However much I really hate always falling back on Sephy as an example of quality villain, sigh, the article is right. The game spends so much time on him that you know him as well as any member of the party, and either he or something tied directly to him is in every single bit of plot that moves the story ahead. He's not just well-written, he's well-integrated. A follow-up article on plot twist villainy such as betrayal and antihero characteristics would be welcomed! I'll disagree with one thing, though... there's something to be said for villain simplicity... to a degree. If someone has seemingly dull and straightforward motives ("I like to kill people!") a game can still be made well around it if the character him/herself is deeper. Like, do we learn how they became that way? What's their MO? Is it actually a handful of otherwise-petty issues that add up to something bigger? Maybe they are just a clinical psychopath, but does the game offer a realistic sense of insanity that drives it? Can we be made to pity them even on something that's so shallow on the surface? I'd argue that 'a Kefka' or similar fits this. Sure, they want to take over the world and kill everyone just for the hell of it and no higher purpose, but man it's way more interesting than it appears on paper. He even hosts the party for dinner at one point to screw with them, and changes apparent motives and objectives several times.

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Article: "For the most part, the developers have kept the changes to a minimum--and with good reason." ...So why is it worth staff time to compare this stuff? If the knowledge in advance is that they're making no notable changes, why the hell would we expect any changes? The games look great. Did, and still do. If something isn't broken, don't fix it. Don't screw with a great formula. Run a comparison article if/when things look sub-par to figure out "where things went wrong", otherwise this mostly looks like an excuse for the staff to bust out some older CoD titles to play one afternoon.

Dear Gamespot: I said it before and I'll say it ever other time-- stop splashing on napalm. Good lord. Especially since we're after the present-going holidays so it's rather moot. Just like EVERY other test in this series, it has alllll the same problems and the idea of a controlled test still escapes editing. Once again, try the following to make it anything close to even comparisons: 720 or 1080p HP with all graphical defaults past HDMI enabled. That's it. Better still, do separate tests with things set or defaulted to either/or. So what if one console can't take it or shows major pitfalls, isn't that worth reporting? If one or both products fail a comparison test, it doesn't just get thrown out. Newest model of each console, more recent OS version. Use -the- same frames for each. Count them, even, out of the raw data grabs. Take the screenshots off splash screens or cutscenes that you can capture start-to-finish to grab the exact correct frames. Ta-da! There, that wasn't hard, was it? Except that it apparently is. We'd all rather see 2 comparisons per game knowing they're as close to 100% even footing as possible and within only a few frames of the other... instead of dozens of comparison shots with "unknowns" on some things and timing upward of a quarter second (at least) off, or 15+ frames.

Re: Ads in NFS: Shift. They are actually -extremely- accurate to the full-time ads on boards around each single track... and pretty well done in their 2009 form, to boot. Having been fortunate enough to do so before on a handful of locations, I giggled endlessly when I saw the Sargento Cheese board across Road America 100% faithfully reproduced and a number of the others there being of far, far more local interest to the state here and would be 110% unknowns nationally or globally. Ads are ads, so of course not exactly welcomed, but trying to be accurate when them? Adds an odd level of character. I still had a meh view of the game, but I can't fault it at all on this angle. On a lighter note, generally thankful for lower prices on all hardware, not because of the pocket cash so much as it means more competition on offering good features and software in the next few years, since that means studios will need to rehire those people that got shown the door. I'm staring hardest at you, EA. More development and competition is always good for the consumer, regardless. Also extreme respect to companies that avoided layoffs; it's things like the success of Demon's Souls to tiny developer Atlus that keep them going and I hope we see more "indie standouts" next year.

