Topic: Team [404 - Team Name Not Found] Deliberation Station

@Jaz007 Looks great! I’ll keep my eyes open — Supposedly we get first dibs this week. I’m off and on the site this afternoon when work allows.

I hope I get this right. I’ll be making our selection soon.
I’m going to go for games that I actually recognize.

@Th3solution Good job mate. You may wanna @Ralizah on the main thread so he can do his teams selection tomorrow. From now on anything less than stellar will be classed as a Sols sloppy seconds lol.

@Jaz007 @themcnoisy @RogerRoger @Frigate

Ok team, if I picked poorly, I apologize, but here it is:

Turok Propaganda Games
Twisted Metal Eat Sleep Play
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Capcom
Ultra Street Fighter IV Capcom / Dimps
Unreal Tournament 3 Epic Games
Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom Sony Online Entertainment
Valkyria Chronicles Sega WOW
Virtua Tennis 3 Sega-AM3
Virtua Tennis 4 Sega-AM3
Virtua Tennis 2009 Sumo Digital
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Relic Entertainment
Warhawk Incognito Entertainment / SCE Santa Monica Studio
Warriors Orochi 3 Omega Force
Watch Dogs Ubisoft Montreal
Way of the Samurai 3 Acquire
Way of the Samurai 4 Acquire
WET Artificial Mind and Movement
White Knight Chronicles Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
White Knight Chronicles II Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
Wonderbook: Book of Spells SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Walking With Dinosaurs SCE
Worms Collection Team17
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Raven Software
X-Men: Destiny Activision
XCOM: Enemy Unknown Firaxis Games
XCOM: Enemy Within Firaxis Games
Yakuza 3 Team CS1
Yakuza 4 CS1 Team
Yakuza 5 CS1 Team
Yakuza: Dead Souls Sega
You Don't Know Jack Jellyvision Games
Zone of the Enders: HD Collection Kojima Productions

@Th3solution I only own one game that could've potentially been in this week's final list; Vanquish, a.k.a. the one brought forward and ranked by another team during Random Week.

D'oh!

In other words, I'm great with your selection. Standing by to research any unclaimed titles.

@Th3solution great thank you Sol. I have played 6 at a glance!

Initial impressions

Turok Propaganda Games
Twisted Metal Eat Sleep Play
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Capcom

Ultra Street Fighter IV Capcom / Dimps - Important

This is the complete version of Street Fighter 4, however going along with team micros selection last round super was the version which cemented its legacy, so I will place it at important.

Unreal Tournament 3 Epic Games - Existing

Personally I would rate it at 9/10, however with our criteria it was a product of years gone by - didn't push many boundaries and had been overtaken by the cods and gears of the time.

Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom Sony Online Entertainment

Valkyria Chronicles Sega Wow - Very Important

Virtua Tennis 3 Sega-AM3
Virtua Tennis 4 Sega-AM3
Virtua Tennis 2009 Sumo Digital
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Relic Entertainment

Warhawk Incognito Entertainment / SCE Santa Monica Studio - Important

Multiplayer only, unfortunately a sign of things to come. It was great at what it did and a precursor of sorts to the likes of overwatch and rocket league.

Warriors Orochi 3 Omega Force
Watch Dogs Ubisoft Montreal
Way of the Samurai 3 Acquire
Way of the Samurai 4 Acquire
WET Artificial Mind and Movement
White Knight Chronicles Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
White Knight Chronicles II Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
Wonderbook: Book of Spells SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Walking With Dinosaurs SCE
Worms Collection Team17
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Raven Software
X-Men: Destiny Activision

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Firaxis Games - Very Important

The best strategy game last gen bar arguably civ 4.

XCOM: Enemy Within Firaxis Games - Important

The expansion to arguably the best strategy game last gen.

Yakuza 3 Team CS1
Yakuza 4 CS1 Team
Yakuza 5 CS1 Team
Yakuza: Dead Souls Sega

You Don't Know Jack Jellyvision Games - Important

Zone of the Enders: HD Collection Kojima Productions

So I have only played two games on the list, despite my choosing them all.

Valkyria Chronicles -
This is probably one of my favorite PS3 games. Most probably know how beautifully rendered it is, and the addictive and unique turn based gameplay which melds action and a puzzle-type chess match gameplay in its combat. The game garnered several sequels which fell relatively flat (mostly due to limited release) until VC4 last year recaptured the magic (I still need to play it though). Besides, if I don’t give it a Very Important rating then @Ralizah will scorn me forever.

