Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Running Itself into the Ground?
ZephyrXero writes "That is the question asked by N-Sider.com in their article "Playing it safe". The article talks of how Nintendo's reliance on tried and true franchises may contribute to their lack of innovation and low sales numbers. Although most have already seen this problem brewing within Nintendo for quite some time, it is also becoming a problem for many other game developers throughout the industry." A nice counter-point to Sticking up for Nintendo from earlier this month.
In other news, DC Comics has realized that it should stop publishing Superman and Batman titles in favor of new characters that nobody has any investment in.
Microsoft has realized that it should discontinue the Office brand in favor of new software that will be more "innovative" than simple word processing.
And McDonalds has decided to discontinue all of its hamburgers, fearing that they haven't created any innovative cuisine in the last 20 years, instead becoming a steakhouse.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Nintendo is a profitable company with billions in the bank (I remember a year or two ago a report that Nintendo has around 8 billion USD in the bank).
Nintendo's problem isn't that they can't make good games. They have completely messed up their entire image. Don't make purple consoles, while I think nothing of it there are a lot of stupid people who didn't buy the console cause it looked 'gay'. Everyone buys the black ones, so when you go to a store and see nothing but purple gamecube's, there's someone who thought about buying one but when looking at the sleek black and green Xbox or the black and blueish PS2, they probably went for it.
Nintendo ALSO needs to suck it up about their "WE know what is best for the gamer" attitude. They have said that, basically, in many interviews over the recent years.
the Political Inquirer
How exactly is releasing a portable game system unlike anything else out there "playing it safe". Especially when compared to the PSP, which is pretty much as "safe" as it gets....
Monstar L
Whine about the resaons why Nintendo isn't the dominant player in the industry gets old. Listen, just because the big N isn't number one in console sales, doesn't mean that they are not a successful company, or that they are on the brink of failure. BMW isn't the number one auto company, but hey seem to be doing all right. Apple might not even hold a candle to the other PC manufacturers, but they service a niche. I love Nintendo, and it doesn't matter if they dominate the market. They meet a particular market need, and they get by just fine. They will proabably never again rule the console roost, but they will continue to be a profitable, successful game company.
Nintendo is one of the few companies out there to consistently pump out quality games across all their platforms. Sure, there is Mario Tennis, Mario Party, Mario Golf, Super Mario DS, etc, but every single one of those games is solid. The same goes with the Metroid and Zelda series. Nintendo doesn't use its franchises as a way to sell bad games. They are instead constantly reinforcing how good the games are that come from their franchises.
This guy brings up some interesting ideas but it's not about innovation and gameplay style that is killing them. I got a DS for Christmas and I challenge anybody to say that thing is not innovative. The problem with Nintendo is for every Eternal Darkness game they make they have 10 Pokemon/Harvest Moon/Talking animal games. Teenagers and adults have the money and the market share for videogames. They are the ones that will save up and plop down 50 bucks for Halo 2, GTA, etc.. Buying a cutesy nintendo game means that 5 year old needs to pester his or her parent for the game. Better said then done. Most parents I talk to are apprehensive to shell out money for their child's game habit. Innovation is not the problem. Disney style games are. /my two cents.
-Dipster
...wasn't this year's Christmas season made up almost entirely of top-notch, blockbuster, super-selling sequels? Judging by what the general video-gaming masses throw their money at, doesn't adherence to the tried-and-true actually make financial sense?
The guy goes on and on about how these franchises aren't attracting new gamers. That's bullocks. The problem is that the GameCube as a whole wound up becoming the Dreamcast of this generation. Not enough AAA-rate games to keep gamers happy: No Burnout 3, no GTA, limited sports support. Simple as that. Metroid Prime got attention, but for many reasons (lack of deathmatch being one), it wasn't the Halo that pulled Microsoft's similarly-shitty XBox release schedule out of the crapper. If Nintendo had gotten their crap together by snagging more third parties earlier, or perhaps by getting Mario Kart DD online, the console wars would've been completely different. As it stands, Nintendo blew the console wars again.
Then again, on the bright side, their profits are pretty damn good. What they lose in licensing, they've made up for by never selling their console for less than a profit and by making more profit for their first-party games. MS and Sony couldn't say that for years and lost more money in their deep pocketbooks than they'd ever care to admit, and paying for exclusivity deals with third parties takes its toll, too. Nintendo, as shortsighted as they are in getting American gamers' attention, have always been pretty good with the pocketbook. That might not mean much to gamers in search of a good system, but it does mean that Nintendo is going absolutely nowhere in the console wars. They won't fall like Sega anytime soon, but they do need to shape up with the new Revolution system, because they won't survive a third N64-style last-place finish, and two bad systems in a row is not a good reputation to go into the next generation with. Can we say Atari?
