Everything Wrong With... will give you a list of everything wrong with a particular game. If the developers fix these problems, then they might have a decent game.
Misc Issues
Most of the gameplay changes could've been patched. Why did we need to buy a whole new game?
Konami randomly decided to re-do the entire movement mechanics making them worse for no real reason. They do this every year.
Nerfed the move where you press diagonally then forward to touch the ball past a player. Also made right stick manual pass which is annoying.
Sprinting - Annoying mechanics. You're expecting to sprint at a slight angle to beat a man, but you're player will cut at 45 degrees.
Sprinting - knock-ahead too large.
Sprinting - you can barely outsprint even slow players. C. Ronaldo being almost matched by a 73 year-old Tugay wasn't fun. Even cheat players with 99 for everything will not be able to outrun anyone unless you use the large knock-ahead, and even then you won't make much distance.
Animations and player models are still average.
Rubbish AI. Most noticeable in Be A Legend mode. Teammates won't cross/shoot/pass when they have a perfect opportunity.
Still has the stupid "2nd FK Taker" option that just gets in the way when you want the 2nd FK taker to be the 1st. Remove this feature for crying out loud.
Stupid knock-ahead after doing the step-over trick. If I wanted that to happen then I could just press sprint afterwards.
Your players fail to intercept ball even when it's 1mm away from their body. They have no awareness of where they are in relation to the ball.
Rebounded balls generally always fall to the opposition.
Stupid pass where the players pass it 1ft infront of themselves.
Shooting - Still has weak shots where the player refuses to put his laces through the ball with power. Always when you're angled towards the corner flag or North/South. It's not difficult to get power on shots from these angles. This is a constant problem that never gets fixed.
Teammates often pass/tackle/shoot automatically.
Sound of ball sucks.
No GK Cursor. It was available in 2008 and let you take control of your GK by pressing L1+Triangle. Has been removed for no good reason. Don't even try to pull your keeper out when an opponent is out wide.
Player's randomly don't pass straight - simple passes an U12 player could nail every time.
Rains too often when you have a certain stadium in ML mode - haven't investigated this much, but it definately rains far too much.
Be A Legend Mode
Stupid placement on corners. I want to be in the box so I don't have to rely on the dumb AI failing to header it clear.
Stat system innacurate. You'll get a worse rating than someone who's made less complete passes and shots on target, etc.
Can't skip international matches, even when banned.
Teammates stop running for ball sometimes when you press R1/R2. Stupid key mapping considering R2 is call for the ball.
Too many teams play 38 year olds.
Tackling
AI cheat with slide tackle timing. Sometimes the EXACT moment your fake-shot animation begins to play, they activate their slide tackle. Slowed down replays show that it begins at the exactly the same time. This is humanly impossible reaction time. Cheating.
When running near an opponent they rarely misjudge sliding tackles. Every tackle seems to bring you down and they get a yellow, or gets the ball.
Opponents happily tackle straight through the back of you, with their leg literally passing through your body to get the ball.
When winning a tackle you'll be lucky to actually gain possession from it half the time.
Long animation after doing the leg-in tackle and missing the ball.
Keepers
Still save the ball BEHIND the line which loses you a goal.
Constantly palm easy saves right into the middle of your 6-yard box.
When saving penalties down the middle they often let the ball go through their legs.
All these issues are easily fixed. The only reason for them being there is incompetence on the part of Seabass and Co.
Update 20th Aug 09 - They've fixed the inventory (34 seconds into vid). I'm 100% sure it was because they saw my Neverwinter Nights inventory pictures below. Lets hope there's an auto-arrange button like there is in Silent Storm. Now if only they'd listen to me more often.
With the recent gameplay video and screenshots released of Diablo III, a lot of true gamers are pretty pissed with the art direction/graphics. Blizzard have taken World of Warcraft's textures and essentially added 1.5x more detail.
Before any cuntmonkeys start thinking I'm some fanboy, I'll say right now that I haven't completed Diablo 1 or 2.
I frequent forums that are filled with CoD4 playing assholes, and as a gamer with taste, I often argue that Diablo 3 is essentially World of Warcraft plus higher resolution textures with slightly more detail. I also mention the unrealistic coloured lighting with greens appearing from nowhere. Note the key points mentioned - texture detail and lighting colour.
