Game of the year?

[Mario-Demise]

Re: Game of the year?

Actually psz if you watch the entire trailer, at the end it says "2008" but the "8" is then crossed out and replaced with a "7." I believe they are aiming for a Christmas release date.

Because of mgs4 im prob gonna go out and buy a ps3 just for it.

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

I'm not worried about the trailer, I'm worried about the press release a few weeks back stating it was delayed til '08.

http://www.konami.jp/topics/2007/1031_1/index-e.html

Clearly says "Q2 2008"

If they moved it up TWO FULL QUARTERS, then that means they're cutting a LOT out.



Also, Konami has never stated MGS4 wouldn't be on 360, and have made numerous comments that they have "many things planned" for the 360 in 08/09. Add to that the fact that the XBox version of MGS2 had extra features, and that a number of "PS3 Exclusives" ended up on the 360 (Virtua Fighter, Beautiful Katamari, Fatal Inertia, Resident Evil, etc) or dual-system games cancelled for PS3 (BioShock comes imediately to mind), and I would not be shocked to see it end up as another "Delayed Exclusive" instead.

(Katamari was actually a PS2 exclusive SERIES, and Fatal Inertia was supposed to be a PS3 Launch Title + Exclusive... It ended up on the 360 something like 4 months earlier than PS3)

Anyway, my point (if you don't feel like reading all that ;->) is that I won't be shocked to see a MGS4 360 trailer at E3 this/next year. I also won't be shocked if it never happens :-P

*EDIT: MGS2 was released on Xbox, not MGS1 :-P

 

[ParagonDancer]

Re: Game of the year?

I surely hope they continue to release MGS games for the PC. I don't feel like buying ANOTHER console just to play one game, when my PC can support near anything 100%.

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

I would imagine they will... I guess... I mean, how well have they sold on PCs lately? (I really haven't paid attention V_V)

If they sell well, they will probably port it (Unless, of course, Sony paid to keep it PS3-Exclusive)

Then again, until the PS3, Sony had a "Strict Policy" of not paying for exclusive titles (Sorta... They'd just buy stock in the company instead ;->). With the terrible sales numbers the PS3 is putting out (compared to Wii60), and the fact Dubai just paid a lot of money for a little stock, maybe that will change...

 

[Nottheking]

Re: Game of the year?

After a bit more time and experience, I've cut down on what I'm thinking on as "game of the year," in rough order of predicted odds:

• Super Mario Galaxy
• BioShock
• The Orange Box
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Crysis
• Halo 3

So that gives us, uh... five shooters and Super Mario Galaxy. Though I do think that SMG seems to have somehow taken just about everyone by surprise. I will say it's a very good game. Though I have some *slight* qualms with it. Namely:

• Given the conspicuous lack of voice-overs in most parts, punctuated with a few lines here and there, makes the game feel a little cheap here.
• I know the Wii isn't meant for "hi-def graphics," and it's really something to blame the console for rather than the game, but given how SMG's graphics (specular lighting, normal-mapping, refraction shaders, bloom) clearly fit FAR more amongst the same crowd as the PS3 and Xbox 360 rather than the PS2 and Xbox, the game's lack of anti-aliasing, resulting in visibly jagged edges, gives the game what seems as a less-clean visual feel.
• Spring Mario is a real pain to control.
• Camera control could use improvement; it's technically identical to how it was in Super Mario 64, minus the fact that half of the time you want to move it around, control is disabled.
• The levels are too linear: while most of the main galaxies have 3-5 stars to find, unlike in Super Mario 64, most of the "galaxies" are not large and open, but rather a set of linear levels, that are selected by the star. I much preferred the massive, all-directional free levels of SM64, namely ones like "Cool, Cool Mountain," and "Wet & Dry World." In SMG, this flaw was most apparent to me in the "Toy Time Galaxy;" while the theme and the music (a high-fi orchestral remix of the original Mario theme) were awesome, I was disappointed to note that the only "planet" present in all plays of the level was the pixelated mario. (which is the goal of the second star)

