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Details on Nintendo's Original Downloadable Content
HaymarketRiot writes "N'Gai Croal from Newsweek has given us a broad outline of Nintendo's plans for downloadable original content. To be called 'WiiWare', the company will be selling these all-new games via the Wii's Virtual Store for Wii points. Not only are they looking to big-name developers for these titles, but small garage-style shops as well. 'Shorter, original, more creative games from small teams with big ideas; these are the buzzwords that you'll be hearing from Nintendo when its Wednesday announcement goes wide. Fils-Aime told us that while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility, with developers and publishers responsible for securing [a rating lower than AO with the ESRB].' For more, N'Gai has an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime on the subject. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing a finished product until 2008."
The XBox's strength is in implementation, not innovation. Online gaming was old-hat by the time the original XBox came out, and it wasn't even really new for consoles. What Microsoft did was make a good online gaming system for consoles. By the same token, the 360 doesn't have anything completely new and different, in the same way the wiimote is, but it implemented a lot of old ideas in good ways. When it works.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I've always thought that the Xbox has pretty much gotten a fair deal on slashdot. Of course there's been the fanboys from either side who refuse to give an inch regardless of the realities, and still a general dislike/distrust of Microsoft. But overall, it seems that the general mindset (generalizing is bad, I know, but sometimes interesting) is that Xbox Live has been a monumental step in online console gaming, and MS did a pretty darn good job with it. MS also received a good bit of praise for their decision to include a HD standard with the Xbox, and a good amount of criticism for making it optional for the 360. The 360 appears to have less innovative stuff in it, but still has a fairly positive vibe to it around here as far as I can tell.
/. crowd has a problem acknowledging when they do something well. At worst, a lot of us wonder why they can't be more consistent at it with all the resources they have.
All that being said, MS tends to miss the mark with new products far more often than they really get it right, so skepticism isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it doesn't seem that the majority of the
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I see three possible solutions. Farm testing out to India, automate testing (have a bot go through and check each code branch for compatibility or something), or just not do very much testing. (Or take a loss, but this is frickin' Nintendo).
Okay, so supposing some combination of the above gets you down to $100 or so, you still need to worry about getting rated by the ESRB; Nintendo can't control the pricing of that. No, I don't think it's realistic to expect this to be an inexpensive distribution channel.
I guess so. The problem is that the Nintendo supporters on this site are so loud and overwhelming that it doesn't seem like the other consoles get their fair due. For instance, while you might see one or two fair and accurate Xbox posts modded up in a discussion, you'll see ten or twenty Nintendo posts modded up in the same discussion, even if the story has little to do with Nintendo.
The general rule with Microsoft is: Hardware good, software (mostly) bad.
Microsoft keyboards and mouses are very nice. Microsoft networking equipment (when they still made it) is great-- I have a MN-500 wifi router I hope never dies, because you can't replace them. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are both very good machines.
Some of their software is pretty good, like MS SQL Server or IIS, but the majority is pretty flakey IMO.
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So, don't buy the crappy and buggy ones then.
Problem solved.
Keep in mind though the 512MB of built-in memory and (current) inability to load games/saves directly from SD cards. Hopefully we'll see a firmware upgrade with this that lets the Wii load from SD cards and/or external hard drives via the USB ports on the back, but otherwise I imagine we'll be burning through that 512MB a lot quicker than we have been with the VC alone. That being said, its still fairly exciting news and I'm looking forward to picking up some new content to sit side by side with my favorite retro games.
I usually don't put a lot of stock in anecdotal failures either, but when Crecente of Kotaku said he was on his sixth, I took notice. If Microsoft cannot get a unit that is not defective to an influential news outlet in 5 tries, something is seriously, seriously wrong.
That is what I look it, because the media is their meat and potatoes. They should be doing whatever they can to get working units to those who comment on and review games for their systems.
Major gaming sites have been reporting that their own 360s have been breaking. This should not happen, and Microsoft is either extremely lucky that these sites do not take their hardware experience into account or they are paying the sites to ignore it.