@phor11: ( v '.' )=(::)
Kotaku's translation of Iwata's comments in question are accurate as well.
You want a cookie?
Wow, it's been three years since the release of the Wii and it's runaway success, and I can't believe people are still blurting the same shit now as they did then. You guys are like an iPod on f*cking repeat.
Just wait for the Digital Foundry team to run the game through their software, to get the true story.
Anyone else a little putoff by the combination of the facial animation and bodily gestures? Specifically, 3:07 is where I really notice it. In the past games (and in anime), movements were exagerrated (the head bobbing, gesticulating arms) to convey emotion because you couldn't afford or had the tech to animate where the emotion was truly coming from: the face, or namely, the eyes and mouth.
But now that Square Enix has sufficient advancement in those areas, with the way the eyes reflect light, eyelids, lips that can twist and form complicated movements, tongues, creases and wrinkles in skin to show sadness or anger, you don't need to have them do what you did in the past.
It's like in Mass Effect. You can restrain bodily movements now because the emotion is all in the face.
Also, LOVE the inclusion of a song that wasn't written expressly for, with its lyrics shaped around, the game. It really gives it an, I don't know, Western quality to the game. It's like how Namco put in the Puddle of Mudd song "Blurry" into Ace Combat 5, which I also loved.
@Skunky: I had made the connection when I saw the first Japanese trailer and noticed the quality of the lipsync with the Japanese dialogue.
But I hope that's not the real reason. By this point I would hope that Square Enix would have developed sufficient lipsync tech on par with Bioware's.
Then again, I doubt even that is 100% perfect, and that after their tech does 90% of the work, they do by hand the last 10%, which is what makes it truly believable.
@RPGmaniac05: Then the 360 version would probably be eight discs instead of four. You can already notice the effects DVD's are having on the voice quality. Some of the dialogue has that compressed, scratchy/staticy quality to it, not unlike the audio quality in FF XII, but not as bad.
Then again, the PS3 version, if left uncompressed, will probably lead to longer load times (in addition to the inherent lag of Bluray discs). I guess it's a choice between audio quality (dialogue) and overall game quality (shorter load times).
Well, hello there MGS4.
@netMASA: What other games in the past have come out that use fuel systems?
- Also, I like that they're taking out the Cooldown. That was one of the greatest flaws in ME 1. It made every gun practically useless aside from the pistol, and you'd only use the other three just to dick around but not as the fall-back weapon.
- Some of the ammo mods were also rendered useless, such as the one that tripled your damage but immediately overheated your gun (such as using it with a sniper rifle), so you'd fire one shot then have to wait six seconds for it to cool down. It slowed the gameplay too much, so I never used them.
- I haven't played it in a while so I don't know what you mean regarding the equipment. I know you can swtich between pistol, rifle, sniper, and shotty at any time, but you want to be able to swap the type of pistol equipped and it won't let you? I don't remember anything like that affecting me. =\
- The combat classes injects more variety! It's an RPG after all, and saying you want to be Sentinel or a Biotic is just like saying if you want to be a Fighter or Mage in FF 1.
I'm sure Reggie was just covering their bases. After all, the design doc. may have it listed as a '10 release, but something may occur along the way that forces them to delay it.
Consider that Twilight Princess came out in '06, that means that this game would have been in development for (come the end of '10) three years. I'm sure that's plenty.
@Madness87: I thought 1 and 3 were terrible while 2 was one of the greatest superhero films ever. Also, Jake Gyllenhal looks enough like Tobey to work.
@Kolian: But do you really believe that 3D is going to go away? All this talk abour VR being the future of gaming and 3D is just the first step. Not to mention the fact that 2010 is going to be the year of 3D televisions. I can just imagine how it must feel to see Spiderman soar through Manhattan, the buildings, the traffic, the birds, all in 3D.
When we see 3D effects as normal, that's when they are implemented well. When it reaches the point where we take them for granted (which I felt Avatar did) then it only adds to the film, in my opinion.
@negitoro: Yeah, that thought had crossed my mind as well. FOX has X-Men and Fantastic Four and Daredevil, and Sony has Spiderman. What I don't know is how long they have those rights, how many movies can they make? Also, now that they are owned by Disney, who have their own distribution branch and studio lots, I'm sure things are going to change. Or, at least, I hope, as those properties are worth a lot of money, but then again they were originally owned by Marvel so I'm sure some stipulation in the contracts exists that they can exploit to get the rights back.
@PoweredByHentai: Yeah the Gravemind was a bad example, I mean it's pretty obvious how he can learn english since he does assimilate humans. And the whole Covenant shift to English was just a stylistic change, because they wanted to tell a larger story (which, I have to be frank, I think they failed at) and they could only do that by having the Elites speak English, so we don't have two minutes of grunts with subtitles. I understand why they did it, but yeah, it's just a screw-up because they didn't plan out the future games well enough.
@Spartan2170: The spread of technology makes sense. But consider that the armor between HALO 2 and HALO 3 is different (you can tell by looking at the gauntlets), and that since ODST takes place around HALO 2 that the VISR would be implemented in the newest MJOLNIR armor?
Also, fiction-wise that does not explain a couple things. For one, so we can't throw grenades as far because we lack the arm strength, yet we can rip turrets from their posts? And what about the absence of the Battle Rifle from ODST, which should have been strewn all over New Mombasa? Yes, I saw the interview where the kid asks and Bungie responds, "Oh it's because we didn't have enough memory." First of all, that's bullshit. The reason why it was taken out from ODST is the same reason why we never saw the HALO 1 pistol again: it was THE weapon of choice, and it makes it impossible to create certain kinds of gameplay. After all, how do you make the ODST seem weaker and differentiate them from the Chief? By giving them weaker weapons such as the silenced SMG. So that's the real reason why it isn't in there, yet Bungie saw fit to lie to the public, and I really don't see why, just give us the honest reason, that's all we want.
