RockyRan

One of the most important basic features, yes. Not sure why I even have to argue this.

No, Wiimote don't count as basic features. That little thing they raved about for nearly an hour, ranting about it so much that it got people confused as to whether or not it was standalone or part of an actual console, I KIND OF consider that the basic feature.

No, what I want out of the console is a robust implementation of their controller. Using only 1 controller per console isn't a robust implementation of this, I'm sorry to say. Again, the "ridiculous number of play options" argument doesn't work with me. It did in 2006 when I thought exactly the same way you did, cooking up all kinds of different methods of control for Nintendo franchises using the zany Wii Remote. Turns out pretty much everything worth a damn coming from Nintendo barely used motion controls, and once you take motion controls out of the Wii you're simply left with a ridiculously underpowered controller. Yes, I can think of a very large amount of games that can use the Wii Remote with Motion plus, Wii Speak and the Balance Board at the same time, but my fantasies aren't the reality and the reality is that we don't see any significant implementation. What I'm most concerned about isn't just multiplayer. I'm most concerned about the most robust implementation of their basic concept, which is the only thing Nintendo bothers to actually work with. What your concerns are are all the doodads that Nintendo puts into their consoles, (think the two cameras on the DSi). What I'm most concerned about are the basic features and I want to make sure that they work properly, (think accurate touch controls and good, durable buttons on the DSi). I know Nintendo all to well and I know they don't expand much beyond the basics for their consoles. They always begin each new console generation with a myriad of promises and "Think of the Possibilities!" ad campaigns, then a few years into their consoles said possibilities don't go at all with the fruition. My stance is simple. If they want to rave about the controller so much, and if they want that to be the focal point of their next console, they damn well better make that basic implementation work. A 1-controller limitation is NOT a robust implementation, and saying "BUT IT'S GOT A CAMERA!!" doesn't at all alleviate those concerns.

There's reports that it's about 50% more powerful than the PS3 (or was it 360?), with a graphics card that's two card generations ahead of the 360's. Based on what I'm reading it does seem to be more significantly powerful, but not really "next generation" powerful. Graphically I'm not totally concerned about the power. Whatever Nintendo's going to put out with the Wii U is going to be outdated by the time the PS4/720 release anyway. My hope was that Nintendo was at least going to make something significantly powerful than current-gen consoles, even if not as powerful as top-of-the-line PCs of today, which it looks like it is so I'm satisfied there. It all goes back to the 1 controller limitation for me. That shit needs to be fixed ASAP.

Yeah, I felt the shooting in BioShock was actually my least favorite part of the game. It felt floaty and disconnected. I really liked the setting, atmosphere, and exploration-heavy level design as well as the plasmid mechanic. I also really enjoyed the fact that I actually HAD health (unlike 99% of shooters that just have regenerating health). I had some complaints but overall I definitely liked it. I also enjoy RPGs from time to time. I'm itching to play Deus Ex soon. I just have to find the time to play it properly

Then again if that's about the only thing you want out of the console the rest of the "checks" aren't really meaningful, are they? I'm looking at base features because let's be real, Nintendo never really goes beyond using a console's base features. They're notorious for releasing new peripherals and never using them. I thought exactly the way you did when the Wii was coming out (OMG LOOK AT ALL THE NEW WAYS OF PLAYING GAMES IT'S GOING TO BE SO VARIED) and look how that turned out. Either gimmicky motion crap or games that pretty much controlled traditionally. Even Nintendo didn't give a shit about the Balance Board, Wii wheel, Zapper, or WiiSpeak. Thank god the Vitality Sensor is all but dead or else that'd be another thing to add to that list of neglected plastic. Attempting to downplay the importance of not having 4 of these controllers doesn't really make much sense to me. This controller is the MAIN selling point of the system, and limiting the amount of controllers to anything less than the industry standard (yes, 4) is nothing short of a failure of design, no matter which way anyone tries to cut it. Trying to divert attention from this by pointing to other peripherals that everyone here knows will almost never get used (balance board? Really?) doesn't magically make this particular fundamental problem any less disappointing. That is, of course, if it does turn out that only 1 controller can be used.

Oh, plenty. Half Life 2, if BioShock counts as one (I do at least ), Crysis, for multiplayer TF2 can't be beat, Left 4 Dead, etc. But apart from that I'm not a very shooter-heavy person. I prefer fantasy adventure games and racing way more, or if there's shooting mechanics but it's not the main emphasis of the gameplay (like Ratchet and Clank. Definitely liked A Crack in Time).

What the fuck is this shit? http://www.gametrailers.com/video/the-fall-mass-effect/716253 Is this a trailer for Mass Effect 3 or a generic Michael Bay film? I still want the game but DAMN this is a terrible trailer. BioWare better not be going for THIS style.

