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Best and Worst of 2005
Next Generation is running a piece looking into the five biggest mistakes made in the gaming industry this year. On the other side of the coin, via GameSetWatch, an MTV News look at the finest moments in gaming in 2005. From the NextGen article: "And what did it turn out to be, this so-called Revolution? A GameCube in overdrive with a controller than can tell where you are and what you're doing with your hands. That was worth it, wasn't it? Not only that, but Nintendo has stated up front that they will not be competing with the likes of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Rather, they'll focus on gameplay. Graphics won't matter if you just focus on gameplay. If you believe in Nintendo, clap your hands! C'mon everybody! Clap louder!" I link to em'. I don't say I agree with them.
When something is hyped up as much as the Rev, there is no way to live up to that hype. Just think of the Segway. It is a marvel of engineering, but fell about five miles short of the hype.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Did anybody do something right this year? Nintendo obviously made a mistake with the Revolution (I mean.. next-gen.biz says so, it must be true!). EA made a mistake with Madden on 360. MS made a mistake with the 360 launch. And Sony made a mistake with the PSP launch. I guess nobody can do right in their eyes.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Yeah, that really caused a lot of problems for them didn't it! Just think of how clean their image would have been without that problem, and how many copies of the game they could otherwise have sold! When oh when will they learn that sex doesn't sell!
Can you HONESTLY tell me that is true? Are you saying that Resident Evil 4 on the 'Cube is too ugly to look at? Is it so full of graphics flaws? If that game didn't come out on the 'Cube but came out on the 360 I think everyone would be talking about howt he "age of next-gen was here". God of War looked amazing on the PS2. I saw no graphical faults there. Yet that platform is almost 5 years old. Psychonauts looked amazing on the XBox an created a great virtual world. It, too, looked amazing on current hardware. If you look at Project Gotham 2, GT4, and many other games that are currently out, the current consoles look amazing. How about Burnout: Revenge on the XBox? Is that too ugly for you?
Can you honestly tell me that those graphics aren't good enough for you? Sure they could be a touch better (and thanks to that additional power, the Revolution can give you more polygons, higher resolution, and antialiasing), but they are about good enough.
Previous generations have given us huge leaps in graphics. NES->SNES->PS->PS2. But now the leap isn't that big. Things look better, don't get me wrong, but they looked about "good enough" already. We'll get a small improvement, and that is all we need. And let's not forget, that graphics are not the end-all-be-all of games (Katamari, anyone?).
The revolution is important for the games, and the new controller. They are taking a risk (as opposed to everyone else who is basically making the SNES with better graphics for the 30th time). People talk about how it is "just a controller" and a gimmick, but they said that about the DS too and look how that has turned out (outselling the PSP 3:1). Nintendo has even said they have been holding something back that will make things even better. I want to know.
But without that, what is the revolution? It is a console by Nitendo (the company who's consoles I always end up playing the most due to the most great games). It has better graphics than current consoles (which are already bordering on good-enough land), will play a HUGE backed library (NES, SNES, N64, Cube; plus it looks like Sega will be putting their library up too), will have an innovative controller for new kinds of games (you can apparently play Twilight Princess for the Cube with it, they built that into the game), in a small box (the XBox 360 is still rather big) which I expect to be quite (remember when consoles were nearly silent? I'm looking at you XBoxes and PS2). It will have a reasonable price point ($400? Too much. And how much does Sony want? I think that $200 to $250 is good, with rumors as low as $150). It is everything I want/need in a console.
Nintendo's strategy? Graphics look good enough now, keep innovating gameplay. They aren't competing with Nvidia and ATI anymore (PS, XBox).
Good for them. Someone remembers its about the games.
Really, aren't graphics good enough? We have the memory and storage to make 2D games where every object is a 100dpi hand-drawn animation in millions of colors. We can make amazingly realistic worlds (GT4, etc) or cool fantasy scapes that look great (Psychonauts, Mario Sunshine, etc). And if the Revolution really has the displacement mapping, it will only look better.
Good for Nitnedo.
PS: PLEASE reply with how graphics aren't good enough. Sure there are some ugly games out there, but I think we have ample proof that isn't a hardware limitation in most cases.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Innovative games like THIRTY MARIO TITLES and FIFTY-THOUSAND POKEMON SEQUELS?
How can the revolution be a gaffe of 2005? Surely something isn't a gaffe until the hardware is in the hands of the general public?
.jpgegs on the internet.
I don't think the revolution can actually be praised or condemned while it's a bunch of
This is just as silly as people on forums arguing over whether UT2007 is better than Team Fortress 2. Except somebody got paid to write this.
Mario party 7? People keep buying them, and each one is better than the last (not worth the upgrade, but if you don't own one, they are fun).
