PSP and PS3 games - are they really that bad?

[your mother]

davygee said:

your mother said:

I think so. The point is valid. Toshinden wowed the media back then with its colorful palette and convincing 3D that blew away Virtua Fighter back in the day.

As a result, reviewers were fixated by the looks of the game, rather than the game mechanics, and they all trumpeted the game like it was Jesus' second coming. That lasted until they actually spent more than half-an-hour with the game and realized it was nothing more than monkey poo with a nice candy wrapper.

Well, everyone gobbled up the reviews like it was the gospel, and the rest, as they say, is history. Most game reviewers later said that they completely overrated the game, but the damage was done: SEGA's Saturn was doomed right then and there.

Personally, if there is any one game that I would attribute to the PSX's immediate success and to SEGA's downfall, Toshinden would be it.

A more recent example of media frenzy/manipulation (albeit unwilling, but manipulative nonetheless) would be Black & White - first the press gobbled it up, then realized it was actually a stinker of a game, and many a review was either retracted, or downgraded.

The thing about Toshinden is that it was a defining game of the time.

Toshinden was a demonstration of 3d fighting that was taking it to another level. Virtua Fighter started it off, but Toshinden took the premise to another level. In fact both were rotten in their own rights and didn't play well as fighters and weren't a patch on the traditional fighting games of the time. They were thrust into the limelight because of the 3d alone.

Toshinden was a graphics-defining game during its time that sure enough, took 3D fighting to another level, but gameplay-wise it sucked elephant 'nads.

The original Virtua Fighter utilized the same gameplay mechanics as Virtua Fighter 4 (haven't played 5 yet but I'm willing to wager it has changed little); hence, it has evolved. Graphically it sucked compared to Toshinden (and was slow as molasses to boot) but all the elements of great gameplay were there; as such, it defined 3D fighting gameplay.

Personally, if anything, Toshinden just proves that no matter the candy wrapper, if the game is a steaming pile of horse manure, no amount of graphics embellishing will hide that fact. Virtua Fighter, while being woefully inferior graphically, has become the hard-core 3D fighter's game of choice, showing that gameplay trumps graphics.