Other than the above, the game is quite superb, and loads of fun. It gets one of Mario's main strengths down better than any game has before: the massive variety of worlds. Each Galaxy feels entirely different and unique, with its own feel, and new things to explore and visuals to drop your jaw at. In that respect, I just wish the levels were more open, and that there were more to some of the late-game galaxies, which tended to have only 1 star, like the "Splatter Matter Galaxy" (a galaxy where only what land was lit up even EXISTED) and the "Bonefin Galaxy." (a tiny ocean ball suspended in the middle of a hollow planet)

Game of the year 2007 goes to Mass Effect

You may want to take another look at that game. (also, look at part 2 when you finish the first)

At any rate, while Mass Effect *IS* good, it also has plenty enough flaws. I wouldn't consider it Game of the Year... See above.

If they sell well, they will probably port it (Unless, of course, Sony paid to keep it PS3-Exclusive)

I wonder if Sony can pay enough money to convince Kojima-san to not port it... Given that he's showing his colors as a Wii-fan, after all.

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

Yeah, he seems mildly upset about the PS3s lack of advertised performance and the price, and he's pretty high on the Wii's performance (considering the price and "lack of hardware"). He also has a looooong history of working with Microsoft Game Studios(Dreamcast days... Maybe earlier). Konami is also a main sponser for the Blue Dragon anime.


I've now beaten Mass Effect (Paragon Infiltrator/Commando. 45+ hours, since I did ALL of the side-quests). I am now playing as a Renegade Soldier (And damn can you be an asshole).

I would put it in the running for "GotY", though, as I said before, not sure it'd be THE ALL OUT WINNER. The flow is damn good, the story is quite nice, it's VERY non-linear but... Some things just seem... Not all there (I wouldn't have minded doing quests for the Turians or Salarians, for example, as opposed to "All Human, except for Story Missions")

It'll be interesting to see how the "Episodic DLCs" will work between now and Mass Effect 2.

 

[Nottheking]

Re: Game of the year?

Yeah, he seems mildly upset about the PS3s lack of advertised performance and the price, and he's pretty high on the Wii's performance (considering the price and "lack of hardware").

I'm a bit surprised by the Wii, with Super Mario Galaxy. Given how I noticed the stark lack of pretty much any sort of pixel-shader scripting in previous Wii games, (the Game cube lacked hardware for pixel shaders) and how suddenly they're heavily used in Super Mario Galaxy, I think that perhaps Nintendo may have been holding off from people the true capabilities of the Wii. Certainly, they don't come close to matching the Xbox 360 or PS3, but it's definitely much more than an Xbox or 2 Game Cubes put together.

That CPU has to be pretty good to handle all the physics Nintendo's thrown at it silently... the bowling in Wii Sports, for instance: the last "practice" lane has 91 bowling pins, yet the game doens't drop at all below 60fps when they're all sent flying. Likewise, that physics in Super Mario Galaxy are put to pretty creative use: I hit a couple of points where I'm pretty sure I was in orbit of one of the small planetoids. And then of course there are all the borders where gravity abruptly changes...

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

I've always said that the people who claimed the hardware was "only on par with the original XBox" were way off base.

Here's my logic:

The Original XBox was a Celeron3 733Mhz CPU, 64MB shared ram, a GeForce 3/4, DVD, NIC, 8gb Hard Drive, and retailed 6 years ago at $300 (ended up at $150).


So, assume that the Wii, at $100 more than the END LIFE price, has been upgraded by that amount...

1) The PowerPC 729Mhz CPU is, hands-down, considerably more powerful than the 733Mhz Celeron (but still inexpensive compared to "modern" CPUs).

2) 88MiB GDDR3 shared ram (split into Internal and External). More Ram. Faster Ram. Cheap.