Mario Soccer? That is supposed to be one of the best arcade soccer games out. There aren't many arcade soccer games.
Mario Golf? An amazingly fun and accessable game. It got me into video game golf.
Mario DDR? Arguable, but there wasn't much in the DDR family on the 'Cube. And since places are having trouble keeping it in stock, so people obviously like it.
Ice Climbers 3D? Doesn't exists (except perhaps in rumors). And the last game was like 15+ years ago, so how is that "yet another of the same old thing"?
The closest thing to a complaint you have is that Nintendo tends to put Mario and friends in all their games instead of random new characters? If all the games were bad, that would be one thing. But they tend to be the best (Mario Kart) or one of the best (Mario Golf) in the genre.
And if you want to yell at people for "pointless" sequels, why not yell at the rest of the industry first (especially any sports game). The last true Mario game came out 4 years ago in 2001 or 2002. The last Zelda was 2 or 3 years ago on a home console (there was Minish Cap, but that's a bit of a different beast). How many Need For Speed games have come out in the last few years?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I can't believe these cockmonglers at Next Generation have the balls to bitch at a company for recognizing that it's unable to compete with the BILLION dollar likes of Sony and Microsoft. What would they have them do, play "Console Wars III" until they waste every single cent of money they have in a market where the other two players financially dwarf them by an order of magnitude?
From where I stand, it looks like Nintendo took a step back, looked at the playing field and recognized that they have no chance to seriously compete with Sony and Microsoft in the high end console market. Really, what the hell would be the point? The 360 and the PS3 already have the bases covered and already have the developer support. What in the holy fuck would be the point of that?
Instead, they are going to offer a cheap as hell console that nearly anyone can afford, give it a unique controller and make it accessible. Are they going to impress the life-long, pimple faced virgins at Next Generation with endless Madden 200X, racing simulators and Movie franchise, shit-quality games? No... and I doubt they really give a flying fuck.
I'm buying a PS3 and I think the Revolution sounds interesting. For the $150 price point, if there are even one or two interesting launch titles, it will be worth checking out.
At least we won't have to sit in long lines to get one like the morons who were camping to get the 360. *snigger*
Alright, any top 10 of 2005 list that doesn't even mention Resident Evil 4 is wrong. The graphics are beautiful/disgusting as needed, the game play is a good mix of ammo conservation and action, and it's worth the purchase price just for the mini game you unlock after clearing the main game. It's got great replay value with the assorted super guns you unlock the second time around. Unless you are offended by the gore, you need to play it. It has so many OMG! moments you won't believe it.
SAILING MISHAP
What makes you think you wont have to brave long lines for a PS3?
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Who knew that an article called "The 5 Biggest Gaming Mistakes of the Year" would fail to accentuate the positive!!!!!1!one!!!
1) Hot Coffee
2) XBox360 Launch
3) PSP Launch
4) Madden Next Gen
5) Revolution
For reasons, RTFA, but it's pretty bland. #4 turns out to be about bullshots and how the XBox360 game is, apparently, worse than previous generation console versions. The Revolution was covered in the write-up, and the rest are basically self-explanatory.
Right now, I spend most of my time playing a 2D MMO called Nexus, which only recently got a graphical update from 640x480 to 1024x768, and many of the game textures haven't been updated. In fact, the framerate and gameplay are still identical, and when you walk around, the camera moves in increments of exactly 2 pixels, because that way, it moves exactly as many frames per second as it did in the old version.
So, I want you to understand that I am not a complete and total pixel whore. If the game is good enough, I'll play it, no matter how old the graphics are. I've even had some fun with text games, occasionally.
First of all, and this is the obvious one: Graphics are easier than gameplay. I applaud Nintendo for trying to innovate the gameplay, but remember -- if I learned to play Half-Life back in 1995, I know almost all the gameplay elements I need for any FPS today. If I played Halo, I know just about all the gameplay I need to know for any console FPS today. When Halo 3 comes out for the 360, I'll be able to sit down and play with a minimum of memorizing new controls and honing new skills, because I played Halo 2 on the Xbox -- but Halo 3 will look incredible.
I have no doubt that it'll look incredible. Remember the Halo 2 cutscenes? The ones that showed you what they wanted the rest of the game to look like? The ones that still lagged quite a bit on the original xbox? Now we'll get those, only more so, and with no lag at all, and during actual gameplay.
But let's look at Half-Life 2. No cutscenes at all. Twice in the game they cheat by having rather long sequences completely devoid of content, which involve a lot of talking, so that it's pretty much a cutscene you can walk around in.
So, this is a game that values gameplay, where most of your time in the game, no matter how pretty it is, will be spent actually playing.
And there are gameplay innovations, like the way the physics are used. And Valve did something right when they refused to add eye candy to a level until it had been thoroughly playtested, although it does give much of the game a feel of a Half-Life environment with better textures, much better models, and occcasionally a bit of personality in the environment itself.
