Nice short film idea... not quite sure what the game is though?

But yeah, I only stuck out the first 3.30 on your recommendation, otherwise it would've stopsville.

I hate the way so many people now complain that Japanese developed games are "too Japanese", it's ridiculous. Now these studios have no choice but to pander to this level of idiocy, it really shows in this trailer, the characters look fucking awful and I have zero interest in this same-old gunfighting rubbish.

I was watching some SICK PN03 vids on Youtube earlier and saw the comments filled with people hating the fact that Vanessa dances. WTF? She's blowing up an entire army of robots by firing lasers from her hands while making it look like a music video - how is that NOT awsum!?!? T_T

If it was a big American man with a gun they wouldn't complain ¬_¬

This is out and happening, and I like the idea of limb based robot destruction with a japanirifc vibe. Anyone got it? It's £25 on amazon and I fancy a pop. The voice control sounds mental.

It's a really good game, and such a shame it's being published by Sega.

It appeared on the shelves without any promotion, it's fucking retarded to launch this game in the same period as Mass Effect 3 and SF X Tekken and not so much as breathe a word about it.

It's a good game, has a solid system and is really well produced. If it was being published by anyone else, it would become a popular franchise.

This is an actual Sega game, so I have to buy it (it's the law). Like you say though releasing it alongside ME3 is mental.

That's all I neede to know. Ordered! (Shame its not on PC?)

I am avoiding Vanquish as per the thread on here, might be a bit dissapointing (although it is a tenner now).

So yeah, the narrative vibe, cover mechanics, squad system and the Nagoshi seems really interesting. The reviews, as much as they are worth, imply the limb destruction and general super slickness come together really well, I really like the idea of the whole limb thing.

Arrrgghhh this hasn't turned up yet so my hype-o-meter has snapped the needle. This is what happens when you order scabpost.

Interested to hear your take on this, I'm still on Mass Effect 3 - nothing is getting played until I'm done! I'm blown away how massive story elements are currently being shaped by my actions in Mass Effect 1, the way they've written this is amazing.

I never got on with Gears of War due to the whole Unreal thing and shoulder pads, so we'll see. It's not a genre I particularly look out for, but Nagoshi and friends means it has to be played. (Although I never really played Yakuza, that was more PS2 prejudice)

Sounds like I better stick to Mass Effect on the PC for maximum freakouts.

OK, so, I played it for an hour or so last night and had it not been a Sega game, I maybe wouldn't have gone much further than the tutorial opening chapter, however its sucked me right in.

The focus of the gameplay IS the voice control of your buddies (of which I only have 1 at the moment). The generic this generation third person shooting is totally fine, the cover, getting into cover all that is totally fine, there is something a bit over sensitive with the aiming I haven't quite worked out, might be a prelude to getting better weapons and feeling the difference. The limb destruction of the enemies is very entertaining, but the pray and spray weapons are making that not as surgical as I'd like at the moment.

It has totally "this comes from Japan" elements such as, slightly wonky but entertaining stereotypical characters, off kilter story telling and a slightly overly complicated premise. Getting back to the game though, you have "shops" everywhere and you get money for the precision of limb destruction and you can upgrade weapons buy health etc and you can find and buy personal upgrades.

There is also a buddy system where in the banter of the game you can respond, to know how to respond you press a button and the responses you actually say into the microphone are listed and the first thing you do in the game is have a banter "Sure!" "I got it" "nope" things like there, there are 79 things it will understand and if you go through the Voice Regonition "is this working" screen it will teach you the word "Fuck!" and tell you if it's recognised it.

In battle you get 4 things to say, "Fire!", "Charge!", "Regroup!" and something else I've forgotten, all this actual talking and responding in the game does genuinely suck you in, and frees up your fingers for actual combat. The way you react to the banter raises or lowers your camaraderie with your buddies and this affects how they respond to your orders in battle.

