really wasn't long ago I came down from weeabooism. Gamespot doesn't allow you to delete your own reviews so you'll just have to deal with some of the stupider things I've said.

Oh how many times I've heard that sentiment.

See, my problem with the Wii wasn't it hurting me, it was knowing that given its popularity, it would one-day hurt me.

And now it has.

Monster Hunter 3 will be an exclusive to the Wii. Instead of 10 weapon types there will be 7, and those weapon types removed were some of the more unique ones. (Who the hell removes something as cool as a gigantic lance with a CANNON IN IT?!)

Note that this is one of those games where weapon types vary an OBSCENE amount in play style, so losing weapon types isn't like Polearms being removed from WoW, it's like characters being removed from fighting games, or weapons being removed from Unreal Tournament.

While we don't know how many monsters will return, we do know not all of them will, by simple educated assumption. Nobody 'reveals' returning monsters if there aren't some monsters who won't be returning. Some very interesting monsters were unpopular (see: Rajang, Tigrex, Akantor, Kushal, Teostra) and judging from how much they're lauding just ONE returning Monster, I'd guess well over half the enemies won't be returning.

Of course, for every monster who doesn't return, that's a slew of weapons and armour that won't, since you make your gear from the corpses of your enemies.

The difficulty has receiveda huge hit, and you seem to take about half as much damage with enemies having about half as much health.

The main focus of the game seems to be swimming underwater, which is just so dumb my head wants to cave in. Swimming? INNOVATIVE? Christ, I remember swimming around in Donkey Kong Country. It wasn't innovative then; in fact, they were the worst levels in the game. Everyone's most hated temple in Zelda? Water. Worst levels in Sonic? The ones where you could drown.

Even if swimming is uncommong in games these days, THERE'S A GOOD REASON FOR THAT. I'd say "I have no idea how you're meant to dodge the attacks of a two-storey tall dragon underwater," but I already know, you don't, because he does 20 damage per hit from your 150 healthand you don't freaking have to dodge anymore.

The worst part? Because it's the Wii and it's starved for 'hardcore' games, and because they're FINALLY advertising for the franchise (on this very site, no less), it's going to be popular.

The first popular-in-the-West Monster Hunter game, and it's not only on the Wii, it's a downgrade in almost every aspect.

A port would be bad enough, but a DOWNGRADE?

hurf durf but da gfx r betar

For one, I thought you morons were the exact people arguing that graphics don't matter, and for two, GOD OF WAR 2, YES, 2, TWO, DOS, NI, II... Looked FAR better.

This game would get an 8 or 9 for graphics IF THIS WAS FIVE YEARS AGO AND HALO 2 WAS STILL CUTTING EDGE.

Meanwhile Capcom's non-AIDS divisions are making Lost Planet 2 which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, look as good as Crysis despite being on the 360. My only assumption is that they've performed some demonic rite that has made the game surpass hardware limitations.

So yeah. For all you idiots who said the Wii isn't hurting me? I knew it would, and now it has. Enjoy your Monster Hunter 1.5, and I hope you're happy that yet ANOTHER of my favourite franchises is being raped.

Another by Capcom, funnily enough.

I guess Resident Evil 5 exhausted their awesome capacity.

So, it's come to my attention that a few people actually wander about this place (and by that I refer to both my userpage and Gamespot in general), and so an update after a 2-year silence may be a good idea. So, here's a few questions that I HAVEN'T been receiving but, if I were a popular game journalist, I may be receiving.

Q: Are you retiring from shovelling piles of steaming hot feces onto popular games?

A: No, I just do it more privately nowadays because I'm sick of being lampooned for what are completely reasonable views, opinions, and often facts, by people with completely unreasonable views, opinions and very rarely facts. I mean, the lampooning doesn't particularly bother me - if I was incapable of dealing with indignant criticism by ignorant masses then I would have done what said masses want by now and offed myself - but it does make it all quite pointless when not only do I not get my point across, I then get a big healthy dose of retarded shoved into my face.

Q: So you're not going to shovel piles of steaming hot feces onto popular games publically anymore?

A: Perhaps. There's also been a lack of games that truly deserve my ire to compound the above issue. Halo 3 is far too mediocre for me to truly sling **** at, there's been no new moves from Square that I've actually had the discipline to force myself to play (My God, did you see that Lost Odyssey crap? I played it for 5 minutes and read more than if I had've actually sat down to read a book. And yet, I read so much LESS than what I actually READ. It's like eating air), and despite being called 'Expansions' the aforementioned objects for World of Warcraft really haven't expanded anything. Sure I could spend a paragraph or two ratting them out for not actually doing anything with their trillions of dollars - like I am now - but then I'd run out of fresh dirt and start digging up all the crap I could pay out about the original game.

That's the funny thing about critiquing an unoriginal media format. You can only do it for so long until you become just as unoriginal as them because you have nothing ****ing new to critique.

And Gamespot's censoring nonsense. I don't like that at all.

That and Yahtzee has, sadly, ruined alternative reviewing by not being alternative at all. He spent five minutes being funny and now all's he does is say how much he's indifferent to new **** Wii (and non-Wii in the case of Prince of Persia) games he should be pumelling to death, while reviewers who AREN'T him get accused of ripping him off, regardless of how long said alternative reviews have been reviewing since before his chavvy bollocks got famous.

All that being said, perhaps I'll manage to squeeze out some reviews at some stage, now that I've remembered this site actually exists. There's got to be a crappy game I played at some ti-... OH YEAH! NINJA GAIDEN 2!

Q: So, what, you're reviewing Ninja Gaiden 2 next? But most people didn't like that game.

A: But they disliked it for stupid reasons. When they should have been disliking it for the fact that bosses stopped being challenging and started being cheap, and that Ninjas are completely freaking lame. Where the hell is Pirate Gaiden, huh? Where's the Pirate-themed DMC ripoff?

