Re: Kirby's Epic Yarn Australian release confirmed (2 years ago)

Why does it take Nintendo so long to release everything, anyway? Very few other companies have issues releasing into the PAL market on time.

Re: Rock Band 3 Review (2 years ago)

I haven't noticed any slowdown at all on the 360 version.

Additionally, as far as price goes - import the Keyboard from the US. Amazon ship internationally. I paid about $105 AUD for it, couriered.

Re: Valkyria Chronicles 2 Review (2 years ago)

I thought about that, but unfortunately I don't have the cables and even if I did, with my PS2 and Wii hooked up I have no spare component inputs

Re: Valkyria Chronicles 2 Review (2 years ago)

I'm still disappointed that the franchise has gone to PSP, not necessarily because it's a huge downgrade, but because I enjoy strategy games more when I can play them on my TV and not hunched over a tiny screen. Can't help thinking maybe if they had gone through with their original plans and made the game multiplatform it might have performed better. But this is Sega, and any long-time Sega fan knows that they have to maintain the balance and offset their good decisions with terrible ones.

I really only have two main issues with VC2. Firstly the game still rewards speed over strategy - you have a certain number of turns to get S (A in English) rank, and you really want to get as high a rank as possible because the rewards scale up. Personally I find this annoying, because I prefer to take my time in strategy games and the way to get top rank in a lot of cases is to do things that are strategically very risky.

The other main issue is the plot. VC didn't have a fantastic plot, but it was fairly serviceable with interesting characters and so on, plus the plot was the driving force. In trying to appeal to the Monster Hunter demographic in Japan I feel like they've lost a lot of this. Apparently they've realised the problem though, Valkyria Chronicles 3 looks to be a lot more strongly plot-oriented.

Re: Atlus announces a new game (2 years ago)

Atlus is fairly likely to take a punt with it and give it a US outing, and if they do then the PS3 version should be importable (unlikely it'll get released here).

Re: Prepare yourself for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon (2 years ago)

I never thought I'd see the day that Ace Combat turned into an on-rails shooter, but that's what this looks like. What a shame.

Re: Nier Review (3 years ago)

The whole regional differences thing with this game absolutely baffles me. Why not just offer players a choice rather than unilaterally deciding that english-speaking gamers want to be ugly old men?

Re: EveryonePlays: Games that caused controversy (3 years ago)

I still don't know how any censorship board could rate Dead Space anything less than 18+.

Re: EveryonePlays: Games Refused Classification in Australia (3 years ago)

How does the 'sexual activity as incentive or reward' issue not result in Bioware games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age? They have achievements attached to them and everything. Is it just that they're not explicit?

What about the sex minigames in God of War?

I've never understood why Getting Up got banned for vandalism, but both Jet Set Radio and Jet Set Radio Future were only given PG ratings in Australia - they had graffiti as a major gameplay mechanic.

I know that our ratings board is incredibly inconsistent, but they should at least get given some more concrete guidelines and/or actually enforce their rules properly.


I can think of other games that have been refused classification that aren't listed. Soldier of Fortune 3 (postmortem dismemberment), Dark Sector (postmortem dismemberment, decapitations), BMX XXX (gratuitous nudity), Silent Hill: Homecoming (inappropriate use of drills)... Just about every mass-market game to have been refused classification in the last 5-10 years, not counting stupid sex games etc, has been banned for things which have sailed under the radar in other games. There's a heck of a lot of games with dismemberment in them. Decapitation is possible in most of them. I can think of several games where topless women were thrown in for the sake of it - God of War topping the list. Heck, even the drill issue: The Darkness has a similar scene.

Re: Rock Band 3 announced (3 years ago)

The stock fuckups with the Beatles instrument packs was a fairly bad sign too. The way EA have handled Rock Band in Australia makes me think they almost wanted to cede the music game market to Activision by default.

Re: Just how successful are petitions? (3 years ago)

Since NASA was mentioned, it's probably worth also mentioning that the Space Shuttle Enterprise (the first working prototype, which is now in the Smithsonian) was originally going to be named Constitution, but was renamed Enterprise after a large petition campaign by Star Trek fans.

Re: 55,000 Submissions made on video game ratings (3 years ago)

Call me cynical if you want, but that petition looks a heck of a lot like GAME are bandwagoning as a publicity stunt for their stores.

Re: Final Fantasy XIII Limited Collector's Edition (3 years ago)

$120 RRP?! Just as well the PS3 version is region free then - the US release will be $60 as usual.

Re: R18 discussion paper released (3 years ago)

I think any submissions will be shrugged off by him as being by a 'small minority' because he knows he is right and no one will sway him from his preconceptions and prejudices.

