Excuse #150 on why Lair turned out shit: Ghosts did it

[demi]

And excuses #151 - 155 as well

"I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted," said Eggebrecht. The setbacks started in May 2005, when the PS3 had its first big unveiling at Sony's E3 press conference. Eggebrecht says the Factor 5 team put together the game's first trailer and delivered it just in time to make it in the show, but the trailer was dark to begin with and the frames had an even darker black-level than Sony expected.

"They showed the material at the last minute to [former Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken] Kutaragi-san, who didn't see a thing and bounced us off the [PS3's demo] reel," he said. "That's why the first tech-trailer was shown at the PlayStation meeting a few months later. That was the start of one catastrophe after the other -- deaths in the family at the worst time [and] sudden surgeries for key members, which bounced the technology off-track. And just in general, every single time there was a crucial delivery, something bizarre went wrong -- all the way to power outages when writing the master disks."

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3162563

[FatalT]

LOL LAIR

[Mr. Gundam]

The dude needs to give it up. The game sucks. I think we should come up with ideas as to what they were doing instead of working on the game.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

good thing there are never any unexpected issues at my game development company. smooth sailing, exactly according to plan, each and every time

[The Sceneman]

what games did you make Patel? You can trust us. WERE YOUR FRIENDS

[Howard Alan Treesong]

bad jrpgs

[demi]

what games did you make Patel? You can trust us. WERE YOUR FRIENDS

Guild Wars

[demi]

Just kidding, he made Indigo Prophecy.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

what games did you make Patel? You can trust us. WERE YOUR FRIENDS

Guild Wars

that's a bad WRPG

if they show my JRPG rap sheet on TV they have to mosaic it

[demi]

Ragnarok Online 2 isn't that bad.

[TVC15]

abrader, you gotta give up defending this turd.  Even the company's big cheese knows the game is a piece of shit.

[tiesto]

Xenosaga?

[demi]

Xenosaga?

Atelier Iris

There, I said it. Sorry, Patel.

[Saint Cornelius]

Rumor going 'round that Patel is working on a WRPG

[TVC15]

Patel was a lead on Two Worlds.

[hyp]

 

damn that's bad when there's no developer spin to it.  "we admit, our game is crap."

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Xenosaga?

:*

[huckleberry]

Kinda feel sorry for the guy.

I would hate to have to go out in public and lie my ass off for my job.


....LAIR fucking really sucks though.  I can't believe I even thought this was going to be a good game

[Rman]

Julian seems like a classy guy and it kinda sucks that his game is garnering such a terrible reception.  I have not played Lair so I can't make any judgment; those who have agree that its not a quality product.  It seems weird since their Star Wars games were critical successes.

[brawndolicious]

yeah but most reviews say it's a great looking and sounding game (just like rogue squadron!) and that it has a good story but it's forced motion controls don't work well enough.

[Ichirou]

what games did you make Patel? You can trust us. WERE YOUR FRIENDS

Guild Wars

that's a bad WRPG

if they show my JRPG rap sheet on TV they have to mosaic it

Did you put the Fs in Final Fantasy?

[TVC15]

yeah but most reviews say it's a great looking and sounding game (just like rogue squadron!) and that it has a good story but it's forced motion controls don't work well enough.

It's a great sounding game, but to even come close to selling Lair as looking good, you'd have to attach a ton of caveats to your statement.

[brawndolicious]

TECHNOLOGICALLY!

[Smooth Groove]

Julian on egm's podcast said that mainstream gamers fare much better with the motion controls than the hardcore gamers, which sounds like bullshit.  Hardcore gamers are hardcore for a reason.  A hardcore gamer would pretty much own a mainstream gamer at any game with any control scheme.  The hardcore gamer might not enjoy it but there's no way that he'll be worse at it. 

[MrAngryFace]

latest from PA on lair lol:

Playing Lair is horrifying, like having a talking cyst erupt out of your genitals. Now that the rhetoric phase is over, we can discuss the relationship between Metroid: Corruption and Lair with the necessary gravity.
Both games are meant to be emblematic of their respective hardware, delivering something that isn't possible elsewhere. Corruption delivers on the best shooting this side of a mouse and keyboard, utilizing a combination of precision pointing and visceral, endlessly iterated motion controls - this is its entire purpose. Lair's task is similar, but it's serving two masters. Well, three masters: it's trying to be a graphical powerhouse, and showcase for motion controls, and do the bidding of Bal-Shurub, King of Liars. Feel free to excise the last one, but those first two taken together constitute a "rock" situated in close proximity to a "hard place."

No person familiar with the medium is going to mistake the new Metroid for a Next Generation Title, at least graphically. It has strong design chops, and it's executed well, but its first task is to deliver an immaculate framerate. Smooth performance and immersive motion controls have a relationship to one another. I said in a previous post that when these novel input methods fail, it's infuriating - but that's not really complete. It's breaking the simulation, so that the experience is less real, deprecated with each failure of interpretation. Running at sixty frames cements the world and your place in it, so that even when simply looking around the environment, these things are credible. Movement is controlled with the analog nubbin poking out of the nunchuck, and generously interpreted gestures augment and elevate traditional gameplay.

It's certainly a lot of fun to tease Lair, and it's a service for which there is a great appetite in the community. During our own play, game performance was not such that our input was dependable - And beyond those controls, there was almost no game to speak of. As I say above, I don't know that this is even their fault. But it's ridiculous the extent to which Retro has done more, with less.