Took advantage of that Target promo and picked up UMK 3 and Worms. I don't really get Worms yet, I guess it's a turn-based strategy game but I'm totally lost so far and the tutorial isn't helping. Anyway, both games for $10 isn't bad I suppose. UMK 3 feels really dated, though.

Impressions on Rocketmen are not sounding good.

The premise and some of the ideas are truly awesome, so hopefully it's just more Halo/Lost kids crying about spending an epic, massive $10 on a game that's just too "old school" in premise for them to grasp. Although the developer's only other credited title is a basketball game, so.. it could go either way. If it sucks, it's going to have me questioning all the work Capcom is farming out to American developers nowadays, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Street Fighter II HD, etc.

I'll definitely be checking out the demo, at least. The videos I've seen have been really boring, but maybe actually playing it will be better.

Halo/Lost kids? Where'd the Lost come from?

Rocketman looks like Robotron/Smash TV in 3D, that should be great... but stranger screwups have happened. It does, however, look a little sluggish...

Check your friends list lately?

I actually don't have a problem with Halo being popular, but that generation certainly doesn't seem to even begin to understand more arcade-styled games and they (because they're usually younger) usually tend to shoot them off as being shit (or gay, in their words) instead of just something different from what they play.

Dude, it's Robotron/Smash TV with an RPG leveling system.

That should be instant win. They have to try to screw that up.

Most of the folks on my friends list are pretty much limited to CoD4 and GH/RB... with Rez popping up from time to time (Don't have the full DVDTalk list on there ).

Yeah it should be an instant slam dunk, but the generic look (understandable due to budget constraints, but really they look like lego pieces.. individual ones.) and somewhat slower pace (if that is what it is, I'm going off of a video) could hamper it a bit. Gonna DL the demo when I get home.

I'll definitely be trying out the demo of Rocketman when I get home tonight.

And it has a chocolate hottie with green pigtails. Three times the win.



Plus four player co-op.

Again.. how the hell do they screw this brilliance up?

I got a good eMail from my friend just now.

This isn't the first time Capcom screwed up a Smash TV game, ie: Cannon Spike.

Hmm, what is so "screwed up" about it? I played the demo and thought it was a fairly fun game. I might even buy it.

I don't know, I'm going off of word from other forums so far. I want to try it myself as I think it could be fun, especially co-op. Reviews have been bad too but reviewers are shit for XBLA titles so those are basically irrelevant, but the gamers themselves are lamenting it, which I trust a bit more than some rere slapping a number on it for his big corporation.

I'm glad to hear some positives though.

I do hate a few things about it, like how when you collect a weapon it has a time limit for use instead of an ammo limit.

Hmm.. that's exactly how Smash TV handled power-ups.

Buncha SHUMPs heading to XBLA!

I posted about it in the main thread since these are looking like retail releases.

I kinda hated the demo. The character controls like shit. Slow and lumbering is not ideal for a two stick shooter. It would be one thing if no one else had ever tried a similar game, but considering (just off the top of my head) you have better, more responsive shooters available for download in Geometry Wars, Assault Heros, Mutant Storm Reloaded, Mutant Storm Empire, Undertow, Robotron, Smash TV and (on the PSN) Super Stardust HD. This one really left me unimpressed with the gameplay. Looks pretty nice, though.

I too was unimpressed by the Rocketmen demo. Sure, it's an XBLA game, but that's no excuse for all the sloppiness. The cutscenes are awful, the graphics aren't very good, and worst of all, the gameplay just isn't fun. Like Decker said, there's no shortage of good two-stick shooters right now, so I don't know why anyone would go for this over those.

Rocketmen is a great game ruined by an incompetent developer. The visual style is fantastic, it has a create a character function (sort of), a highly customizable equipment and statistic system but ultimately it has broken ass gameplay. First of all, whose boneheaded idea was it to give this style of game cutscenes.. and LOTS of them? Secondly, in a shooting game you should be able to DODGE things. This game compensates for lack of actual run-and-gun gameplay by having health packs after each wave of enemies. Oh and of course the screen moves automatically and your character animates like a first-week 3D modeling student project. It's just sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

It's a bummer, because the ideas promised to bring a lot to the table.

ATTENTION:
Bionic Commando Rearmed
Commando 3
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD
Talisman

You've all been placed on the warning list. Rocketmen has done nothing but happily reinforce my views on American development houses and I'm not too keen on Capcom farming out so many potentially awesome projects to you hacks.

Nothing wrong with American development houses, but budget American development houses? Yeah, definite problem there.

Overall, I haven't been too impressed with a majority of the XBLA "original" releases, this is just another notch in that belt (though this is also on PSN, or at least coming soon, so yeah, thoroughly crappy).

Rocketman is definitely subpar, it controls worse than some of the SNES-era games of the same style.

A lot of big budgets houses have the same issues I have problem with. American developers work visually. Their priority is to make the game LOOK like it's supposed to. Japanese developers work functionally. Their priority is to make the game FEEL like it's supposed to. Obviously, this is not all across the board for either side but in general it is pretty damn consistent, regardless which style of game you actually like to play.

I'm going to have to disagree with the "regardless which style of game you actually like to play" aspect. It's obvious you have a hard-on for Japanese games, and in many cases they're better than their American-made counterparts. But I think it's more genre oriented than you give it credit for. America is more of a PC Gaming development shop and dominates in genres that essentially originated on PCs (RTS, Computer RPGs (I include Oblivion into this), First and Third Person free-roaming shooters), of course if you're considering America as the Northern continent and not just the US, we're getting even better (Ubi Montreal and Bioware are responsible for some of my favorite recent games). The Japanese gaming companies have arcade-style gaming down pat (as their slew of Shumups and Fighters easily prove) as well as numerous other genres that originated/built up the console gaming world. Personally, I think a lot of Japanese developers are getting to be too reliant on a few tried and true tricks, and it's getting kind of stale. I was never a big fan of the "quirky titles" that try to be different, and succeed to an extent, but aren't particularly interesting as games themselves (Cooking Mama, Katamari Damacy and Mr. Mosquito come to mind), and have sort of fallen out with RPGs as of late.

That said, if good ol' Rocketman looked more like a sane Touhou game with more RPG elements while controlling more like Geometry Wars (Well, Smash TV, but with more of a sensation that somethings happening... kind of feels like bullets are falling out of the guns right now, if you know what I mean), well that'd kick ass.

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Okay so it sums up the industry as a whole, but you get the idea.

Not a lot of people like chess