PC Gamer - 96/100
PC Gamer UK - 94/100
OXM - 10/10
Quote:In an eight page review scoring the title with 94, Tom Francis [PC Gamer UK] calls it “A dark, cool and beautiful revival of an incredible game… Smart, substantial, funny, creative and endlessly entertaining.”
He goes on to say it’s ” absolutely the Deus Ex of our age, a genuinely worthy prequel, and a game that puts almost everything else in the genre to shame.”
I'm confused... the crazy skulls and organs all over the place don't help. It's like if that doll song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was done by a serial killer.
It's your fault we can't have amazing adventures across special boundries! We gotta resort to fantasy and sci-fi for that...
Maybe all isn't lost, let's start jump starting crow, squid, dolphin, ape, elephant, jaguar, and robot evolution. Those folks seem pretty up there in the intelligence department, they just need a push.
Here you can also see charts showing system sales so far this year. So far this year the DS and Wii are both down by almost 50% versus last year, and the 3DS isn't fully making up for the gap. This isn't really surprising though, given how badly the Wii in particular has fallen apart this year... as if Nintendo should have expected anything else when they're barely trying and aren't releasing any games for it anymore in the US, though? Also, the strong Yen hurt Nintendo again. But yeah, whatever teh cause it's a substantial loss for the quarter.
The 3DS's price is being cut from $250 to $169 as of Aug. 11. In Japan, prices are going from 25000 yen to 15000. To make up for that for people who bought the system for the higher price, Nintendo will be giving people who register their 3DSes before that date 10 free NES VC games for the system and 10 free GBA VC games for the system, in both cases before the games for those systems are available for purchase otherwise.
Games Japan gets include:
Quote:Free VC NES games for 3DS (from sept 1st):
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros.
Donkey Kong JR.
Balloon Fight
Ice Climbers
The Legend of Zelda
+ 4 more
Free VC gameboy advance games for 3DS:
Super Mario Advance 3
Mario Kart Advance
Metroid Fusion
Wario ware
Mario vs. Donkey Kong
+ 5 more
... So yeah. The price cut isn't surprising, given the 3DS's mediocre sales, but the SIZE of the price cut is somewhat surprising, I'd have thought they'd go to $220 or $200, not all the way to $170... they must really want sales to increase. We'll see how it works. I hope that Nintendo can get back on track, they seem to be slipping this year and I hope they recover and get back to the success they've been having. Oh, and actually release some games here please...
That is, Apple is now phasing out DVD drives from its machines. Of course, this started a few years ago with the Macbook Air, but it's now continuing with their cheap line of desktops. I'm not surprised that Apple is continuing with this, it's the kind of thing they'd do; as the article's speculation says, and I agree, it's quite unlikely Apple will stop there and not move on to removing disc drives from more of their computers. Sure, you can get an external drive, but that's not exactly the best solution compared to internal.
On the other hand, of course, this was quite obviously coming. As if Apple'd stick with physical media, when instead they can push people towards using Apple's web store more, and can get rid of that ugly disk drive in their console too? Hah!
... I think everyone can guess what my opinion of this is. Of course I'm not exactly fond of Apple, but this kind of thing shows exactly why that is. Function matters more than form, darnit, Apple! And despite what Apple fans and the DD-only-future faithful may say, there are lots of reasons to want physical media. You have clearer ownership of something physical; you get more for your money (physical product and packaging too), lots of things aren't available as digital downloads; things can be removed from DD stores and vanish from legal access, because there's no way to buy a used copy of a DD product; bandwidth limits are getting worse, not better; and more...
But Apple cares for form above all and Steve Jobs hates things like buttons and media drives messing up the clean styling of his systems, so disc drives are out.
(And yes, I thought that iMacs dropping floppy drives in 1998 was stupid. Basically anyone wanting to actually use one needed an external drive of some kind (floppy and/or zip, usually), that was before flashdrives after all, and that internal CD drive wasn't a burner...)
I'm not too surprised this game got cancelled -- since Inafune left Capcom, and he was Mega Man's creator and biggest defender, it's not too surprising to see this and Mega Man Universe both get canned -- it is a bit sad. I mean, I'm definitely not a MML fan (sure, it's an okay 3d action-rpg franchise with some terrible controls, but it's not Mega Man at all...), but the games are okay at least, and it's too bad that this was canned, though technically it wasn't because it was actually never greenlit for production.
Anyway, so afterwards the fans got mad. As that second link above shows there's a twitter war with some Capcom Europe PR people, a Facebook protest page that has 20,000 likes now, lots of anger on Capcom's forums, etc. I'm sure there's no chance any of that will make the game get un-cancelled, but when you give people who'd been waiting that long (MML2, the last one, was released in 2000 or 2001 after all) some hope and then take it away, they're not going to be happy.
Would the game have sold, though? Honestly, who knows. That depends in part on how good it'd have been, and now there's no way we'll know that.