Invariably, this is when I get some little shit telling me that I apparently want a pitch black game and that I'm emo. Remember the key points? Not one mention of brightness. Checking their profile, they're always 16 or under. I wish they'd fuck off and go cream their pants over their shitty little wannabe-sims like Forza and FIFA 08.
At some point they'll throw this screenshot at you:
That screenshot is the last resort of someone who's seriously trying to defend an indefensible point. Unfortunately they fail, because you can't argue against fact - the fact that Diablo III looks like World of Warcraft 1.5.
Let me clear up the point about the textures. Diablo III's indoor areas look extremely flat. It's as if they got a painter to paint the stone textures, instead of just using real stone in the first place. This means there's no grainy, or realistic quality to the stonework. If you touched the surfaces with your hand they'd be totally smooth. Now compare that with these screenshots that actually have detail:
Your hands would get torn to shreds if you rubbed it down that stonework. After seeing those screens, this Diablo III screenshot looks fucking embarrassing:
I've made a few screenshots to emphasise the point:
Now take a quick look at this screenshot from IGN:
Good god. I practically just raped you. That table/shelf thingy was from World of Warcraft:
It's about time I mentioned the new inventory. It's shit. Take a look at Neverwinter Nights 1's inventory vs NWN2's.
If you think NWN2's inventory looks better, then you're an idiot. It's no surprise that NWN2 was shit. NWN1 got all the little things right, and the little things do matter (in fact, they're more important than the story. More on that in a future post). Diablo III's already fucked up a few of the little things. Not a good sign.
Potions - dumbed down (on the Oblivion quick-jump scale) so dumbasses can play. There's nothing more to it. (EDIT - I've just been informed that dev's prefer to call this "accessible". Sorry about that dev's. All is forgiven... NOT.)
To wrap this shebang up, take a gander at this video: (I just got shebang and gander - two words you've never said out loud - into the same sentence. I am God.)
If you still think Diablo III looks like part of the same franchise, then you're fucking deluded. This game should not be called Diablo.
PC gaming is dying! PC gaming is dead! PC gaming has hopped the twig! It's joined the choir invisible! But why?
I feel entitled to point out that PC's require a brain, and people are dumb. Top tip: PC's and dumbasses are never good combination. If "Autoplay" on a PC disc fails to launch, a large contingent of the console owning population would be left slavering over their 360 joypad wondering why they can't install the latest Colin McRae cash-in. Then they realise their Radeon 9600 won't even run it.
PC gaming is not accessible to these people, and it never will be.
To be fair to those lacking a fast enough graphics card, developers have left thousands of PC gamers out in the cold with the switch to Shader Model 3.0. According to Valve's survey the X800 is the 2nd most popular ATI graphics card at the moment behind the much older 9600. Neither of these cards can run games using SM3. In fact, the top 4 most popular ATI cards will not run SM3 games. Of the top 10 most popular cards, half of them will not even get to the main menu of an SM3 game. This amounts to around 182,000 out of 424,000 who will not be able to play an SM3 game with the top 10 most popular graphics cards.
You have to bear in mind that Valve's survey was probably carried out by less than 50% (estimate) of all Steam users. A large amount of users may not have logged in for months, or played HL2 once then never logged in again, and others may have decided not to take part in the survey at all, so it wouldn't be unfair to expect the figure of 182,000 to double at least.
If developers would make games that half of us could actually physically play, I don't think they'd be complaining so loudly about piracy. By shafting hundreds of thousands of consumers they've shafted themselves.
Warez (illegal downloadingz) is often cited as the reason for a decline in PC game sales and development. It's not the dark ages anymore, it's 2007, and it's easier than ever to download the latest overhyped PC game using BitTorrent. I took a look at Colin McRae: DiRT, a Shader Model 3.0-only game, on a popular torrent site, then checked the comments. Note these two:
omg! My problem is my graphics card doesn't support shader model 3.0!!
There are plenty of things killing PC gaming, but at the end of the day, if your game is truly a good game it will sell its fair share (Company of Heroes, not that I thought it was brilliant or anything). If your game runs like a piece of shit on 50% of people's hardware, or doesn't run at all, then people will switch to consoles, then we'll see more developers bitching that no one's buying PC games. I suggest that developers just shut their pie-holes, stop making shitty games, and make sure it runs on as many PC setups as possible.
I'm tired of mod teams spending years on mods, so here's a few reasons why modifications should release early rather than wait 3 or 4 years.
