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Sega Done with Sports, Take-Two Launches Label
Gamespot has the news that Take-Two Interactive's MLB deal has already had repercussions. Sega has gotten out of the sports business, selling their internal sports studio Visual Concepts to Take-Two for a bargain price. This newest addition in hand, Take-Two has turned around and launched a new game label entitled 2K games. From the article: "2K Games will incorporate Take-Two's internally owned development studios Visual Concepts, Kush Games, Indie Built, Venom Games, PopTop Software, and Frog City Software, as well as the team at Take-Two Licensing..." This new label will have a subsidiary specifically tuned for sports titles. As expected, it appears the sports game market is now going to fall to only a few companies. Commentary on Greg Costikyan's Blog
DAMNIT!!! I just started to like sports games again this year, and it was all because of Sega!
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
The site is already slashdotted . . . except in Nebraska.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Good bye beloved sega... I'll miss you... MMh... Just another glimpse of decadence from Sega...
Hopefully Take2 will continue to develop and challenge EA's near monopoly of the sports genre.
They got pwned in the console market (despite better games and platform) And now they are getting pwned in the software market as well? (despite very good games)
Is Sega the new Apple?
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
I can see it now at EA's corporate offices:
<mr. burns> Excellent... </mr. burns>
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
I was very pleasently suprised by the great job Sega did with NFL 2K5, and with a $20 price tag it was an unbeatable choice. Unbeatable unless you are EA games protecting your Madden franchise. When I heard they bought exclusive rights I was pretty annoyed. This sort of practice is completely understandable from the prospective of the company seeking to keep market share. But as a customer it still pisses me off. I'm thinking I'll not be buying any sports games for quite a few years.
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Well, I'm not really one to talk: the only 'sport' I play is chess. (I wonder what the odds are of 2K making a killer chess engine?)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Super Monkey Ball?
Feel the Magic?
Good games in their own right, but is it enough to keep the once great Sega empire afloat?
Will this have a negative impact on the Duke Nukem Forever ship date?
If you think
Why couldn't have Sega gotten out of the sports market YEARS ago? If they had, there'd be better Genesis selections in the Rummage Bin than the standard "50000 copies of Madden '94"
UTF-8: There and Back Again
It's bad now because when you want to purchase a football game, your only choice will be a overpriced over-rated game that comes out every year just so you can have your football team on it. EA will contend it's not a monopoly, but lets be honest with ourselves, who's really going to buy any other title than Madden?
Unless i'm playing a cracked copy, i will not be playing EA sports games again...and i'm a big sports game fan. I ask you do the same.
Long live the KING! Loved sega sports, since the days of mutant league football and hockey. It's definitely a sad day, and leaves the question, what's left?
Sure they have a few franchises, but that really can only carry them so far as a independant developer. Frankly, I'll keep praying for the DC portable, which would smash face on DS and PSP (and runs off a single chip, so it is plausible)
How Jaded Are You?
Well, I've played some pretty gosh darn good 2k games, but it seems like a bit of a niche market these days.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The NFL should also take some heat for this. I refuse to go to another overpriced nfl game. There.
But now I can't think why I honestly care about this. I don't like sports games at all. I don't play physical sports outside, why would I want to be subjected to them on the computer as well?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Why doesnt everyone just go out and buy a copy of Sega's 2k5 football and just update your roster every year? Why buy a new game every NFL season if their is a downloadable roster?
The NBA was wise not to sign EA's initial offer for exclusivity, but I hear a sweeter deal is in the works...
In my opinion, Sega's 2K basketball series is deeper and more intelligent than EA's Live franchise and it's rather sad if no more future versions of it won't ever get released.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
They sold their mobile/multipleyer unit to Nokia, they sold their soul to Sammy and now this? Looks like Sega is being nudged out of business alltogether!
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
What about the new features like NFL cards, decorating a crib, and even playing against celbs. It's all about the bling and the homies, yo.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/24/16 15232&tid=187&tid=4&tid=218
"Pushed" Into Management (Score:5 Bananas) by rafael_es_son (669255) on 2005.01.25 16:44 (#11472771)
You're a lieutenant in the Army now!
