NoisyUniverse

Focus groups are the bane of creativity. In anything. With every decision they make, they do nothing but push things closer and closer towards a bland, safe, watered-down midpoint.

A few people say that a story element is too difficult to understand? Dumb down the whole thing and insult the intelligence of the rest of your audience. People think the ending is too dark, depressing, and confusing? Change the ending to include Deckard and his new replicant lover driving away happily in the beautiful sunlit mountains discussing how happy they are to spend the rest of their lives together.

Focus groups govern everything from awful commercials to terrible movies to idiotic game design. I'm not saying this particular game would have been "better" without this recent change (who knows, it may ultimately be for the best, for reasons the public isn't aware of yet), but the suits that have the final say in pretty much everything these days are too willing to make drastic changes in something just to "upset as few people as possible".

From their business perspective, angry viewers (even if only a small minority) will always equal lost revenue. And they're after every penny they can scrape together, no matter what.

As I said, I'm not saying the aforementioned methodology was used in this particular story, but it's certainly indicative of the toll that "safe, effective marketing" has taken on entertainment as a whole. Focus groups DO yield valuable information for developers and directors, there's no doubt about it. So I don't doubt their usefulness one bit. But ultimately you have to decide who to listen to and who to ignore.

Great. Just bought some gigabyte-heavy games and now I'm getting awful download speeds because everyone and their mother just rushed to Steam to buy stuff. So instead of getting to play within like 20 minutes, now it's gonna be like a few hours. GO AWAY PEOPLE, LET ME DOWNLOAD!!!!!

What's that you say? I'm part of the problem, too??? Nonsense.

This is depressing. I was actually considering jumping on board this whole Dreamcast revival thing. But this kills it. What's next, a limit of 720p? I'll stick to emulation.

Cena doesn't deserve to be in the same cardboard lineup as The Rock.

Right. Unfortunately for you that hasn't the slightest bit to do with anything I said. I guess I should've expected people to suddenly get defensive and emotional about something they're apparently already in love with.

Wait. Why are people pretending to care or be impressed by this "preview"? Does this have ANYTHING to do with what the game will look like, how it will play, if it will be any good- you know, the things that actually MATTER?

How many commercials for video games do you see these days that contain ACTUAL gameplay footage? The answer is "not many", save for things like Wii and handheld games. These scheming companies are continuing to put a CGI mask over their product to con people into thinking the game will be ANYTHING like what they're seeing, and rely on sites like these (blasphemy, I know) to generate pointless hype with articles like this. I still haven't heard a single good reason to be excited about this video as it relates to the game.

Is it "cool" or "fun to watch"? Um, sure, I guess. But why would anyone hype this up as having any relation to a video game (which was vaguely indicated by the first line of the last paragraph of this article)? Companies are increasingly lining their pockets from people who buy into things like this, and who will be sold on the CGI videos so much before the game even comes out that they'll buy it no matter what the reviews end up saying. Granted it's a minority (most people aren't stupid enough to base their decision on what to buy on videos like this), but they do exist. And these companies know this, and are exploiting it in order to, more often than not, hide the fact that their actual game looks and plays like complete garbage.

Take a game like MGS4 for example. There was no gameplay shown in the initial trailer, but it was still rendered with the game's engine (for the most part). It had the same cinematic flair as these over-the-top CGI "trailers", but it actually showed what the game would LOOK LIKE in action. So if you're not gonna actually show gameplay, at LEAST show us what we can expect to see. I know that they've already released some non-CGI stuff to preview, so you could argue that they've "already shown us what it will look like, and now they're just having some fun"; I just think using "dazzling" videos like this (even if they're really, really, really good and well done) serves no purpose other than to generate interest and traffic for ENTIRELY the wrong reasons. And while most people with a brain fully understand that it's just a video and are able to still appreciate it without having it affect their view of the game, there are still the few who are hitting the "preorder" button as we speak after seeing this.

Final Fantasy: Four Swords

I wouldn't be opposed to an entirely new HL3 game so long as the engine is new. Granted, with proper modding you can get some pretty fantastic things from the Source engine these days. But the original "wow" factor of the engine was based on physics and lighting, and plenty of games since then have realistic physics and HDR lighting.

If it was an entirely new game (with an entirely new engine), chances are we'd still be waiting another year or two to play it, depending on when(/if) the decision was made to make it HL3. It's been almost a few years since the release of Episode 2, so if the decision was made right then and there to develop a new engine for a full-length game, then it may not be very far off. But when it comes to Half-Life, I've always had the mentality of letting Valve take as long as it needs to get it right. I just have a hard time believing that they've spent 3 years making an episode with a 4-5 hour play time. That, to me, is evidence enough that something big is bound to be announced.

I was playing this game at 1080p 6 months ago using emulation, with max graphic settings. And my computer is "Ok", certainly no monster. People here who are saying otherwise must not have very much knowledge of emulator configuration or something, because it's not difficult at all to get this game running at a consistent 30fps. You won't get it straight out of the box, you definitely have to tinker around with the settings. But it's not difficult by any means. The only PS2 game (that I've played so far) that gives my system trouble is MGS2, and that's just because the emulation on it is screwy.

Honestly it was one of the main reasons I upgraded my computer in the first place; the idea of playing Shadow of the Colossus in HD was worth the cost of admission. And make no mistake, it's every bit as good looking as you would expect it to be.

Looks great in stills. In motion, not so much. Plenty of things look like they still need fixing. I hope that's the reason for this delay, but something tells me otherwise. I guess my hopes for decent Sonic games have been beaten down for far too long.