No no no. Re-review Lair AFTER reading the new manual

I'm pretty sure that's not the case though. IIRC Lair is rendered at 1920x1080...hence the PR cries of "1080P!"

The final frame's resolution is 1920*1080p, but through this multisample buffer trick, they're only shading half as many pixels, which boosts performance considerably. Especially because they have to render a lot of small distant objects and creatures, which is far from optimal for the GPU as it's rendering 2x2 blocks of pixels at once.

The general look of direct feed screenshots supports this explanation, they do have a typical undersampled look.
 
Famitsu gave Lair 33/40

"Sligthly" diffrent approach than european or us reviewers

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Famitsu gave Lair 33/40

"Sligthly" diffrent approach than european or us reviewers

Hah, 82/100. I'm not surprised, I thought that knights and dragons would be to their liking, especially with motion controls, huge environments and other monsters. They love their monsters. ;)

Though I'm intrigued to know if the Japanese/European releases of this game will get one or two fixes, would be interesting if they did as that could mess with the online leaderboards. But maybe the others get a downloadable fix. We'll see.
 
Hah, 82/100. I'm not surprised, I thought that knights and dragons would be to their liking, especially with motion controls, huge environments and other monsters. They love their monsters. ;)

Don't be surprise that this game will still do horribly in Japan. If it's not Japanese developed they won't buy it. Sales numbers here in the US is underwhelming.

I wonder what Factor 5 next project will be. If I recall, they have a contract to do two titles on PS3. The first one bomb of course. :cry:
 
From PSM3. Is that now the official PS3 magazine?

Lair - 54
"Lord of the Rings meets Reign of Fire. And explodes. A massive disappointment"
 
From PSM3. Is that now the official PS3 magazine?

Lair - 54
"Lord of the Rings meets Reign of Fire. And explodes. A massive disappointment"

Since we are bumping this borderline troll thread with Lair info, here is something useful. I thought this review nailed some info that the larger, sloppier review sights seem to gloss over.

http://www.gameplaymonthly.com/reviews/lair.php

Depending on whom you talk to, the game either boasts impressive Sixaxis controls or the game boasts Sixaxis controls and shallow gameplay forged by Satan himself in order to steal the souls of people who play this game. The truth really lies closer to the former than the latter. However, that is not to say that Lair is a game that you can immediately pick up and play. For better or worse, Lair does have a fairly steep learning curve. The air controls are entirely Sixaxis based: you tilt the controller to adjust your altitude and heading. Tilt right, you go right. Tilt left, you go left.

Honestly, it is hard to get used to in the beginning. Playing through the first Prologue mission, I felt completely and utterly lost. This feeling is my best guess as to why Lair has over a dozen Tutorials, a full third of which are dedicated to flight. I believe this is the source of most of the complaints about its control: I, like most other gamers, tend to skip Tutorials when I play games. When I tried to do that with Lair, I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out all the moves I could do on the dragon. After about an hour of running through the Tutorials, I got much better at it, and honestly, the controls work much better than I originally thought.

I cannot possibly emphasize this point enough: play through all of the Tutorials, and ideally, play at least the flight courses more than once. Many people will have trouble with the 180-degree turn, which requires you to jerk the Sixaxis up. In all honesty, it reminds me of the shield bash with the Wii Nunchuk in Twilight Princess: motion-sensing technology is not quite mastered as of yet, but with practice, it is a hurdle you can overcome.

Also, the excellent score is now on iTunes:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/10/02/lair-score-now-on-itunes/
 
True, I started up the tutorial to see if I missed any techniques, and realized late in Chapter 10 that I have done dragon ram wrongly :)

That's why I couldn't do it when I wrote my impression earlier on.
 
Since we are bumping this borderline troll thread with Lair info, here is something useful. I thought this review nailed some info that the larger, sloppier review sights seem to gloss over.

http://www.gameplaymonthly.com/reviews/lair.php
I think this highlights a major concern for developers, and something Wii addresses from the other direction. Designing a game, you also have to consider how it's going to be received. Wii is 'KISS'. LAIR is 'Make it real, man!' and real life = hard to learn = no fun. Imagine if Guitar Hero needed you to have the skills of Hendrix to play the game?! It's successful because it's dummed down the real-life complexity into something that people can live vicariously, with lots of the thrill of success but without any of the hard graft. There has to be a curve that describes complexity and appeal, where with increasing complexity, interest tails off. I know if I have to take too much in, my brain switches off. Molyneux is trying to address this exactly in Fable 2. It's the old gameplay balance, which must be both hard and terrifying if you're wanting to do something new!
 
Huh? That Famitsu score is actually very good!
Did they improve the game for Japan release? Will the Euro release have the missions and control issues solved?
 
True, I started up the tutorial to see if I missed any techniques, and realized late in Chapter 10 that I have done dragon ram wrongly :)

That's why I couldn't do it when I wrote my impression earlier on.

So regarding the Famitsu score then, either Japanese are much better at games than we are, or they really, really like monster games.
 
I have just read the EDGE review and although the control system is roundly critiised so are the gameplay mechanics. 3/10
 
I think this highlights a major concern for developers, and something Wii addresses from the other direction. Designing a game, you also have to consider how it's going to be received. Wii is 'KISS'. LAIR is 'Make it real, man!' and real life = hard to learn = no fun. Imagine if Guitar Hero needed you to have the skills of Hendrix to play the game?! It's successful because it's dummed down the real-life complexity into something that people can live vicariously
speaking as a guitarist who could play some hendrix note-perfect :p (until i got RSI that is 17yrs ago) i looked at some vids of ppl playing guitar hero about 6 months ago (i was interested cause of the hype) man i laughed + said what a bunch of losers, (some u can see have spent like 100hrs learning a song by pushing these 4 buttons!!, perhaps time better spendt actually learning to play the song on guitar, though after 100hrs u maybe able to strum along anyways)
anyways i was wrong, cause the majority of ppl will give up if they dont get instant results, ive seen it time + time again,
"im gonna learn guitar"
(1 week later) me"hows the guitar going"
"fuck that shit"

the lair guys screwed up majorly, perhaps the method of control is superior to a more standard method but it obviously was a to big of jump to make for a lot of ppl to make
a better method would be choose in options standard(default) + advanced(motion sensing)
since ppl dont normally think + just choose whatever theyre given ( :) oxymoron)
they be controlling the dragon with a normal method (with the joystick) and after each level they could enable a new move with the motion sensing (eg a short hint onscreen) eg by tilting the pad u can do a loop-de-loop, so ppl in the next level would experiment with that a few times + get the hang of it, after level 5 or so, they could be controlling the dragon solely with the motion sensing, a lot i think will replay the game anew with the 'better method' cause it makes more sense.

remember developers, the customer is always right even if theyre wrong

personally ive changed ingame control methods cause even though they were logical for me, from testing on others they just 'didnt get it'
 
Well said Zed. They should give more options, or at least use more buttons and less gestures. The game is still perfectly enjoyable, I'm just stuck on mission 12, it's unforgiving.
 
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