Games Industry Things We Should Leave Behind in '07

MTV's Multiplayer blog has a list of nine videogame concepts we should be 'leaving behind', left to rot in the now-passed year of 2007. From the countdown clocks to Halo 3, their snarky list leaves no stone unturned: "The Phrase 'Next-Gen' - Ladies and gentlemen, 'next-gen' is now. Everyone from PR firms to development studios are still using this phrase. Please, I beg of you, stop using "next-gen" until the PS4, Xbox 4000, and the Nintendo Super Wii are slated for release. Those consoles will officially be 'next-gen.' The PS3, Wii, and 360 are the current generation of games. Now is the time to accept it."

Comments

Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[fotbr]

Please?

Re:Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have another thing to add: MTV doing non-music related events.

Re:Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also include women being allowed to vote, drive and hold jobs in fields other than food service, secretary, nurse, schoolteacher, and flight attendant.

Re:Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[mqduck]

I think you're missing the point. Articles like this just serve as good jumping-off points for Slashdot discussion, which is what a lot of us are here for.

Re:Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[LordKaT]

They're great SEO.

Re:Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[PFI_Optix]

You forgot "stripper" and "prostitute". It'd be a sad, sad world when only men did those jobs.

Re:Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists?

[mqduck]

You know, if you think my opinion that articles like this are worthwhile because they spark conversation is wrong, you could just ignore me - or, better yet, the whole article - instead of modding me "overrated". For that matter, why are you even reading the discussion if you don't think it's worthwhile?

I really wish people who don't like certain parts of Slashdot would stop showing up at those parts and bitching instead of just staying away and letting the rest of us enjoy ourselves.

How about poor supply chain management?

[compumike]

Nintendo couldn't keep up with demand for the Wii... and it was like that for more than 9 months! Take a look at this article from Wired, but still there are few answers as to why it was so bad for so long. I'd like to vote for better supply chain management in 2008.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[jandrese]

9 months? From what I see their problems are going for at least 13 months now and counting. There was an article in my local paper this morning about how people were lining up in front of some store because they were getting a shipment of 100 Wiis instead of the normal 5 or 6. Apparently that store won some sort of sales contest over the Christmas holiday season and got the big shipment as a prize. The idea of seeing a Wii in stock around here is still laughable and the console has been out for over a year now.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've produced about 20 million in about 13 months. That's more than twice what the PS2 did in its first 13 months.

How exactly is Nintendo dropping the ball when they're vastly outperforming the PS2, widely regarded as the greatest success seen so far in the game industry?

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[immcintosh]

I always figured the Wii supply shortage was intentionally manufactured in order to create buzz. At first I could see them maybe not having anticipated the demand, but after a couple months passed and they were still rarer than hens' teeth (hell, they still are to this day at least in my area), I've come to the conclusion that Nintendo is milking what's started for the social benefits. To many it makes their console much more "exclusive" seeming than the competitors, and to that end it seems to be working wonders.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[anotherone]

That's stupid. Nintendo is leaving literally BILLIONS of dollars on the table because they simple don't have the inventory to meet demand. It wouldn't make any sense to create buzz when you couldn't monetize on that buzz.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[rhombic]

How exactly is Nintendo dropping the ball when they're vastly outperforming the PS2, widely regarded as the greatest success seen so far in the game industry?

Because a year after the PS2 was released, I could go into a store and buy one. In San Diego, at least, a year after the Wii was released I cannot go into a store and buy one. They're leaving a lot of money on the table by not being able to fulfill demand (I would have bought one this Xmas for my kids, but I'm not paying $500 for Wii plus eight games I care less about). They're also on the receiving end of a ton of bad PR b/c of this bundling making their $250 console w/o HD capabilities or DVD playback cost more than a PS3. I've read that they're trying to deal w/ the bundlers, but as far as I can tell it's had no effect. Ah well, the kids may not like it as much, but I'm enjoying the new PS3 ;().

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[C0rinthian]

If Nintendo had any more buzz, women (and some men) would be lining up to ride it.