I know I'm jumping all over this but it just goes to show how much passion I have for the universe and how much I want it to be better than what it is. It saddens me to see things like this.
Regarding the reboot, I think it's a great idea. Three films in and it's been firmly entrenched in viewers' minds that this does NOT take place in the Marvel universe. By rebooting the series, they can finally intertwine it with the Iron Man/Hulk universes, among others. I thought about this years ago, after the success of Iron Man and rumors of Starks appearance in Hulk, about how it didn't make sense for Spidey to get his powers, fight all these villains, and NOT get noticed. I mean, in Spiderman 2 Aunt May specifically says that it's been TWO YEARS since Uncle Ben died.
It'd be hard to retconn that, and it's this lcommitment to consistency you know the director's now share, such as how Favreau is worried about how they're going to marry the strong-scienced Iron Man/Hulk with the mystical world of Thor. By taking Peter back to high school, this also creates the gap that must exist between Spiderman, the poor, young, idealistic superhero with the older, wiser personas of Stark and Banner. It think this is the right thing to do.
After watching Avatar one of the things I knew for certain was that Spiderman had to be in 3D. The notion first popped up in my head while watching Spiderman 3, and the battle in the sewer with Sandman. You have Spidey swinging and doing all his acrobatics through the pipes and I was just, "Yawn. We've seen all this before." How many times can you show Spidey swinging though gaps, you know? I knew then that Spiderman was going to have to do more visually to keep the action scenes more involving. Spiderman 2 was great because that was the film that made all his powers practical. In the first film, it was just him swinging and pulling guys towards him.
Come Spiderman 2, he would shoot the web-bullets, use the webbing to catch pedestrians, stop trains, grab objects and use them as projectiles against his foes. His entire skillset was utilized within the film and made it a part of the fabric of the action scenes.
@PoweredByHentai: Yeah but the Elites only spoke in their native language which sounded like a series of grunts and snorts, with the occasional broken english thrown in. Enter HALO 2 and suddenly they are fluent in English and speak it with a dignified noble accent.
Also that ridiculous scene in HALO 2 where you see the hologram of the Prophet speaking in an alien language about the Great Journey (I think it was on Delta HALO). The Chief asks her what he's saying, then Cortana snaps her fingers and instantly translates it, 100% perfect, from alien into English, even though they (the Prophets and entire Covenant) have been speaking English since the very first cutscene. I was dumbfounded. I was like, what was the point of even having the Prophet speak alien in that cutscene in the first place? These are the inconsistencies I keep referring to. You see the Chief speak to Gravemind, Arbiter, other Prophets and they both talk in English, so we must assume they either A)know English or B)Chief had translation software running. But if it were always running, why did he have to ask Cortana to provide a translation?
Oh Bungie...Or maybe I should say, "Oh Joe Staten..."
@KommanderKeith: I have, but apparently you were the one who was reading yet not comprehending. My gripes were across the entire HALO series, and this is not immune. The removal of the nades notwithstanding (which I understand), does not explain them bringing back the health system. Prequel or no, that is a gameplay design choice that has no bearing on the consistency of the actual HALO universe. For example, they're probably either going to keep the Spartan Laser, which chronologically won't make sense, or replace it with something else, which also will not make sense because you never see it in HALO 1. It's things like these that bother me.
And I'm not a guy that hates everything about HALO or just looks for things to tear it down. It's because I enjoyed the series so much (well, it only extends so far as the first HALO and the first couple of books) that my passion for the universe is why I get upset when these things occur, because I want it to be the best, but things like these just keep it down, sales charts notwithstanding. A prime example is the Half-life series, specifically Half-life 2. The universe has been kept amazingly consistent throughout all the sequels in terms of tech and story, they don't introduce fancy gadgets you've never seen before or gameplay features that weren't in the previous games.
...in the number of enemies and objects that can be on screen at any one time...
Bungie made the same claim on the leap from HALO 2 to HALO 3, about the scale of the battles and how they were going to be so much bigger than what you saw in HALO 2.
I don't know about you but I never noticed the difference, the battles never seemed bigger or more populated. The only thing I can think of were the Scarab battles and even then it didn't feel epic.
Here's a copy/paste of a previous comment I made here regarding my feelings towards the HALO series:
I was a big fan of HALO back in the day, ever since I read the very first preview Computer Gaming Wolrd had when it was still just a Mac game.
However, since HALO 2 I've started to realize that there is no foundation for all of this stuff, and nothing being laid down to bring HALO to the future. It started with the aliens speaking English in HALO 2 and the sudden appearance of those flying green things to the Covenant, to the retconning of HALO Wars where units you had never seen before (not even in HALO 3) magically appeared in the universe, to the love story that came out of nowhere in HALO 3 between Cortana and the Chief, to the introduction of tech in ODST that the Chief in his cutting edge armor never had, such as the VISR and silenced weaponry...I'm like, "BUNGIE JUST MAKE UP YOUR F*CKING MIND!" And this is just me taking one detail from each game.
I'll still play the future games because when you have as much money as Bungie, you can only make shit so many times before you finally get your shit together and make something good.
And here we go again! Removing things, putting things back. ARGH! Is there NO consistency to the HALO universe, even with the purported HALO bible they keep talking about!?
