Quote:Quanity != Greatness. Quality + Quantity also don't necessarially equal being the best. Ubisoft does have a good run of solid titles (and a lineup of cheap ones too), but if I like the games other developers are making more the fact that they have produced fewer games is irrelevant.
Blizzard = best developer. Anywhere.
Haha, what a joke. I love it when you Billzard fanboys say this. They make one good game every few years and because of that they're the best developer ever.
Quote:For some more very good Western developers, just look at PC games. There are a whole lot of them there. I'd make a list, but it would look familiar...
As for Ubisoft, they annoyed me by abandoning Conquest: Frontier Wars (a good RTS)... yes, it didn't sell great and every other big company has done the same, but the point is Ubisoft isn't oh so much better.
Anyway... currently good Western developers? Blizzard. Firaxis, Troika, Obsidian, Bioware... I could go on for quite a while. There are a lot of very good smaller developers, certainly more than on that list. If you mean publishers, though, it's harder. None of the major publishers (Ubisoft, Vivendi Universal, EA, Activision, Take Two, etc) are great. Oh, they make some good games, but most of the best are from independant developers. I'm not sure what it is about the big ones that drains innovation but it sure seems to happen... Ubisoft as much as anywhere. Just look at sequels like Rayman 3 -- good game, but not exactly innovation-driven...
Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell 2, Prince of Persia, Prince of Persia 2, Rainbow Six 3, Beyond Good and Evil, Ghost Recon 2. All good-to-superb games released within the last two years, and I'm not even counting slightly older titles like Rayman 2, or PC games that have gotten good reviews but I don't care for, like the Myst games. That makes them the best western developer of the past few years (notice that I never said "ever"). Blizzard and their whole two games in the past three years does not make them the best developer of the past few years. To even say that they're the best developer ever in anything but your own very subjective opinion makes you look like a very foolish PC fanboy.
Do I really need to list out all of Nintendo's games? Do I really?
You never cease to crack me up, ABF.
Quote:I stopped when I ran into a bug in the PC version that kept me from being able to get a couple of pearls. Sure, I don't HAVE to get them, but it'd be so much easier (down to the underground base in town via that long downward passage)... it is a decent game, but the badly ported controls are not the only problem with the game... good, but flawed. It's just overly simplistic in action, in plot and story development, in "twists" in the story... a good effort, but with a ways to go. Too bad they won't make another one and try to improve on the idea.
BG&E is one of the best adventure games in years, and it's really too bad that you got the horrible PC version with its shitty controls and based your opinion of the game off of that. Still, I find it amazingly hypocritical that you can call BG&E overly simple when you like so, so many terrible, simplistic games (like all of those crappy Diablo-esque games you love so much, including Gauntlet). BG&E wasn't complex, but it did what it set out to do exceedingly well, and presented its experience like very few games have done.
How far did you get, btw? I'm guessing not very far, since you usually form opinions on games after little playtime.
Quote:As for UbiSoft, the Rayman games are great. Very good platformers. I have a few other games they released... several they just published (Rocket, Conquest), several they developed (Pod, BG&E)... and they're all good, but comparing what I have of Ubisoft to Blizzard? No way. Oh, they have great art direction (as you expect from French developers), but... I guess a big part of it just comes down to whether you prefer PC or console style games. If I had to choose I'd choose PC. So UbiSoft loses out to the likes of Blizzard, and continuing that line of thought I'd probably also place them below several of those other developers... though they get a good ranking if just because of how awesome Rayman 2 was. And Pod.
Pod??! That was a very average racing game at best. Rayman 2 was good but nowhere near as good as Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, or BG&E. Ubi Soft of the last couple of years has been a far better publisher/developer than any other western game company. Quote:BG&E was a pretty good game, I likely would have beaten it but a glitch some hours into the game destroyed any chance of me making any more progress.
What glitch? Which version did you play? You really need to finish the game.