Seriously, the Wii is one of the hottest products of the year and Nintendo gains nothing by limiting supply this far after release.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Stefanwulf]

The key thing to think of with regards to production of a video game console is that it's different from making more copies of a game. If a game is selling out, you call your manufacturer and they just turn some of the other DVD-writers to producing one DVD instead of another DVD. To lease a factory and retool/staff it in order to churn out new consoles is a huge investment, not to mention taking time. At every step of the way Nintendo has had to weigh the costs of underproducing against the possibility of this huge wave of demand dying off during the ramp-up time for their (actually their manufacturer's, but they'd be footing the bill) new factories. This is much easier for us looking back than it is for a businessman trying to predict what will be happening 3 or 5 months from now. I don't know how much it costs them to prepare a new manufacturing facility, so there's no way I can say where that balance between these two factors actually lies, but it's not as though a conspiracy theory is needed to explain their being cautious about something like this.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Dorceon]

You have to have buzz to sell out in the first place. Which came first, the shortage or the buzz? Also, the console you would have sold to someone if you had it in stock has an attach rate of 0.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Chris Mattern]

What you mean "couldn't", kemosabe. It ain't past tense. There's no place I know of where I can just walk in and get a Wii for $250 (which is supposed to be the MSRP). I've been thinking I might like one, but I'm not paying a premium or buying one of those ridiculous bundle packs. I'll buy one when I can buy one for $250, and until then, well, I really do have a lot of other games, some of which I haven't gotten around to playing at all yet.

Chris Mattern

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[rtb61]

The ecomomist's would say once you have achieved sufficient buzz with the whole 'entertaining exercise game playing', you limit supply in order to maintain a higher price. It already has been categorically states that the Wii is sold at a profit, limited supply ensures that profit margin is maintained.

Naturally enough if the public becomes to aware of the inflated price being driven by an artificial limitation of supply then demand for the game will fall off, resulting in a drop of per unit pricing to maintain sales, people do not like to be scammed.

As a side issue, a lot of people are likely to stick with the sports games that came with the unit and not really wanting any others.

The other console manufacturers need to catch up and came up with similarly packaged and bundled units targeted at the 'entertaining exercise game playing' market, which seems to be a growing market segment, along with waistlines ;).

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[immcintosh]

The only lost sales are those people who want one immediately and will not for whatever reason eventually buy one when it becomes finally available for them. Everything else is not lost revenue, just deferred. I would be so bold to say that the buzz which I (incorrectly or otherwise) attribute in large part to perceived "exclusivity" of the device easily offsets those actually lost sales by generating revenue in new markets previously untouched by console gaming. Again though, just my take.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[immcintosh]

The way I remember it, the buzz really started a couple months after the console actually went on the market. With the very low supply they sold out very quickly due to natural market demand, and that's when I really remember them becoming a big deal.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Txiasaeia]

Are you sure about that? If they're producing as many Wiis as they possibly can, the only way to create more supply is by opening another factory. How many billions will that cost?

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well to increase output they have to make new deals with all of their suppliers. All three of the console makers outsource their production (to the same company in fact) and it takes months for an order to increase production to be executed. On top of that, Nintendo doesn't want to ramp up production and then find out that the demand drops and leaves them with a glut of consoles, so they have to increase it a little bit at a time and watch what happens to see if they can increase it any more.

You're essentially asking Nintendo to blindly increase production beyond what they are certain they can sell even though their production is already at record setting levels.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[NonSequor]

The Wii sold more at launch than the PS3 or 360 though (not as much as the PS2's launch, but it did more than make up the difference after the fact).

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Runefox]

Ironic, isn't it? =D

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Runefox]

I got kind of lucky. A Future Shop (think Best Buy; they're the same company) in the city here had five consoles in stock, with one being sold as I was buying another. I managed to grab one just by walking in, and I haven't seen anywhere else with Wii stock since.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[__aaclcg7560]

Supposedly they are available in my area at Fry's Electronics but only in the $500 bundle. I'm waiting for the day when I can just walk past all these piles of PS3 and 360s that no one wants to pull a Wii off the shelf. :)

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[anotherone]

I would be so bold to say that the buzz which I (incorrectly or otherwise) attribute in large part to perceived "exclusivity" of the device easily offsets those actually lost sales by generating revenue in new markets previously untouched by console gaming.

Nope, sorry. $250 from your mom is exactly the same as $250 from a hardcore gamer. If anything Nintendo would make more by getting Wiis to the gamers- All of those retired people who've bought Wiis probably don't have more than one, maybe two games (Wii Sports, maybe Cooking Mama or something awful like that) -- whereas "traditional" gamers tend to shell out $50 every couple of weeks for new games.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Zeussy]

Quote from George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America. He said there was a shortage because the company must plan its production schedule five months ahead, and projecting future demand is difficult. He added that there had been a worldwide shortage of disk drives that had hurt Nintendo as well as makers of many other devices.