You Don’t Know Jack -
This game is witty, clever, and uniquely enjoyable in small groups. Metacritic 83, A gameshow type quiz game, it was not the first of its kind, but by bringing this game to consoles it really sent the genre to the next level. Other copycats followed and this was the quiz game that seemed to influence them all. I think it lacks a little bit in the technical achievement and artistic merit department, but I’d call it Important due to its name recognition and influence on games like “Knowledge is Power” and Playlink titles such as “That’s You!”

—+—+—

Many of the other games on the list I haven’t played but I chose them because they seemed popular enough that hopefully our team played some of them, or they were games I’m actually interested in researching.
For example, I started researching the Yakuza games, but I’ll post my final thoughts later.
I also chose the Wonderbook games because I thought those would be an easy ‘Pointless’ since the accessory died such a quick and celebrated death, but upon researching the specific games, they actually look pretty good and were well received. Do we punish a game just because the peripheral didn’t catch on? I’m still trying to decide. So more on that later too.

Good boy.

Also worth noting that Valkyria Chronicles has inspired other games as well: most notably, the excellent but commercially flaccid 3DS game Code Name: S.T.E.A.M., developed by Intelligent Systems, of Paper Mario, Fire Emblem, and Advance Wars fame.

By the way, you do ABSOLUTELY need to play VC4. It actually fixes my biggest issue with the first Valkyria Chronicles by ditching Side Stories that you need to purchase with in-game currency and that only concern the core group of characters in favor of Squad Stories, which you unlock by using various characters in battle, which actually help to characterize the numerous people in your squad, and which encourages the player to constantly cycle through their available soldiers in order to unlock new stories. It's a very cool, vaguely Fire Emblem-esque system that made me feel like every single character in the expansive cast of VC4 was valuable in some way.

Two of Sega's very best games.

@Ralizah Lol, I would have gone with “Very, Very, Ultra Important” if I could have. Especially considering it has a lineage outside of the direct sequels. We’ll have to settle for “Very Important” though.

And yes, I really need to play VC4. Waiting on a price drop, but it isn’t dropping much. I may just have to go for it.

@Th3solution You must live outside of the U.S. The game bombed so hard here that, within a couple of months, the freaking special edition with all the goodies dropped to $30 on Amazon for a few weeks, and the standard editions have gone as low as $20.

Prices have gone back up again since then, however.

I bought it digitally on Switch at launch, and I'm quite happy with my purchase. The Switch version, as far as I can tell, is almost identical to the PS4 version, aside from some very light drops in framerate during hairy segments and slightly lessened foliage in the environments.

Secondary opinions taking Sols and Ralis opinion into account and a couple of other games I have played.

Turok Propaganda Games
Twisted Metal Eat Sleep Play
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Capcom

Ultra Street Fighter IV Capcom / Dimps - Important

Unreal Tournament 3 Epic Games - Existing

Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom Sony Online Entertainment - Not Important

Valkyria Chronicles Sega Wow - Very Important

Virtua Tennis 3 Sega-AM3
Virtua Tennis 4 Sega-AM3
Virtua Tennis 2009 Sumo Digital
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Relic Entertainment

Warhawk Incognito Entertainment / SCE Santa Monica Studio - Important

Warriors Orochi 3 Omega Force - Very Important*

Watch Dogs Ubisoft Montreal - Important

Way of the Samurai 3 Acquire
Way of the Samurai 4 Acquire
WET Artificial Mind and Movement
White Knight Chronicles Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
White Knight Chronicles II Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
Wonderbook: Book of Spells SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Walking With Dinosaurs SCE
Worms Collection Team17
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Raven Software
X-Men: Destiny Activision

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Firaxis Games - Very Important

XCOM: Enemy Within Firaxis Games - Important

Yakuza 3 Team CS1
Yakuza 4 CS1 Team
Yakuza 5 CS1 Team
Yakuza: Dead Souls Sega

You Don't Know Jack Jellyvision Games - Important

Zone of the Enders: HD Collection Kojima Productions - Not Important**

*Warriors Orochi 3 was everything good about musuo games, 100 characters, brilliant levels and so many different moves. It was also after this point that the quality fell off a cliff bar arguably One piece pirate warriors and the zelda spin off. Out of all the games Orochi 3 and Gundam Warriors 3 are the best in the long running series of games.

**Zone of the enders HD collection is obviously a good game. However fans of the ps2 game have mentioned a poor port of ZotE 2 with a flagging frame rate. It's a high not important.

I have played one of the above Virtua Tennis games and have a strong opinion on the Yakuza games having researched them in anticipation for the Western release of 3,4 and 5 on ps4. I will leave my scores at that though unless they remain unscored towards the end of the week.

