I loathe skateboarding, and I have nothing but contempt for games related to such.  A jackass builds a ramp so he can ride it on a piece of wood with four wheels.  Ground breaking stuff.  If I was paid to make a case for how retarded the human race is, the first thing I would mention is skateboarding. 

You can't make a great game based on garbage.  The point of a videogame is to either simulate something that is great or to make compelling gameplay mechanics.  Anything based on skateboarding is intrinsically made of fail.  To the same end we won't  make a game based on knitting or watching paint dry.  For a concept to have any merit at all it has to have either intellectual or emotional merit.  Skateboarding appeals to the lowest common denominator, it's so far below any standard of significance that...I have nothing to say.  Skateboarding is useless.

Skate 1? Skate 2?  WHO CARES!?     

"Skateboarding appeals to the lowest common denominator"

Couldnt have said it better myself. (SceneKids, Emos, "hardcore kids", extreme!!!'s)

Johnny Jiron


Skate 2 coming in a few weeks... the demo was "show-ful" is probably the best fake word I can think of. 60fps is by far a nice additon. The new tricks are fantastic. Visually it's hit and miss but I'm quite passive about games with big free-roaming worlds...but fuck that demo was so fuckn limited...fuck you EA and your shitty demos...

Anyways I was wondering if kikizo has anything to say about this first game to grab in 09 (well for me at least).

Also...still holding onto that 8/10 for Killzone 2? I should probably go reserve it and play the demo but fuck I hate gamestop now so yeah...

I just dont know what to think. It looks nice in those videos...but I've grown bothered by fps games what require damn near a full clip to drop one person. Plus that whole bullet physics crap well just seems like crap. A unique death my ass, I keep seeing that hit to the shoulder spin animation. Seems like call of duty's death animations followed by rag-doll only done a bit better admittedly.

In all honesty Skate 2 isn't something I particularly give a fuck about, but we'll see what we can do :)

It doesn't take many bullets to drop someone in KZ2, but they have to be on-target. Empty a clip in one go and the other guy will still be standing when you reload (especially if you're using a heavy machine gun), but fire controlled bursts and he'll snuff it in a second. The exceptions to the rule are well-padded shotgunners and those massive mecha troopers.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the bullet physics stuff - it's there, it's very impressive, but at the end of the day it's just another kind of death throe. There are better reasons to own this game. My key concern at the moment is that the campaign won't offer sufficient and sufficiently exciting set-piece encounters - with hindsight, none of the big battles I fought through in the single player beta were quite up to the standard of, say, the Scarab/buggy/rocket launcher bit in Halo 3.

I played the Skate 1 demo when it came out. It wasn't bad, but not something I'd want to dump time or money into.

Nobody into HAWX then? I was pleasantly surprised by that one.

Nobody into HAWX then? I was pleasantly surprised by that one.

Flight sims aren't my thing.

First impressions from the trailers for HAWX have been one of - baahahahaha.

Then when they talk about stuff like the Enhanced Reality System or ERS, you laugh some more.

Alls I want to know is, is it better than the Ace Combat series.

And what dyu mean is it worth the pain of watching Top Gun??  That film's qual-ity.  If Hawx doesn't license Highway to the Danger Zone as background music then I'm not interested.

It's more serious than Ace Combat, sometimes to its detriment I think. I don't think Tom Clancy ever penned a joke in his life.

You'd better be right about Top Gun, man. I'm holding you personally accountable for whatever mental and emotional state I might happen to be in after I watch it ;)

Tom Cruise = Fail. Luckily Top Gun was before he found cult... er I mean religion..er I mean Scientology.

Bit of an oddity, that man. Anyone heard anything good about his latest flick, Valkyrie?

Edwin


Bit of an oddity, that man. Anyone heard anything good about his latest flick, Valkyrie?

Yes. Ive heard that everyone but Cruise did a decent job acting, and the critics seem to have the same opinion.

He's not bad in Collateral. Or so I'm deducing from the ten minutes or so I've watched.

Flower (PSN) preview -

http://games.kikizo.com/features/flower-ps3-hands-on-p1.asp

Absolutely lovely game from the makers of flow.

You mean we won't be able to eat things?  At least in Flow you got to eat things.

At least you can eat things while playing Flower - one-handed control very much FTW.

Here's another 2009 feature, 21 Things We Missed, restoring some of the titles/events shamefully absent from the first one.

http://games.kikizo.com/features/21-things-we-missed-gaming-in-2009-p1.asp

Heads up, Dreamcast diehards! Ready 2 Rumble Revolution (Wii) interview -

http://games.kikizo.com/features/ready-2-rumble-revolution-interview-p1.asp

Dreamcast diehards? I thought Ready 2 Rumble was on multiple consoles? I think I had it for N64.

Yeah, but it led on Dreamcast. Albeit only by a month or two.

Adam's done a super-massive GTA: Chinatown Wars preview, with lots of juicy screens.

http://games.kikizo.com/features/gta-chinatown-wars-handson-p1.asp

Still not 100% convinced myself. I think this one could go the same way as Phantom Hourglass - a cute distraction, but no substitute for a sofa, 50 inch screen and thousand-polygon character models.

Edwin

a cute distraction, but no substitute for a sofa, 50 inch screen and thousand-polygon character models.

Thats handheld gaming in general.

Innit :)

GTA IV: Lost and the Damned hands-on -

http://games.kikizo.com/features/gta-iv-the-lost-and-damned-hands-on-p1.asp