But, much of the experience of the game is inseperable from the graphics and the physics, both of which require a MUCH more powerful machine than you needed for Half-Life. You wander around the beach area, and because of the detail of the antlions, because of the design of the highway and how you feel you can see to the horizon, you're practically shaking sand out of your ears even by the time you reach the bridge. And at the bridge, the steel girders you're walking on feel real and tangible, and you look down at the ocean, stretching out to the horizon, and you're going to get a bit of vertigo. If the bridge didn't shake when a train went over it, if you were walking on solid brown sticks over a big blue polygon, and if you could count the polygons on the gunship chasing you, would you still be as careful about falling? It's not as if you don't have a quicksave function...
Yes, much of that is not a hardware limitation -- not anymore. Much of it is due to the artistic geniuses working at Valve. In fact, if you look at Doom 3, where, despite the environments feeling more flawed and real and less purely geometrical than in Half-Life 2, if you have a machine which can handle the dynamic lighting, there isn't a huge difference in experience and gameplay between Low quality and Ultra quality, especially considering id focuses their detail where it counts, so if you whip out your flashlight and actually examine the maps, you'll find a stunning lack of quality. You'll find pixels (texels, to be precise) the size of your hand, that they get away with because you usually won't see them, because the maps are so dark.
My point is, there are thresholds in the technology, any technology, graphics included, where before you hit that point, everyone agrees that current
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
1 biggest internet mistake since the year 1980: really short articles that for no apparent reason span across 15 pages with a terrible interface.
Here's a summary of the article, for those of us who don't want to painfully click our way through what should have been no longer than twenty lines of text: "5 biggest game mistakes in 2005: the 5 game related things that happened. The end."
Frog blast the vent core.
Only 3 people have enough gold bars to buy one.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
I'm as interested in and supportive of Nintendo, generally, as anyone here, but I have to say that, based on what we know so far, I agree with Matthews on his Revolution synopsis.
Specifically, I agree on two points:
First, the word about Revolution's processor power. It is understood that, these days, graphics hardware tends to be a truer example of what a console's graphics look like than raw CPU speed -- look at the DS, it's got souped-up GBA chips in it, an ARM7 and an ARM9, but its graphics are arguably better than the N64. (Mario Kart DS uses actual models for the drivers instead of the N64 version's scaled sprites.) It's also understood that, since the Revolution isn't targeting HD sets, it needs much less power to produce the same quality of visuals.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible for developers to make use of extra processing power. To a sufficently ingenious team and designer, that's golden. To someone thinking about creating the next SimCity-like simulation-game, every spare cycle is useful, and in the future that style of game will become more and more important as advances in graphic quality progresses further into diminishing returns compared to the time, energy and money put into improving them.
Second, his gameplay comments. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that Gamecube was a *little* disappointing. It is true that we had a number of really cool games that didn't appear on other systems: Pikmin, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Animal Crossing, etc. But on the other hand, Luigi's Mansion was quite disappointing, Mario Sunshine, while great for what it was, was too similar to Mario 64, and Zelda Wind Waker, while it certainly possesses obvious strengths, is the seventh traditional Zelda game since the modern take on the formula was created in Link to the Past (1 SNES, 1 GB, 2 GBC, 1 GBA, 1 N64). Majora's Mask is the most interesting recent Zelda, in my mind, because it played around so much with the formula, and Four Swords Adventures, while not as interesting as the basic Zelda formula, at least did something clever and unexpected with it. Miyamoto himself said that Twilight Princess may be the last "traditional" Zelda game, and their developers have been heard in the past grumbling about how the Zelda dungeon system is showing its age.
Mind you, Nintendo still has the best designers in the industry. Sony may have Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, but both their designers have acknowledged their debt to Miyamoto. Design well and truly *is* king in gaming, but like everyone's an armchair movie critic these days, everyone has an opinion on video games, even those they've given a rightful chance. It's so easy for a game to get torn down by the, frankly, incredibly stupid gaming culture because its different (one word guys: Celda).
Lots of great games (and there are some on PS2 as well) never get the respect they deserve. Nintendo's in a bit of a privilaged position, in that if they make something truly different and special, that many people will actually give it a chance because of Nintendo's history and reputation. Don't forget that even the godly Katamari Damacy is not a huge seller for Namco and has sold better in the United States than in Japan, and that much of its success can be traced, directly, to those early reviews and web articles, Insert Credit's among them, that praised it so highly and caused Namco to take the chance on releasing it in the U.S. It is possible that more people would have played it if it had been on Gamecube, despite its substantially smaller user base, because Gamecube owners are more likely to expect that kind of game!
