Former Nintendo Boss Talks GameCube, PSP

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a GamerFeed article translating an interview with former Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamauchi about the state of gaming. The legendary Yamauchi is customarily dismissive about Sony's attempts to get into handheld gaming with the PSP ("I don't think [Sony] understand the game business... but software for both machines will be much different, and it would be a mistake to consider them in direct competition."), and also offers a different perspective on slipping GameCube sales ("Sales of GameCube software fell short in North America and Europe last year, and I believe that's due to the popularity of violent games on other consoles. The culture of Japan is much different and less accepting of such titles. Our target market is the entire world, so it's very difficult to develop software that appeals to everyone.")

Comments

NES production to stop this year?

[PyroMosh]

Question: The Famicom (NES) recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, your thoughts?

Yamauchi-san: Fortunately, many people have the chance to enjoy it. It became impossible to procure a fixed number of parts to continue manufacturing the console, so production will stop this year.

Huh? Are they saying that the origional 8-bit NES / Famicom is STILL IN PRODUCTION? Or at least that it was until this year? Where? And can the top-loader still be had?

Re:NES production to stop this year?

[PainKilleR-CE]

Sad how everything has to be a fad like the computer just because the newer machines can show more of Lara Croft's pixels.

Actually, the NES had to be a fad like everything else because most of us couldn't play games on our NES consoles without 10 minutes of cleaning cartridges and aligning them just right in the old front-load systems we bought 15 years ago. I've never seen an original NES system that didn't start having problems loading games after a few years, and most of us couldn't justify buying a 'new' NES console after buying 2 or 3 other consoles.

Misleading summary

[Westley]

The /. summary of this article is very misleading. It says:

<quote>
The legendary Yamauchi is customarily dismissive about Sony's attempts to get into handheld gaming with the PSP ("I don't think [Sony] understand the game business... but software for both machines will be much different, and it would be a mistake to consider them in direct competition."),
<quote>

Actually, Yamauchi isn't dismissive at all, and the [Sony] in the summary is incorrect. It's the *analysts* who don't understand the game business. Here's the actual interview quote:

<quote>
Sony's PSP isn't expected to hit the market until late 2004, and there's still many unknown details about it. There have been analysts who think Nintendo has a monopoly over the handheld market and Sony maybe able to break it - I don't think they understand the game business. New product competition in this industry is important. Although Nintendo's core business is software, having another hardware developer will allow us to judge the superority or inferority of our machine. But software for both machines will be much different, and it would be a mistake to consider them in direct competition.
</quote>

Now, where exactly is he dismissive of Sony? Doesn't he actually accept the possibility that the Nintendo machine will be inferior?

Please use some basic reading comprehension before coming up with summaries like this...

Violence in gaming

[dracol1ch]

The following keeps comming up over and over in discussions about US vs Japanese games.

Sales of GameCube software fell short in North America and Europe last year, and I believe that's due to the popularity of violent games on other consoles. The culture of Japan is much different and less accepting of such titles.

It's a funny juxtoposition but the quick answer is always something about how violent anime is yadda, yadda. I think I finally hit the cultural nail on the head today though when I read this story. It's not the vaunted 'tolerance for violence' that everyone keeps spouting (on both sides). It's simply a cultural preconception. In Japan it's okay for cartoons to be violent but games should be cute. In the US it's okay for games to be violent but cartoons should be cute. Neither country seems (in a general sense) to be able to get over these preconceived concepts.