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Nintendo Unveils Casual Gamer Brand
The Guardian Gamesblog discusses the newly announced Touch Generation of games for Nintendo's consoles. From the article: "This is, of course, a pointless piece of product re-positioning, symptomatic of modern business's obsession with branding above and beyond the call of sense. More importantly though, it's about Nintendo reveling in its E3 success. It is about a company that has effectively spent the last decade in its own self-made ghetto, turning to the industry and saying, 'I told you so' ... The wider world is coming back to videogames - and Nintendo is speaking its language. Anyway, the first three new releases in the Touch Generations line-up will be Big Brain Academy, the second title in the brain-training series, Magnetica, a marble-based puzzler, and Sudoku Gridmaster, a Sodoku game with over 400 puzzles. They're out this summer."
I think Nintendo is realizing that puzzle games are the most effective games in the handheld realm. When you have a handheld gaming system, most likely you use it while waiting for something, and you want to be able to put it away at a moments notice. You don't want to have to tell someone to wait while you finish up a level, or fighting a boss.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
I highly doubt that you need to make a second brand to help casual gamers more readily adopt casual games. Usually casual games are far cheaper to begin with and usually give away the fact they are are rather simple concepts. I'd say a casual gamer is far less likely to look for a brand within a brand and far more likely to pick up an affordable title that looks enjoyable.
Who pissed in this blogger's Cheerios?
How many ways can juveniles combine "Touch" and "Wii" in a sentence?
I can see it now:
"The Nintendo Wii; part of the Touch Generation!"
(And, no, it never gets old - for me, at least.)
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
The Casual Gamer(tm) likes to play with his Wii.
This guy's the limit!
I'm sure Michael Jackson is all over this one...
I found the bragging about 400 Sudoku puzzles slightly comical when other games have several thousand/millions of puzzles. I mean, a sudoku puzzle, it can't take more than a few hundred bytes to store them.
"Over 400 puzzles"? I sure hope they mean "over 400 variants" of Sudoku or something. (Variants can add up fast when you have multiple independent dimensions to vary on; remember the old Atari 2600 games that had "32" variants, which were just all combinations of 5 binary flags? "Shots bounce" vs. "Shots don't bounce", for instance. Oh, and don't forget the color variations!)
Solving Sudoku puzzles is moderately computationally intensive and maybe the DS shouldn't be doing that, but it ought to be able to generate them just fine, and an experienced Sudoku player who is also a decent programmer even ought to be able to make a good stab at varying the difficulty levels automatically. (It doesn't have to be *perfect*, just mostly effective.)
Otherwise that's a bit of a rip-off; as long as you're going to computerize your Sudoku you might as well get all-the-puzzles-you-can-eat. (And for that matter, open the field up to some of the more advanced variants, like the 4-version.)
Nintendo , Sony and Microsoft are a bit like The Finches in the Galapagos isles(The phantom being more like the Lesser spotted Galapagos Fantastapotamus) .
Sony and Microsoft are unfortunately both going after the Bugs , whilst Nintendo has decided to screw it and eat berries .
There are a lot more Bugs out there , but they require more energy to catch and you have to deal with the rival birds.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Nintendo are obviously doing this to make things easier for the casual consumer. Someone with little or no industry knowledge would probably welcome a marketing strategy that provides a clear distinction between the casual games that they are interested in and the dirth of bestselling (traditional gaming) titles that line store shelves. The accidental purchase of Castlevania might frustrate a casual gamer enough to scare them away from future game purchases. It is in Nintendo's best interest to make sure that the uninformed casual gamers are empowered to make the correct game purchases. Of course, more hardcore fans should be able to make their purchases based on something other than the colour of the box!
Official Touch Generations website here. It contains a full list of games included under the Touch Generation name.
This message will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3...
...but in Japan even Nintendogs was marketed as a Touch Generations title. This is something they've been doing for a long time!
Have you played brain age? This game also includes a few sudoku puzzles for you to try.
You don't have to type numbers and move the joypad to play. You simply tap the stylus in a square to give it focus and write the number in it. The DS recognizes your handwritting. This is as close as it gets to a pen and paper sudoku puzzle.
...Invisible Tank Pong on the 2600 Combat cart - don't tell me that wasn't a whole game in it's own right! That one kept me and my mate out of school on many an afternoon...
Not to be a vocabulary or spelling nazi, but I think you spelled the word wrong, and I don't think it means what you think it does:
Dearth A scarce supply; a lack"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
Who the HELL are you talking to when you're playing? :(
I have ample time to finish whatever is needed, or just turn the damn console off whenever I leave my train/bus/whatever. I rarely use the sleep mode, but pausing/closing the DS doesn't "kill your groove". If you think it does, you take your toys way too seriously, dude
Sadly, the latest screenshots and video for Sudoku Gridmaster show that its UI sucks compared to the small sudoku feature in the brain game. :(
Hopefully they'll get that changed by the time it is released.
+1.
I dream of a time when Video Games are treated like books, movies, music, or even PC software, and instead of being thrown on the racks in alphabetical order, you'd get a "FPS" shelf, another one labeled "brainfood", "this is the kind your grandson would really really hate if he's older than 8", "survival horror", "Party games", and so on. THAT would help confused non-gamers know how to buy a gift for gamer their acquaintances, plus we'd be treated like every other fucking media!
If you look at the NES game packaging, there were such categories. "Action", "Adventure", "Lightgun", and such. So, it's not really innovation, but it's nice of them to wake up from their long, boring, slumber.
Disclaimer : Maybe some store actually does that, but I have never seen that happen.