Re " Management Books" [amazon.com]: Unless you've been "pushed" into becoming an Accounting Manager, after re-reading "The Wealth of Nations [amazon.com]" by Adam Smith [wikipedia.org], you may substitute them with anything from the "Self-Help", "New Age" or equivalent sections [amazon.com] of your local Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com. These type of reading material should prove to be more entertaining while providing an equivalent amount of substance.
Works on human-manipulation techniques [humboldt.edu] -to be applied to the management of your "normals"- tend to be quite popular among managers even when the results of its application to intelligent human beings tend result in somthing risible. If contact with clients is mandated you might want to pick up a book or two on the subject of Illusionism [amazon.com].
If your topmost priority in life -besides food and shelter- is the acquisition of better-than- normal-quantities of money, you will feel very confortable in your new position. Anything else (including technical excellence of your supervised normal's work) must be second-to-profit unless you work for Google or plan to be a considered a mediocre manager. Referring to other humans you work with as "normals" -dare I not ask "As opposed to what?"- reflects an excellent disposition for management work.
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HAD
I could be wrong, but I recall games like Double Dribble on NES, Baseball Stars on Neo Geo, and Virtua Tennis on Dreamcast as being fun.
I mean, they can be goofy sometimes but at least Nintendo is still making good sports games.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Actually, sports video games the likes of Madden, NBA Live, etc. aren't really played that much by so-called computer geeks, but mostly by a whole sub-culture of sports video gamers. These sports gamers are primarily interested in the sport simulation angle, and are just as likely to be young and urban, and many play sports. Just watch a Madden Championship tournament sometime and see who's playing.
And that's why having the actual players, stadiums, uniforms etc. is so important to this demographic. So while
-G
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-G
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http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp =^Fernando+Martin+Basket+Master$&pub=^Dinamic+Soft ware$
I haven't played any sports games since then.
Are they any different now?
I don't get why people care that much about the team and player names. Dump the money required to license that garbage and diehard fans will do it anyway.
Is not gameplay the thing? That's where the real problem is. "Gary," the avid Madden fan mentioned in Greg Costikyan's blog, is absolutely correct--there's very little difference from year-to-year in the actual gameplay. I'm an NCAA Football fan. I did not buy the 2005 edition because the additions in the 2005 edition weren't that big of a deal. I might pick it up when there's a used copy for $20, but I feel no urgency.
I'll have a ton of fun with randomly generated player names and great gameplay. A static game with graphical facelifts from time-to-time and NFL player names will beg me to spend my money elsewhere.
Sega is shrinking, Nintendo are making decisions like a bunch of idiots and hemorraging money like crazy, Atari are ancient history... grim days for old skool console gamers like myself.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Does this mean sega will start making good games again!?
Eat sleep die
Sega needs a dictionary, because I think they got the idea of seppuku wrong. [corporate suicide]
Sports games suck anyway.. This is obviously going to make the situation worse, but I could care less...
First it was the end of The Screen Savers and now Sega... What am I going to do now???
First of all, Sega did not make Madden- EA did. That was the best selling game for the Genesis and since then Madden Football is the best selling game franchise of all time.
What kind of company would want to stop producing their #1 product? What kind of business move would that be?
I loved their consoles, but they decided that it wasn't profitable so they exited the hardware business.
Then a hollow shell of the company continued to produce software for other platforms, and now they announce that they're going to stop producing the most popular games they make (sports games).
What is left for them? Will they just sit there and "exist" but do nothing? Maybe they can pay other game makers to randomly put a Sega banner somewhere. Maybe they'll turn into a new type of corporate entity... "the undead"... a company that doesn't do anything but "exists".... a zombie, the corporate equivalent of a ghost ship.
...come 3000. Bad move, Take 2. 2. 2K. Hmm.
...is that they are Y2K compliant.
