lostshore

"Many critics have written off the game because developers missed some essential MMO ingredients when it launched."

Metacritic is sitting at 71 critic reviews, with 67 positive, 4 mixed, and 0 negative. Little bit of sensationalism in claiming "many critics have written off" SWTOR, huh?

I definitely thought there'd be more races to choose from, and that's still my biggest disappointment.

It's not that consumers want "a quickly consummable mobile experience", it's that mobile platforms like iPhone offer small dev teams who are willing to take greater risks and make real innovtions a chance to stand next to the mega-developers on the platform and, in many cases, outshine them.

Console developers ae generally taking fewer and fewer real risks, which leads to less variety for consumers to choose from. See THQ's Homefront and Space Marine as examples. E3 2011 was loaded with the 'safe bet', and the vast majority of noteworthy releases this year on consoles are sequels.

On mobile platforms, while there is obviously a proliferation of copycat developers and high-selling casual games, there is also a wealth of innovative, intelligent games made by clearly passionate teams, to the point where there are so many to be discovered that the drive to be seen, purchased and played becomes legitimate innovation rather than the big-budget, copycat mindset of console developers. Since that's already their mindset, they're far more apt to only notice the copycats on the AppStore, but legitimate gamers with access to the AppStore know there is far more to be discovered.

Ha ha, great write-up Mr. McElroy!

Looks like what the Fable series could've/should've been. Promising, but that series' mediocrity has left a wary taste in my mouth. At any rate, it looks like good fun so far.

I am a big fan of Joystiq as a news source, but this article is tough to swallow. Push Sony or take our business elsewhere? How many YEARS has it been a joke that 360s red ring, forcing buyers to wait weeks for repair? Then, when they finally release a new model that supposedly lacks any of the past issues, my Xbox 360 S model lasts three months before being unable to read any sort of discs any more, after having an original 60gb PS3 for over three years work flawlessly. I lost a month and a half of gaming time when my 360 stopped reading discs. At least when PSN is down for a couple of weeks I can still play single-player games while I wait for them to fix their free service.

I get the separate issue of my info being compromised, but it's not like this couldn't happen to another company. As a consumer, I didn't make the mistake of tying all of my personal info to my PSN password, somehow thinking security is infallible. It's ridiculous to think that, when PSN goes down for a couple weeks, all gamers should join some huge, anti-Sony mob, whereas literally 9/10 of the people I know with 360s have had to send them back, losing weeks of any sort of gaming time with no compensation, and somehow that's okay because it doesn't happen to everyone all at once. Who's to blame for hackers breaking the law? Maybe Sony could've been less antagonistic and better with security, but the hackers are literally criminals in this situation. But who's to blame for faulty hardware affecting millions of gamers for YEARS? An outside source breaking the law, or Microsoft? I'm not advocating a huge, anti-Microsoft campaign either, but to act like Sony has done something worthy of the entire gaming community rising up against them is just silly if we're going to let Microsoft get away with nothing but red ring jokes on webcomics.

I, for one, am more pissed that I lost my entire 360 for a month and a half than losing access to online for a couple of weeks on my PS3. I know that's not the case for everyone, but Microsoft burned me worse than these hackers have, and definitely worse than Sony ever did.