The Arcade Random Thoughts Thread

[KNUBB]

[Bomberooski]

Final Fantasy is still kicking my ass

[Garrett67]

Just played Gran Turismo 5 for the first time. I have to say, after playing so much Forza 4, this game is just a massive disappointment to me. Taking this one back to Gamestop tomorrow.

I could overlook some things but I have a difficult time ignoring the crappy ass engine sounds and there is no excuse for the cockpits (now that they are there) just being a silhouette.

[Swarley]

I could overlook some things but I have a difficult time ignoring the crappy ass engine sounds and there is no excuse for the cockpits (now that they are there) just being a silhouette.

I mean they have a lot of content, which is nice, but everything else is just crap in comparison. And that's pretty interesting when you look at the time it took for each developer to make each game.

[Epidemik]

GOW III

BOSS

[Maynard]

anyone who thinks gaming online with a wireless connection is just as good as a wired connection is insane

[IamMedellin]

David Jaffe's Twitter account brings the lulz

[ryne candy]

Just noticed today that my PSN Plus expired on 1/28. If I end up getting the Vita, I will also have to get a subscription card, so I can use the MLB The Show cloud save.

[padman59]

Platinum'd MGS Peace Walker. I probably won't play it again for a while unless someone wants help on co-op.

[Bomberooski]

Played a bunch of Madden yesterday morning. Man I still love that game a lot

[Twigg4075]

Played a bunch of Madden yesterday morning. Man I still love that game a lot

I have been playing it a lot lately too, since I was finally able to get the NCAA rosters to upload thanks to the video posted by Ryne.

But I must say that I still think NCAA is the netter game. I throw way too many INT's in Madden. It's ridiculous. The defenders just seem to jump routes like it's going out of style. Besides just throwing the ball deep and up for grabs, like the CPU does all the time, trying to complete a deep pass is nigh impossible. You can have a guy wide open but when you throw it it's like the CPU forces your QB to throw it more in the direction of the closest defender so that they can pick it off easier. I can't tell you how many times I'll have a receiver coming across the field on a drag route with plenty of separation and my QB will seem to intentionally either underthrow or overthrow the ball right to a defender.

In my last game I threw FIVE interceptions. Out of those five one was definitely my fault. I threw under pressure and made a very poor decision. The other picks were just ridiculous feats by the defenders, in most cases a LB making a leaping pick on an absolute laser thrown by Cutler. These guys are LB's, with cinder block for hands, not elite WR's.

There are also too many fumbles. Most of which seem to be recovered by the fumbling team though. It's amazing how quickly these players react when a ball pops loose.

Does anyone know any decent All-Pro sliders I could use or should I just tone down the INT's and fumbles?

[Sven Draconian]

I have been playing it a lot lately too, since I was finally able to get the NCAA rosters to upload thanks to the video posted by Ryne.

But I must say that I still think NCAA is the netter game. I throw way too many INT's in Madden. It's ridiculous. The defenders just seem to jump routes like it's going out of style. Besides just throwing the ball deep and up for grabs, like the CPU does all the time, trying to complete a deep pass is nigh impossible. You can have a guy wide open but when you throw it it's like the CPU forces your QB to throw it more in the direction of the closest defender so that they can pick it off easier. I can't tell you how many times I'll have a receiver coming across the field on a drag route with plenty of separation and my QB will seem to intentionally either underthrow or overthrow the ball right to a defender.

In my last game I threw FIVE interceptions. Out of those five one was definitely my fault. I threw under pressure and made a very poor decision. The other picks were just ridiculous feats by the defenders, in most cases a LB making a leaping pick on an absolute laser thrown by Cutler. These guys are LB's, with cinder block for hands, not elite WR's.

There are also too many fumbles. Most of which seem to be recovered by the fumbling team though. It's amazing how quickly these players react when a ball pops loose.

Does anyone know any decent All-Pro sliders I could use or should I just tone down the INT's and fumbles?

I can't stand the insane LB jumps either, but the zones on the game are so bad they have to make up for that somehow. With the ability to left-stick the pass wherever you want it, no zone coverage can work without the super-leaps (and, they still don't work for the most part).

A few years ago they really helped the pass coverage because the defenders would disrupt the routes by getting that shoving animation. This really helped the wide-open seams because the WR would get shoved, and you couldn't throw to him for a few seconds. By the time he was recovered, the safety was actually in position.

I think that in '10, after the last patch in December. That's gone now, defenders let the receivers run their routes without interference and you can abuse the little seams in the zone again.

Completing deep passes is easy. Throw the ball sooner and put a little lead on it with the left stick (against man coverage. Against zones.... just left stick the pass into the open space). It'll take a few games to get the feeling, but once you do it's pretty easy. Or, the easiest way is to get a tall WR, throw the back shoulder, and turn it into a jump-ball.

[Swarley]

Naughty Dog Almost Made A New Jak And Daxter

From Crash Bandicoot to Uncharted, Naughty Dog has a history of putting out top-notch entertainment. The studio is jam-packed with talented game creators. So many, in fact, that two years ago the company expanded to form a second team, which would eventually develop The Last of Us. But before the first glimpses of Joel and Elle’s post-apocalyptic survival tale wowed gamers, Naughty Dog was working on a next-generation reboot to the lauded Jak and Daxter series. This is the story of how Naughty Dog’s new team started work on a Jak game that would never see the light of day.

Following the success of Uncharted 2, Sony wanted to license out the game’s engine to make more great-looking blockbusters, but, due to technological factors, Naughty Dog ended up being the only studio that could actually use it. The game’s warm reception also brought up the inevitable side effect of competitors trying to poach the talented team. Thus, Naughty Dog proposed creating a second team in order to release more games using their engine and Sony agreed instantly. It also opened up new promotional opportunities for talented staffers and helped keep the headhunters at bay.

The thumbs-up from Sony meant the brain storming process could begin, and one of the first ideas was to return to Naughty Dog’s PlayStation 2 duo. “We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking ‘When’s the next Jak and Daxter?’ says Wells. “I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively.”

Naughty Dog wanted to find a way to apply elements from Uncharted 2’s award-winning game design to Jak and Daxter. The team experimented with implementing Uncharted-style narrative techniques and rendering Jak and Daxter in the same realistic style seen in the company’s gorgeous PS3 games. According to Wells, the new project would be a departure from slapstick, comic book-tone of previous games. But before full-blown work could begin on the game Naughty Dog would have to create new, more realistic versions of the titular heroes.

“We dug around trying to find the core of Jak and Daxter,” says creative director for The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann. “Who are the characters? We had to reboot it essentially. Every time we got excited about an idea we’d take a step back and look at it and be like ‘It’s not Jak and Daxter, are we just slapping the name on it for marketing reasons?’”

The lighthearted Daxter proved to make the transition from wacky hijinks to a more grounded experience particularly difficult.

“There’s a lot of baggage that comes with Daxter,” says The Last of Us director Bruce Straley. “If he’s not lighthearted and slapsticky and fun then he’s not Daxter to the fans. We were thinking what if he’s mute? What if he’s this? We had all these ideas that made Daxter interesting, but then we’re still trying to be creative within that box of ‘I have this rodent on my shoulder.’”

“It started feeling like a compromise,” says Druckmann. “The more we tried to make Jak and Daxter like we wanted to, it didn’t feel like things were matching up. We have folders and folders filled with scrapped ideas.”

Naughty Dog opened up a select few of these folders to offer us a glimpse of early concept art for the abandoned Jak and Daxter reboot. We saw a much more humanoid version of Jak, lacking pointy ears but retaining similar clothes, features, green facial hair, and fit physique. His signature yellow locks remained, however, with sketches showing it off in everything from dreadlocks to messy spikes.

Early examples of Daxter’s transformation were more extreme. We saw an orange, goggled, ferret-like animal with expressionless eyes perched upon Jak’s shoulder. Several additional sketches highlighted Daxter’s beastly qualities, in accordance with the attempt to reboot the series with slightly more realism. Daxter’s expressive facial expressions and big eyes returned in other pieces of concept art, but the non-cartoony look still made the critter difficult to recognize.

Things just weren’t clicking into place.

“All the ideas just started to feel like they were going so far away from what made Jak and Daxter Jak and Daxter,” says Wells. “Even though we wanted to give fans another Jak and Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted, and that we would end up either limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice.”

Shelving the Jak and Daxter ideas meant the team could begin work on a fresh idea. Shedding the restrictions of an existing IP allowed directors Druckmann and Straley to let their creative juices flow and explore whatever they wished. One day Straley arrived at work having watched an interesting episode of BBC’s Planet Earth. He enthusiastically told Druckmann about the disturbing yet beautiful footage of a fungus that would effectively turn colonies of ants into zombies. Enthused, the two talented creators would mold their inspiration into the team’s new project, The Last of Us.

Fans shouldn’t see Naughty Dog’s halted attempt at a Jak and Daxter reboot as an omen that the series will never return, however. There is still hope.

“Never say never,” warns Wells. “It could happen. Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy but right now we’ve got [The Last of Us] that we’re definitely going to be supporting. I guess there’s a possibility that the Uncharted team could move on to Jak and Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen, because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.”

[Twigg4075]

I can't stand the insane LB jumps either, but the zones on the game are so bad they have to make up for that somehow. With the ability to left-stick the pass wherever you want it, no zone coverage can work without the super-leaps (and, they still don't work for the most part).

A few years ago they really helped the pass coverage because the defenders would disrupt the routes by getting that shoving animation. This really helped the wide-open seams because the WR would get shoved, and you couldn't throw to him for a few seconds. By the time he was recovered, the safety was actually in position.

I think that in '10, after the last patch in December. That's gone now, defenders let the receivers run their routes without interference and you can abuse the little seams in the zone again.

Completing deep passes is easy. Throw the ball sooner and put a little lead on it with the left stick (against man coverage. Against zones.... just left stick the pass into the open space). It'll take a few games to get the feeling, but once you do it's pretty easy. Or, the easiest way is to get a tall WR, throw the back shoulder, and turn it into a jump-ball.

It wouldn't be as bad if they just swatted the ball down most of the time but they almost always pick it off.

Maybe it's just me but I can't tell you how many times I've had a receiver open and my QB will either put tons of unneeded loft on the ball to allow a defender to swoop in for a pick, or like I said before he'll throw way behind or way ahead of the receiver. I know Cutler is far from the most accurate passer in the NFL but the shit he does in that game are ridiculous.

[IamMedellin]

Report: Jaffe leaves Eat Sleep Play, layoffs hit developer

Eat Sleep Play, which will shortly ship Twisted Metal, has reportedly laid off eight employees. The Salt Lake City Tribune also reports that co-founder David Jaffe is also out and is expected to pursue "casual games." Jaffe responded to the "rumor" of him making casual games after Twisted Metal as "highly exaggerated."

Eat Sleep Play now has a staff of 26 and will transition to iPhone and iPad development. "It's a platform that is in our pockets almost 24/7. It's kind of the size and types of games we're playing," said other co-founder Scott Campbell to the Salt Lake Trib. "You can certainly reach a lot more people. That's pretty exciting for us."

Campbell confirmed Jaffe's departure and said that the company and Jaffe are "going down two separate paths." Twisted Metal is Eat Sleep Play's second project, following the dissapointing reception and sales of Calling all Cars. We've contacted Jaffe for clarification of his current status.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/07/report-jaffe-leaves-eat-sleep-play-layoffs-hit-developer/