@Ralizah No, I’m here in the States, but I must have missed the early price drops because it seems like it’s always around $40-50 at best when I check and with all these great PSN sales it never seems to be included. I’m sure it’s well worth $40, but when a game is over a year old I expect the price will drop soon and I hate it when I buy and then a few weeks later it’s 10 bucks cheaper. That’s happened to me many times. Or usually the games over a year old would frequently go on PSN sales, but for some reason this one hasn’t.
It does seems a great fit for the Switch, if I ever get one.

@themcnoisy Yeah, I will post about my feelings on Yakuza later on and we can deliberate as I’m having trouble categorizing them and need a little more time to research. Just when I think I know which of the three games seems to be the strongest and most important, I see another review out there that changes my mind. Maybe @Frigate has played all of them and will have a good first hand comparison. The short of it is they all are really good games. Sammy’s reviews on the site are all high. 8-9/10 for each except Dead Souls.

@Th3solution I'll @ you the next time the prime plummets, them. Despite not buying many sale items, I do track sales for Switch/PS4 games almost religiously.

Glad to see Valkyria Chronicles is getting the love it deserves. I think it's a strong contender for best game on the PS3.

I would suggest XCOM: Enemy Within deserves very important as it really transforms the game and makes it considerably more entertaining the the vanilla game.

I had some trouble with ranking the Yakuza games. They all are so well received, have a strong following in the East and West, and have high Metacritic scores. After reading several reviews, much of the differentiation comes down to personal taste. I’m putting my thoughts, but I welcome anyone who has a dissenting or agreeing opinion to chime in.

Yakuza 3 -
Credit here as the first Yakuza game on PS3, it sold like hot cakes, especially in Japan. Known for its very strong story, as all the Yakuzas are, the gameplay was pretty standard and carried over from the PS2 gen but refined. Yet, it being an early PS3 game it is clunky in its animations. However for the time, it accomplished a lot and seems to have been the smashing success that the series needed to propel it into the PS3 gen. So, as far as influence, this game should get high marks, technical achievement is probably average and artistic merit above average. Personal opinion would be very high, basing on Sammy’s 9/10 review and the fact the only game that outsold it in Japan that year was FF13. — All together I would put that as Important

Yakuza 4 -
This game seemed to be more of the same, which can be seen as good or bad. The game was noted to have the series’s characteristic very strong narrative which includes great characters, plot twists, and engrossing storylines. In fact, the character and plot development were said to be without equal for that time (2011). The addition of three other unique playable characters helped to strengthen the story and vary the gameplay. At the end of the day though, as Sammy’s yet again 9/10 review states in the tag line “In the five years since the Yakuza series launched on PlayStation 2, the series has changed very little.” So where the story and artistic merit seems stronger than its predecessor, the lack of innovation pulls it down, despite it being a fan favorite. Another Important ranking is what it seems to me.

Yakuza 5 -
Released around the end of the PS3 lifecycle, this entry really ramped up things graphically and was noted to push the PS3 to its limits. Reviews comment on the facial models as some of the best on the whole PS3 era (Uncharteds and TLoU included) and that the game “looks better than some of the next gen releases” when comparing to the PS4 games that were starting to come out at the time in 2015. The fantastic narrative, multitude of mini games and addictive combat are all still here. The writing continues to be noted as excellent and even called “masterful” with inclusion of five main characters and tons of content. More than one reviewer gave it high praise such as “incomparable” and “one of the best games of the generation.” The Game Scouts went so far as to say that Yakuza 5 is “right next to The Witcher 3 as a Game of the Year candidate.”
Well, if Yakuza 5 can be mentioned in the same breath as Witcher 3 (a game commonly referred to as the best rpg of all time) then I have no choice but to assign it as Very Important — Despite Sammy only giving it a measly 8/10... I think he was burned out on Yakuza games by then. 😉
His concerns about it being ‘more of the same’ is legitimate, but this seems to be the most refined version of the series on the PS3.

It has been hard to assign importance because by my research the most polished and overall best game is 5, the most innovative and fan pleasing is 4, and the most ground breaking and influential is 3.
I’m going based on the 4 categories @themcnoisy established at the beginning, so influence, technical achievement, artistic merit, and personal opinion, and so that’s how I ended up splitting hairs for these 3 fantastic sounding games.

Oh, and I neglected the forgotten step-child:
Yakuza: Dead Souls -
This actually came out between Yakuza 4 and Yakuza 5. It’s a spin-off that introduced zombies and exchanged the fisticuffs of the series combat for bad sounding shooting. The dialog and characters are still of the quality expected in a Yakuza experience, but the gameplay sounds unrefined and a bit archaic. Mediocre reviews reflect this opinion, although it is far from a bad game. It seems that it would only really be appreciated by big fans of the series.
Existing.