To get public feedback early on to fix any issues. Let everyone test it, not just a select few. Beta testers are usually forum whores or IRC users that have been bumming the makers of the mod to get a beta spot. Their opinion is somewhat useless. Don't leave it 4 years then realise your target audience don't like how your mod plays.
Your mod will never live up to the hype. You're likely to get negative feedback from those who were expecting an entirely different type of game.
It's easier to get extra team members (namely coders) if you have something already playable to show them.
Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod, summed it up well in a recent interview:
The main argument about this (releasing early) is that they don't want to release a shit version of their idea and turn everyone off. Fair enough, but it's going to be so much worse if you work your balls off on it for 2 years then release, and your idea is still rubbish. Iterating would have let you know that this idea isn't working out, so you could adjust it. In every update you're picking up more people playing your mod. You build a community.
More Fallout 3 news has been released. Get more information at NMA. They also have some nice magazine scans with in-game material.
The only thing that concerns me is that Bethesda are one of those companies that can't get the little things right. The horse riding in Oblivion was worse than Mount&Blade's, which is made by a tiny Turkish developer. It's good to hear they're going to make a decent 3rd-person view. Their previous 3rd-person efforts have been laughable at best.
We've seen how Oblivion turned out compared with Morrowind when it was made with the Xbox in mind. The UI at the very least is likely to suffer, as Oblivion's UI was clearly built for consoles only. Look forward to relying on user mods to fix most things a PC user.
No level scaling is definitely a good thing, although there will be a few people who complain about the level 20 character cap.
It's sounding more like Fallivion at the moment, but we'll have to wait until late 2008 to see how it'll turn out.
In a Reuters interview, Scott Steinberg, Sega's vice president of marketing comically states:
"I am a little concerned about the creative depth of the Wii pool."
"The Wii will start to look really dated in a couple years when developers get more value from the 360 and learn more and more about the PlayStation 3."
I don't know about you guys, but I'd rather have "a couple years" of some original gameplay, rather than play some of the unoriginal crap that the Xbox and Playstation have been spitting out over the years. Need For Speed 16 anyone? They ran out of ideas years ago.
I'm not surprised Sega couldn't compete in the console market with mugs like Steinburg working for them.
Analyst Michael Pachter has told GamesIndustry.biz that he believes a higher spec, HD-enabled "Wii 2" could be on the shelves "in a couple of years".
It's easy to envision a Wii 2 in a couple of years that runs at full HD, and has both a Wii-mote and an analog controller, so that all games can be ported to it.
If Nintendo were to introduce such a device, it would be fully comparable to the Xbox 360 - perhaps it wouldn't have Blu-ray, so a comparison to the PS3 may be unfair - and would likely have most of the same third party content as the other two devices.
Can you imagine what would happen if a Wii was released in 2 years time with video power comparable to the current 360?
It may shock some of you that most developers build a game for one console, then port everything over to other platforms, all the while keeping their fingers crossed that it'll work without a hitch. They rarely spend time upping the quality of every asset just because one console can handle more. Developers have nothing to gain from doing that.
If a texture seems blurry or is missing a normal map after porting they're not going to go out of their way to fix it. You can't really blame them. Their publisher's breathing down their neck the whole time to get these games finished so they can make as much money as possible.
None of this means the PS3 sucks, or the 360 sucks. All it means is that the developers got lazy; they had to rush for a deadline, and simply pushed the games out the door as fast as they could, at the expense of a few blurry textures here and there. No big deal.
It doesn't help that Gamespot mostly choose games published by EA. They generally have the worst porting standards along with Ubisoft.
I feel entitled to point out that PC's require a brain, and people are dumb. Top tip: PC's and dumbasses are never good combination. If "Autoplay" on a PC disc fails to launch, a large contingent of the console owning population would be left slavering over their 360 joypad wondering why they can't install the latest Colin McRae cash-in. Then they realise their Radeon 9600 won't even run it.
To be fair to those lacking a fast enough graphics card, developers have left thousands of PC gamers out in the cold with the switch to 
Warez (illegal downloadingz) is often cited as the reason for a decline in PC game sales and development. It's not the dark ages anymore, it's 2007, and it's easier than ever to download the latest overhyped PC game using BitTorrent. I took a look at Colin McRae: DiRT, a Shader Model 3.0-only game, on a popular torrent site, then checked the comments. Note these two:
