To be perfectly honest I understand the reasoning behind flat-packed furniture for people who buy from the stores, but I ordered all of this new furniture from the catalogue and it was home delivery... there doesn't even seem to be an option anymore of whether or not you'd like your item to be assembled beforehand for an extra fee. It's like furniture manufacturers have become too lazy to even do it for more money.

And it's not that it's the hardest thing in the world to do, even though you can guarantee you'll always have a few problems with the assembly, it's that when you buy a lot of furniture in one go, as I have done with my bedroom, you need to put in a lot of time and effort to get it all set up. Over £2,000 has been spent for new furniture in this bedroom and it feels like a bit of a swizz that I have to make a lot more effort than just handing over my card details.

What?! You don't like the excitement and thrills of Sea Bass fishing?!

I chortled at your description of people playing Wii huddled around the TV shaking the WiiMote furiously like bumbling idiots, because that's exactly what it looks like to me when I see people playing Wii. I call the gaming system "Wii-Wii"...as in "I have to go Wee-Wee," because I think it is piss-awful, especially when it is advertised as a way to keep kids healthy because Wii "makes them move." To me it looks like Wii is just trying to teach a whole new generation the grand skill of making tiny tots suffer from Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Of course, my disdain for Wii may come from the fact that I appear to lack the "gaming" chip from my brain. I was satisfied enough with Pong when I played it centuries ago, when it first came out, but since then I have never felt the urge to play any video game.

*My* big gaming gripe is with these "Rock Band" games where you are supposed to buy all these fake instruments and fake-play other people's music...and the whole game costs about as much as a real electric guitar!!! GAA! A solid wall of some gaming store in my area is filled with boxes of "Rock Band" games. Meanwhile, a real music store not far away scrabbles for existence.

P.S. I agree with you about the dangers of doors. I once got my thumb broken by a big heavy door.

^^ Thats actually my main problem with criticism of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Rhythm based games have been around for a long time and it seems to me like as soon as the concept is applied to a game with controllers like the Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitars people start to make comparisons to a REAL guitar. I can't count the amount of times i've heard someone say "Guitar HERO?! Why dont you just get a real guitar?"

The answers simple really, i didnt want one, i wanted a game. If there actually are people out there that see those games as some form of a substitute for a real guitar then fair enough, thats kinda sad.

Also, i never bought a Wii for kind of similar reasons as mentioned above. If i could have used the classic controllers on more games, i may have been tempted. The Wii remotes and the Wii in general can be fun for a get together but i have a feeling i would never play on it if i was by myself.

I suppose my view is based on my feeling that playing instruments *is* a game, and I feel Rock Band is not as fun of a game (and it is a pretty expensive big jumble of plastic stuff). Maybe I just don't like traditional games that are intended to be games. I don't like card games, board games, sports, etc. I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps the overt competition doesn't appeal to me? I just know I don't find them interesting and if there were suddenly no "games" on earth I would not miss them. My idea of evening torture is sitting down to play a board game, although I can force myself to do it for a child. Although bop-it is fun. I"ll keep bop-it. :)

I feel like the Wii is a novelty, and Nintendo knows it.. I've pretty much completely stopped playing wii due to the fact that I'm blind in one eye and have half vision in the other thus I can't be close to the screen because of this new technology.
I wish i could just sit down with a traditional controler in front of m t.v. and just chill out.
Oh wait, I have an xbox.

I played Guitar Hero III yesterday, fun stuff, and I think the criticism of it is stupid. I hate all these metalhead douchebags who constantly whine "Why don't you just get a real guitar?".

Because I suck at guitar and always will, video games is about escapism, assh*les. Obviously Guitar Hero is not meant to be a substitute for the real thing, it's just a game and anyone who thinks they can play a real guitar because they beat Guitar Hero is clearly an idiot. It's just a simple (but hella addictive) rhythm game that anyone can pick up and have fun playing. Stop looking at it like it's some serious threat to real guitar players. :laughing:

I don't think better graphics and DVD add ons is what the industry needs, it needs to take a step back and remember the age old philosophy of KISS. Keep it simple stupid.

And guess which console best lives up to that? I'll give you time to think about it.

I think they knew damn well that they were gonna piss off the "hardcore" gamers by going for the casual market, and I can at least understand why people are mad about that. But when people say Nintendo are selling out their fans, well that's stupid. They're not alienating anyone, they're just expanding their horizons a bit.

However Nintendo has always been the "family" game company, their targets has always been the kiddies and their attempts to appeal to casual gamers goes way back to the days of Tetris and Duck Hunt.

Nintendo are the easy target because now the gaming community consists of 20 somethings and so Sony and Microsoft like to pick on Nintendo and call them the "little kid's choice". Well, Sega did the exact same thing, so have a lot of companies who failed at the console market. Nintendo didn't need a "mature" image back then and they don't need one now.

The "casual" gaming community is not to be underestimated, they're here to stay and people need to get used to it.

While I agree that the Wii is suffering from quality control issues (which is ultimately what undid the Atari 2600) I do think there are are some very excellent games and not just the obvious ones, you just have to look harder. Yes aside from Sega and Capcom the third party support is very nonexistant.

But Nintendo has had this problem since the N64, a console that is now considered a classic even though I can't think of any good non-Nintendo published games for it off the top of my head, except for Turok, Rayman 2, Harvest Moon 64, Resident Evil 2 and a fantastic library of sports and racing games.

So since then Nintendo has relied solely on their first party games to wow gamers, and their current success is built on those games alone, with help from only a few third party games. That's pretty damn impressive that they have managed to do that for over a decade now and comes to show that not everybody cares how big a console's library is. I'd rather have a few masterpieces than thousands of games that are just rentals at best.

Casual gamers can't afford to buy games every goddamn week like the spoiled rich brats who make up the modern community of gamers, so they don't have very large libraries of games anyway. I'm like that as well. I favor quality over quantity, and I don't really care if I could fit all of the Wii's great games into a dresser drawer, I consider that enough.


Well then, that's Segas fault (and your fault for still buying their games), not Nintendos fault.

"Hey Sega still makes shite games, curse you Nintendo". Seriously you think it's Nintendo's job to get Sega to stop making bad games? Nintendo is just a video game company dude, they're not miracle workers. :laughing:

To be fair to Sega though, Madworld looks awesome, and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games looks like a fun multiplayer game.

Again this is nothing new. Weird and whacky peripherals have been part of the industry since day one. NES had a LOT of them, so did the Genesis. And this is not a trend that just the Wii continues to adopt, the PS3 and 360 are just as guilty. In fact 360 is now going into the motion capture biz as well, so to say Nintendo are no longer relevant to their competitors is obviously wrong.

You don't need to do that with the Wii either, there's still a handful of quality games that are compatable with the GC conroller if the wiimote is not your style. Mario Kart and Brawl for example. Some people actually do like that white piece of plastic (like me) however so it's nice that Nintendo gives options.

Well I do agree that single player games don't seem to be as important anymore and that is very sad, not everybody has friends to play with all the time.

But one thing I love about the Wii is how many of it's multiplayer games encourage REAL social gameplay. As opposed to the other consoles which is just...

ONLINE ONLINE ONLINE!

But I guess that's something for people who don't have any real friends.

Oh, boo boo, boo boo...I hate to whine, but...

why don't you just get a real guitar?!

I do understand the desire for escapism, though. Hey, that's why I'm on MB! Sometimes you can find yourself by escaping. <--My deep thought for the day.

Seriously, though, I wonder how many kids (or 20-somethings) might play more instruments (or play instruments more often) if they weren't hooked up to a Wii or Guitar Hero III. Guitar Hero may just be a serious threat to real guitar players and the future of music!!! When you wake up in 2030 and find all music is dead, you'll know what happened. And then you'll headbutt everything because you'll realize I was right. Say, who made you think you suck at guitar and always will?

I have a real guitar.

But if I want to play Sunshine of Your Love without sounding like someone trying to start up a lawnmower. I have to play Guitar Hero.

I thought a lot of guitar playing these days *sounds* rather like a lawnmower starting up. I should think your "Sunshine" song would sound just dandy, boo boo.

glad someone else appreciated saxondale, brilliant,

Anyway, just for laughs, here's a video I found of Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian sucking ass at Guitar Hero 2, he can't even play his own song, on easy. :laughing:



Proof that Guitar Hero is not meant to be a musician's game, it's just a game.

Well, Scott Ian *did* say near the end, when he was botching the solo, that he's a rhythm guitar player, implying *that's* why he was having problems (in that section, at least).

Changing topics, here's something that happened to *me* recently that makes me want to headbutt something, if not everything. I volunteer at an elementary school, and after helping kids read a book about different animals who enjoy jumping, my instructions were to ask the kids to summarize what the book meant. One child said, "It's about animals who like to jump, because that is how God made them."

I cringed inwardly, hoping that whoever is instructing this child at home isn't also teaching the child that the reason giraffes have long necks is that they stretch them to reach leaves.

Couldnt agree more. You know the only difference between Guitar Hero/Rock Band and any other rhythm game is that these games came with controllers styled as a guitar rather than the old school standard controllers? The premise is the same.

The price may be a little much admittedly, and expanding from just the guitar to guitar, bass, drums and mic MAY be taking it a little too far (?) but its just for fun at the end of the day.

EDIT: And i dont have Rock band or the FULL Guitar Hero by the way, i just have GH2 and GH3 with one lone guitar controller but if i could actually afford ALL of the gear and decided to buy it, it would still be for shits and giggles rather than thinking i could actually play of the real instruments.

Guitar Hero is fun on single player but Rock Band is purely a multiplayer game, if you have nobody to play it with you might as well stick to guitar hero.

I do think both are way overpriced for video games.

I understand that casual gamers are a much larger portion of the market these days than they ever have been, and that Nintendo are catering to that. I haven't got a problem with them doing such a thing, because at the end of the day it gives them more money to put out more quality games.

But that's the thing. It seems to me that there is a lack of quality games. The biggest title that Nintendo has released in a loooooooooooong time is Wii Sports Resort, which says a lot doesn't it really?

Plus, this whole range of 'new control' games, that are basically just rehashes of old Gamecube games, is a bit of a slap in the face. Give us a NEW game, rather than a half-arsed re-release of a Gamecube title.

I also heard through the grapevine that at this years E3, aside from announcing Super Mario Galaxy 1.5 (why?) and the New Super Mario Bros (which I am genuinely excited about) their only other major announcement was some sort of unnecessary sensor system.

I just can't be bothered to see any more games involving throwing frisbees at dogs when there hasn't been a new Legend of Zelda game since the GC.

Exactly. Sony and Microsoft get the job done by appealing to the mature crowd, I have nothing against that, they're just continuing the marketing strategy that Sega started way back in the Genesis days.

Nintendo have always been the exact opposite, some think their conservative approach is a bad thing, I don't. It makes them distinctive and it's what has always set them apart from their competition. Nintendo have tried to capitalise on fads in the past and failed horribly (cashing in on the virtual reality fad with Virtual Boy), since then it's best that they start the trends rather then follow them.

Meh, I disagree. Of the first party games for the Wii. Galaxy, Brawl, TP, Mario Kart, MP3, Super Paper Mario and Punch Out have all been crowd pleasers. Capcom and Ubisoft has put out some quality games on the system as well, even Sega has put out a few good games among their usual crap.

Anyone who won't at least admit those first party titles are all good games is probably not a Nintendo fan to begin with, and their opinions are as meaningful to me as my opinions are to PS3 fans.

I would like to see them devote more time to new games yes. And they are, Nintendo don't put out as many first party titles as Sony does, but that's because they take their time. They delayed Brawl so many times it was ridiculous, sure it pissed us off, but we knew that in the end they didn't want to release an unfinished product, and they didn't.

Also there's still some new Wii games to get excited about. Super Mario Galaxy 2 being the main one, more than one Mario platformer on a Nintendo console is quite a rarity and a pleasant surprise. There's also New Super Mario Bros Wii, Sin and Punishment 2, Pikmin 2, the new Metroid by Team Ninja, a new Kirby game, and even a new Zelda game.

That's right, we're getting another Zelda for the Wii, SUCK ON THAT. :ar_15s:

Super Mario Galaxy 1.5? Ok that's just stupid.

It's a full fledged sequel, so far we don't know much about it, but from the video I've seen there's tons of new gameplay mechanics and powerups and the new environments look like an absolute blast to play. Seriously how can you not be excited about it?

NintendoFE3 2009î•ñ | o“Wƒ^ƒCƒgƒ‹ | Super Mario Galaxy 2

*orgasm*

Uh, you're wrong. Phantom Hourglass on the DS, and there's another Zelda game for that system coming this December, called Spirit Tracks. And like I said another Zelda for the Wii is on the way.

Nintendo are not neglecting their franchises by any means, it's just that Mario and Zelda isn't like Sonic or Madden NFL, they're not putting out a rushed, incomplete game every millisecond, they actually take their time polishing their games, and the fans are rewarded for their patience.

I would still rather stick to Air Guitar personally :D You can throw shapes without worrying whether you have missed a few chords.

Onto the redundant 'guitar hero over real guitars' debate. If a group of kids are not going to acknowledge the difference between pressing buttons on a piece of plastic and plucking strings on an actual instrument, then are these really the sorts of kids that you'd want buying guitars and starting bands in the first place?

Music games are different from actual music. I'd be impressed if a kid could perfect 'Through The Fire and Flames' on the hardest difficulty setting, but I wouldn't buy his album.

So yeah, Guitar Hero is the reason why there aren't more bands like Nickelback, apparently.

And that, my friends, is why Guitar Hero is the greatest game ever. If it means less kids making crappy music of their own, than those folks at Harmonix deserve all the praise they get.

I just want to decapitate any person that says "stop playing this, get a real guitar".

Hey kids, stop playing Call of Duty, become a real soldier, stop playing Punch Out, become a real boxer, stop playing Grand Theft Auto, become a real car hijacker.

I don't even want to know what word of advice you'd have for kids that play Kirby.

:laughing:

booboo seems to have taken over this thread. We knew it would happen eventually; it's a rant thread ;)

i think yous are looking wayyyyy too into this guitar hero thing. i have guitar hero and rockband, rockband gathers dust as i dont often have enough space for it when a large amount of friends come round. also, guitar heros just a game, its NOT going to stop musicians from being musicians, thats a silly prediction to make, thats like sayin dancemats will take over, and stop real dancers from being dancers. or that karaoke will take over from real singers. silly. its a game, just like call of duty, assasins creed, or any other normal modern game.

edit:
my point, exactly.

Meh... I just think Guitar Hero sucks.
That fact has absolutely nothing to do with some kind of purist musician attitude. The game is just boring to me.

It's anything but boring.

I'm not really good at it, I can play it on easy but even normal is too much for me because it requires 4 buttons which is hard either when you're trying to do it with just 3 fingers or when you try to use your pinky.

And pinkys are stubborn assh*les.

Hehe you should try expert.

I've somehow gotten really good at guitar/bass on that game, but I'm only average at drumming and my singing is awful. It is in real life too.

Too bad that you find it boring freebase, it's a great game to play with friends

Stupid people...piss.me.off

:banghead: :banghead:




:banghead:

:banghead:

Yea I can't really help it.
I don't think I'm a deviant for finding Guitar Hero boring.
I'm perfectly fine with not wanting to play it. No loss for me, really.

I could understand criticizing it's gameplay for being too simplistic, though IMO that's what is so brilliant about it.

I certainly wouldn't say it's boring, when you're really into it, trying to get all those notes in time makes for some pretty suspenseful gameplay, especially when playing a really fast song, it can get really intense.

i like your style :)

Simplistic in what sense? I'm not saying you're wrong but i'm not sure what you mean by this?

On easier settings then yeah, its simplistic in the sense that even the fastest songs have 80% of notes missed out to make it easy to pass. However one of the things that pisses a few of my mates off about Guitar Hero/Rock Band is on the harder settings there is always a few songs that they can play on a guitar that they cant get past on GH. They claim they make some notes up to make it harder which may be true i guess but i think they only say that because they cant do it.

i agree i find it highly entertaining wither im myself or wither im with friends, youv got to love it. im okay, i play on medium, and pretty good at it. i should play on hard but i cant quite grasp the moving my hand down the neck of the guitar. murder :(.

i never got that part either. that pisses me off also as a friend of mines is a drummer for a band and he cant get past a few songs hes excellent at on real drums, its pretty frustrating that way. :(

I don't mean it's simplistic as in easy.

I'm just talking about the core gameplay elements, it's a pretty basic rhythm game, like dance dance revolution but with fingers.

I agree with you on a lot of stuff you said, but at least DDR has the physical element, you know?

I haven't played a DDR game to be fair, but I gotta give props to Konami, watching some people try to beat that thing is hilarious.

I know some people who used to be really good, it's an amazing way to exercise.

is this DDR just like dancemats? ive never heard of it. :(

I'm not really sure what I think of this.
I think that everyone should know about the perils, but it's your choice if you want to smoke.
I know why people smoke, I know many reasons, but I don't think people really realize what smoking does to them until something happens to someone close to them, or them personally.