So has Microsoft lost the battle for the living room? Hardly. With a few exceptions, the PlayStation 3 fell to third place. Over the course of the year, we saw the Wii own the market while the Xbox 360 held a respectable second-place position. And although one month's numbers don't tell the whole story, it's a representative look at 2008. The Xbox 360 sold 836,000 units that month, compared to the PS3's 378,000. In November alone, the Wii sold 2 million units, double its numbers for same month last year. Add Galaga Legions, Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Portal: Still Alive to that lineup, and 2008 begins to look very good indeed.Īlthough both Sony and Microsoft like to act like Nintendo isn't a direct competitor, the truth is that the Wii, for the third year in a row, has completely dominated the broader videogame landscape. The Behemoth finally delivered Castle Crashers, follow-up to the developer's popular game Alien Hominid, and indie dev Jonathan Blow gave us Braid, an innovative and absorbing puzzle game that took everyone by surprise. Even Xbox Live Arcade had a blazing hot year, most of it shoehorned into the month of August. Major multiplatform games like Fallout 3, Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour and Prince of Persia round out 2008's impressive list. Rockstar's epic immigrant tale Grand Theft Auto IV kicked things off in the spring, and the hits just kept on coming, many of them Xbox 360 exclusives - Ninja Gaiden II, Fable II and Gears of War 2 to name a few. And fortunately, 2008 was a blockbuster year for games on the 360. That's all well and good, but without great games none of that matters. When the NPD Group releases its monthly report on the state of the videogame industry, Redmond is quick to respond with its own facts and figures, citing attach rates, Xbox Live subscriber numbers, and even peripheral sales to bolster its claims of living room supremacy. State of the Platform Microsoft has an arsenal of ways to define its success in the videogame space. Ryan Geddes | Blog Associate Editor Joined IGN: July 07 08 Event: Tokyo Game Show Nate Ahearn | Blog Editor Joined IGN: May 07 08 Event: Kept it real More interesting modes like Pacifism (where you have to survive without shooting a single enemy) or King Classic (where you can only fire a weapon inside protected zones that quickly disappear) do appear eventually, but it takes a bit too long.Hilary Goldstein | Blog Editor-in-Chief Joined IGN: October 01 08 Event: Failed presidential campaignĮrik Brudvig | Blog Executive Editor Joined IGN: May 05 08 Event: Breakfast sandwiches Many missions follow too-similar setups, either requiring a high score, a strict time limit, or a limited number of lives. The lack of game type variety hurts most in Adventure mode, where the early portions are poorly paced and repetitive. I can perpetually chase friends’ scores on the leaderboard, but it’s a bit of a one-trick pony. However, after a while, the focus on pure score challenges starts to wear itself thin. The inclusion of classic modes like Deadline, King, Evolved, Pacifism, and Waves provides a great reason to revisit Geometry Wars on new-gen platforms. That’s not terribly damning, because chaining together enemy kills to build up a combo multipliers is simple enough, and it fits the arcade nostalgia this series is known for. However, a majority of the challenges are focused around simply racking up high scores. Winning these battles is a fun exclamation point for a campaign that leans on repetition. Each one has a unique bag of tricks to both fool and evade you, like having you chase an exposed weak spot while the the boss’ core spawns more enemies on the other side of the map. Boss battles add a bigger, more intelligent target to the chase down. The different enemies are easy enough to discern in the early, low-activity phase of a run, but tracking these colorful foes in the middle of shootouts is very challenging when dozens of them flood the screen at once. This variety of opposition sets up tense moments that make Dimensions a fast-paced and challenging game to play solo or in co-op. A school of green cubes never felt quite this menacing in a game before, but the way they bob and weave around bullets still gives me nightmares. Blue diamonds slowly drift toward you while purple pinwheels float off into empty space without a care in the world. Enemies come in all shapes and sizes in Geometry Wars games, and each one has a distinct personality.
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