Nintendo has screwed itself with its idea that it's going to target the youth market which, frankly, is the worst gaming demographic. There will never be a mom or dad that will spend as much on video games as someone in the mid- or late teens. And I mean that on a general scale. For example, the other day, without Christmas in mind, I bought a Nintendo DS just on a whim. Would anyone here spend $218 (total, with game and stuff) for their kid or kids completely on a whim?
Doubtful.
Your ad here.
The anti-innovation point would have been good, had it been made before the wildly innovative Nintendo DS, and before the announcement that the next Nintendo console will have a completely new control scheme. Even if they use the same characters in upcoming games, they're going to have to be used in entirely new ways.
Glog!
For every decent point, the author trots out the same Mario-bashing that has following Nintendo since the SNES. The author shows a complete misunderstanding of how businesses maintain corporate identity and branding when he launches into such brilliant ideas as suggesting Donkey Konga would have been better served with brand new characters instead of recycling Donkey Kong. Because we all know how the PS2's Taiko Drum Master is burning up the charts (another drum peripheral game, nearly identical to Konga, also developed by Namco) because people are just begging for new drum games featuring all new IP. Come on. Half of those dreaded Mario spin-off games are concepts that nobody knew would become huge, and Nintendo figured that attaching Mario to them was the surest way to help their success. Risk = lousy games would diminish the brand, Reward = good games that strengthen the brand. Was there a huge appetite for cart racers before Mario Kart? For party games before Mario Party? For silly golf games before Mario Golf? Nintendo ventured out (Donkey Konga is a risk... new bulky hardware for a genre that mostly runs off one game, DDR), made some sharp games, people lapped them up... so Nintendo realized they hit gold and made more. And then everybody started doing them, and whaddaya know, they mostly paled in comparison.
You can write the same article about PlayStation, switching in Metal Gear, Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto. The major differences are A) that Nintendo has been around longer - and thus has been doing the branding game longer. And B) that Nintendo's core franchises are family-friendly and thus open to constant ridicule by those who don't like them.
This is clearly going to go down like a lead balloon on slashdot, where kissing Nintendo's ass is second only to MS bashing as a past-time. I imagine there are already dozens of furious and/or smug fanboys dashing off "OMG, NINTENDO R TEH ONLY INTEVATORS" rants in response to this.
However, it doesn't change the fact that the central thrust of the argument is true. Particularly the assertion that Nintendo's position in the console market these days is to be largely ignored. This might not be apparent to the average slashdot reader, given the high prominence that Nintendo-based stories get in here, but the wider world doesn't really care about the Gamecube any more, for good reason.
It's very, very true that Nintendo haven't innovated in their game designs for a long time. The point about most Cube games (and I say this as a Cube owner) being rehashed versions of N64 games is the real problem here. Even Metroid Prime, which the article singles out as an exception to this, is only a standard console fps with a bad control system. Sure, it's a good enough fps and it deservedly did well, but it's not innovative. Nintendo's idea of innovation these days is to make a tacky new controller, charge a fortune for it and hope the fanboys buy enough that it breaks even.
Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart 64 and Zelda Wind Walker were all good games. However, they all fundamentally appeal to the same audience. No, not kids; I don't fall for the argument that Nintendo games are aimed at kids. Let's face it, today's kids would rather be playing GTA: San Andreas or Halo 2. Rather, Nintendo's games are pitched at the same people who were buying their consoles as kids in the early 80s. These guys are older now, they don't really play games much, but they like to keep a console around for nostalgia value and, as many of them are part of the slashdot horde, they like feeling "alternative" by owning a console that isn't all nasty and corporate like the X-Box and PS2. This isn't a tremendously huge market and it's not likely to grow much.
So, how does Nintendo break out of this? The article talks at length about 3rd party support. This is pretty much essential, but it's only part of the solution. The GC has very little in the way of must-have exclusive games at the moment, for somebody who's not into Mario. Eternal Darkness is one of the very few that springs to mind. And, as the article says, there are so many games missing from the lineup that you can get on other systems. If I only owned a Cube (fortunately I have a PS2 and X-Box as well), I'd be pretty damned annoyed at not being able to play Burnout 3 on it. Of course, there's a bit of a vicious cycle here; 3rd party developers don't make games for the Cube because they don't sell, so people don't buy Cubes, so Cube games don't sell. It's going to take a lot of money to solve that.