I know people were eventually going to say "it's a shooter so you should expect to do shooting", which is exactly why I said it didn't make any effort in switching things up. That's what makes a good game good. Half Life 2 switches up between calm moments, shooting moments, moments of conversation that last quite a while, moments of puzzles, etc. Reach doesn't do this. It doesn't even change the level design in ways to make the shooting mechanics interesting, it's just shooting in the same way, using the same tactics, throughout the entire game. THAT'S what I mean by saying my first post. I know shooting games have shooting, so there's a reason why I brought that up I realize that Reach was "awesome" for fans because it takes place at a time where all other games/books/whatever merely referenced, and thus it's brought "back to life". But here's the thing, the way in which it's presented makes for only empty fanservice that's not good from the perspective of someone who hasn't played a Halo game before. I knew only basic amounts of information from the Halo story, but all I pretty much knew was that Reach was a prequel and it was set at an important time in the series' history that's only referenced (Reach has fellen, etc.). The basic skeleton of the story for me had quite a bit of potential to be interesting and emotional, but it wasn't at all with the way it was told. Taking the story out of the Halo context made the storytelling in Reach an incredibly hollow experience, which was exactly what happened on my end. The main problem I had with the storytelling is precisely because Bungie just assumed everyone already knew about everything in the story and didn't feel the need to actually tell it well. A lot of the events that happen in Reach that SHOULD be important are merely glossed over. There isn't absolutely any feeling in either the gameplay or the cutscenes that you're fighitng a losing battle (that is, no feelings of desperation and no real sense of losing the grip on the planet), you're just blandly instructed to go here and shoot that and kill them sons-of-bitches aliens. Dialog between characters is cursory and shallow, not unlike other games where the campaign's story is all but disposable. In general, it seems that Bungie didn't bother to fill in the context of that the hell is happening in the game because they just assumed that everyone who played it already knew the story and how important everything in it is. There was a distinct lack of effort in actually expressing, even on a subtle level, the importance of specific events. I know a lot of fans of the game are completely blind to this because they already know the backstory and its importance. The gaps that I'm seeing are filled for them, but that's not good storytelling I'm sorry to say. A story shouldn't look "awesome" for a fan and "careless and dull" for a newcomer. Look at Half Life 2. Valve did what Bungie and actually BUILT context around the game's setting and events, serving as more fleshed out experience for the fans and a good experience for newcomers as well. Bungie didn't seem to care at all about anyone who may have had this as their first Halo game with the way they chose to tell the story. That's mostly what I'm getting at from a story perspective. Besides, in response to Chew's "play the other worse games before playing this", I don't really think that's a compliment for Reach. You're basically saying I should lower my standards because by comparison the other games are worse.

Go ahead and throw in Halo Reach as well as maybe the series in general for me. I played Halo: Reach for free by me signing up for that "disc format beta" thing. I had never played a Halo game before, but since it's so freaking popular AND so freaking popular with kids (they make Halo-themed LEGO toys FFS) I said to myself "well, it's probably not going to be awesome but it's probably going to be amused in some way". Holy shit was I wrong. There's nothing particularly WRONG with the gameplay, except for the fact it's the most pedestrian and flat AAA title I've played in several years. The level design I found completely unimaginative and not at all engaging, and you did absolutely NOTHING but shoot. They didn't even make the shooting interesting by switching things up for you to shoot things differently (with the exception being the space dogfight, which was fine if not a little pedestrian itself), it was just "go here and shoot. Done? OK, move up a bit and shoot more". The fact that I've heard many call Reach the "best in the series" makes it even worse. If this is the best then I really don't want to play the rest. It's just "Space Shooter: The Game". Generic art style, generic story, generic music, generic shooting. Just generic in general. Nothing is of low quality, but Bungie made absolutely no effort in going above and beyond in any way in my opinion.

That's kind of the reason why I loved Demon's Souls so much. Yes the tutorial only covered extremely trivial things, but the game NOT telling you everything else (like the entirety of the crafting system, including the fact that there's two blacksmiths in the game) meant everything was there for you to "find". Not telling the player these things and giving them reason to find these things makes the player more involved and giving a larger sense of wonder and discovery, provided that they're given reason to be willing to learn these things. The fact that DS was so challenging certainly gave me the reason to take every upgrade I could. Soon I was scouring the land (and the wiki) for any ring, shield, weapon, and piece of material that might give me any advantage because it would actually be useful for me. I feel that if the game had told me a whole bunch of things in any way (like providing an in-game map or encyclopedia of some sort) it would've taken away from that experience. In that way the lack of tutorial/documentation actually made the game better. Then again, Demon's Souls is its own special kind of game so that probably wouldn't work for games out there, but I do like to see devs "hiding" more things like that for us to find. Way too many games these days meticulously document and lay out every single piece of content out for us, to the point where everything a game has to offer is spoon-fed to us with little to no effort from our part. Belgh, I'm veering way off topic. I'll be quiet now