3) Now here's where it gets sticky: People claim that the Wii GPU is just the GC GPU with a better clock. This is *OBVIOUSLY* not the case. I'd say it ranks similar to the Xbox's GPU when it first came out: Lower end of the MODERN cards. Since it's ATI, assume similar specs to the X1x00 series. OBVIOUSLY an improvement of the GC and the XBox (more pipelines, shaders, etc). This may also be off. It may be a non-HD version of an HD 2x00 series. Doubtful, though, due to the costs.

All-in-all, people don't give the Wii the credit it deserves in terms of performance.

Also: The XBox360 and Wii both use IBM PowerPCs based on the same "generation". The 360 has the higher-end chip, but you can expect the CPUs to have at least SOME similarities, in terms of commands and operations.

EDIT: Had the Wii CPU at 724, fixed it to be 729

 

[Nottheking]

Re: Game of the year?

The Original XBox was a Celeron3 733Mhz CPU, 64MB shared ram, a GeForce 3/4, DVD, NIC, 8gb Hard Drive, and retailed 6 years ago at $300 (ended up at $150).

Technically, the Xbox's GPU, the NV 2X, was a GeForce 3, not a 4; it only supported Shader Model 1.1, as did the GeForce 3, while the 4 Ti supported up to 1.3. (the last model that was in Direct3D 8.0) Though it was upgraded to have two Transform & Lighting units, the same number as the GeForce 4 Ti. Just as a clarification.

1) The PowerPC 729Mhz CPU is, hands-down, considerably more powerful than the 733Mhz Celeron (but still inexpensive compared to "modern" CPUs).

I think that this is what Nintendo was aiming for: a very high performance-to-cost ratio. It's been demonstrated time and again that a top-end CPU isn't necessary for high-performance gaming.

2) 88MiB GDDR3 shared ram (split into Internal and External). More Ram. Faster Ram. Cheap.

That figure is incorrect; it's 64MB, as memoruy chips only come in sizes equal to powers of 2. The other 24MB is actually eDRAM mounted inside the "Hollywood" GPU package itself, as the "Napa" daughter die, similar to the Xbox 360's GPU, only the Wii's GPU can use that memory for general-purpose VRAM, rather than just as a tile-rendering backend.

As for the 64MB of GDDR3, this can be pretty easily confirmed: a quick glance at the Wii's inner guts shows a single memory chip, with about the exact same markings as those found in the PS3 and Xbox 360. In other words, it's a 512-megabit module of GDDR3, a 90nm fabricated part with up to 1.4 nanosecond timing. (allowing a speed of 700MHz, or technically an effective "DDR" rate of 1400MHz)

3) Now here's where it gets sticky: People claim that the Wii GPU is just the GC GPU with a better clock. This is *OBVIOUSLY* not the case. I'd say it ranks similar to the Xbox's GPU when it first came out: Lower end of the MODERN cards. Since it's ATI, assume similar specs to the X1x00 series. OBVIOUSLY an improvement of the GC and the XBox (more pipelines, shaders, etc). This may also be off. It may be a non-HD version of an HD 2x00 series. Doubtful, though, due to the costs.

Well, you can compare it to ATi/AMD's other GPUs at the time, namely others made on a 90nm process. Going on die-space alone, it's clear that it's not the same GPU, and would need to have around 120-175% more transistors in order to take up so much silicon.

Obviously, I'd say more hardware was added: it's worth noting that the Game Cube's GPU did not actually support pixel shader hardware; it just had hardware T&L. (which only it, the Xbox, and the Nintendo64 had up to that point)

As far as the "HD" bit, I'd remind everyone that it's just a buzzword; the GPU itself cannot dictate the maximum resolution; that is purely determined by the maximum framebuffer size. (which in the Wii, is apparently around 1MB, or large enough for anything up to 480p widescreen) I doubt it has any connection to the Radeon HD 2x00 series: those are much newer parts.