It is a really bad idea to destroy the poptop brand. I for one always check out every game (i.e. play the demo) that comes out of poptop. That is mostly the case because I had so much fun playing Railroad tycoon 2. And I am the kind of person that actually buys games.
In fact, a good sign why the poptop brand is so good is that it is already being immitated. I am talking about Popcap software who make cheesy java games (among them insaniquarium which is quite adictive).
We're way off topic here, but obviously Jesus was a human being. If you believe that the truth of the story is unknowable (because of all the hype afterwards), and you believe in Occam's Razor (go with the most likely explanation), then that's what you believe. Jesus was a revolutinoary Jew who wanted to totally reform Judaism. He wanted a religion open to anyone. He wanted to tear down the reliance on the Temple heirarchy (the irony of it is that some of his followers built that up again in a different form). Anyway, the rest of Jesus' teachings can be summed up as follows: "be good to others and good things will happen".
As for the other existance of God idea, it's absolutely impossible to know. I personally belive that it is fundamentally necessary for it to be impossible to know for sure. I mean, if there were irrefutable proof that there was a God and you just didn't know about it, you'd be pretty pissed off. So anyway, realizing that the answer is unknowable, the question is really whether to play the game or not, to believe in something or not to believe in anything. Personally, I like believing in things, in general even if it turns out I'm wrong later.
But anyway, the reason why what he said is still valid is basically because we humans are fundamentally the same as we were 2000 years ago. Evolution has pretty much been stopped. We can't rely on government or corporations or our friends to tell us how to live our lives. We still have to follow all the goals of the game of life (grow, learn, get job, get married, have children, have good experiences). But Jesus sort of says, "If you screw up, don't worry about it. Just be a good person and it'll work out in the end. Oh, and forgive other people who screw up." That's a good philosophy whatever year it is.
My other first post is car post.
Now Sega will have to start making games like the ones that made the Dreamcast such and undervalued classic.
Maybe we'll even get that Shenmue 3 I've been despertate to play for years.
SEGA! You gotta come through for me here, homie. The others are doubting, but I know you can do it. You're backed into a corner - so now you can come out swingin! You know you gotta.
The market niche is totally there for you: The Innovative Gameplay Company. You mostly already have it! C'mon - Nintendo is the kids and girls game company, XBOX is the computer clone company, and Sony is the everything else company. Note that if you are not a little kid or a girl these stereotypes won't appeal to you.
So all you gotta do, SEGA is invest in innovation. Seriously. You don't even have to do a super awsome job at it, 'cause nobody else bothers at all. All your games don't have to hit, the just have to explore new directions. Put new spin on old concepts. Explore new concepts. People love that wacky stuff, they wanna check it out - Super Monkey Ball? That sounds so wierd! I have to try it! Katamari Damacy? WTF?! I gotta play it!
SEGA, you can do it. Japan already has proven that they can do stuff so wierd that the rest of the world can only scratch their heads. If you can just avoid focusing on schoolgirls (that's Nintendo's job) you're golden! Sony - as all giant megaliths are required - will doubtlessly spend all it's effort trying to do everything, focusing on nothing. SEGA can be the spice! I'm sure there are some Japan-only properties that you could release worldwide to get you started.
I know you can do it, SEGA! SEGA!
NOTE: All instances of the word Sega should be read as ***---SEGA---***!!! as their DC era ads.
PS - If you'd commit to one platform then I could buy it and play all your games. As it is I only have an XBOX, and can not play Super Monkey Ball =(
While its seems like a big deal, it's really not. All the really good Sega Sports games (in recent years) were actually developed by Visual Concepts anyway. So, sure, they're not owned by Sega anymore, but the studio making the game still exists, and will still be making sports games. So, that's something.
#includes go at the top of a file, silly. That way, C++ preprocessor inside my brain can physically parse the disclaimer before getting to your actual code.
Putting an #include at the bottom is like closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped and declared an independent republic where all horses are equal and some horses are more equal than others.
DUUUUUUH!;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
You can find more information about Civilization IV from http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=108 315/
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
They could sell an empty box.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.