axe99

EA's hardly a model corporate citizen, but for them to win in the face of far, _far_ worse companies out there just shows it's another internet (anti-) popularity contest, driven by whatever the latest popular buzz is, rather than any reasonable measure of what a poor company is. Hell, even the selection of contestants is populist rather than an objective look at which companies really were the worst American company.

@Draugdraugr Agree that memory is one of the big issues, but Rome: Total War only required 256 MB ram/64MB video, and Medieval 2 only needs 512/128. There's no way that, appropriately coded, both the 360 and PS3 could handle that easily. Hell, given that the gameplay doesn't vary that much until you hit Fall of the Samurai, if TCA could handle less shine graphics, I'm sure they could get Empire and Napoleon on there as well.

And don't forget Kessen was a PS2 launch game. I'm sure the 360/PS3 could cope with being a little more shinier. As for the rest of the comparison, Kessen's gameplay was pretty damn similar to the TW games - slowed down, perhaps, and more supportive of use of a top-down map for battle overviews (and a far better deploy system at the start of battles). But you had similar unit sizes (to vanilla, default TW), similar ranges of commands, at least as good AI as to Rome and Medieval 2 (at least prior to the Kingdoms expansions - I don't know whether they beefed it up, but the AI in TW started to be a bit brighter from there on in) and lots of individually animating units (which broken into mixed melee battles more organically than Rome and M2 as well). There was no turn-based empire building gameplay in Kessen, but that kind of gameplay is not resource hungry unless you get seriously tricky with your AI (something TW most definitely does not, at least not with the games I'm comparing to Kessen).

@Kinthalis What specs are you running AC:R on? I find that, spec-for-spec, games on console look _far_ better than PC - ie, to get a PC game to look as good as a console game, you need twice as much video and other memory, say. Depends on the tightness of the coding, of course (Metro 2033, for instance, is very resource hungry relative to how good it looks - but if you have the resources it looks very good).

And regardless of all of that, my argument is that the game would run (and the game only has to compete visually with other console games, not with machines running on a $1500 gaming rig). I comfortably ran Rome and Medieval 2: Total War on a machine that couldn't handle games the 360/PS3 could - so TCA coming out and saying that it doesn't have the resources sounds to me like PC devs who can't think outside the square (and I'm a big TW fan, and a fan of the TCA as well, but they don't know console and don't always get it right - Stormrise for example).

@Draugdraugr / @shoop008 You can't blindly compare PC minimum specs with consoles. Assassin's Creed: Revelations requires 1.5GB of RAM and 256MB of video RAM on PC and 12GB on the hard drive, but it runs on 360 just fine. I'm a PC and console gamer, and anyone who's both should know that making straight-up spec comparisons doesn't know what they're talking about.

As per my original post, these style of games were done, and well, on PS2. Are you both arguing that the 360 and PS3 can't cope with what the PS2 could?!

Maybe Napoleon, Empire and Shogun Total War couldn't be done on console, as it's currently done on PC, but Total War in general could be done. Hell, Kessen had a similar-style set of gameplay (that was good fun, with a good interface) on PS2! Wasn't exactly the same, but it was the whole hundreds of units working in squads across the battlefield in real-time, pausable to give commands, all of that.

So if it could be done on PS2, I'd wager it wouldn't be too hard to pull of on PS3/360. Now, it would need to be designed for those games - Total War games are heavily designed to be RAM heavy at the moment, so clearly a straight port couldn't be done. But the gameplay and style of game can and _has_ been done last console generation!

@trickybuz93 Granted, sold would be better, but if shipped numbers are steadily rising, then sold will be as well, unless retailers have decided that they should start stockpiling the thing ;).

@den69 It depends what you were looking for. Like anything, research before you purchase. I've spent over 100 hours in RUSE with Move, and it's a far better way to play it than with a gamepad (and really not that far off a mouse/kb setup, the main difference is a limited no. of hotkeys, but I rarely worry about all the damn hotkeys anyways). I've enjoyed it a heap with Top Darts, and The Shoot was good fun as well (it's short, but you can pick it up cheap now, and it's a good lightgun shooter). It also works very well with Under Siege, and while you'd never buy Move for Flight Control HD, Flight Control is an enjoyable game to play with it and works well. And Sports Champions is a heap of fun - a generation ahead of anything on the Wii. Beat Sketchers is a fun (and original) family game, if you're into that stuff.

On the other hand, I found it wasn't my cup of tea for FPS or TPS games, and stuck with the controller in KZ3, SOCOM and MAG.

But I don't mind - it's a peripheral - it's like a racing wheel (except more versatile). I don't complain that I only get to use my wheel for GT5, Dirt and the like, or that there are only 2-3 good racers released each year. I enjoy the wheel because I get right into my racers. Similarly, if I get 2-3 good (and reasonably long) games out of Move each year, I'm happy with that. But if others aren't, or they look at the games out or due soon and don't like 'em, then don't buy it.

On the by, beyond the games I've played, I'm keen to check out Tumble, Medieval Moves and Echochrome ii. Not bad support for a peripheral, really.

@Vic Fontaine It's horses for courses though - I'm a Dualshock person for my shooters, that's the way I like them - but I know a number of people that preferred (genuinely) to play KZ and SOCOM with Move. These are people that have logged hundreds of hours in shooters with a controller. There is a genuine audience for this kind of thing, and according to Insomniac, working move support in isn't particularly tricky (and even less so now that Insomniac, Guerilla, Zipper and the like have paved the way).

If it was something that was likely to take months of dev time then I'd be a bit more wary, but given there's an audience for it, and it's fairly straightforward, I'd say it's both a sensible business decision and the right thing to do for gamers (noting that not all gamers like the same thing).

I think an extra peripheral would be a bit silly though - I've got enough random bits of plastic!

@Axe99 Oh, and KZ2/SOCOM (pre-SOCOM 4) did it for free as well.

Absolute first on consoles for BF3 maybe, and DICE as well, but the SOCOM franchise had customisable servers on consoles last gen! At least DICE is slowly catching up to the best of last gen's online gaming....