E3 info freako thing

[baratron]

It's not a good idea for me to spend 2 days at home by myself. Being away from people makes me kinda... jittery. Right now, I'd be running round the house screaming and waving my arms frantically at things if I wasn't still sick & dizzy. Eurgh.

It doesn't help that it's E3 at the moment and I'm getting random snippets of news about new game things, some of which are making me run around screaming with excitement, and others which are making me want to stab the game developers to death with an Ikea pencil. None of the game sites are really giving me enough news about MY kinds of games, either, so I'm having to compile my own news from all of them, which is making me even more jittery.

Stabbing to death? Each new snippet of info about Pokemon XD is making me more pissed off - Snag machine? Shadow Pokemon? Can only play as a male character? Eurgh.

And have you seen the PS3 a.k.a breadbin with its boomerang controller? WTF?

The End Is Nigh: Final Fantasy XI is coming out on the Xbox.

Apparently I need this game: Hello Kitty Roller Rescue. Preview and screenshots (are you dead of cute yet?). Also, it looks as though Harvest Moon: For Girls will finally get an English translation! (I don't even mind if it's NorAm only, because I already have a FreeLoader disc).

Most wanted DS game is still (unsurprisingly) Animal Crossing DS, although I fear it at the same time. The GameCube version of Animal Crossing lends itself to those annoying 12 hour Sims-style sessions, where you start in the mid afternoon, and finally manage to peel yourself off the controller at godknows am when you finally notice you're cold, tired, hungry, thirsty, sore and needing the toilet. If Animal Crossing DS is anything like this, I can see instances of me ending up at the seaside by mistake because I failed to notice I was supposed to be getting off the train two hours earlier! I'm also rather wanting Katamari Damacy DS, although this is still just a rumour.

Last but absolutely not least, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess looks really impressive. For some of the game, you get to play as a wolf! *growl*

More news to come, probably.

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I kind of liked the design of the PS3. :/

Aha! We've found him!

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Hey everyone, I've found the person who likes the PS3 design! ;)

Actually, I don't really think the console looks that bad, apart from looking huge and breadbin-like. In fact, it might not be anywhere near as big as it looks in the pictures, where it looks kinda Xbox-sized - if it turns out to be the size of the current PStwo (the reissued small one), it'll probably be quite nice. Mainly my objection is to that utterly bizarre bananary/boomerang controller, which looks extremely uncomfortable and totally non-ergonomic.

I have issues with controllers at the best of times. I own a Donkey Konga controller that I can't use because the rubber of the drum pads makes my hands swell up and itch, and the GameCube controller that I use has been hacked to pieces, to remove all the "bad" rubber. After much experimenting with wrist supports and rest periods, I now only play games with the controller supported on my lap by a pillow - if I try to hold the controller up myself I get pain in my wrists & thumbs after only 20 minutes or so. The best controller ergonomically is the GameCube one - it's comparatively small with comparatively large buttons. The GBA SP is actually fairly lousy unless I'm lying on my back, but I just alternate how I hold it, and massage my hands every few minutes.

I will spare you my complete rant about gaming companies that don't take into account people with disabilities as ... my wrists hurt :X

Re: Aha! We've found him!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Would you be able to play with the Donkey Konga controller with a pair of thin gloves on? Like, I'm imagining something like a pair of BMX cycling gloves.

The controller does, in fact, look pretty dumb. I'm kind of holding back real judgment pending holding one myself, but the pictures didn't make me think, "Comfort," by any stretch.

All of it's kind of academic, though. We played the heck out of our PS1, so we bought a PS2 as soon as it was out (pre-ordered it, actually). However, the PS2 has gone almost untouched, barring a few anomalous stints here and there. We even loaned it out to a friend for I think around a year or so at one point and didn't miss it at all. I think part of the problem was that games and accessories seemed to be more expensive and it was less justifiable, especially in cases where we were basically replacing stuff we used to have on the PS2, so we didn't end up buying fun things like multitaps and lots of controllers. Also, buying the games themselves was difficult because we have less disposable income now. But more I think we just lost interest. We play a lot more board games now, and for games to play on my own, I'm now using an OS that does have some games for it (at the time I got the PS1, I was using BeOS). Lastly, some of our favourite games and controllers just don't work in our new place. The Taiko controller is too loud -- we get noise complaints from neighbours. We don't have room for DDR plus the people living below us would come up and murder us.

Ultimately, it adds up to something like us not being able to justify it and just sort of scraping up discount PS2 games over time as they drop in price.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the multitap idea on the PS/PS2 just sucks. I'm SO glad they've finally got their heads around the idea of letting you plug more controllers in right from the word go... something Nintendo and Sega did years ago.

We are so sad we have 2 PS2s - a European region and a Japanese region one. As most rhythm action games come out for PS2 rather than any of the other consoles, I can't imagine not having them. Ours are plumbed into Richard's rather decent hi fi separates system, so we have full stereo. I could live without a lot of the games we own (like Gitaroo Man and Space Channel 5... although I go through stages of playing them obsessively), but not playing Frequency and Amplitude would make me a very sad wolfy indeed.

As for the issue of noise from music games, there's a reason we moved into a house ;)

I dunno. At one point almost all my disposable income went on video games. It was a case of "spend £30 and have this at home to play whenever I want vs spend £30 in the arcade and have nothing to show for it afterwards" (yeah, I have spent £30 on a single game in a single session a few times in the past). Almost all my games are bought second-hand from independent retailers, and I trade in old games for new - so buying a new PS2 or GameCube game can cost me as little as £3. At the moment, I own ~20 PSone games, ~20 PS2 games, ~10 GameCube games and ~10 GBA games - but this figure is highly variable depending on what I'm playing at the moment and what I've traded in. (The interesting thing is that roughly half of my PS2 game collection is basically just in our house on long-term loan - I buy the game, play it, finish it, and trade it in for something else. Whereas my GameCube and GBA games are the ones I play for HOURS and HOURS and will never trade in even after I've finished them).

The thing I like about consoles over PC games is that if you own a PS2, your machine is capable of running any PS2 game on sale (with the exception of ones that need the hard drive, but I'll ignore that for the sake of this argument). Whereas, you buy a PC game, and you might well have to spend a few hundred pounds on a new graphics card and more memory - and then a few hours tweaking your system with the latest drivers. I can't handle that constant reading of the specs on the back of the box - and the "minimum" vs "recommended" specs idea. My PC has 256MB and is running Windows 98 - but it's still perfectly adequate for browsing teh intarweb - so why upgrade?