I don't think it's so much an issue of "sugar coating it" as much as it is other people trying to "piss coat it". I don't want to speak for everyone, but the reason why I don't say Piracy = Theft is not because I'm trying to use that as a justification, but because there actually IS a difference in semantics. No pirate in their right mind is really going to argue that they're not "playing something that they haven't paid for", but the reason I think a lot of people call it "theft" is because we have been trained since we were little tykes that theft = bad. We have a Pavlovian reaction to the word "theft" and thus people piss-coating piracy want to use the word "theft" because it there's an "it's bad and you should feel bad" undertone built right into the word. The problem is that it's factually incorrect. So as to not sound redundant, I'll just point to Hakidia's picture. There's the difference. Piracy naysayers of course object to that image because then they don't get to use the word "theft", but if it really ISN'T theft, why stick to saying it's theft? If you want to say "it's bad and you should feel bad", then say it (which Beefy does so hooray for that ). If you think it's horrible in terms of morality, great, tell us why. But insisting that it's "theft" simply because saying that word makes the point easier to get across isn't really the best way to go about doing it, especially because there's a difference between making an illegal copy and stealing a physical good from a store.

That's not the issue. It's the issue that the capabilities of the Wii U are going to be castrated by this very obvious limitation. And it's not even something we're all crazily expecting out of nowhere. We've already had the ability to play games on the GameCube with each player having their own screen. It's obvious that I see a Wii U controller and I think "Zelda: Four Swords for the GC". It's counter intuitive to say "yeah, well, that experience you could play in 2004 you won't be able to play in 2012 out of this arbitrary limitation". Yes each player needed his/her own GBA for Four Swords but come on. This is 2012. There NEEDS to be a solution for this. If it came down to it I would've VERY well preferred a lower resolution and screen size on each Wii U controller. It just makes no sense in any way to rave about the controller so much (talking so much about it that they were CONFUSING people as to whether or not it was actually part of a new console during their presser) then say "yeah, only 1". Really? They don't see that as a bad thing in any way possible? Nintendo, who are the people most concerned with local multiplayer? They're obviously spinning into a "asymmetrical multiplayer!" excuse, but no matter which way they try to spin it, it just screams "limitation" at the end of the day. If they could, they would enable 4 players, period. The fact that they're not doing it means a failure on their part, and that's the only thing I'm going to be hearing until they fix it.

Pretty much my thoughts. Four Swords on the GameCube is a riot and it's a complete shame that we can't get anything like that with the console (unless they do 3DS connectivity, but then we're right back where we started and the WiiU tablet didn't help at all). I wish Nintendo would've come up with a better solution for this. Smaller screens is probably the best option for this, or maybe just think of another "twist". Emphasizing the tablet controller above all else (and even going so far as to confuse people by not showing the console itself at all) in multiplayer gaming then quietly revealing you can only use 1 per console is just a buzzkill of the worst kind.

Only the ones with shit DRM and multiplayer games. The vast majority of single-player games can still be played online. Anyway, I feel like we're going in circles here, so I'll just leave it at this crude chart. The PC is not hard, consoles are not hard. But the PC has gotten far easier to deal with and consoles have gotten a bit harder to deal with. My amount of "hassles" with a PC is just about equivalent as my amount of "hassles" with a console (that is to say, it doesn't happen often at all). Try to argue 'till your blue in the face, this is what I think and that's that.

I saw it too and I liked what I saw, but I most definitely DON'T like Bethesda's attitude of "So what? It'll be a console port. Got a problem with that?" It's obvious the game won't do a single thing that the consoles aren't capable of doing, even in the PC version. I expect low draw distances, continuing to divide the game world into "cells", and two-line conversations.

(...which is a completely reasonable assumption...)

Well, that's the thing. I haven't had very many issues with Steam at all. Nothing really comes out at me, except those times there's a really hot sale and download rates are low. My experience with PC games goes: "buy game, download it, boot it up, get to playing". No issues. But that's my point. The experiences are interchangeable at this point. Like Dean says, I find it hard to believe that a console gamer can redeem codes, troubleshoot for online problems, download/manage DLC, calibrate controllers, etc., yet look at the PC and say NUUU THIS IS TOO HARD!! It's not "complex" in an absolute sense of the word, but yes it IS MORE complex than it was before. It's not difficult, but it's not any less difficult than dealing with consoles and whatever capricious problems they like to bring up, just like PCs when they have capricious problems they like to bring up. Let's not forget about botched releases like Test Drive Unlimited 2 and issues like the PSN outage. Like I said, the days of "pop in and play" are gone. I'm not saying it's incredibly complicated, but neither is the PC. The people who tend to overplay the "PC gaming issues" are generally people who just hear things and assume that's the case for everyone. Go to PS3 or 360-related help boards and if you didn't know any better you'd probably think the same way as well of the consoles.