That said, one hopes that if there's a clear sentiment across the community that the change needs to happen, he'd back down. Then again, when someone spends over two decades in office, I suspect they begin to take their power for granted and forget that their purpose is to represent not just their electorate, but when placed into a higher level of power, the wishes of their state and their country.

Unfortunately I can't see that happening based off his constant rhetoric. I suspect that he's actually playing this angle up to try and be seen as supporting 'family values'. Basically another 'think of the children' appeal. If he backflipped from here he'd probably be worried about how the change could be painted by political opponents. Trouble is, his current position is fairly tenuous and any half-decent opponent could turn his arguments back onto themselves, if only the media cared enough to actually report on it.

Honestly I hope he continues to push the line he does. We need to always respond with fact, pointing out that his well-intentioned stance is actually potentially harming the people he is trying to protect while inconveniencing the rest of the country's adults' ability to choose the media they consume. "Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake."

Re: Good Game co-host Junglist sacked (3 years ago)

I don't see why they couldn't have simply added a third major presenter, rather than having to drop one of them. Lots of enthusiast shows work quite well with three presenters.

Re: Valve resubmit Left 4 Dead 2 to OFLC (3 years ago)

Interestingly enough, we actually don't know this for sure. Something that always gets lost in the rhetoric around the issue is that only one of the State Attorney Generals (Victoria's) has openly stated support for an R18+ rating for games. The rest of them haven't categorically come down on one side or the other.

Re: Australian sales charts, week ending 13/09/09 (3 years ago)

It won't be in the top 10 for very long if there's no copies left to sell...

Re: WarTech: Senko No Ronde Review (3 years ago)

It should never have been a full-priced retail 360 release. XBLA was the appropriate platform for it.

Re: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World Preview (3 years ago)

Namco hates the PAL territory. Missing out on their good RPGs and only getting the mediocre or crappy ones is their usual game. I'm still surprised we even got Tales of Vesperia.

Additionally you've got to question why it has taken so long for this to release here. Japanese release was June 26, 2008. US release was November 11 2008. PAL release is November 13 2009. A year and a half has to be one of the longest waits for a PAL release of a JRPG ever.

Thing is, the game's pretty heavily flawed. Symphonia for all its popularity is certainly one of the better Tales games, but both Abyss and Vesperia are far better. This sequel ends up focusing too much on their silly monsters-in-the-party mechanism and not enough on building their actual characters. The difficulty is very inconsistent and spiky, and the leveling feels like it hasn't been tuned properly. Tales games are usually designed such that if you don't actively avoid battles, you will generally never be underleveled or overleveled for a given area, without any real need to deliberately grind extra levels. In Dawn of the New World I've been feeling significantly underleveled for quite a while.

Also there's the fact that the main character is irritatingly weak and pathetic. I'm assuming that at some point in the game he'll man up and grow a pair. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Something not mentioned here is that all the skits in the game are voiced. It's not a half-assed localisation like Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss, they've actually dubbed all the dialogue that was in the Japanese edition for once.

The PAL version will have some minor extras but not anything to get wildly excited over, it's nothing like the enhancements being made to the PS3 edition of Tales of Vesperia.

Re: Further guests announced for A Night in Fantasia 2009 (3 years ago)

My understanding is that the whole logistics of moving a whole symphony orchestra around the country with their instruments, finding a decent venue and actually putting on the show make it prohibitively expensive without charging astronomical prices for the tickets, which is why they've only really done shows in Sydney (where they're based) and periodically Melbourne where there's a large enough population etc that they can basically guarantee they'll sell all the tickets.

Sucks though, wish it wasn't just Sydney too.

Re: PS3 backwards compatibility gone for good (3 years ago)

The PS3:360 sales gap has been getting smaller, yes, but not anywhere near as fast as you're making out. Sony are counting on the system having a really long tail like the PS2 to catch up. Microsoft beat them to market and built a very considerable lead quite quickly, and in the US has continued to outsell them just about every month. That lead isn't going away.

But that's neither here nor there. My point was that PS2 sales have dropped off significantly. Rather than a clear upgrade path for their existing customers, by removing BC Sony allow MS a foot in the door, so to speak. There's nothing to be gained for a PS2 user to go to a PS3, aside from a small handful of exclusives. They know the PS2 will dry up, and they want those sales to become PS3 sales, but they're not approaching that in a productive manner.


Not just for that, the system had other sellers. Gears of War for example convinced a lot of people to jump in. However the numbers speak for themselves - the most played game on Xbox Live on X360 for a substantial amount of time, aside from occasional weekly blips when new releases came out, was Halo 2. So the proposition given to early adopters was pretty clear: new, more powerful system, better integrated with Live, some great looking games in the pipeline, and it was guaranteed to play Halo 2 and make it look *better* than on the old system.

