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Nintendo's Reggielution Continues Apace
Gorf writes "Nintendo's now famous Reggie Fils-Aime had a presentation at the Ziff Davis Games Summit where he discussed the upcoming Nintendo DS. The full transcript is available on Ziff Davis' games web site 1UP.com." Reggie's immortal first lines? "Hello, my name is Reggie...and I'm addicted to my Blackberry. In fact, to me it's a 'Crackberry.'" 1UP is also running a related story indicating "Nintendo's DS handheld will likely see release in North America before Thanksgiving weekend, according to several sources at the [same] summit", though it's argued: "Less confidence is evident when it comes to Nintendo's ability to deliver a fleshed-out software lineup at that point, however."
This is interesting, but I seriously can't help feeling that the guy comes across as frankly hysterical. I know marketing guys are supposed to be enthusiastic, but he sounds like a parody of himself at times. Some of what he says is undoubtedly true; the section about the PSX and the Eye-Toy certainly sums up what happened pretty well, although personally I feel that the PSX was doomed from the start by Sony's rather erratic level of committment to it. However, a lot of the other stuff he said strikes me as unadulterated rubbish. I mean, I'm really, really glad that he told me Mario 64 invented 3d graphics. In my own foolish little way, I'd believed that my PC had been doing them in one form or another for years before the N64 even existed (and frequently far better than the N64 did them).
Also, if innovation or quality or whatever all stems from the controller, I'd love to know why the Gamecube has far and away the nastiest of the controllers for the current generation consoles (well... if we count the S-controller as the X-box controller, rather than the original 2-tonne beast). A malformed right analogue stick, awkwardly placed and erratically sized buttons and a button shortage that makes a lot of cross-platform titles unfeasible has added *sooooo* much to my gaming experience. He has a point about the 4 controllers thing; the lack of that on the PS2 is a serious flaw, next to the X-box and the Cube. To say that Nintendo has cornered the market on interface innovation is an outright lie, though. I've been seeing innovative controllers on the PC since time immemorial (ranging from my old Thrustmaster F-16 to a bizarre turtle-device which lets you control games by tilting the shell) and of the recent console-based controller innovations (dance-mats, eye-toy, pop'n boards), none of the most notable have come from Nintendo.
Moving onto games, I'm slightly curious as to why he spends so long talking about the Game Gear, given how long-dead the thing is. I'm pretty sure that the real causes of its decline and death were its size and price (both of the unit and of the games), which made it implausible as a hand-held console. As to the type of games people play on a handheld console, I think this is a little more complex than he makes out. Sure, quick-blast games have a market on consoles, but I think that more serious efforts can also work. Hell, Nintendo's biggest success in the handheld market of recent years has been Pokemon, which is essentially a Final Fantasy game with some of the cutscenes stripped out. Not really the kind of thing which works for a quick blast, but the actual core Pokemon games (as opposed to Stadium etc) are only available on a handheld console.
Which brings me onto this issue of "transportability". I think he's drawing exactly the wrong lessons here. Ports have, in the past, had a pretty poor track-record. Largely, this was because they either tried to move an arcade game where the gameplay wasn't fun and the attraction was the technology onto a home platform (eg. Afterburner) or else the ports to many platforms were done in a hurry and were deeply flawed compared to the original game (eg. Street Fighter 2). These days, ports and cross-platform titles work much better; Grand Theft Auto 3/VC was ported off its original platforms onto the X-Box in a manner that actually improved on the original (sharper graphics, custom soundtracks). Resident Evil survived its transition to the Gamecube pretty well. Of course, Nintendo's attitude here has often been a bit odd. I do wonder whether the story of the N64's unsuccessful struggle for dominance against the PS1 would have turned out differently had Nintendo actually made a proper Pokemon game for the thing. With the Dual-Screen, they're actually making it much harder for them to go cross-platform on any of the games which use the touch-screen, as equivalents don't exist on other platforms.
The upcoming DS vs PSP battle is going to be interesting. Nintendo are clearly more worried than they have been by any of their previous r
Actually, Mario64 was a pioneer in 3D graphics. The 3D games on the PC that came before it either had a) bitmaps for enemies (like doom) or like 2 or 3 enemies at once (quake) and I can't think of one that had wide open areas like Mario64 did (it was quite a feat, really) and M64 still had pretty damn smooth graphics. Oh, and it was definantly a pioneer for console graphics, it was definantly the best game as far as graphics go for either that PS1 or N64 for a long time, and remained in the top 10 for a long time. .....
On the rest of your stuff, yeah, it is a story, and it's really nice to read something good coming out of the Big N's mouth.