Nothing has changed in the genre since 1993. Trust me. But yeah, I used to dislike FPS games myself. Most of them are pretty derivitive and boring . . . but the good ones are really, really fun.

they all suck

So what I'm reading about TW 08 - and this is across platforms - is that in career mode, there is an issue with "rubberband AI" where the field plays down or up to your level. It sounds like it is a conscious design decision to make sure you always make the cut, but that's not the point of a real golf sim, is it? If I suck, I shouldn't make the cut and Tiger and the other great golfers should be great. But apparently what happens is, during the first round the leaders shoot in the 60s and if you shoot, say, a 90, all of a sudden in the 2nd round, the leaders all shoot in the 90s with you. If you shoot 72, the leaders basically shoot what they shot in the 1st round.

That sucks. If you want to coddle the gamers, at least make it an option for "reality mode" and "always make the cut" or something like that.

How's the control scheme for TW08? From what I understand, the original didn't have the 1-to-1 motion ratio like Wii Sports Golf. Instead, I think you used the controller to draw the club, and then hit a button or something to release. Is it still the same?

I don't know, I don't have it (yet ), but this is from IGN's preview:


After putting about three hours of solid play time into Tiger Woods 08 we've come to a very similar initial impression as we did with the last game; it works, but it's not all there. Tiger Woods 08 uses better swing tracking, has more in-depth tutorials, and is an all-around better game of golf than it was last year, but it's still plagued with a few Wii-mote issues, and they really hurt the experience.

For starters, the hook and slice manipulation has been changed for the better - at least a little bit - and you'll no longer worry about hitting straight shots only to have the ball rocket to the right in a gigantic slice, splashing into a pond or hitting "out of bounds" sections. When you hit straight, Tiger Woods 08 knows it, and rewards you for it. As another solid upgrade to last year's effort we're finding that swing tempo and power are factored into the equation far more.

Rather than having the player auto-swing once you begin to move (as found in the standard control in 07) this year's effort plays more like last year's "advanced" setting, having the club actually attempt to track you in a 1:1 manner. Along those same lines, swing speed is far more of a factor this year, as you'll need to master not only how well you time your shots, but how powerful the snap of your swing can deliver. It's a nice touch, and it makes Tiger Woods 08 feel like true golf. Check out our video below, titled "Mastery of the slice."

Where the game is a bit of a pain in the ass, however, is in its hook/slice manipulation. Any golfer knows that while beginning players work to eliminate troublesome hook/slice shots, advanced players use the manipulation of those shots to their advantage. If a group of trees are off to the right, accompanying a dogleg to the right far and beyond those trees, you'll need to aim slightly left, slice hard to the right, and avoid the trees with some seriously skill-based shots. In Tiger Woods 08 that's still the case, but managing to get the hook/slice to register consistently can still be a bit touchy.

In fact, we spent a full hour of our initial playthrough simply hitting balls, checking out what works within the swing, and what doesn't. The game wants you to manipulate your shot based on your wrist rotation, particularly at the beginning of your swing. The best way to do it is center your hand, twist your wrist as if opening a door, pull the B trigger, and rip your shot, taking careful notice that your hand continues to be tweaked to either direction consistently throughout the shot. On the slice (both in left hand and in right hand golfers) this is an easy task, and we have had literally no trouble using consistent slice to our advantage on the course.

I'd take a mediocre FPS over the best JRPG filled with 40+ hours of crappy, anime-derivative graphics, cheesy melodramatic storylines, and terrible v.o.

Just sayin'.

i'll make to ignore your posts from now on

Awwwwww. You can't stay mad at little ol' me.

I will take a mediocre JRPG over the best FPS with a cliche plot (hero arrives on devastated planet/ship over-run by aliens/mutants) where you mindlessly shoot anything that moves and your main goal is to locate some big gun. 'Tho the graphics sure are purty in dem FPSes.

omg cmon nubz halo is teh best fps

outside Tales Of Symphonia, I can't remmeber playing a good JRPG for since the 90s

Thanks. That actually sounds pretty cool, I may have to pick this up (if only because I'm sick of the same 9 holes on Wii golf).

Campaign isn't the best, but the multiplayer is as much fun as you can have. I have 4 good friends who all play. We get into the MP, play some team games, shoot the shit, drink some vodka or scotch, and laugh like fucking loons all from the comfort of our respective homes.

And 4 player co-op in campaign mode in H3 has the potential to be legendary. With hard liquor, espescially.

Yeah, seriously. We love playing golf on the Wii, but those same nine holes get really boring after a while.

SAme with me. Although I'm actually surprised I am enjoying the golf game at all, because I can't stand the game. But I find Wii Golf enjoyable, and I want something a little more "real," so I think I'm going to take the plunge.

BTW, here's the complete review if you are interested. For the Wii, the main gripe seems to be that the game isn't that much different to what was released 5 months ago, but for those who didn't buy 07, that obviously isn't an issue.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/810/810829p1.html

Busy with college, and trying to save money for a 360. So right now I'm only playing Brain Age 2. Which is pretty good, major improvements in handwriting recognition, and more entertaining games/tests. The multiplayer has 3-4 different games now, so what I'm enjoying most is triumphing over members of my family in each of those. I'm getting particularly good at Change Maker.

