The Best Of GDC

Gamasutra's Question of the Week has been asked and answered, and from around the game industry there were brought forth opinions on The Highlights of GDC 2005. Overwhelmingly, people saw the "Burning Down the House" and "Spore" presentations as the most interestng, with a few other folks digging other parts of the conference more. From the article: "I think Nintendo's keynote speech was the most interesting moment for me. Coming a day after Microsoft's keynote, it highlighted the clear divergence between these company's platform strategies moving forward. If you're a gamer at heart (and have the heart of a gamer) root for Nintendo, as they seem to be more interested in gameplay innovation than making an uber-media-micropayment device. (HD-gaming be damned!) - Anonymous" The Puzzle Pirates and Game Atoms talks were probably my most amused moments during the conference. After all, Raph's talk had little monsters and the pirates brought rum.

Comments

Re:Nintendo's Approach

[FidelCatsro]

I have been a nintendo fan since the early 80s ( and several other consoles too and computers hell im just a techno fanboi though I do hate that word) and can tell you hoenstly the thing that killed off the Virtual-Boy was the fact that using it for longer than a few minutes caused massive migranes to alot of people , IIRC it was because the lenses were misaligned slighty (perhaps it was the refresh rate or both).
Inovation has always been a good thing for nintendo , specificaly in the control front , to my mind the N64 controler was one of the best controlers ever devised for 3D games (lacking in 2d though) , and not to mention the SNES or NES pads which were amazing at the time(the snes pad can still hold its own for 2d).
The problem nintendo has is the fact that alot of people wish to Apear ""COOL"" and nintendo is yet to shake off its For-Children image .
This is the only thing limiting nintendo , However as a long term fan i would hate to see nintendo depart from this style , there is a kind of inocent charm in the games that gives them a timeless feel , not to mention amazing gameplay , Sometimes i love ripping the heads off of people , or gunning down the inocent citizens of liberty city , other times though i just want to relax and enjoy a game with a type of magic and wonder akin to the works of the brothers Grim.

The Reveloution will need two things if is to become a market leader,
A Kudos factor with some maturity and A lot of grade A Games . Most importantly is the games , remembering the Gamecube launch , i remember being disapointed with the lack of options(some classic titles though like pikimin) and variety .Nintendo Will learn from there mistakes and i suspect the Reveloution will be both inovative , Cool , and have a menagre of titles at launch