Rather, I'd judge that, like the Xenos in the Xbox 360, it was based off of the R5xx architecture. Amongst the 90nm chips in that lineup, the Wii's MEASURABLE specifications seem to be similar (in both size and TDP range) to the RV530, the chip used in the Radeon X1600 series of cards; that comes with the equivalent of 4 pixel pipelines (both 4 render output units and 4 texturing units, the same numbers as in the Game Cube) as well as 32 shader ALUs (stream processors) organized into 16 pixel shader units. And the chip would likely, in order to have a Thermal Design Power (TDP) envelope of around 10 watts, would likely have to run at over 300MHz; the RV530 in the Radeon 1600pro runs at 500MHz, and the GPU itself consumes perhaps 15-20 watts.

Also: The XBox360 and Wii both use IBM PowerPCs based on the same "generation". The 360 has the higher-end chip, but you can expect the CPUs to have at least SOME similarities, in terms of commands and operations.

EDIT: Had the Wii CPU at 724, fixed it to be 729

Actually, I'd say both figures are wrong: there is no official listing of the CPU's clock speed, and the *ONLY* source out there is IGN, which is fishy to say the least.

My estimate, to be honest, comparing it to PowerPC GPUs, is that it probably runs more in the 1.2-1.5GHz range, given that even given it's small size, and efficient 90nm Silicon-on-Insulator fabrication design, it still consumes a whole 7 watts or so.

As far as performance comparisons go, it could be presumed that the Wii's CPU is an extension of the architecture used for the Game Cubes; it can't be more than twice as complex given its size, (my estiamte is more like 60-75% more transistors) which means that it would have to effectively be running using mostly the same design specs, which provided a rather strong performance-to-clock rate ratio.

By comparison, the Xbox 360's "Xenon" CPU has particularly a low P:CR ratio; comments from the likes of John Carmack place it as being half as efficient, per clock cycle, as a Pentium 4, (per core) which in turn was about 60% as efficient as a Pentium III (from whose design the Xbox's CPU was taken from) per core. So each core would equate to a Pentium III at 960MHz or so; more potent than the P3-based celeron in the Xbox, but not by a WHOLE lot, and if at all, not too much beyond the GameCube's "Gecko" at 485MHz. (which, due to efficient instructions, a much larger cache, and a FAR shorter pipeline, achieved vastly better per-clock performance than the Xbox's Celeron)

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

Note: I said 88MiB not 88MB. There *IS* a difference ;->

 

[malcav]

Re: Game of the year?

HALO! HALO! HALO!

Try connecting 2 360s...

HALO! HALO! HALO!

 

[Nottheking]

Re: Game of the year?

Note: I said 88MiB not 88MB. There *IS* a difference ;->

Only if you're a metric-sympathizer, and thus have no respect for precedent.

The original definition of those terms, as named in the mid-20th century, recorded a Kilobyte as 1,024 bytes, a Megabyte as 1,024 Kilobytes, and so forth.

It was metric-people who got upset and decided to coin the terms "Kibi-" and "Mebi-" and so on and RETRO-ACTIVELY change the terms. (that, and also to make hard drive advertisers retro-actively correct)

Personally, I think it's rediculous: a base-10 system is wholly unnatural, and is only liked because humans happen to have 10 fingers. The laws of physics really don't cleanly divide into powers of 10, and computers certainly don't use anything but powers of 2; the next thing we know, the metric lobby will want computers to switch to using 10-state "decisistors" or whatnot. >_>

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

Tonight is the SpikeTV Video Game Awards.

