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Super Smash Brothers Wii, Featuring Solid Snake
mcc writes "In a surprise news conference this evening, Nintendo unexpectedly revealed Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii, and released a promo video of the title. Smash Bros. Brawl will feature online play; a Nintendog item that blocks your view of the playfield by jumping up on the screen and demanding to be petted; bizarre Dragonball Z style superattacks; your choice of traditional Gamecube or motion-sensing Revmote control; and new characters in the form of Samus (without the suit), Meta Knight, Kid Icarus (!), and... Konami's Solid Snake, complete with a cardboard box he hides in. The only bad news is despite earlier reports it would be a launch title, Smash Bros. Brawl will not be out until 2007."
I hope the Wii does well. This is not because I am a fan of the company (though they've done great work which has brought me much pleasure), but for a more pragmatic reason: I intend to buy one, and want lots of third-party support.
/., I think I will be able to scrape up the funds for a Wii and a game every couple months. The way things are heading, I will have a huge supply of desirable games to choose from.
This is excellent news for people like me, and presumably Nintendo itself, because:
a) SSB has become a marquee title for Nintendo, and it will be good to have this out in that first 6-months-to-a-year period
b) this gives everyone an early answer on the question of GC controllers. Namely, on games where it's appropriate, we CAN expect the option of using the GC controller.
Though my budget for games seems to be much smaller than a lot of the people on
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
I'm still waiting for Sonic to be added to Smash Bros., so we can settle once and for all which mascot will win in a bar fight...
Read my blog posts on usability.
"However, if it turns out that most games are better without the 'chucks, how would Nintendo fan boys justify spending another 200 bucks on a system that is no better than the gamecube they already have?"
My GameCube won't be able to play this new Smash Bros. game. I ultimately buy game systems to play games on.
"Look at the Mac ... these days hardware wise it's pretty much a PC in a white case. About as boring and uninventive as you can get. MacOS X looks nice but is just an evolution (or mashup) of existing systems. Its primary innovation was a focus on eyecandy. The most innovative feature I can think of in a Mac is Expose. The real innovation in operating systems takes place in things like Plan9, Singularity etc."
before apple what color were all computers? beige and maybe if you are lucky, black. That was the rule.
How many computers came standard with a GUI in the 80s before apple's? More recently, a unix based desktop OS your mom can use? How about a GL acclerated desktop? a major commercial open source OS with full driver support? how many unix laptops could you buy? did you see people in starbucks running BSD made so simple they didnt even know it?
regarding innovation, have you even used a mac or an ipod? before the ipod, no one put tiny HDDs on mp3 players. There were HDD based players that were huge and tiny flash players. No one bothered integrating an mp3 player with a desktop based magement system that actually works. Itunes does more than sync your mp3s, it maintains ratings and play counts, album art, lyrics and syncs that with your ipod as well. Listen to a song on the ipod and rate it high and it will show up as such on your dekstop.
How about the itunes music store. Are you telling me that was done before? with flat pricing? integrating with your ipod?
sure there are copy cats now, but when they first came out with the ipod, tons of people here were saying it would be a failure (or it was "lame"). Do you remember the surprise when the music store came out? these were all risks becasue they were not doen before.
Lets not even get into iLife. go use a mac before saying there is nothing innovative. Just because you've never used it does not mean it does not exist.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Honestly, these days Apple is more focused on inventing new themes (Super Brushed Metal Pro) and doo-dads (Dashboard) than they are doing any serious usability work.
I'm not entirely sure you can say Nintendo is really in the backseat. I mean, in the last few years, you can definitely say the majority of the vocal gaming community sided with Sony, whereas Nintendo and Microsoft were always regulated to 2nd or 3rd place in the opinions... But on the other hand, when you step away from the hardcore crowd, Nintendo is the ONLY company of the three to actually walk away with more money than they started with. You can argue Sony sold this, or there are x units more shipped, but from a purely financial perspective, Nintendo is still king.
And if you even ignore profit, Nintendo has a number of good reputations. It's known for products that simply don't break. I've heard plenty of stories of consoles and gameboys getting hit be vehicles, falling out windows, and even being frozen and they still work. Whereas I've had so many complaints of Playstations (1 and 2) breaking for no real reason.
So, maybe it's unfair really to compare Sony and Nintendo. Over the past few years, it's become perfectly clear Nintendo is different. It's not in the same race. It goes after different demographics with different technology with different goals in mind (In Nintendo's case, this sums up to saying trying to create products that can appeal to everyone but still turns a profit, whereas Sony's business model seems to be to aim for the already tech savvy no matter the cost.).