It's never at the top of anyone's list, which has been the point that I and several others have made. It's a nice extra that makes the purchase an *upgrade* for users of the old platform. Companies don't just release a product and then not entice people to buy it. Doesn't matter how good the system is, if you don't convince people to buy it it won't sell. Dreamcast is a good example. Backwards compatibility is a major selling point, because if your old library becomes useless you're not replacing your old console, you're buying a whole new one and have to either keep your old system or ditch your old games for good.

Gamecube and Wii both use PowerPC processors. Wii's is a more modern chip and clocked higher, but it's the same bog-standard PPC instruction set.

The graphics chip in the Wii is an ATi chip. The Gamecube's was an ArtX chip - ArtX were aquired by ATi not long after they designed that chip, and it became the building block for a lot of ATi's subsequent cards. I've never actually coded for the two, but I would imagine they would be fairly similar and very compatible.

It's true that there's an emulation layer over it, but when you can push the bulk of your instructions to processors which are completely compatible with what you're emulating, backwards compatibility is not a difficult prospect. Unlike with PS3 or 360, where the hardware is completely different.

Unfortunately the PS2 has created a precedent in the mind of the consumer, at least on Sony's part. A good chunk of PS2 users were PS1 users, and took the backwards compatibility for granted. It always seemed like a natural thing, really. Calling it a Playstation '2' suggested that it was an upgraded Playstation, and the fact that it played practically all existing PS1 software reinforced that and created the expectation that the same would be true of PS3. The fact that their two competitors, when producing a successor to their existing systems made sure to add some level of BC should underline that it's become an expectation.

I do agree that putting backwards compatibility into the PS3 then yanking it out was a terrible move, though. If it had never been there in the first place there'd probably be a lot less angry whining about the lack of it. I don't agree that it was a mistake to put it in in the first place, however. It was a mistake to suddenly remove it. The only 'mistake' in putting it in was that Sony underestimated the costs to build the whole system and overestimated demand and how much people were willing to pay for the system. I suspect they also expected blu-ray to ramp up much faster than it has, which will have had the knock-on effect of keeping BR components expensive. In other words, Sony got complacent and arrogant. The rhetoric in the original post here is just more of the same from them.

I think the most likely thing Sony are up to has already been speculated. Emulation-based backwards compatibility for select titles that you're expected to re-purchase from them at exorbitant rates over PSN. It's the sort of thing that publishers would love too - I can just imagine Bobby Kotick from Activision salivating over the prospect of charging his customers again rather than having them buy the game second hand for a quarter of the price.

Re: PS3 backwards compatibility gone for good (3 years ago)

Why buy a PS2 if you could buy a more expensive PS3 and still play all your PS2 and any new PS3 games that are released? Well, possibly because until now Sony weren't making as much of a margin on the PS3. But the bulk of their profits have always come from software royalties, not hardware. Contrary to how they behave sometimes, Sony *want* more people buying PS3s than PS2s. PS2 sales are falling off but PS3 sales aren't increasing.

The reason that the 360 has backwards compatibility is that Microsoft knew they wouldn't have Halo 3 until later on in the console's life cycle, but they had to convince early adopters to buy into their technology or they'd have been sunk. Additionally there's the fact that they actually listened to their users and implemented a feature which in the previous generation had been considered one of the best things about the PS2, and one of the reasons that early on it was so successful despite an incredibly bad lineup of games on launch.

Wii is backwards compatible because it's the exact same hardware and Nintendo were able to do it for practically zero extra effort. Again I'm fairly sure that the main reason they did it was because the PS2 basically made it a standard feature. No one would launch a new iteration of a console nowadays without some form of backwards compatiblity - even Sony didn't.

Or you could just get a cheap PS2 and have it modded. If you want to really be extravagant (and potentially break the letter of the law) you could even pick up the Tales of the Abyss undub, which pulls out the mediocre English dub and replaces it with the original Japanese - a whole lot more of the game was voiced in the Japanese version.

Adding Linux capability was to try to get the PS3 classed as a computer in Europe. Computers have a lower tax bracket than games consoles. They tried it with the PS2 as well but were turned down because the base console couldn't run a PC operating system without additional parts. Besides, it stopped the hackers who like to try and exploit consoles for the sake of getting Linux on there from being as interested.

It's an extra power socket, extra space, and extra input used up on my TV. It's also about future security - Personally I own about ten PS3 games but close to 60 PS2, I want to make sure I can still play the games I've purchased when you can't buy a replacement PS2 any more. They were solid hardware but they do crap out after a while. I don't want to just play PS2 games, I want to play both.