However, Nintendo are also going to need to get up to speed on other developments in gaming... and fast. The classic example here is online gaming. This has been huge on the PC for years, X-Box Live is a pretty incredible achievement and even the PS2 has a respectable range of online games now. Meanwhile... I can count the Cube's online offerings on the fingers of one hand. In fact, I could do so even if I had a couple of fingers missing. And to cap it all of, we have some Nintendo exec telling us that online play isn't what gamers want. Henry Ford said that drivers could have their car any colour they wanted, so long as it was black... remember how well that worked out for him?
Oh, and while I'm ranting, how about European coverage. Europe is a huge market and it's growing fast. However, Europe gets consistently shafted by Nintendo. Major titles come out many months late, or not at all. We don't even get the extra features, by way of compensation, that we get in games by, for example, Square-Enix when they come out late in Europe (eg. FFX has a number of features in the European version missing from the US version and the original Japanese release). This isn't even a ca
How rediculous. Nintendo is the second largest publisher in the buissness and they do it without making any PC, PS, or Xbox games. They can do it because they constantly publish A material. No other publisher pushes out as many AAA games a year. You might dismiss Nintendo but you can bet the people over at Sony and Microsoft sweat over what Nintendo is doing next.
The Dreamcast had lots of great games. In terms of AAA titles, given the time schedule we saw for other systems, I'd say it was only after mid 2003 that the Xbox had a better number of titles equal to the number of great titles on the Dreamcast (which, if launched at the same time as the Xbox, would've been announced as dead in Feb/March 2003).
As for Nintendo being last, I haven't seen too many Nokia, Microsoft, or Sony handhelds going around lately... Even with the GBA lineup being largely shitty licences and crappy 2/3rds 3D overhead views, there manage to be excellent games available (Wars series, Boktai series, SquareEnix games). I could see Nintendo living on its handhelds for a long time if it ever did get into 3rd in the console market (which, last time I checked, wasn't happening; Microsoft was lucky enough to be in 3rd due to the lackluster sales in Japan -- no surprise there, the Xbox has no Japanese titles worth a damn).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It goes like this. Video games are just like every other medium of entertainment. Just like movies, music and TV. There are shows, films, games and songs to cover every genre across the board. What's happened to the video game industry mostly mirrors the film industry. There are shitty blockbuster movies which everyone sees that make a lot of money. But the people who know quality most often stick to art house theatres. There they get quality, but the people who make it get less money due to less marketing.
/. love to attack and infer broad sweeping generalisations like that. What I am saying is that overall Nintendo is concentrating on creating an innovative and new gaming experience that can be enjoyed by all people. As long as they profit, they're happy. All the other companies are mostly concerned with making a quick buck. So they release three GTA games that are all really the same with slightly changed themes. And they release a shitty FPS named Halo, twice, which is pretty much a modernized goldeneye plus vehicles and aliens. It makes them loads of cash the same way a blockbuster film does. But you can't honestly say that their games are high quality works of art. But if you play some Zelda or some Metroid its hard not to.
Nintendo has made the error of making high quality games. People don't realize that the game itself and the theme of a game are two seperate things. For example, look at Star Trek and any daytime soap opera. Both are soap operas, the substance of the shows are identical, but the themes are different. One has an outer space theme and one has a theme of eviltown USA. But the actual substance of the thing is mostly the same.
Nintendo makes high quality games. In fact, most of their games are the highest quality you can get. Just about anything that says Metroid, Mario or Zelda on it is top notch. But the theme, other than Metroid, is not one that appeals to punk teenage kids. They are too manly to buy a mario game even though they know it is better and more fun than GTA whatever. Always worried about graphics and self image instead of their actual gaming experience. So games like BMX XXX exist. These types of games are all the same crappy thing. They come in two genres, run around a shoot things and run around and beat things up, sometimes both. But like blockbuster movies with no substance they sell well.