Results updated again

Turok Propaganda Games
Twisted Metal Eat Sleep Play

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Capcom - Important

Ultra Street Fighter IV Capcom / Dimps - Important

Unreal Tournament 3 Epic Games - Existing

Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom Sony Online Entertainment - Not Important

Valkyria Chronicles Sega Wow - Very Important

Virtua Tennis 3 Sega-AM3 - Existing

Virtua Tennis 4 Sega-AM3 - Not Important

Virtua Tennis 2009 Sumo Digital
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Relic Entertainment

Warhawk Incognito Entertainment / SCE Santa Monica Studio - Important

Warriors Orochi 3 Omega Force - Very Important

Watch Dogs Ubisoft Montreal - Important

Way of the Samurai 3 Acquire
Way of the Samurai 4 Acquire
WET Artificial Mind and Movement
White Knight Chronicles Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
White Knight Chronicles II Level-5 / SCE Japan Studio
Wonderbook: Book of Spells SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler SCE Studios London / Supermassive Games
Wonderbook: Walking With Dinosaurs SCE
Worms Collection Team17
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Raven Software
X-Men: Destiny Activision

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Firaxis Games - Very Important

XCOM: Enemy Within Firaxis Games - Important

Yakuza 3 Team CS1 - Important

Yakuza 4 CS1 Team - Important

Yakuza 5 CS1 Team - Very Important

Yakuza: Dead Souls Sega - Existing

You Don't Know Jack Jellyvision Games - Important

Zone of the Enders: HD Collection Kojima Productions - Not Important

Thanks @Th3solution we have gotten off to a solid start. @Jaz007 @RogerRoger @Frigate up to you boys to fill in the blanks.

Oh yeah, and the Wonderbook games ....

Like I said earlier, I selected these to hopefully be easy games to just label ‘Pointless’ and go on. The problem is that the reviews of the actual games are pretty decent.

For the uninitiated, the Wonderbook is one of the great fails of the PS3 era. The augmented reality peripheral for the PS3 and its reveal at E3 2012 has become a punchline for many jokes over the years. The peripheral quickly became a commercial flop.
The reasons for its failure are many. To start with, playing the games required a PS3, PlayStation Eye, a Move controller, the Wonderbook, and the game. It seems just way too many items to play a short niche game. Furthermore, the peripheral and it’s games were very much targeted at children and as an attempt to get into the family friendly sphere of the Nintendo Wii and cater to a thriving casual market — which immediately doomed Wonderbook to fight for a small selected market that was quickly drying up. And although it seemed an interesting innovation, the device wasn’t even the first of its kind - In fact, I read that Nintendo had a similar peripheral first, the THQ uDraw. For whatever reason, the Wonderbook‘s epic crash is well documented, and it seems to have not influenced modern gaming other than to say it may have been the embryonic seeds of the PlayStation VR headset and it’s poor marketing and reliance on niche children games perhaps taught Sony some much needed lessons that helped them not to make the same mistakes with PlayStation VR, which has been much more successful.

As for the games, the inaugural game was Book of Spells, a Harry Potter themed game in which the move controller worked as you wand together with the Wonderbook as the spell book. Later JK Rowling also collaborated on the game Book of Potions (@themcnoisy - this game wasn’t on the list, and I’m not sure if that was an oversight but I’ll rank it also.)
Diggs Nightcrawler was a fairy tale-esque game with a detective spin.
And Walking with Dinosaurs was apparently about ...well, walking with dinosaurs. I think it was a spin-off of a BBC show. (Interestingly, this game was developed by Supermassive Games, who would later go on to make Until Dawn, Hidden Agenda, and the upcoming The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan. Very different types of games, indeed)

Long story short, no matter how well these games reviewed, none of them sold well or influenced game much. Even the technological achievement of the games is questionable since the gimmick had been done before and has not really been done since. So I’ve categorized them as such:

Wonderbook: Book of Spells - Not Important
Wonderbook: Book of Potions - Pointless
Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler - Pointless
Wonderbook: Walking with Dinosaurs - Pointless

As always, I don’t mind feedback if someone feels differently.

@KratosMD Lol, yeah. It’s the same with VR. People all look pretty silly while they are playing.
I must say, that as a Harry Potter fan, I am actually quite curious about Book of Spells and Book of Potions. But I’d be hard pressed to even be able to find the games and the Wonderbook device, eye camera, and move controller available to purchase. Second hand on eBay would probably have options for purchase, but the amount of investment and then gathering up all these items, hooking then up, and all to just experience two games, it’s just madness.