Nice to see they're pulling in classy headlines to draw in the well-cultured reader.

Old PS3 says hi. Also it's funnier having a console that's compatible with 2nd generation old system but not the last generation. Ouch, I completely forgot the PS3. Though all PS3 models have PS1 BC, so I guess there's that.

Wait, wait, wait... It's difficult to: 1) Insert disc 2) Push a button to accept update 3) Sit for three minutes as the console downloads and installs the update 4) Play the game That's all I did when inFAMOUS 2 had "Update 1.01" upon insertion. It was truly difficult on my end. Then again, who am I to judge when I know there are people who can't run a System Update, even when the console itself tells them to update and where to update. Way to miss the point. My point is that it's no longer about "just pop in the disc and play" that a lot of PC naysayers like to say. The point is that gaming consoles are getting increasingly more complex to the point where you have to wait several minutes (and in some cases upwards of an hour) to boot up the game you just bought, not to mention whatever happens when the console isn't connecting online for some dumb reason (which has happened more often than I would like it to) or you get an RROD. Like I said, the days of "pop game in, play" are over for consoles. I don't find consoles to be any less of a hassle than the PC. Oh please, a game getting a patch is hardly "complex." You sit there and the game fixes itself. If your console isn't online, you don't receive the patch and you play. However, you run the chance of playing a buggy/terrible version of the game. Yeah, we're past "pop-in and pray" that version 1.0 you purchased works out of the box. Now we're at a better state where things can be fixed. No, now we're at "pop-in, (possible patch), and play." I don't have to do anything else besides wait a few minutes. And an hour? What cases are these? Never have I had to wait even half an hour for a patch to download and install. The hour-long updates happened in 4 cases. Once for Burnout Paradise's first bootup, once for LBP's first bootup, once for ModNation Racers first bootup, and once for a random security update for when I was trying to do the MNR update. The last one was cumbersome in particular because it was actually taking OVER an hour to download a measly 250+ MB update for absolutely no reason, and to "keep things simple" the PS3 doesn't say at what rate you're downloading when updating. In fact, I couldn't tell at all what the problem was because the console told me nothing. Reconnecting did nothing, and testing the connection on the console yielded a perfectly normal download rate. Had to try a solid 3 times to update before giving up, grabbing a thumbstick, downloading the update through the website on my PC, and using THAT to update. It was completely ridiculous. So no, don't tell me it's simple enough. There's problems and it's possible to have problems. I'm not saying anything about it being difficult, I'm just saying it's not at all "pop in and play" like you're trying to make it out to be.

Wait, wait, wait... It's difficult to: 1) Insert disc 2) Push a button to accept update 3) Sit for three minutes as the console downloads and installs the update 4) Play the game That's all I did when inFAMOUS 2 had "Update 1.01" upon insertion. It was truly difficult on my end. Then again, who am I to judge when I know there are people who can't run a System Update, even when the console itself tells them to update and where to update. Way to miss the point. My point is that it's no longer about "just pop in the disc and play" that a lot of PC naysayers like to say. The point is that gaming consoles are getting increasingly more complex to the point where you have to wait several minutes (and in some cases upwards of an hour) to boot up the game you just bought, not to mention whatever happens when the console isn't connecting online for some dumb reason (which has happened more often than I would like it to) or you get an RROD. Like I said, the days of "pop game in, play" are over for consoles. I don't find consoles to be any less of a hassle than the PC. Most common urban myth regarding PC gaming. If you hate sitting on a desk so much, simply plug your PC to your TV and get a controller. Works mighty nice and makes games look far better than on consoles (native 1080p, copious amounts of anti-aliasing, 60+ FPS, getting to use a mouse for shooters, etc.). Never did see the validity of the "don't like to sit on desks" complaint.

Yup, had this as one of my E3 predictions. Still doesn't make it any less crap. And confirming that Smash Bros. won't support Gamecube controllers pretty much clarifies the Wii U doesn't support Gamecube controllers. Period. This could leave a sour taste on people's mouths. Still, I'll wait for more info. And confirms there's no BC to GameCube, though to be fair having a console be 100% BC to another console two generations ago IS a little crazy.

Oh god, here's a doozy: http://www.vg247.com/2011/06/08/console-version-of-skyrim-bethesdas-lead-sku/ Hooray, confirmed console port Also, he says stuff about simplicity: I personally don't care much about going away from stats. No dumbass number crunching is actually the reason why I like Oblivion in the first place. I just hope they can actually preserve the depth of it. If they go way too casual it'll be obvious and I won't like it.