I'm not saying all Nintendo's games are flawless masterpieces. Nor am I saying that all games for other systems are crap. People on
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Welcome to bizzaro-world. Nintendo is the one console I've seen where non-franchise games seem to do well. I Ninja, Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, P.N.03, and Tales of Symphonia are the majority of the games I've played on my GameCube lately, and they're all non-franchise as far as I can see. Compare this to Playstation 2, for example, where the games of choice at the moment are TOCA 2, Gran Turismo 4, Grand Theft Auto 3 San Andreas, Star Ocean 3, and Elder Scrolls 3, Final Fantasy 12... Maybe that's just me, but franchises certainly aren't what I was thinking about when I bought a GameCube.
If anyone needs to invest in non-franchise games, it's the other two consoles. Hell, even the non-sequels that show up on Playstation 2 and X-Box seem to mostly be things like movie franchises. Ugh.
Random and weird software I've written.
Telling people online gaming is where its at got me bad looks when I tried to appeal to a video game employer. Apparently the only video game company that ever interviewed me as a game designer, also just lost half their company to a split... The verant split to Everquest. So they didn't want to hear online gaming is a thing of the future. There's SOOOOO much you can do with online gaming, yet people barely touched the basics.
Read up on my online racing game concept at: Racing
It illustrates that if you allow users to build levels and other content, and have it available for play automatically to all, then you build a community and a growing game.
God spoke to me.
As opposed to... what? Who's pushing the boundaries like Nintendo is at the moment? Sure, the Big N uses familiar franchises pretty often (which is the only gripe I could find the author had). That's to build on established brands, a common marketing strategy.
Despite familiar characters and storylines, Nintendo's in-house games are some of the most original and interesting available today, whereas Sony and Microsoft will play host to the latest multiplayer futuristic shooter or various racing games. Sony practically produces nothing in-house, yet the worldwide PS2 sales are well above GameCube, a distant second place, and Xbox.
The author of the article claims that Nintendo doesn't try new things, and then mentions Super Mario Sunshine. Sunshine tried a new concept, and the fact is that it wasn't well-recieved. EAD tried a new approach to the genre, but it's not their fault people didn't like it.
And that's the thing about innovation. New ideas usually don't start a revolution; they can often backfire, as did the Virtual Boy, or (to a far lesser extent) the graphical style of the new Zelda. For every hit, there are a number of misses. For every DS, there is a Virtual Boy, and an innovator must be prepared for that. Most take the easy, tried-but-true path and use a proven formula to produce a mediocre game, where success of some degree is guaranteed.
The problem with the article is that the author is trying to directly relate innovation with market domination, but if that were the case, Sony wouldn't be in the position they are today.
Because according to Nintendo's own financial statements each console has sold more than it's predecssor by a significant amount, due mostly to the fact that there are more and more people turning to video games as entertainement each year, and because there are always new children born into this world. I really get sick of these articles which are the drivel of an person who was a fan of Nintendo back when "system x" was the king, and don't understand why "system z" has the same games. Well bub, it's because most of the "system z" owners never even heard of "system x" except in a museum and most of "system x's" games look like puke to them. Get over it.
Yeah, right into the ground...
The article's premise is ridiculous and unsupported by evidence. Nintendo's franchise games are:
a) Consistently among the highest-quality games available for any system, and
b) Consistently among the top sellers for Nintendo systems.
Nintendo are ancient master game makers, and if there's anything - anything about their business that they know how to do well, it's make games.
Nintendo does have problems and a dismal outlook for the future, but its product quality is not the issue. Its real problems are corporate mergermania and technology convergence, which are in tandem killing off or causing to be absorbed any and all companies with narrow focus interests. Nintendo could make the best games in history, but versus monolithic conglomerates with inexhaustible resources, in the long run, they can't win. It's actually a testament to Nintendo's competence that they've survived so long.
Nintendo's destiny may be to die out or be absorbed, but to blame the game quality for that is ridiculous and utterly wrongheaded. Their best games are as good as the other guys', at least - it's the other areas where they fail to scale. You may as well say that Starbucks and WalMart killed every local business in America because of "better quality products". In most cases, it was actually because of "same quality products, way more resources". As it is with Nintendo.
"Perhaps, the largest success story of this generation would have to be Halo: Combat Evolved for the Xbox. The game continues to top the charts after nearly three years on the market. Why? Because it features polished gameplay and a completely original world and story; it was fresh, it was new, it was fun, and it was immersive."
Fresh? New? It's the spiritual successor to Bungie's Marathon series, and another FPS where you are against aliens, hardly fresh or new. It sold so well because for the first year, there wasn't much of anything else for the Xbox for the masses to embrace.
