Fighter games will never overrated, let me just put it that way. No matter how many generation of Tekkens or Virtua Fighters come out in the next 10 years, it will always be meaner, better and stronger in all sense of the word. PS3’s Virtua Fighter 5, (yes 5!) is out and has great reviews as well as ratings. My favorite game site, Gamespot, rated it to be 8.1. Hey, this site is rarely that generous with their ratings so with an 8.1, it’s definitely worth the play.

Virtua Fighter 5’s fighting is virtually top notch. And that is what fighting games are suppose to do best – fight. With great graphics and 14 year storyline, it’s hard to resist. I am quite tempted to poke fun at how plain and amateurish the first Virtua Fighter looked but I won’t. But do look at this :P

Virtua Fighter 5 is a great-looking game from top to bottom. The characters look great and animate well, with the lone exception of their mouths, and teeth, which just look a little off when characters speak at the end of a fight. There are plenty of different backgrounds in the game, and they all look great while also figuring into the fights. Some of them are walled off, giving you a surface to juggle fighters up against, while others are open, letting you win by pushing your opponent out of the ring if you can. The game runs at 720p on the PlayStation 3, which gives you a nice, high definition to work with, though some of the characters and stages can look a little pixelated in spots.

Overall, I think the game looks pretty good. I am a sucker for great graphics with corny melo-dramatic storylines in these games.

Well, I’ve you a trailer of Virtua Fighter 5 to see:

Source: Gamespot; Wikipedia

OMG can I finally afford PS3!?!?!

Sony Execs are telling AP that they are evaluating the price of the PS3 with a possible price reduction in the future! And the reason why for the price cut? Well, they seem to think that it’s because their sales haven’t met their expectations – so the solution? Sell it cheaper so more of the mass can afford it. Duh! Why didn’t they think of it earlier?? I would have gotten it.

This week, Sony announced that profits had fallen some 5.3 percent over last year in the company as a whole, with the games division suffering third-quarter losses of 54.2 billion yen (approx $455 million). Some had predicted that the company would suffer even greater losses. In a survey conducted by Bloomberg of five industry analysts, the median estimate was that the company would report a 50 percent loss.

Apparently, Sony has already cut the price of PS3 in Japan; from taking the 20GB version to 49,980 yen ($429), 10,000 yen ($85) less than previously slated. The move, however, backfired as some analyst slammed the price cut. I don’t know what’s there to bitch about…some poeple are so hard to please. Anyway, the company’s share took a little stumble after in Japan. Ouch.

OK, now this is even weirder. In my last post, I said that 46% of people surveyed by Famitsu were not happy with the upcoming release of Dragon Quest IX. But the same magazine published a survey of what people thought would be the top 10 hit gaming products in 2007 and that very game made #2.

What a fickle bunch, those Japanese gamers.

The rest of the list:

#1 Wii — 412 votes
#2 Dragon Quest IX: Defenders of the Starry Sky — 122 votes
#3 Nintendo DS — 107 votes
#4 PLAYSTATION 3 — 56 votes
#5 Impossible To Tell — 50 votes
#6 Xbox 360 — 28 votes
#7 Final Fantasy XIII — 28 votes
#8 Metal Gear Solid 4 — 22 votes
#9 Blue Dragon — 16 votes
#10 Monster Hunter Portable 2nd — 15 votes

Looks like Nintendo is going to be coining money this year.

Link:
Kotaku

A week ago Muken and I went to the Tokyo Game Show 2006. Games are sometimes somewhat interesting but don’t usually look too nice in photos, and the only interesting stuff in my humble non-hardcore-gamer-otaku opinion was the Sony pavillion, but they put signs everywhere to forbid pictures to be shot.

So, I went with the crowd, and shot the booth girls instead…

See all 70 girls in this photoset.

(More after the jump…)

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not exactly Japan-only, but since Sony is a Japanese company and gaming’s home is here in Japan, I thought I’d better post this.

At E306 in Anaheim, Sony announced the launch details of their next generation gaming console, Playstation 3. It will have a nearly synchronous worldwide release in November and will come in two flavours: one with an inbuilt 20GB hard disk and another with an inbuilt 60GB hard disk.The 20GB release will retail for US$499 – a half-price Blu-Ray player, it seems. The 60GB variant will retail at US$699. Steep. Quite steep. Especially since I think in Australian conversaion-and-markup rates which means my PS3 will cost me AUD$849.95…for that money I could buy an awesome video card for my PC.

