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Japanese Gamers, Retailers, Developers Sum Up 2003
Thanks to Game Science for their news story compiling the results of an end-of-year survey in Japanese videogame magazine Famitsu. Among the intriguing results: the most popular game of 2003 for readers was Namco's GameCube RPG Tales Of Symphonia, with another GC title, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, coming in second, and Square's Final Fantasy X-2 for PS2 was voted the most disappointing title of the year. Elsewhere, game developers and shops voted Western-developed Grand Theft Auto III the game that "sold better than your expectations", and Square Enix's Final Fantasy XII is the most-awaited Japanese title of 2004 among developers, retailers, and gamers, with that company's Dragon Quest VIII firmly ensconced in second place. Finally, as an aside, the Game Science site has collected a neat conglomeration of Happy New Year postcards from Japanese game developers.
Will of warrior triumphs again!
But I thought Gamecube was dead? At least, if you read helf the articles that seem to get posted on games.slashdot, that's probably what you'd believe.
So, they award the latest Final Fantasy game the title "most disappointing this year" and still regard the next one as their most anticipated game? Kind of odd, really. But then, Eidos want to make another Tomb Raider game too, so its not exactly unique thinking.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
for those of you interesting in a Tales of Symphonia trailer without having to sign up for gamespot one can be seen here:e sofsymp honia.html
http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_tal
- Joe
The only thing is misses? RPGs.
You may have forgotten a little title by Bioware called Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It won game of the year at Gamespy.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
N00b it's coming to xbox.
There's hardly no real reason to own an Xbox. No other system has the systemlink or online capable games that the Xbox does. No other system features such a handy storage medium for its save games (the HD) which also adds a whole bunch of possibilities that are being used -- like in PGR2, being able to record your replays without even thinking about buynig a new memory card.
In addition to all live titles (Mech Assault, PGR2) and great driving titles (PGR2), the Xbox has a great deal of great Sega games. Toe Jam and Earl, Shenmue 2, Panzer Dragoon, Gunvalkyrie, etc. Best of all, the Xbox is very technically advanced. My copy of Fatal Frame for the Xbox doesn't suffer from the horrible slow loads that the PS2 version does, nor did my copy of Silent Hill 2.
It's also the only console that lets me DDR online.
The only time there's no reason to own a console is right at a console's lauch, because rarely are there are launch titles worth playing -- plus it usually takes a few months (or years, in the PS2's case) to get a good library of games to make it worth owning the system. There are plenty of system link, online, Sega, and other games on the Xbox that make it the (on of) the ones to have if you're serious about video gaming.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
as a person who railed against the idea of a final fantasy sequel, i must now admit that i enjoy this game. i've been playing it non-stop for a few weeks, and it's better than you would think. perhaps not as serious as previous outings, but what's wrong with having a sense of humor?
Music lovers are not criminals.
I was confused for a moment when I saw that FFX-2 was rated Most Disappointing Game of 2003. I mean, most Americans know better than to have high expectations for a game that has a commercial with its main characters (all in ridiculous outfits) singing J-Pop in a concert, but the Japanese actually like that stuff.
That said, from what I've heard from friends who have played it, its gameplay actually sounds pretty interesting. A CRPG-style quest system would make a nice change from the usual FF model, and the quasi-real-time battles are a huge leap forward in my mind.
Rob
the "Tales of" series has always been just as popular in Japan as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Tales of Symphonia was the first 3D game in the series, but it still stays true to the 2D movement battle system. It's no surprise that the latest title in such a popular series, which delivers plenty of new content while retaining the basic elements of the series, gets the most praise by consumers.
However, since there are far more DQ and FF games than "Tales of..." games, this fact usually gets overlooked by gamers from other regions. Most gamers wouldn't know what the Tales of series is or who makes it.
It is too bad the sales in Japan don't benefit Nintendo of America, thus not really changing the fact that Cube sales in America are still not as good as NOA would like.
my xbox isn't dead. Xboxes won't be dead as long as people port operating systems to it
linux
win CE
??*BSD??
I would say *nix, but somehow I don't see SGI, IBM, HP, Sun, SATAN(formerly known as SCO group)(formerly known as Caldera Systems)(formerly known as Caldera), and any major unix vendors I might have missed
(plus I added SCO into major since they "own anything and everything" that conforms to IEEE 1003.1