Tuesday, December 16, 2008

PS3, Silent Hill and Tabula Rasa

So, in case anyone has missed this little bit.

The Playstation 3 is dead. The games available (major exclusives like Little Big Planet and Valkyrie Profile) are selling dismally.
Sony as a whole does not understand it's market by promoting Video Downloads instead of the Blu-Ray player.
The Home network, while a cool concept, is just Second Life, except it has been hacked already while live.
I think we can at this point declare the Wii the winner of the casual market and Xbox 360 the winner of the hardcore gamer.
Seems the PS3 does not fit any "niche" or cannot find it's footing...

I almost bought a PS3. I am glad I did not, and decided to wait.

Patience is a virtue indeed.

Silent Hill: Homecoming - OMG, how hard is this game?
The combat is very unforgiving, and, as has been noted, westernized.
Meaning (besides development being given to a western company) you have full control of the main character. The strange camera angles are gone, and you have full visual acuity around you.
Yet at the same time, the AI is more brutal. Situations more dangerous.
Each creature has a special guard like ability or attack. You must learn these moves, or else suffer horribly.
First aid drinks and heal kits are few and far between. And the boss fights are next to impossible to avoid damage.
Weapons are always limited so far. Guns are a "Only use if you must" item, due to ammo situations. Some creatures are even somewhat immune to bullets.
The first time you are attacked by any creature you have never seen, be prepared to reload your save. They attack swiftly, and smartly.
Speaking of saves, ARGH, too few to speak of.
Yet, the creepy factor is high, the story intriguing and combat is fun, though fraught with controller throwing moments. I have not felt like this since Ninja Gaiden on xbox.
I beat that sucker though and felt the wave of victory wash over me, so I must persist here as well.

Tabula Rasa has become my morning game. Perfect, since no one is on at any time, but hopefully that will change.
For now I can just run around, try to complete quests or missions, and finish the zone.
My calculation is to be level 20 by the time the 26th comes around. Then my next focus will be to get to level 40 by the end of January. But, if I reach 35, I should still be ok to try and hit 50 by the end of February.
I am not worried if I do not, but it would be cool to max just one character in any MMO besides Guild Wars.
Not much to report here, except that I continue to find ways to complete missions even though the spawn rates are nasty. The Divide is still quite the pain. I can only imagine what the next area will bring.

Anyways, looks like I have my hands busy, and will hopefully be able to get to my Xfire charts by the end of the week (that is proving to be fun to watch...especially with the RMT announcement for EQ2...seems some drop is occuring. Will this be a trend? Some sure are miffed about it...)

6 comments:

Talyn said...

I think I'm level 5 or maybe 6 now. I'm having a rough time of it again, mostly because of performance. Constant stuttering while it loads in textures, etc. when I move. Blurry textures and sub-par animations don't help either, nor do all the invisible walls and poor terrain. And I'm only in the first area!

I did think it was interesting the few times I've seen other people on, that many had absolutely no clue the game was shutting down.

I'm glad I never got a POS3, not that I was really considering it; I intensely dislike Sony's penchant for everything to be their own proprietary tech, far worse than Microsoft, in my own opinion. I kept my PS2 for years before getting an Xbox because frankly it took that long before the Xbox had enough games I'd get to make it worth the purchase. I wasn't going to buy an Xbox *just* for Halo, that's for damn sure. And I won't buy a POS3 *just* for... oh wait, there *aren't any* good POS3-exclusive games...

Elementalistly said...

@Scott

Poor performance in TR? Weird? But, then I have some horsepower (which can run AoC at 60FPS, yet chokes on LOTRO and Vanguard)

Weird..

Are you using an AMD processor? Wonder what is different that our systems run each of these games differently?

Comparing
Intel e8400 6MB cache Dual Core
4870 512mb ram video
4 gigs PC1066
Hardware based sound card (offloads sound to internal memory and is not onboard)
640gig 32mb cache HDD (2 platters for speed)

As to PoS3, lol...nice name.
I see no redeeming qualities yet.
Several games interested me (Folklore, MGS), but really, quality wise, the 360 works just fine.

Unknown said...

I still buy Playstation 2 games. If my Ps2 broke I would buy a new one rather than a PS3 >_>

Talyn said...

Yeah it's an AMD 5200+, about a year old or so and a 7950GT. So it's still a firm DX9-generation system. I'll probably update the CPU and videocard next year at some point once I decide what I want. But the TR issue seems to be the same "stuttering" as in LOTRO where it's not looking ahead of my rendering range and waits til things should be rendered to load the new models and textures from the hdd. Only it's happening more often than I get in LOTRO. Also the same texture swap issues as LOTRO that "jolt" from immediate swaps instead of a blending effect like WAR used that was much smoother and I never noticed any stutters. Yes, WAR actually did *something* right! It seemed like WAR looked ahead of me and pre-cached the new higher-res texture so when it swapped (which was a smooth blend instead of insta-swap) I never saw any jolts or stutters at all. Even GW will stutter *just a little* sometimes during those insta-swaps it does.

Tesh said...

*agrees with Rory*

Danshir said...

Hehe, you think Silent Hill Homecoming is hard NOW? God wait till you get further in =). Combat gets a lot easier once you get the hang of it*Melee wins btw*

As for Xbox..

Well I WOULD have agreed with you, but my unit bricked itself yesterday for no reason. A month after warranty expired, had it just barely over a year. My NES to this day still works, but MS can't make a system that lasts this long?

So I bought a PS3. I must say I'm really happy with it so far. As for exclusives, I'm really looking forward to Heavy Rain*made by the guys that made Indigo Prophecy*. There is a huge list of PS3 only games coming out 2009 but i'm too tired to remember them.

I like Xbox 360 games, but I must say MS lost a fan yesterday due to a variety of factors.