The controller for the PS3 has also been changed. Last year’s banana/boomerang design was scrapped and the new controller looks exactly like the old one, but now the cable connecting it is USB and it also has functions similar to Nintendo Wii’s remote shaped controller – that it, tilt motion detection. On the downside is the fact that the vibrate function available in old DualShock controllers will not be available in this new “DualShake”.
Other features of the console include Bluetooth, the Blu-Ray optical drive, a Compact Flash/SD/Memory Stick slot (in the premium model), 802.11g wireless (in the premium model) and HDMI output (in the premium model). There’s a lot of extras for forking out about $100 more.

The launch details have sparked criticism of Sony stealing Nintendo’s ideas but I’m not entirely convinced those allegations are fair. The idea of having motion sensors in controller devices has been around for a while. And apparently Microsoft and Logitech came up with a similar device a few years ago, in which case, Nintendo is the thief.

But theiving or not…the patents system has been put in place for problems like that and I don’t think Sony has breached Nintendo’s patents as the systems are a only similar, not exact. Then again, Sony has been to court before over patent breaches so I might have to eat those words one day.

What I’m trying to say is that Sony may not have had the innovation to come up with a concept like a motion-detecting controller, but they were at least smart enough to realise that the idea could make their product even better. So adopting it, even in the seemingly under-developed fashion that they have, has added some value to their console.

And while it is disappointing that Sony could not keep the vibrate function from the DualShock controller (while the Wiimote will have it), I’m not going to miss those vibrations too much. That was the gimmick, if you ask me. “But while you were driving your car in Gran Turismo, you could feel the controller vibrate!” you say? So? It wasn’t very realistic. For something like a car racing game, I’d like a very low, smooth rumble, growing and fading as the engine does, not just going in bursts like the controller did. I get better vibration control out of my sex toys.

Anyway, basically, I am looking forward to PS3 even if only for the HD onset that it will bring. All of the major gaming sites are writing about this more in-depth than I am – go check them out.

Links:
Kotaku
Engadget

1up.com, crediting Dengeki Online as their source, has posted an extensive list of the planned titles for Sony’s upcoming PS3 console. Check it out here!

Engadget has posted a news about Sony losing money on the sale of the PS3. So far, nothing surprising, as the first 2 years of a game console are usually in the red, and money starts to kick in from games royalties overcoming the development costs on the 3rd and 4th year.

Merrill Lynch Japan Securities has calculated the cost structure of putting a Sony PlayStation 3 on the shelf, and they’re expecting Sony lose $94 per unit selling each at an estimated $399 at launch. (…) They go on to predict a net loss for Sony of $1.18 billion the first year—way, way more than the $458 million they lost the first year on the PS2.

Put into perspective of another article that they had few weeks back, everything makes more sense now I suppose.

The PlayStation 3 won’t be coming with an internal hard drive, because “no matter how much [capacity] we put in it, it won’t be enough.” Glossing over for the moment the curious logic of imagining zero capacity is somehow better than “not enough,” we move on to the news that there will likely be at least several add-on HDD options available, both locally in a 2.5-inch drive bay and in the form of some sort of network drive.

So, if I understand well, Sony will sell very expensive devices cheap and lose money on every single one, while selling cheap optional-yet-mandatory hard drive on the side with a fat margin. Also, because the HDD are “accessorized”, it allows them to sell upgrades when games become fatter, and cashing in on existing users, later on in the life of the same device.

All that seem very smart, getting money later while starting low, so that consumers buy their PS3 without being frightened by a cost too high, right? Well, the PS3 will most probably not be that cheap to start with anyway ($399)… When asked about the high launch price of the console, Ken Kutaragi (the “father” of the PlayStation) answered: “Our ideal is for consumers to think to themselves, ‘OK, I’ll work more hours and buy it.’ We want people to feel that they want it, no matter what.” Sony Style…

1UP.com has this cool feature on videogames emulators by Nich Maragos, titled “Afterlife“, which is an interesting read if you’re into video games.

What looks like a game system, plays like a game system, and yet isn’t a game system? The answer is an emulator, which is a means to make one piece of consumer electronics behave like another. Whether they’re hardware add-ons or clever pieces of coding, emulators have been a part of videogames almost as long as the medium itself — but they’re decidedly the black sheep of the gaming family, for a variety of legal and ethical reasons. (More…)

(Always via Waxy)

Sock Master has published a game console controller family tree (in other words, a visual history of console joysticks and gamepads) with family relations, pictures, and comments.
If you remember your first Atari or if your first console was a PS2, anyway you should go get inspired…

Via Waxy

That the PS3 would use a PowerPC-based Cell processor was already well known, but Sony yesterday revealed the chip would be clocked at 3.2GHz – matching Xbox 360’s PowerPC-based three-core chip – enough to yield 2.18 teraflops, the company claimed – twice what Xbox 360 will be able to pump out, apparently. There’s 512KB of on-die L2 cache, and seven AltiVec vector processing units.

More here.