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Nintendo, Square - Embarrassing?
Thanks to EvilAvatar for pointing to a recent update at the sadly semi-retired ToastyFrog site, in which Nintendo and Square are added to the list of The 20 Most Embarrassing Game Companies. A gentle roasting is applied to Nintendo for being "..called the gaming equivalent of Walt Disney. Partly because their work is innovative, polished and marketable, but also because a pervasive stench of evil hovers over the company", and a similar treatment is applied to Square, of which ToastyFrog posits: "Which is worse, the company, its fanboys or its ex-fanboys? The world may never know." However, this tongue-in-cheek cynicism produces plenty of good points, most notably Square's Tom Sawyer RPG as a "terrible cultural hiccup."
Nintendo=Walt Disney?
I don't think so.
Nintendo has constant high quality for all of their games. Not only that, there is little that comes across as rushed.
The Walt Disney of game companies? Edios. Enough said.
Hardly a niche Player when the GameCube is #2 worldwide, and of top 100 games in Japan, Nintendo published more than anyone else.
... since there are only about 20 major game publishers left. AFA "embarrassing" my top 3 would be:
1. Lucas Arts - No explanation needed
2. EA - Most guilty of trying to take advantage of their customers by rehashing games, selling bogus expansion packs and of course charging on-line fees.
3. Capcom - A tragedy more than embarrassing, they were once one of the greatest, most innovative game companies in the world, but are now reduced to making fanboy wet-dreams. (Viewtiful Joe being the exception)
3DO and Acclaim are guilty of just making lousy games
Those games rock (FF3 and Chronotrigger). I still play them today on my SNES emulator, and loved them when I was a kid. The story lines are well thought out, and the multiple endings for Chronotrigger was a great idea to get people to keep playing. In fact, I think it's about time I fired SNES9x up again :)
Square may have made alot of mistakes, but what company doesn't? Overall, I think they've done a pretty good job over the years.
"1995 The Super NES, revitalized in sales by Donkey Kong Country, realizes its swan song year, offering a huge variety of top-tier games like Chrono Trigger, Earthbound and Yoshi's Island. No one cares, as Sony launches the PlayStation and new mascot Polygon Man wins the hearts of millions."
Talk about biased writing. I wish there was a better mechanism to control the quality of article submissions- unless... the intention was to create controversy.
The articles for Ninetendo and Sqare-Enix may be toungue and cheek, but I think its more important to look at the entire section as a whole. Too put Capcom, Nintendo and Square-Enix in the same context as 3DO and Acclaim...now that's just wrong. I find 3DO and Acclaim seriously embarassing as a gameplayer. They put out some real steaming piles, and lets not talk about tombstones. I just think its bad journalism in a way, to put those companies in the same context.
He deffinately has a pair for critcizing Capcom, Nintendo and Spuare-Enix in this way, though. I just think he might have had a blood flow problem at the time.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Having owned a myriad of consoles from sega,atari,nintendo,microsoft,sony,amstrad etc I can honestly say that Nintendo have always had cornered a very clear niche part of the market.
They have always had the consoles that have many original, approachable, FUN games, by fun I mean that the games aren't complex, they aren't necessarily easy and they generally have bright, fun graphics and are simple to play - especially for novices (there is almost always a novice in a group of 4 players playing at the same time).
Yet another artifact of (perhaps sony's) marketing department, since there seems to be a lot of anti-xbox and gamecube propoganda (particularly sales based propoganda). Doesn't seem like the war with consoles is based now on game quality, machine performance and the likes, all I ever see are sales figures justifying which console one should by.
Is great. That's why I bought my PS2.