That's Revolution's biggest promise, that the people who really know and care about gaming will get a system to call their own. That, mixed with the interesting new play styles made possible by the controller, has a chance of sparking a new resurgance of gaming with players, first drawn in by the controller and the hype potential of actually being able to play pretend swordfight in a video game, then kept around by Nintendo's historically strong design ability.
- #5 - Nintendo sucks
- #4 - EA sucks
- #3 - Sony sucks
- #2 - MS sucks
- #1 - PC gaming sucks
Wow, maybe it's just me, but I think that article is meant to insult every single gamer (he even almost makes a pass at retro gamers). Everything's got a downside, too pricey, too little power, too easy, too hard... someone's going to complain, and he basically just went down the list and picked the biggest gaffe from each area.I mean, he even insulted Nintendo on a product he hasn't tried and isn't out yet. That's got to be reaching....
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I can't believe these cockmonglers at Next Generation have the balls to bitch at a company for recognizing that it's unable to compete with the BILLION dollar likes of Sony and Microsoft.
God damn it. Nintendo is a company that keeps billions of dollars in cash. They are famous for it. The last figure I read, they had over $7 billion completely liquid. That is nearly twice as much than Microsoft lost on the XBOX. They have enough money to play the same game as Microsoft and Sony; they choose not to.
Why? Profit.
The arms race between Sony and MS may yield no net profit for either company. Nintendo is a well run company. They will not invest billions in a venture that is so high risk.
Is when Mario Revolution comes out, and NextGen spends 5 pages telling us how great and groundbreaking it is.
Nintendo's a company that has been in business for over 100 years and which has a ton of money and offices around the world. I think I can expect Nintendo to compete with Sony and Microsoft, the former being the company that hoisted Nintendo by its own petard two console-generations ago.
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No, you missed his point. His point isn't "EA puts out more sequels", it is "EA puts out the same game with a new lineup and calls it a sequel, and does it every year."
The point is, EA doesn't take chances until it has to compete. Nintendo tries to do something genuinely different with most of their sequels. One of the only sequel machines that Nintendo hasn't really changed fundamentally is their Mario Party lineup, but even then it's hard to say that they just do more of the same. Often times, the mini-games (the heart and soul of those games) are totally different for each game. Pokemon I guess could be formulaic as well (I don't know, to be honest) but the gameplay at least fundamentally changes with the addition of new Pokemon. It's not like adding new football players.
Or to put it in Simpsons form; "within 1 year, consoles will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them."
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I agree that Nintendo has what I wholehearted believe to be a major success waiting to happen in the Revolution. It is a system that tries not to aim too high like the 360 and the PS3. Not eveyone has HD, so the lack of HD support isn't that important. Focusing on gameplay is possibly the best idea they've had yet. Not that the Revolution won't have good graphics capabilities, so far I've seen that it will almost rival the next-gen systems in this area, but dazzling graphics aren't what games are all about. Too many game makers have made the mistake of equating mind-blowing graphics as the sign of a great game. Well, it can look ultra-realistic but if the gameplay isn't up to par then its bound to fail. A great game doesn't need astoundingly realistic graphics. Look at Animal Crossing and Link Four Swords which didn't have astonishingly amazing graphics but they played well and had a lot of gameplay options. That's the key, that is what Nintendo is aiming for, and its a formula that will make the Revolution truely a revolution in the gaming industry. When it hits the shelves we'll see a revitalization in the gaming development community. We'll see fresh new ideas and gameplay styles that don't exist on other consoles.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Bill Gates PERSONALLY is worth in the billions of dollars. $7 billion for Microsoft is pennies, the only reason they don't outright buy Nintendo is because they're resist to the death or every major/important/notable developer/musician/designer/artist would outright leave.
Sony is also relatively large, they're in the TV business, laptops, media center industry, Walkman/CD players/mp3 players industry, digital cameras and of course theres their influence in the music industry (as seenen in their DRM efforts).
Nintendo has... the video game industry. This is basicly a David vs. Goliath fight. Nintendo can win, but only if they pick their fights wisely.
Nintendo controller - a let down???
You gotta be kidding.
It is the only innovative thing that has come from a hardware company in years.
So while my XBox 360 sits there, playing the same ol' madden game and overheating, I can't help but thinking I'll be sitting there playing the revolution with the new controller trying out all these new and innovative games, and as usually is the case with nintendo, not being able to stop.
I wish these guys would stop measuring things in terms of 'chips'. I actually think that 3D has ruined the play of many game types, especially madden. I remember on the first Sega, the guys were nice little sprites, that you could see and understand abstractly. Now, with the 3D guys, you can't really see what is going on - the game is much harder to play and not as all as fun. Same thing with Hockey. But you know, boy it looks great doesn't it!!! Game sure is nice to look at, just not as fun.
Arg, it is fun sounding like an old man ranting about games.
Dave