The design is top notch for the robot enemies, and they vary those pretty quickly compared to the promo shots you see, I've had at least 5 distinct designs attack me in specific patterns so far, and they do come in specific scenario type waves so each encounter feels like a game in itself, i.e. you get a shop first, then wave 1, bit of banter more waves, positioning, but it happens quite naturally. The AI is pretty brutal too, I am playing on the hardest level, and if there is a clump of enemies, 1 or 2 WILL rush you and you WILL be freaked out.

So far so good.

On further play over the weekend, the game forces you to select which people to team with, then might split you up anyways. Having typical fun of voice control, HELP! Sounds like NOPE! To the voice recog, so that's fun, but if you were to be role playing in the melee of battle thats kinda excusable.

The combat itself is getting a little tiresome, the wave scenarios are ok, but I'm not super into it, more so than when you are shooting people though, the limb exposions and exposing elements of the robots is good, my tactic is to take the head off at least one of the enemies, then that robot will attack the others and they will return fire giving you enough time to take the head off another one, which is slightly more fun than the usual gruntfest.

There is a whole perks thing I haven't really worked out and the upgrade paths for the weapons is totally generic, the menus are basically the same as Virtua Tennis 4, so thats a fun juxtoposition. Generally though the premise is quite entertaining and they keep kicking it up a notch in the narrative stakes. It's doesn't have anything going for it mechanically though, nothing really hooking me other than its totaly competence.

Scheduled for PC in April, typical. Almost worth holding off, the game might look uber in 1080p with the neo futuristic white stuff and all that jazz (it will be cheaper too).

That's the version I'm waiting for. I was going to go for the 360 version, then Sega made the PC announcement. Should be available on Steam for a reasonable price.

Be interesting to see if the voice recog is any better, with the more processing cycles it might do a better job. Based on the intro logos its a bought in thing, but I've think they've got too confident with the amount of phrases that might be useable when players are in the thick of it.

Does the voice recog work without Kinect? Perhaps they're using the Kinect APIs to do it. Actually no this is Sega in-house, so it'll be some sort of proprietary technology.

Sega never include anything remotely useful in their PC releases.

I noticed that the PC version of Sonic Generations supports 3D, and was looking forward to seeing how it looks. But instead of supporting NVidia 3D Vision which just about everyone with a 3D PC setup is using, they instead only support side by side 3D which only a select few HDTVs support. It's absolutely useless.

Hmm, I thought that the layout didn't matter and that was all handled somewhere in the stack, i.e. you tell it (the driver, controller, whatever) that it's getting a side by side input and the card composits appropriately?

3D really is a broken mess of different shit isn't it.

Voice recog is using the headset, nothing to do with Kinect fortunately, I've removed that white elephant from the top of my TV months ago. So its like Android voice control or whatever. This would make it easier to work cross platform naturally. I think the issue is if I have the phat bass up it talks to my team without me, so you can see the ear icon appear on their status this, and essentially its goofing because the game isn't taking itself out of the equation. Now there is a tuning option, but I guess you'd have to do that each time or retain a certain level of sameness in the ambient noise stakes to ensure it works consistently, which is quite alot to ask for a slackster doofus like me.

I have no idea man - I've tried all sorts to try and get it to work with the NVidia setup but it's a no-go. If you allow the NVidia driver to do its thing by itself, objects are placed at random depths and it's very difficult to look at.

The PS3 surprisingly handles things very nicely. I just picked up one of the new Panasonic Viera plasmas and tried Wipeout HD with the bundled glasses. It's easily on par with the NVidia setup, very little cross-talk even at high brightness settings. The thing that lets it down is the HDMI standard, it is not possible to display 120fps (60fps for each eye) over HDMI as the bitrate is too low. The best you can get is 60fps (30 for each eye). The next batch of consoles will need to support dual-link DVI or similar if the-powers-that-be are still serious about pushing 3D.

- and you STILL can't buy 3D Avatar on Blu Ray!

Here we go, its these guys:

http://www.speechfxinc.com/

And they've done plenty of games:

http://www.speechfxinc.com/video-games.html

Including EndWar which relied on voice stuff and was equally sort of maybe sketchy.