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How The Revolution Will Change Games Forever
1up.com has a lengthy article discussing the possible ways that Nintendo's next console will change the face of gaming. A nice pie-in-the-sky article for a quiet Holiday afternoon. From the article: "... We're sick of waiting, so we came up with a list of hypothetical Revolution game concepts -- some pulled directly from Nintendo's Tokyo Game Show video that showed actors but no real games, others pulled from some of the popular ideas we've heard floating around -- and took them to impartial third-party developers to find out how practical it is for games on Revolution to be more than just gimmicks. Over the next five pages, we talk with developers from Harmonix, Radical Entertainment, Foundation 9, Atlus, and Midway to figure out how many of these hypothetical game ideas that are floating around have the potential to become actual games, and what advantages/problems might come with that as a result of the Revolution's remote control-shaped, motion sensor controller."
I hear a full 45% of Mario Kart DS owners are playing online. They may have waited to do it, but it sounds like they knew what they were doing. I haven't picked up the game yet (I intend to), but it looks great. The only thing I wish is I hear the online races are only four players. It would be nice if it was 8 (even if each DS supplied one computer player). But that is a minor gripe.
You do have to keep in mind that bandwidth and lag considerations are present, especially with wireless. If the percentage of dropped players/races increases as more clients (virtual or not, they use the same bandwidth) are added, then i'm glad they kept the number down.
I've had one race with noticable lag, every other one has been perfect. Except for the fact that I suck.
Disclaimer: Card Carrying Nintendo Fanboy, so take my comments as coming from such.
Nintendo does have mature games. Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime, and Resident Evil are examples. They will always carry family-friendly/kiddy games. You have listed examples of them. It is perfectly possible, and perfectly reasonable to do both. The existance of one does not preclude the existance of the other. In fact, limiting their audience by dropping one or the other would be an unwise choice. Most of your comments, such as your belief that they will add handles and such to the console seems to stem from the idea that they are a kiddy console. I would encourage you to rent a Gamecube and fire up some of their mature games to convince yourself otherwise. You really will have a blast. The way I see it, if they have the controller working as flawlessly as people are hoping, they will have a real hit on their hands. If it is even SLIGHTLY under expectations, retail stores will be reclassifying them as paperweights to get rid of inventory. I don't believe there is a middle ground on this.
Don't be quick to discount Nintendo's influence; they have quite the history of changing controllers forever. Their previous innovations include the d-pad (Game & Watch), shoulder buttons (SNES), the analog stick (N64), expansion ports (N64), and rumble (N64). The analog stick is especially notable, as it was also thought to be just a gimmick when it was introduced. Also, with the traditional-style shell Revolution has the best of both worlds; a standard-style controller with full motion and tilt sensing.
The RC is the first controller with three-dimensional input; it supports six degrees of motion (three displacement and three rotational), while an analog stick only supports two. Two analog sticks together only cover four. Factor in the Revolution's d-pad and analog stick, and you have 10 degrees of motion while making three-dimensional navigation more intuitive.
Possibly, but I doubt it because wi-fi connection could easily have been subscription-based, and Nintendo opted to give it away.
True, but the Game Boy Micro and the DS redesign (as well as the Revolution design itself) indicate that they're learning. Also, Nintendo's said that the Revolution will be its smallest console yet.
The PS3 and 360 will be amazing in streaming media operations (which translates to better graphics), but both use deep-pipelined CPU cores with unimpressive cache and small or nonexistant branching predictors, so branching performance suffers. Poor branching performance won't hurt graphics; but will limit processes like AI, game control code, and physics. With Nintendo's games-over-specs mentality, Broadway (the Revolution's CPU) will most likely have either a beefy cache and/or be PowerPC 970-based and thus have nice branching predictors, either of which would make it the most powerful next-gen for branching-intensive code. Leaked specs indicate a dedicated physics processing unit, which would make Revolution games feel the most realistic by a good margin if true. Microsoft and Sony aimed for super-powerful graphic machines, and they succeeded; Nintendo just wants a game machine, and they'll make a good one.
Nintendo's game-centric mentality is at fault for the GameCube's perceived weakness; their target audience doesn't care about specs, so they didn't trumpet the GameCube's specs much. Spec-wise, GameCube is close to the XBox, and they're both far ahead of the PS2. In my experience, GameCube games are much smoother-looking than XBox or PS2.
In general, I don't think Nintendo makes games for kids; they make games for everyone that are appropriate for kids. However, some Nintendo games have parts that would be disturbing to some children. Ocarina of Time has bloodstained floors, walls made out of bones, and blood being coughed up. In the Wind Waker finale, Link embeds his sword in Ganondorf's skull.
That said, they do have an image problem among gamers in a certain age range in the U.S. I suspect cultural differences make it hard for them to see how there games are perceived over here. However, I don't see them changing focus to the adult market as long as their family-friendly games keep selling as well as they do. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo has to be profitable in the gaming market to survive; and
### Nintendo does have mature games. Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime, and Resident Evil are examples.
Sadly that is already half of the mature games available for the Cube, there really is not much more and especially nothing more that is Cube-exclusive. Speaking of MetroidPrime I don't even consider that very mature, sure you have a big gun, but hardly any story worth to talk about, no characters, no dialog (well, a tiny little bit) and hardly any violence worth to talk about. I really love the 2D Metroids, but Prime never really got me, kind of just bores me, I think it simply didn't went far enough, it basically never was scarry. Anyway, the throuble of the Gamecube isn't the non-existent mature games, it has some, but simply the lack of quantity and varity of games. Gamecube has the games that Nintendo produced and very little else, these days even the multiplatform games end up PS2 und XBox only, Gamecube gets ignored.
After having this for a few days, I find it rather sad that it took this long to get Mario Kart on-line.
Mario Kart Double Dash has been playable online via Warp Pipe's tunnelling software for years now. True, it's no longer supported by them, but it still works and there's a community of players around it and the two other GC LAN games.