I really don’t have it in for Cryptic, the designers of Star Trek Online, though it may seem so if you happened to read my impressions of the Champions Online beta last August. Many called me out for being overly hostile, for being too critical of a beta, blah-blah-blah. Folks, I’ve been around forever and I’ve played every MMO ever designed. I can spot a loser from a mile away and no amount of polishing and tweaking can fix fundamental design problems. I pegged Champions Online as a complete loser of a game and the ensuing months have proven me correct.
So it is with a heavy heart that I must slam Star Trek Online, which I have been slogging through for several days now.
First, the obvious: Cryptic is over-extended as a company. Making a solid MMO is a mammoth undertaking, a chore made all the more difficult by an ever-expanding market and increased competition. If you can’t deliver something as good as or better than the competition then you are doomed. When one considers Cryptic is a relatively small company, it’s utterly amazing they opted to take-on Star Trek and Champions Online at the same time. This business decision spelled disaster for both products as neither has received the attention they require.
In terms of Champions Online, Cryptic didn’t face a rabid fan-base full of demands and expectations, so its failure was barely visible to the gaming public. But with Star Trek, Cryptic is messing with a popular brand and its failure to deliver a compelling experience will be far more devastating. read more…
It’s like a scene out of West Side Story, with two groups of fanboys spitting into gangs and ready to rumble in a back-alley somewhere. I speak of the impending battle between PS3 owners and Xbox 360 loyalists in light of the impending release of Final Fantasy XIII. The issue? Which platform will the game look better on?
Answer: PS3.
There isn’t even an argument.
Here’s the facts:
According to Square-Enix, the PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIII will ship on a single Blu-Ray disc, containing uncompressed video and music for maximum quality. The Xbox 360 will ship on multiple discs and audio and video will be compressed. Why is this happening? Simple: it’s Blu Ray versus DVD. Blu holds up to 50GBs on a single disc whereas the Xbox 360 can only hold 9GBs.
So, yes, the PS3 will look better. Will you be able to notice? Probably not. But that isn’t the point in a fanboy war.
Update: Those are the facts when it comes to the old format wars and the benefits of Blu-Ray over DVD (and the now dead HD-DVD) and it will certainly give PS3 owners a clear advantage when it comes to the audio and pre-rendered video of cutscenes. However, it is still unknown whether or not Square Enix decided to use some of that extra room for the code needed to handle the compensations in the software developers need to write to overcome the anti-aliasing deficiencies in the PS3’s GPU. The hardware native to the Xbox 360 which allows it to smooth the geometry of curves, circles, arches, and certain diagonals in 3D games being rendered in real-time wasn’t included in the PS3’s internal architecture and was glaringly obvious in the system’s early games. Many recent games compensate for this by asking the PS3 to overcome this through extra routines they write into their software – often at the significant cost of some of the main processor’s clock cycles which can subsequently mean lower framerates. So was that a trade off Square Enix was willing to make? Were they clever enough to make it so you still won’t even notice? We don’t know yet, but it is a battle that will have to be won by more than capacity alone. It will probably be determined by how smart they were in working around the different limitations unique to each platform – no matter which one you personally are rooting for. – Christiaan Allebest
Uncharted 2 is enjoying stellar reviews, riding high with a 96 average on Metacritic and standing tall as the critical darling of 2009. In fact, the lowest score a critic could muster was an impressive 9, meaning Uncharted 2 must be damn-near perfect in every way. Unfortunately, my experience with Uncharted 2, which I played to completion, was not that of a 9-10 rated game. Quite the contrary.
Before I launch an attack on Uncharted 2, allow me to proclaim some praise where it is due.
Lush, Detailed Graphics
Uncharted 2 is one of the most beautiful-looking games you’ve ever seen. The attention to detail, set design, and tons of little touches all conspire to push the PS3 to its maximum capability. The artists and level designers truly delivered something fantastic.
Great Voice-Acting
99% of videogames have horrendous voice-acting by 5th-rate talent that would be better served by abandoning the acting and relying solely on subtitles. Not so with Uncharted 2. Here the acting is solid and lines are delivered with something akin to emotion, which is nice to hear.
That’s pretty much it for my positives. Now on with the show.
Great Graphics Do Not Make a Great Game read more…
Yesterday we pointed you towards an article that clearly showed the PS3 version of Ghostbusters is graphically inferior to the Xbox 360. Of course, that managed to get the PS3 fanboys in a frothy rage. Well, in an attempt to soften the blow, Terminal Reality has explained the difference and in so doing, probably made things worse:
“For the record, the PS3 version [of Ghostbusters] is softer due to the ‘quincunx’ antialiasing filter and the fact we render at about 75% the resolution of the 360 version. So you cannot directly compare a screen shot of one to the other unless you scale them properly. The PS3 does have less available RAM than the 360 – but we managed to squeeze 3 out of 4 textures as full size on the PS3.”
I thought the idea of pitting the Xbox 360 versus PS3 in terms of graphics had faded as a fad last year, but I guess there is still some life in those old bones. The latest slugfest find Ghostbusters going head-to-head on the two platforms, and unlike most of these fights, this one ends with a unanimous winner: Xbox 360.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the PS3 sucks compared to the Xbox 360…just that developers probably don’t have a clue what they are doing on Sony’s notoriously difficult platform.
(Ratings Average: 3.78 out of 5)
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