I'd agree it was immersive, the first time through, but after that the multiplayer was the only reason to pick it up again, certainly not the single player (unless you wanted to beat it on harder difficulty levels)... but the only difference in the ending is on Legendary, and it's a dumb but funny change. And, honestly, except at a friend's house for LAN games, I haven't touched the original Halo since I beat it. I've also pretty much stopped playing Halo 2, even online, because there's a ton of issues that need to be fixed.
Everyone keeps saying "Nintendo makes the best games!!!", completely forgetting that that's all kinds of their opinion. The only real AAA title that came out of Nintendo this year, to me, was Metroid Prime 2. They did some other decent stuff this year, like Pikmin 2 and Paper Mario 2, but otherwise? I don't like sports games, so the formula of "mascot + wacky + sport" doesn't appeal to me. I never liked Mario Kart (still don't) and could not possibly care less about the Mario Party games. Given my taste in games, that crosses out a huge number of the first party games. I dig Zelda and F-Zero (the most recent being a Sega game technically) but Nintendo as a whole just doesn't seem to make games that I like. And then there's the overeliance on mascots. See, I'm of the opinion that the Ratchet and Clank games are pretty much the best 3D platformers ever made. It's not innovative, but it certainly is polished to all hell, and it's a lot of fun. But you'd never see Mario running around with an assortment of laser guns. Why? Because that's not what Mario does. Similarly, what if they tried to put Fable-esque elements into the Zelda games, like havi you make moral choices? Well, again, Link wouldn't possibly be evil or shack up with chicks, because it doesn't fit into the tone of the franchise. These shackles, most of it coming from being family friendly, ultimately do more harm than good.
But wasn't Nintendo the second largest publisher of video games last year, right under Electronic Arts? Even if the gamecube is in a solid third place, they sell a ton more first person titles than both Sony and Microsoft.
Until Nintendo starts losing money (they are still very profitable), there isn't a problem. And when that day comes, they could easily convert over to a software only company. At which point they'd probably have a good chance of overshadowing EA. I hope that day never comes, as I really enjoy how well their games and hardware integrate with each other.
the cosmos in 20 words or less: thumbuki.com
When Apple ran itself into the ground, Microsoft came along and bailed it out.
You can get even better at the nearby Kentucky Fried Wiccan franchise.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
How is this a troll? The DS is selling very well. And of course, good sales = not running into the ground.
Moderators need brain transplants.
Nintendo has screwed itself by losing the market that can buy things on a whim? And you demonstrate this by explaining how you bought a Nintendo product on a whim?
For what it's worth, the DS isn't an entirely new portable. It's an amalgamation of the original Game & Watch and Tiger's game.com, with added wireless connectivity to bring it into the 21st century.
That's right, the commercials with the blue-haired midget. XTREEEME.
Zelda : Link to the Past for the SNES/GBA, he fails to save Zelda from being sent to the dark world and the priest whos supposed to help her hide gets killed.
Zelda : Ocarina of Time for the N64, he pulls the Master Sword out about 10 years too early and plunges the world (at least Hyrule) into a post-apocalypse place and only managed to fix things thanks to time travel.
Zelda : Majora's Mask, this time he screws up even before the game begins losing Epona, his ocarina and then getting transformed into a Deku kid.
Zelda : Wind Waker, his sister gets kidnapped, he manages to lose his sword about 15 minutes after getting it after getting shot at a stone wall from a cannon, he lets Zelda get kidnapped and then he leads Ganondorf to the sunken Castle of Hyrule.
Admittedly most of this is just to move the plot along, but jeez! How many times can you let the princess/his sister get kidnapped? Time travel? Please, thats probably the least original theme to be used in a video game. And why does he keep 'accidentally' helping the Ganondorf one way or another? Doesn't he have any friends he can count on to hide Zelda?
Cube games aren't affordable enough. They are always priced high, and it's really hard to ever find bargains, whereas on PS2 there are always tons of bargain games, or new games get discounted quickly.
"new bulky hardware for a genre that mostly runs off one game, DDR"
Though DDR has overshadowed most games in the Rythmn/dance genre, a most underrated game that hardly saw American shores was Samba De Amigo (here and here). It started off as an arcade game with maraca controllers (something you wouldn't likely see in American arcades), and was then ported to the Dreamcast. They even had maraca controllers for the 'real' experience. I guess it was the failure of the Dreamcast (Despite the many good games released for it), or the strangness of shaking maracas to latin beat with a dancing monkey, but it's one game you aren't likely to see in stores again, despite the enormous enjoyment one can get out of it.