Obviously this blogger has never taken a basic marketing class in his 80's university classes. As one marketing giant once stated: "If you are too intelligent to be swayed by advertisement, then why, when I say 'Jolly Green Giant', you think frozen peas?". The power of branding is extreme and Nintendo realises that although their brand strikes a cord with those who grew-up with Mario and Co., everyone else sees Nintendo as a waste of time for young boys. Nintendo is realises that seizing the new "casual gamer" market can't be done through that lens and so is providing the new customer a way to look at the product without thinking of Mario and classic video games. To market everything under the Nintendo brand would make a difficult barrier for the new user and taint the brand image for the old user.
Shhhhhhhhh! My parents will hear you!
"It's dinner time."
I'll be right there.
"NOW."
I just have to beat this one thing...
"Can't you pause it?"
I need to find a save point.
"It's getting co-oooold."
I dream of a time when Video Games are treated like books, movies, music, or even PC software, and instead of being thrown on the racks in alphabetical order, you'd get a "FPS" shelf, another one labeled "brainfood", "this is the kind your grandson would really really hate if he's older than 8", "survival horror", "Party games", and so on.
Me too. All my dreams are set in the present. At least PC games are ordered by genre 'round here, though there are some weird choices (especially on the topic of what constitutes an "adventure"). There's shelves with Action (usually FPS), Adventure, Strategy, Simulation, Kids, Budget and Add On games. I don't know what they sort all those Sudoku games that are coming out lately under (I think there's no label on that shelf) but they are grouped together as well.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I think that perhaps Nintendo knows that puzzle games are a rage not just in Japan, not just among women and girls (a vast untapped market with lots of money), but also for people trying to prevent/defer Alzheimers and dementia.
A wise company finds new untapped markets - an old feeble company tries to keep selling whale oil for our lamps.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Since my left hand is disabled, I am unable to play any games that require the directional pad. I've tried, believe me. It is difficult for me to shop for DS games since the ones that do operate with the stylus only use it for mini-games. I have found many games that run completely on stylus control, but I had to do alot of research to make sure that was the case.
I was going to write Nintendo today to see if they could provide a list of games that only required the stylus.
Lo and behold: they've already done it.
Damn, I haven't been this pleased with Nintendo since the 8-bit days (Even if they have been helping me unintentionally).
Then the difficult part is atomic - either you finish it, or you don't.
The problem is that you want atoms like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, but some games tend to throw you much bigger atoms like uranium.
If you made it to a high level of Lumines (DS) or Tetris (PSP)
Looks like you've been playing a lot of homebrew. Officially, Tetris is on DS and Lumines is on PSP, but unofficially, Lumines is on GBA and Tetris is emulated on PSP.
This sort of brand is exactly what *I* want. I've been playing console (and PC) games since the original Odyssey, and I'm very pleased Nintendo is doing something like this.
:)
Without doing a metric buttload of research these days it's damn near impossible to know what a game actually plays like. With 3 major console systems, plus 3 portable systems, all with games being released every month.. there are hundreds and hundreds of games I've never even heard of. With most, it's fairly easy to look at the package description and the screenshots (unless they're cinemas like with a lot of Playstation games... grr) and get a rough idea what the game's like.
But a lot of games aren't this easy. Especially the kinds of games I find myself wanting to play more and more. I've seen puzzle games that seem to be marketted as racing games, fighting games, platformers... and they're just simple puzzle games. The perfect thing for a DS, when you have 5-10 minutes to kill. However, I pass them by because they look like a long and involved game. And it works in reverse - games that seem to be the type you can quickly pick up and play for a few minutes, meanwhile every session ties you up for half an hour or longer because it's hard to put "5 minute game sessions!!!!" on the back of a box and sound excited about it.
I'm looking forward to this (at least for the Nintendo systems' games). It will make it very easy to find the games to play while riding the bus, PLUS it will help to separate out the really involved games - and yes, I still play some of these
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Why not? I think your definition of "casual gamer" is a bit off. In Nintendo's view, everyone who isn't a hardcore gamer is a potential casual gamer, as shown by their Wii videos: Even grandmas can play video games, and some of them do. Why should Nintendo not take their money?
but maybe they should stop with the puzzle games and make a fully fledged RPG that doesnt take 100 hours to beat. And one that doesn't leave you sratching your head for 20 minutes after turning it on, trying to figure out what you were going to do next before you turned it off! A game where you can get from place to place without much delay. No more walking through the woods for 15 minutes fighting trivial encounters, casual gamer doesn't have time for that. Make a game that can be finished fairly quickly, put down and picked up any time, and one that isn't shorted on features such as graphics.
why have infinite computer generated puzzles when you can have 400 quality ones
To discourage somebody with more time than money from solving them all and posting the solution to a site that some people have called GayFAGs. That is, unless you take the 400 predefined puzzles and use the 1.6 million different permutations of column groups (3!), columns within groups (3!*3!*3!), row groups (3!), and rows within groups (3!*3!*3!), along with the 360,000 permutations of the symbols (9!). This means each of the 400 puzzles can possibly be presented 600 billion times without the player noticing.
You can also swap rows and columns and double the number of presentations. However, if you follow the convention that requires sudoku puzzles to be rotationally symmetric....
For every puzzle, you have a row/column swap or not (2), first/third column swap or not (2), first/third row swap or not (2), first/third column swap within the second column or not (2), first/third row swap within the second row or not (2), and complementary permutations of rows within the first and third rows (3!) and of columns within the first and third columns (3!). This will give (I think) as many as 1,152 unique permutations of a puzzle (modulo the symbols used) that preserve rotational symmetry. With 9! permutations of symbols, that gives possibly over 400 million versions of each puzzle.