I don't quite understand on all the FPS bashing being directed at Metroid Prime and Bioshock.
First of all, these games being labeled first-person shooters is a stretch. With Bioshock's incredible attention to detail, visually and aurally, and Metroid's focus on story and exploration, both games, the entire Metroid Prime series, really, have already stepped out of the FPS genre. DOOM was mindless, itchy-trigger finger, carnage creating gameplay, as are a lot of other FPS', even to this day.

Metroid and Bioshock are two of the best, if not the two best games to come out this year, and it ain't just because to you shoot a lot of nasty shit with really cool looking guns, even though that is very possible in both games.

It seems the easy work-around on the TW 08 "rubberband AI" thing is to simply play tournaments as 1 round. That would probably work for me, actually, since I'm not sure how far I'd progress in a career playing 4 rounds a tournament. I have only so much time for gaming in my life. And by using only 1 round, that eliminates the issue entirely, since the AI appears to reconfigure scores after the 1st round depending on how well/poor the human player scored.

I'll probably pick this up over the weekend at Best Buy with the 10% off coupon and a $5 reward zone certificate to get it for about $40.

Well put. I would argue that Bioshock is much similar to an adventure game in the vein of the more recent Zelda incarnations, than a traditional FPS. You can play it like a normal FPS if you want, but you with the plasmid and upgrade system, the openness and ability to free-roam, the rewards for searching and exploring, and the character customization available, the gaming experience can be substantially more sophisticated.

I think a game like RE4 (which I also love) is much more in the spirit of a FPS, even though its in a 3rd person perspective.

actually i hate all fps's because they give me motion sickness.

I tried playing through metroid prime but every 15 minute session i'd just get dizzy and choke on my vomit. Also platforming/doing anything besides shooting in a first person view is clumsy and counter-intuitive.

Me too! I get migraine level headaches if I play them for anything more than a half hour at a time.

I'd normally agree, but Metroid gets this part right. Very right.

joke post

All you genre haters are fools. I'll take a good game over a bad game, simple as that.

I don't know why you'd take a mediocre anything, but that's prejudice for you.

Do any of you have any OLD copies of Nintendo Power (1988-1990?) laying around?

I wouldn't ask if I wasn't extremely interested in obtaining a certain issue.

Probably not that old, but I used to have a heap of issues from the SNES era. Got most of them from a buddy in middle school, when I first really got into console gaming (and thus, gaming magazines), and I had them stored in a box for years, but I don't know if I ditched 'em in a move or not. But nah, I doubt I'd have 'em from the NES era. Not many, at least.

I don't know which issue I need. I'm afraid it might even be the very first one, with Super Mario Brothers 2 on the cover. My friend had a copy in his parents' basement that I should have taken when I had the chance 2 years ago, but I didn't.

After a weeklong vacation, I'm just sinking my teeth into Metroid Prime 3. Very nice so far. I'm pretty close to getting used to the control. I hope I finish this one before more games come out.

The point and shoot control for Metroid is so natural that I get pissed off I have to remember the secondary conrtol buttons for the visor, map, and morph ball (and hypermode), which I constantly get confused. The Wii will go down as initiating the best control scheme for first person shooters. Metroid unfortunatley still has control issues, largely legacy created from the past games. At some point an original game will come along, built from the ground up for the Wii, that will establish a new benchmark for natural FPS control.

I played another hour of it today (for a total of two, shazam), and I'm still not completely convinced of its overall quality. And the aiming seems a bit iffy -- I don't want to have to stand to play.

Hoping my issues clear up and/or the game becomes more interesting ASAP. I'd like to finish this before Skate drops next week, because I've played that demo about seven times now and I want it in my life forrealz.

Spent a few hours with Tiger Woods 08 for the Wii this weekend and really enjoyed it. I've never played a golf game before (outside of Wii Golf), so this was a new experience. The swing seems pretty true, adding slice and fade worked pretty well I thought. After playing a few 9-hole practice rounds on standard difficulty I jumped into a career and was -3 through 16 at the Doral until I double and triple bogeyed the last 2 holes. D'oh! That's probably why I've always hated the game of golf to begin with. But I think I'll be playing this much more than Madden 08.

That's how I feel, but the only fps I have for the Wii is Resident Evil 4. Its controls would be close to perfect if you could: (1) strafe, and (2) use the wiimote crosshair to move the camera angle up/down and side-to-side. That said, even with its flaws it's still the most fun control scheme I've ever used. There's something very satisfying about reloading your gun by just flicking your wrist; or knifing an object by slashing the wiimote. I also love using the wiimote like a light gun, and as a result I almost always end up playing standing up. The whole experience is very engaging.

While I have only played RE4, I think the lack of strafe is a standard design in other, if not all, games in the series. I know for a fact that there was no strafe on the PS2 or the GC version of RE4, so that is not a limitation of the Wii.