So, let's predict the following:

Most Addictive Game Fueled by Dew (WTF?)
Game of the Year
Best Shooter
Best Action game
Best Rhythm Game
Best RPG
Best Driving Game
Best Military Game
Studio of the Year
Best Graphics
Breakthrough Technology
Best PS3 Game
Best Wii Game
Best XBOX 360 Game
Best PC Game
Best Individual Sports Game
Best Team Sports Game
Best Handheld Game
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show
Best Soundtrack
Best Original Score
Best Multiplayer Game
Best Mobile Game

The "Dew" one is just "Most Addictive Game"... Damn sponserships. The nominees are located on vga.spiketv.com

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

Most Addictive Game Fueled by Dew - Wii Sports
Game of the Year - I think the "obvious" answer will be Halo 3. Shame.
Best Shooter - Call Of Duty 4
Best Action game - Hmm... Assasin's Creed or SMG..... Damn.... SMG!
Best Rhythm Game - Rock Band
Best RPG - No Blue Dragon? Bastids.... Mass Effect or Eternal Sonata... Mass Effect (Seems to be pushed more)
Best Driving Game - Forza 2
Best Military Game - Call Of Duty 4
Studio of the Year - 2K
Best Graphics - Call Of Duty 4 (BioShock and Mass Effect are good, but...)
Breakthrough Technology - Rock Band
Best PS3 Game - Uncharted
Best Wii Game - Didn't Zelda come out LAST year??? Oh well. SMG!
Best XBOX 360 Game - Halo 3
Best PC Game - BioShock
Best Individual Sports Game - Skate
Best Team Sports Game - Madden 08
Best Handheld Game - Zelda
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show - Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja
Best Soundtrack - BioShock (Sorry, but all the dated music and original stuff just fits SO WELL)
Best Original Score - BioShock
Best Multiplayer Game - Halo 3 (just from number of players daily)

Just my guesses, based on the nominees they posted on vga.spiketv.com

 

[Nottheking]

Re: Game of the year?

A shame that Rock Band has such a RIDICULOUSLY unoriginal and cheesy name... Guitar Hero and Frets on Fire were at least bearable.

 

[psz]

Re: Game of the year?

Eh, I long ago stopped judging games by their names... If 99.9% of the creativity is in the game, and then they throw darts to pick a name.... That works ;->

(I do agree, though... Kinda.. Plain name)

 

[EKiN]

Re: Game of the year?

Call of Duty 4 (PC) is my game of the year.

I beat SMG (just 61 stars tho) , love the innovation w/ the gravity and controls, but COD4 had the most impact on me. It is basically a simulation with the most EPIC action sequences I've ever seen (Death from above--> wow) and arguably the best Intro / Credits scene ever *Chills*. Both games are must haves.

 

[Nottheking]

Re: Game of the year?

arguably the best Intro / Credits scene ever *Chills*. Both games are must haves.

I'll admit to not having seen those cutscenes yet. How are they, and how'd they compare to those of, say, Diablo II or Descent Freespace: The Great War?

 

[Drittz]

Re: Game of the year?

well im proud 2 announce my cousin was one who worked on bioshock, that said COD 4 wins hands down, its blown halo 3 off the sales shelf its smahsed pc sales and its completely fantastic even tho my pc isnt capable of running it (i played on a mates pc) the only thing holidng it back is the need for a computer straight from NASA lol

 

[Zyro]

Re: Game of the year?

I watched the Video Game Awards today. Here's the results:

Game of the Year
BioShock
Best Shooter
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Best Action Game
Super Mario Galaxy
Best Rhythm Game
Rock Band
Best RPG
Mass Effect
Best Driving Game
Colin McRae: DiRT
Best Military Game
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Studio of the Year
Harmonix
Best Graphics
Crysis
Breakthrough Technology
Portal
Best PS3 Game
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Best Wii Game
Super Mario Galaxy
Best Xbox 360 Game
BioShock
Best PC Game
The Orange Box
Best Individual Sports Game
Skate
Best Team Sports Game
Madden NFL 08
Best Handheld Game
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show
The Simpsons Game
Best Soundtrack
Rock Band
Best Original Score
BioShock
Best Multiplayer Game
Halo 3
Most Addictive Game Fueled by Dew
Halo 3

That's the results. I'm sad that Persona 3 didn't take home "Best RPG" but I guess Mass Effect was more popular, shame. I'm sad that Halo 3 took home anything, but I'm so happy it lost Game of the Year to BioShock. Anyway, that's the results.