OH SHI-, DMC4.

Okay, so may I DO have quite a lot of crappy games I could review.

Q: And finally, even though you addressed it all, mostly, over the last few questions: Where do your loyalties stand?

A: Here is a list, compiled for your leisure.

Crap: Nintendo, and all things related

Blizzard, and all things related

Square, and all things related

Srsface competetive gamers

Meh: Left 4 Dead

TF2 (Previously win before destroyed by srsface competetive gamers)

Win: Tom Clancy's HAWX

Fallout 3

Fighting games

EA. Wait, SERIOUSLY? EA? Even I have trouble believing they pulled themselves out of the ditch that was madden to begin making some of the best games of the last six months.

Win Beyond Your Wildest Dreams: Bioshock.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Yeah, that's right, I'm still here. Sorry to burst your bubble, I've just been on lurking status for a while.

Just thought I'd update my standings on current things. The next gen was off to a shaky start for a multitude of reasons, so my opinions have been re-evaluated a lot. And here, finally, are my final standings:

XBox360: Currently, the best console, and the only logical one to buy. It's already got a large library of games with at least a couple of titles for pretty much everyone, it's the cheapest CONSOLE, its online is beautiful, controllers are comfortale and logical, and its "Coming Soon" list is chocked full of stuff I can't wait for. To top it all off, its current flagship game, Gears of War, is actually really good, God forbid! The EXPERIENCE, the feel and presentation of that game, is absolutely gorgeous.

Playstation3: Currently, you're an idiot if you buy a PS3. That's not to say the PS3, itself, is a bad console. But currently it's ridiculously, hugely overpriced, no one's seen what it can do yet because the Cell is extremely hard to develop for, and we probably won't for a long while. It has barely any games, let alone good games, and most of them, like the 360's launch titles, just suck. When the price drops and it gets a library to reflect the PS2's, it'll be great. Until then, don't, God, damned, buy, one.

Wii: Wait, what? This is a console now? I could have sworn it was just a kid's toy, not unlike a tamagotchi, that people will be sick of in just another month (and many, many people already ARE sick of). It's pro-simplicity and anti-complexity, it looks at hardcore, difficult-to-play, unaccessible games and deems them horrible, and every single game on it takes no less than half a second to pick up. It's not a console, it's a joke, and anyone who ISN'T sick of its gimmicky controls in another month or two, is just an idiot.

WoW: It still sucks.

Vanguard: What a letdown. As much as I'm willing to support a game with a rocky start, that was just way too much. Plus, like most MMOs, it failed to solidify the gameplay, the feel of your character. So far, only four 3DMMOsI've playedhave achieved this, and only three of those four are respectable. (Matrix Online, City of Heroes/Villains, Guild Wars and, the unrespectable one, World of Warcraft). Not to mention, like 5 minions? Who are you kidding? That's not a Necromancer. Go learn from Guild Wars or, in a more extreme case, Diablo 2.

And that's about it.

Short post here, I've been playing FFVAdvance a lot. Yes, I do like the old games. And I just realized that, hey... All the new dialogue is really good.

It doesn't feel like a cheezy soap opera like FFX (and FFVIII, FFIX and FFXII) did. In fact, it actually feels natural. All the characters are more 3D (or more 2D, since most Square characters these days are just 1D) than anything Square's done in years. Now before, this was logical. Because I just assumed Square had changed to be retarded. But this prooves that they actually do have the capacity for decency. They just... Choose when to use it...?

Or maybe, they've managed to be casual about the new dialogue (hence making the dialogue, well, casual, instead of uptight) because it's just a half-assed GBA port, so it's ended up good? I dunno. Either way, they're still retarded, though I am looking forward to either hating or respecting FFXIII. The main character has a gunsword: that's a good start.

On the other hand, they've completely ripped off PSO. That's not.

Hah! Two weeks in and I'm already duelling with Sigil's Customer Service. They're a good bunch, they really are, and MUCH nicer than Blizzard or NCSoft's group, but I'm Shinkada damnit. I'm ALWAYS against the majority. It doesn't matter how good the staff are, I'll always be warring with them.

If they can fix this issue then I guess that I'll eternally respect them as the first MMO company to actually HELP me rather than sit on their fat asses.

If not, well, I wasn't expecting good customer service any more than I was expecting Warriors to have DMC-style gameplay.

Review is delayed because it's hard to dedicate myself to a character with the issue at hand. I'm not saying what it is because it'd just be typical if some idiot tried to duplicate it after it was resolved to spite me.

I own Vanguard. Chances are you don't and you're just twiddling your thumbs waiting for your dumbassed Raid group to come online so you can swim around in a world of horrible graphics, stupid, innacurate races and halfassed lore. Review coming soon... Just as soon as I stop obsessed over how damn cool my character is and actually TRY OUT Crafting and Diplomacy. Oh, that and just staring at the sky in wonder.

Thank you, PC. Thank you so very, very much.

As you can see, I'm back. That's right. Why? Why did I get your hopes up, thinking I would leave then suddenly boom, I'm back? Well, two people are to thank...

Microsoft. Sorry for the initial bagging guys. The 360 got off to a rocky start, sure, but it's certainly come a long way. Mugs up to the likes of Crackdown, Chrome Hounds and... Well, let's just say I'm looking forward to Fable2.

The second? Computers. Hm... I guess Microsoft are to thank a lot for that, too. Hah! Vanguard, CnC3, Supreme Commander, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., even Huxley. Let's not forget small-name titles like Blacksite: Area 51 and Duke Nukem Forever...

...

Okay, so I'm just kidding about DN:F. Maybe when DX11 comes out.

The point is, I'm back, so you can all bite me.