For Sausage, Love Death 2, the game of Bukkake:

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My brother-in-law lent this to me. I am hooked. Very cool game.

amazing

That bukakke game was FUCKED up. Who the fuck would want to play something like that

Excuse me, but I have to go kill an indentured and kidnapped 7 year old girl in Bioshock.

no fucking way i just watched that like three days ago and was laughing hysterically.

i think freddie is stalking me.

i was seriously go to start a thread about it, damn, i can't believe i was beat to this by a dude like twice my age.

you lose 3 internets

I celebrated my Dreamcasts eighth birthday yesterday by blasting through Sonic's game in Sonic Adventure. Can't believe the thing is eight damned years old.

Yeah, that was a nice machine. Equally hard to believe it's been (hardware production) dead for six years. It was an awesome console, with a wide range of really good games - and weirdly streamlined compared to what came later. An actually cool console.

The Dreamcast, next to the SNES, is my all-time favorite system. So much time spent playing it, the excitement of burning games for it, the Capcom fighters, the arcade ports, the RPGs, everything that it had was great.

What pissed me off was how Sony tried in their marketing to say that Sega's market was more "kiddie" and this somehow stuck. Were they fucking serious? Sega was always the MANS company. They had the greatest marketing campaign the video game industry ever saw during the 1990s. Sega was always the "cool" company. They let blood go in Mortal Kombat when Nintendo censored it. Sonic The Hedgehog was fast and always cheating death while Mario grew fat and had a much gayer cartoon.It's just really too bad they blew it with the Saturn. So many things went wrong.

and now Sega is a shadow of their former selves. The last really great game they put out was Panzer Dragoon Orta and that was like five years ago. sigh

in terms of other anniversaries. This game is now a decade old.




Discuss. It was the reason I bought a playstation. I remember playing the demo over and over that came with Tobal No. 1. My embarassing devotion to it before I knew it was going to be the biggest RPG ever is really nothing compared to the cult it has now. It's not the best Final Fantasy ever. VI was loads better, but that feeling of playing a Final Fantasy and being able to talk to regular non-RPG gamers about it who played it as well was really cool. In my school the only people who played RPGs before VII were all nerds or faggots. That changed after this came out. I like where the RPG industry sits now.

Yeah, I still haven't looked into the homebrew side of the console. I do know that playing Metal Gear Solid on Bleemcast was awesome (and miles better than playing it on PS2).


There was that period when they were releasing Rez, Monkey Ball and F Zero and whacking everyone but, yeah, there has been a bit of a tail-off. Want to buy Yakuza cheap, but it does look very sub-Shenmue. I would get Virtua Fighter V if I had a posh new machine. Actually, Outrun 2006 is fucking boss.

But yeah, Sega on DC:

Shenmue
Virtua Tennis
Cosmic Smash
Rez
Crazy Taxi
Jet Set Radio
etc

[edit]

Same. I was strictly Nintendo from 1993. Then Square fell out with them and hooked up with Sony. Got a PlayStation literally because of that.

The less said about VIII, the better.

Did you blast through Chao Adventure on your VMU? I would hope so, otherwise you don't get the full Sonic Adventure experience.

That whole VMU crap was innovative, but Sega didn't really support it. The Dreamcast in general was full of good ideas that never fully developed. One of my favorite systems. That and Saturn turned me over from Nintendo to Sega during that console era.

In regards to FF VII: I stole my brothers PS one to play it. Yeah, I enjoyed it, but it gets way too much love. I think because there was this drastic change in presentation(The FMV, 3D environments, etc) as opposed to the sort of SD characters flying in an airship, or running around on a Mode 7 map. This cinematic presentation sucked in people who never played a FF game. The summons were cool to watch, but as with most sequences I got sick of them after awhile. Beautiful game for it's time. I don't think I can ever play it again though because I played the fuck out of it the 2 or 3 times I played it. I think I will always be a FF VI guy. I felt more invested in the story line of VI. I know I'll get the weird looks, but I hated Kafka more than Sephiroth, and that probably has something to do with the fact I was younger, and more impressionable when I played VI. In VI you could control 6 characters at a time, as opposed to VII's 3. VI also had I think 30 playable characters, but more isn't always better(I didn't level up everyone completely, and that bit me in the ass later in the game). I guess I can see how VII's story might benefit from having fewer main characters. It focuses the story. I just have fonder memories of VI, but I did like VII as well, and I'm glad I played VII. Haven't played a FF game since then though. I never bought a PS2 because all my friends had/have one, so I didn't feel the need to get one.

My friends who recently got married named their second daughter Emily Aeris in memory of one of the most beloved FF characters lol.

Goodbye XBOX Live!! I'll miss you for the first three days of Halo 3's launch . . . condsidering the game will come with 3 FREE DAYS OF GOLD ACCOUNT!!! Lag city, here we come!!!

Fuck you, Chocobos, you temperamental crappy racers.

Don't know if this technically counts, but I've been on fulltiltpoker.net a lot lately.

FF VII was an awesome game. When I started in radio, I had a 3rd shift that actually let me bring a desktop computer in. This game kept me sane.

I'm playing Drawn To Life as a walking giant penis.

"Stranglehold" is pretty sweet if you enjoy total destruction...and I do