LANCOZA Blog

The festive season rush has bearly washed over us and now the new round of releases has begun. Street Fighter IV , Resident Evil 5 and KillZone 2 will all be vying for your attention.

In addition, Microsoft are releasing a red, 360 Elite as part of a Resident Evil 5 limited edition bundle. The price is R4020 ($399) and may be available locally but when that will happen is anyones guess.

The local launch date for Street Fighter 4 has finally been released. Nu Metro secured the Capcom license and announced that it will reach our shores on 27 February. This date is subject to change and for the sake of our local gaming market I hope that the change means an earlier release date.

The Capcom license debacle is yet another example of our local distributors not  getting their act together. It also acts as additional incentive for gamers to import their games so that they receive the game on release day. In the end it's the small, independant, retailers that suffer but as we well know by now, the distributors only care about volume of sales not small retailers.

 

Tycho over at Penny Arcade says that there is nothing wrong with the Resident Evil 5 controls . Although I would not call them sluggish more stunted and unnecessarily cumbersome. The control scheme for a first or third person shooter does not have to be fine tuned to maximise your twitch reflex but it also should not be so cumbersome that it acts as a barrier to the game experience.

In other news, Nintendo plan on converting you all to Islam, so you had better be prepared .

My first encounter with Street Fighter was in a local arcade called the Outer Zone in Kenilworth. My main interest was in games like Raiden and Final Fight so I was not particularly excited about it. I am also not good at fighting games, my twitch reflex is a bit delayed so I generally steer clear of them except for the easy ones like World Heroes (not Jet) .

When Street Fighter 2 came out, I bought a gaming magazine and studied each new character in detail. I decided that Dhalsim was perfectly suited to my style of play but in actual fact he was really slow and it also did not help that I was unable to do any of his special moves.

Street Fighter IV is coming out soon, and the trailers are very promising. There is a limited edition available as well as a few arcade sticks. Although which one you buy will depend on how deep your pockets are and whether you can find one.

I have seen a few posts mention that the cheaper Hori sticks are a viable alternative to the Tournament Edition from Mad Catz . When I was in Tokyo, I went shopping for arcade sticks and I found the cheaper Hori sticks were very cheaply made and not really worth the price. Hori has also released new Street Fighter IV sticks for the PS3 and Xbox 360 and these may be worth a look.

 If you are a fan of the franchise, the latest Street Fighter looks like it is definitely worth getting.

I must admit that I was pretty surprised to find out that people exist who don't follow game release schedules religiously and who do not immerse themselves in every single cryptic screenshot or game trailer that is released for their favourite title.

I would have guessed that if you were not immersed in the gaming sub-culture it would somehow diminish your enjoyment of the games that you play but apparently it does not .

I really thought that 2008 was the year of the PlayStation 3. Finally the hardware would be matched to a significant and exclusive games catalog. But as the year wore on nothing materialised that could really justify the PS3 price tag. Post the Tokyo Game Show the signs seemed to indicate that the tide had turned against title exclusivity further diminishing any justification for buying a PS3. When Final Fantasy was announced for the Xbox 360, I was pretty sure we had entered the End of Days.

Some now believe that 2009 will be the year of the PS3, but I really doubt it. With it's high price and shortage of exclusive titles, the PS3 has very little going for it. Now we have the sales figures to add a few more nails to the coffin. The Wall Street Journal has reported that November 2008 sales are 19% lower than last year and they also predict that December will be the same. Nintendo has doubled on their sales from last year and Xbox 360 has increased by 8%.

I think that Sony has lost this round of the console war and that only a major price cut can save it. Speaking of which, with the Global financial crisis, Sony is in no position to increase the competiveness of the PS3 with a price cut. What's that sound...sounded like the last nail to me ...

I had a meeting with a senior manager from Ster Kinekor. One part of the discussion was about piracy in SA and why more is not done to combat it.

The bottom line appears to be that we do have a piracy problem is SA but no where on the scale of other regions like Russia, Egypt and Greece which essentially have industrial scale operations. Piracy is therefore not such a high priority concern for Ster Kinekor.

Reading between the lines, I also got the sense that anti-piracy operations are mostly conducted against people who have links to organised crime, where piracy is conducted in concert with other crimes like drug smuggling etc.

This provides some much needed perspective but still does not change the fact that piracy hurts small independent retailers more than major retailers because of the scale of their operations.

It also does not change the fact that better pricing from the distributors will go a long way to combating piracy and growing the local games market.

The latest addition to the Resident Evil series will be released shortly.

I have not had a chance to play the demo yet but I have been soaking up alot of the trailers . The game looks very good but some of the annoying game mechanics have not been changed. You cannot move and keep your weapon aimed , which is irritating in the extreme. The voice acting is generally very stilted and cliched.

I will give it a try once it's released but judging from the game play videos it does not look very promising. They also appeared to have adopted the offset, parrallel split screen from Call of Duty World at War. The split screen setup is a real waste of precious screen real estate.

I was looking forward to fighting crazy zombies on motorbikes, but I think that my Zombie hunger will be better satisfied with some Left for Dead action .

I was hugely impressed with Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay , when it was first released.

It had a great combination of action, puzzles and RPG elements. The entire package was brilliantly rounded out by the fact that Riddick's night vision was well implemented in the game and was not a gimmicky after thought.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena will be released in 2009. It is coming to the Xbox 360, PC and PS 3 and will include online mutliplayer and a re-mastered version of Escape from Butcher Bay. It is definitely going to be worth having a look at.

 

I am a huge fan of World War 2 history which is why I played all the Call of Duty games, even CoD 3.

World at War in single player is not a good game.

All the CoD games are heavily scripted, CoD WW is less scripted than previous versions but the game play still feels very mechanical.

Added to this is the fact that the AI of your squad is bad as well. They don't attack enemies that are right next to them, they run single file into an ambush and show no tactical awareness.

This would be fine if you did not depend on your squad mates to get through the levels. But the game is designed to be squad based.

I am past the first tank based mission and the game has not gotten any better.

The level of realism and the graphic violence is intense. The use of archive film footage in the intro sequences emphasises the 'reality' of the game's context. But if you're trying so hard to emphasise a games real historic context then you also have an obligation to ensure that the war is portrayed in a more nuanced way, which the game fails at doing.

I must still check out the co-op mode, but the single player campaign is terrible.