Additionally the Backwards Compatible PS3s had a really nice upscaling system in them which meant that PS2 games played on PS3 looked far better than anything your PS2 could put out, especially on an HDTV.

But the main reason people whine about it is that it was a feature which was randomly and suddenly taken away without warning. And generally before a lot of people had had the cash or interest to buy the system.

Re: PS3 backwards compatibility gone for good (3 years ago)

It's an incredibly obvious comment to make that really doesn't do justice to the argument whatsoever.

Even if the PS3 was backwards compatible, I wouldn't buy one to play PS2 games on it if I already owned a bunch, unless for some reason I no longer had a working PS2. You buy them for the new games, not for the old ones. That's the primary reason.

Backwards compatibility isn't just a bonus, though. Backwards compatibility means there's an upgrade path. It means that the PS3 is a step up from the PS2 - it could play PS1, PS2 <i>and</i> PS3 games.

By taking that away, they make PS3 essentially a closed unit. It's not an upgrade or even a cross-grade, it's a completely separate platform. The problem with that is that they have a competitor which has a larger library, has most of the games they have, and their competitor's product is far cheaper.

Honestly, Sony shot themselves in the foot by taking the capability away and that they've managed to convince themselves that it was a good idea in any way aside from the financial bottom line shows that the reality distortion field that their execs seemed to all be affected by during the first 18 months or so of the system's life is still alive and well.

Re: Special guests attending A Night in Fantasia 2009 (3 years ago)

No Melbourne concert. Not quite dedicated enough to travel all the way to Sydney for this.

Re: Updated Australian Release List - 11/07/09 (3 years ago)

Klonoa on Wii is also still popping up on these listings but it's been out for a while.

Re: New Tales of Vesperia PS3 trailer (3 years ago)

PS3 games are unregioned, so we can play it a few days after it gets a US release.

Assuming it does get a US release. It wouldn't be the first expanded edition of a popular Tales game that english-speaking audiences have been deemed unworthy to receive - they also never released the similarly expanded PS2 port of Tales of Symphonia outside Japan.

Re: Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Na (3 years ago)

It's a fair bet that the bulk of the audience for this are not newbies and instead are fans of the original point-and-click games...

... or maybe not.

Re: Tales of Vesperia Review (3 years ago)

Tales games are always conventional, but I don't see how that's always a bad thing. When you get a game by the core Tales studio, you always know exactly what you're going to get. They're solid, very fun to play, and while they generally have reasonably conventional plots, what truly makes them shine is the characters. It's a great shame that Tales of the Abyss never got a PAL release as I think it was slightly stronger in this aspect than Vesperia, though Vesperia is a slightly better game overall.

I also disagree that Tales of Symphonia was 'more fluid'. That's actually not the case at all. It had terrible AI, for one thing. Mainly though, you're confusing fluidity with the fact that Lloyd is stupidly overpowered and has a move set that requires nothing but mashing to build insane combos together. This was something they fixed in subsequent Tales games, and Vesperia reflects that. It's not that it's less fluid, it's that Yuri's moves require a bit of thought to be able to really string things together.

It's also a bit unfair to mark it down for not being as detailed as Eternal Sonata. ES is certainly a prettier game, but that came at a tremendous cost. Far less variation in enemies, more linear, the environments are pretty but tiny, the load times are longer, and there is no ability to customise the appearance of the characters as they gain new weapons etc. The tradeoffs that Vesperia makes allow for a game with much greater freedom and scope.

I really hope that more games take notice of how consistent Vesperia's anime-style visuals are. Very coherent artistic direction and so on. Nothing really looks out of place or odd. Not to mention that their engine will scale well for subsequent games, and the games will probably age much more gracefully too. Compare that to the stupidly high-definition look that Star Ocean 4 tried, where the detail combined with the same anime-style aesthetics ends up having the exact opposite effect, making the visuals often seem odd or even slightly creepy. Given the audience for these sorts of games, going the realistic detail route doesn't seem to give much of a benefit unless you're commanding the sort of obscene budgets that a core Final Fantasy game enjoys.

Re: Oz internet filter to block sites selling mature games? (3 years ago)

The ACMA blacklist requires someone to register a complaint, so basically they expect people to do their work for them.

I bet certain attorney generals from certain states (we all know who) would spend his idle weekends trawling for just this sort of thing, just to tweak our noses. :\

Re: Star Ocean: The Last Hope Review (3 years ago)

Honestly, if you're after a JRPG, don't get this, get Tales of Vesperia. It's better in just about every way.