Perhaps if the monkey had been Donkey Kong it would have taken off?
And you wonder why Nintendo's consoles are struggling?
51% of homes in the US have broadband and its rising. Of course only 5% people play online. I can't think of a single online console game worth playing. If they knew how to make an online console game correctly, more people would play online.
God spoke to me.
Nintendo is the only remaining console producer who has strong first party development. Sony is beginning to try their hand at it with stuff like Gran Turismo and ICO... but they don't make nearly as many games as Nintendo. Nintendo was able to keep the N64 afloat pretty much single handedly through some skilled 1st and 2nd party development. Sony in comparison relies almost entirely on 3rd parties to sell their systems. Nobody would have bought a PS2 if not for Square, Konami, and Enix. Microsoft relies pretty much entirely on their marketting and Halo. I have to wonder when that's going to blow up in their face, but that's beside the point.
My point is that Nintendo is the only console manufacturer with strong game development internally. They are consistently among the top publishers, and although they rely on a core set of mascots to sell their games, each game of a franchise is often quite different from its siblings. (take Paper Mario to Mario RPG to Mario and Luigi, or Metroid Prime to Super Metroid for example).
I just think it's a little absurd to rag on Nintendo for lack of innovation while Sony and Microsoft don't even make their own games for the most part, and when they do, they are often sequels as well. And most of the 3rd party developers prefer to build on their franchises as well. (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Splinter Cell, Kingdom Hearts, etc. etc.) I just happen to see a lot of new stuff on GameCube, such as Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, Super Monkey Ball, Ikaruga, etc. And such games are often greatly appreciated.
you can waste 2 billions dollars on one console and have it said succesfull because it has one best selling title (which btw isnt innovative at all, being a rather dull fps) and have nintendo being shown as unsuccessfull because they base their profitable business on their conception of what games should be.
This is a world which never ceases to amaze me.
Donkey Konga is a risk... new bulky hardware for a genre that mostly runs off one game, DDR
You mean two. The other wildly popular music game in Japan is Beatmania IIDX.
GameCube game media can hold up to 1.35 GiB. Xbox and PS2 game media can hold up to 7.95 GiB. Would you want to have to swap discs several times during gameplay?
Basically, it's not just Nintendo that's overdoing it with the franchises. It's pretty much the entire industry. Most of the time, the people who buy video games, regardless of what they buy, would rather buy a sequel to a game that they like, instead of something original. Back then, there was always something new to enjoy(Ex: Mario Bros, Contra, Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, Sonic, Street Fighter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(Okay, so that was a franchise, but it was executed good). But nowadays, most games you find aren't as good quality as games of yesterday. The topic should have been dubbed "Video Games running itself into the ground?" since basically, everyone's been following the same pattern that Nintendo is following in terms of franchises. Not to mention, it should have focused more on the industry in general.
you are kidding right? google for the answer fanboy. if nintenho comes out with the revolution it will only sell 10mil at most. nontenho is dead.
Some of their hardware innovations (feel free to rip me a new one if I'm wrong):
In addition, I think Super Mario 64 pretty much invented the whole "go from the main world into various sub-worlds and collect something shiny" theme used so often in modern platformers.
It's also worth noting that the article about the PSP was submitted by its own author and blatantly ignored the complaints about the system, whereas this article was written in October and ran on IGN, where most of the readers of this section of Slashdot had a chance to see it.
Am I the only one bothered by this?
Goo goo g'joob.
Google for what? Just go to Nintendo's website, into their corporate area and pull down their corporate annual reports where they report their sales, etc... to their investors. And since when would selling 10 million pieces of hardwareb be a bad thing?!?! STFU.
Alright, That's not just biased, it's wrong. They came out with the most innovative handheld console ever concieved, Metroid Deathmatch, and all you can do is notice the lack of GTA? Comparing the DS to PSP may be a toss up, but there can be no question the DS is the more original of the two.
SAILING MISHAP
broadband.
/. we periodically see stories about the rise of broadband internet connections in the USA, and we also see stories about how Nintendo is failing.
Here on
I am waiting for a story to combine the two. As people spend their hard earned money each month for a cable/DSL connection, they want to make optimum use of it. That means if they are a console gamer, they want to use a console that has awesome online capability, and Gamecube is definitely not it.
Nintendo has the chance to rectify this in their next console, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.
In Shenmue, how hard you held down the run button controlled how fast you ran. Ryo's chunky jog is rather amusing.