Great job with the CoD2 reference, forgetting that for over a decade we've already been bored after a fight and pondering headshotting the civilians for fun. Counterstrike partially became popular at first just from that reason. Can we scold hypothetical games that make a selling point on the protagonist as "good" despite constantly forcing the opposite (GTA)? What about games that justify some particularly nasty things just on their invented religion?. Even worse, It took until the last half of the last page to actually get to "Black&White", and it got 2 lines of text? The mission statement of B&W was for 100% of game events based on your morality! No desperate need to stretch the meanings of things like in this feature. About about some deeper [J]RPG inferences? One game in particular I loved... players were brutally punished with -20hrs of a 60hr game ("the bad ending") if they took they easy way out by taking the easy bait and murdering in revenge at a specific moment. It even led to complaints and a few lower review scores because people didn't know theu weren't getting the latter story. We'll get nowhere until we can make normal choices and SEE really controversial real-world stuff like homosexual romance, and lord forbid we ever be given the option to not accept a mission or next objective if doesn't feel right to us? Seriously. I dare companies to get their games an M-rating for "adult maturity" instead of blood, sex and language.

Hooray for proving that nothing has changed in a year, which is to be expected since the technical capacities of the system were obviously lower then, and until a higher factor Bluray drive comes this is never going to change. The fact that the rate on the slim's HDD is higher hardly means a thing, since it'd take an 8x drive to hit the top of the older models limits. This test is kind of list asking how much another 2GB RAM stick will help your Windows Me box from 2001. I love how they just passively mention only AFTER the tests that it's a 2x Bluray drive with a transfer rate far, far lower that the rates of either drive. If there had been any more than that 0-10sec gap in installs I'd be looking for a new drive. Biggest improvement seen as 11sec on GTA4? That'd still be l about 45 seconds too long to hold my interest. It's not like it's recent news that HDDs can only go so far. Sony systems have never really had cooling problems, and though I'd prefer they stay safe on that angle after the whole RRoD that no company wants to ever see again this round... but even so I'd trust them at 7200rpm the good track record. I even appreciated the grunt work of the PS2 HDD that was shoved in a rather alien environment. So, who will roll the dice on a new console in 3-5 years by slapping on another $100 for a SSD?

As usual, it's basically not fair to put the PC version in to compare. It obviously has a different set of textures with far more detail... the stitching detail is absolutely amazing. What should be asked is if these were the desired textures and they needed to be toned down for consoles, or were they designed 100% separately just to specifically use the higher power of the PC? Has there been an image comparison article where the results weren't exactly the same as this?

The big news is always expected and always comes, but it's more the little details that are released but drowned out by the massive high-end noise that are the best news to come out of E3 and I'm hoping this is as good as it was last year. Titles that were shown but hardly noticed like Valkyria Chronicles, the forgotten bits behind the A+ news, etc.. This year, things like that might be a major update on FFversusXIII which arguably floored people even more than the XIII demo-- yet we have basically zero info on it. Will it make the 360? What of storage space concerns moving forward on the 360? Are we ever going to hear more about Duke Nukem or GranTourismo 5 which we know are being worked on but we haven't heard about in at least a year? Mostly behind the scenes compared to the "big" stuff.

Hotel scene in Persona 3. It's the sort of wow-I-can't-believe-this-happened-in-a-game sort of thing and something anyone who has played it will never forget. Where else do you have to verbally argue with yourself about NOT getting some action to continue? Better still, the FES epilogue chapter of Persona 3 is basically a 30-hour walking obituary and jealousy contest. All the players involved are loved characters from the main storyline and women you (probably) all dated, so as the story pushes ahead the level of tension is outstanding. Better still is that it's all open to interpretation-- the game never presents a "best" love situation and you are free to follow your own path. Moreover, the entire social link system in Persona 3/4 is a great trial of possible (and likely) heartbreak, sometimes leaning on a single thing you could say. The games actually makes you THINK about what you should be saying to the people-- hence the game title. Special mention for bathhouse and strip club chapters of P4. Actually, special mention as well to the female characters in both games that are obviously meant to be stereotypical as hell, are, yet make for great content anyway. I rambled on substantially, but given the really minor-grade level of some of the stuff above (...cake?)... a series with actually legit writing that tears at your emotions should get some attention.