Thumbs are awesome. They’ve been doing our bidding for hundreds, if not millions of years. This editorial will explore the impact of the thumb on the gamers’ lifestyle.
The greatest thing about having thumbs, of course is being able to use input devices such as controllers. The thumb allows the gamer to exert a handy amount of grip onto the surface of the input device.
Additionally, it is able to manipulate buttons and analogue sticks to their desired effect. The thumb is also useful for grabbing common, and delicious Cheetos; or if you prefer, Doritos.
… Sorry, am I boring you? Blame everyone else; it is a REALLY slow week. I mean, seriously, the reviews of The Witcher 2 and LA Noire were predictably around the ninety percentile area, and this years’ COD release wasn’t exactly a surprise. We’re running out of money Activision. Everyone is.
Of course you could always purchase and play LA Noire instead, I heard it’s out now, and said to be really good, although apparently in its current state it may crash your console whenever you try to play it. We’ve already got an article up on that I think, but here’s a more recent update anyway.
According to the internet some older… wait, hang on, let me slap on a title right here…
LA Noire May Cause Older Consoles to Freeze – Rockstar Admits Fault, Publishes Fixes
…There we are.
Yeah, so anyway the freeze/crash problem seems to be affecting some older consoles, both for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. After first blaming Sony’s latest PS3 firmware update for the troubles, Rockstar has acknowledged that it was the fault of their game and have released a list of puzzling workarounds for the consoles, most of which are related to save games, user accounts and the console itself… which is strange, because you’d think this was a software error, not one to do with data storage and console problems.
Here’s the list, if you follow the steps you might be surprised, but if you’re still experiencing difficulties of the freezy nature and these ersatz fixes don’t cut it, contact Rockstar’s support service directly.
- 1. Delete your L.A. Noire Game Data (not save data) from the PS3 Game Data Utility. If on 360, clear the 360 cache.
- 2. Create a new temporary PS3 user to ensure that new save files are created. If on 360, create an offline Silver Gamertag.
- 3. Launch the game and try again. If you are on PS3, try playing while signed out of PSN.
- 4. Check your disc for scratches, dust, dirt, or other damage. Clean if necessary.
- 5. Check other game discs in your PS3/360 to see if issues are occurring in other games, suggesting a potential console problem.
- 6. Try your L.A. Noire disc in a different console or try a different L.A. Noire disc in your console to determine with certainty whether the issue could be with the disc or console, rather than the software.
These fixes seem a tad desperate for an overheating bug, so hopefully Rockstar, who have promised a fix via a patch, will release that fix soonish, because to be honest it doesn’t seem likely that these garage job solutions are going to cut it.
Nintendo, Silicon Nights – App Stores ‘affecting industry in very negative way’
The handheld gaming market is coming of age, let’s face it. Long gone are the days of Game Boy, those endless summer days sat under the biggest patch of shade available to avoid screen glare, the pitch black winter nights huddled beneath the covers with Super Mario Advance…
Enough with the nostalgia now, something must be done.
The guys at Silicon Knights seem to think so too, and their Big Man Denis Dyack is far from amused, accusing the throwaway apps and cheap social plugins of “eroding the handheld market” and “affecting the industry in a very negative way”. To be honest we’ve seen this coming a mile off. If you’ve been to the app store recently you would have noticed the influx of straight up copies, rip-offs, cheap, buggy games and general useless content found there.
Recently Nintendo president Satoru Iwata met split responses when he trashed ‘quantity-obsessed’ social and mobile game developers, mostly questioning the financial viability of the platform and developer method in future years.
Dyack seems to be with Iwata on this issue, pointing out that the app stores are full of crap, literally, and all it’s doing is driving the prices of everything else down and down. “As an example, my understanding is that there are 17,000 fart apps right now. Those are more fart apps than anyone could possibly ever consume. What that does… when you start having performance oversupply, it accelerates the commoditization that drives the value of games down,” he said.
“EEDAR did a talk at a conference where they said the gross average for an iOS game – gross, not net – was $700. I can guarantee you that a company like ours and most people cannot survive on a $700 gross,” he pointed out, additionally stating “it’s not clear if that’s a viable industry”
Continuing, Dyack pointed out that “Looking at that number, it’s frightening, but what it seems to be doing is eroding the handheld market where you’re actually getting really high quality games instead of fart apps. And I’m not saying there aren’t quality games on the iOS, because there are; there are some good games there, but there’s so much performance oversupply and so much commoditization, that it actually is affecting, in my opinion, the industry in a very negative way.”
“And from the perspective of what Iwata-san is saying and what Reggie [Fils-Aime] is saying, I do agree that the industry has to be really careful with that – you’re seeing such a dramatic disruption.”
Well, it seems that fart apps are the root of all the game industry’s problems. You should probably go find whoever’s developing them and um… fart on them or something…