Taken from NYTimes Planning ahead for future demand is hard, but after the first initial rush on launch back in 06 they should of realized that demand this holiday season would be pretty hot too, but if you can't source the components how can you manufacture more units?

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[servognome]

The only lost sales are those people who want one immediately and will not for whatever reason eventually buy one when it becomes finally available for them.

Which can be a large number given the time period. Once the Christmas season was over, the money for the Wii was likely spent on other gifts and the immediate demand to satisfy the kids is over.

Everything else is not lost revenue, just deferred.

Deferred revenue has a cost, the same amount of money you get later is not worth as much as money you get now

I would be so bold to say that the buzz which I (incorrectly or otherwise) attribute in large part to perceived "exclusivity" of the device easily offsets those actually lost sales by generating revenue in new markets previously untouched by console gaming.

From my limited experience word of mouth is a huge driver for sales of the Wii. For many non tech-savy people it's just another new video game console, until they try it themselves. So limiting the supply and chances would in fact negatively impact sales.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[afidel]

I doubt the bottleneck's in assembly, and that is most likely already outsourced to one of the big electronics houses. Most likely there's a handful of components that are the limiting factor, most likely the GPU and/or CPU. My bet is on the CPU which is being fabed by IBM which has historically had production problems (hence why Apple switched to Intel).

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[king-manic]

Took me about 3 visits to EB to get mine. But that was before Christmas.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[KDR_11k]

That would be true for a regular good but the Wii is a platform for software, that software only comes if the platform is sold enough and that software is what will have to sell the thing after the release hype dies down and people start buying for actual software instead of potential. If you sell slower at first you don't get as much software as quickly and thus sales lower as demand decreases.

Re:How about poor supply chain management?

[Hognoxious]

The ecomomist's would say once you have achieved sufficient buzz with the whole 'entertaining exercise game playing', you limit supply in order to maintain a higher price.

They also know what elasticity is, and a higher price isn't the whole story - profit is. Sometimes selling a higher volume at a lower price generates more profit.

P.S. I assume you were talking about economists, not some unknown thing that belongs to one of them.

Super Wii

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

Man, I really hope they call it that.

Re:Super Wii

[HappyDrgn]

I'm totally with you on that one! When I read that I took pause and thought, man, that's a really good name!

Re:Super Wii

[mlheur]

What about the Wii 1024 (W1K) or the Wii HoloCube

Re:Super Wii

[Lost Engineer]

Gamesphere FTW!

Re:Super Wii

[Cheapy]

"Hardcore Wii: Putting the Hard back into the Wii"

Re:Super Wii

[UnknownSoldier]

I just want proper render-to-texture support.

Re:Super Wii

[red_dragon]

I have word from a "reliable source" that the next Wii upgrade will go by the name of Superfly Johnson (Suupaa Dankon in Japan). The bundled game will be Daikatana 2: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

Re:Super Wii

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible. Also in the running:
  - Wiii
  - Wii, too!
  - Wii++
  - Zii (or Zid in Canada)
  - Wii 7.0 (if they get the Sun marketing people)

Also, the controller will be even deadlier than before. Rumor is, it'll be an ordinary cardboard tube.

Re:Super Wii

[Anonymous Coward]

WiiMax. Totally.

and my captcha is "retard".

Re:Super Wii

[ZorbaTHut]

Whenever I need to make a comment about the next generation of consoles I refer to them as the XBox 720,000, the PlayStation eXtreme, and the Wiiwii.

Re:Super Wii

[crono_deus]

"Massive Wii."

Not only do you get a continuation of an unendingly funny joke ("hey guys/girls. Come play with my Massive Wii!"), Nintendo actually can use it as a workable pun for online play. Games would be called "MassiveWii Multiplayer Online Games."

Come on. You know it'd be brilliant.

The Hardcore vs Softcore arguement

[CrazyJim1]

I don't like people saying that people shouldn't get deep into the game as a hardcore player. I like the philosophy on board games: Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.

Re:The Hardcore vs Softcore arguement

[Floritard]

That's the type of game Nintendo does really well. Take Mario Galaxy for instance. You can beat it with 60 stars, but if you want to go deeper, you can continue for the total 100 stars. The more casual players can still "beat" the game and get a satisfying ending, while the more hardcore can go for total completion with the slightly harder challenges. This is something they've done with that franchise since way back in Super Mario World (maybe even SMB3 as it had alternate routes in the level path IIRC).

Or take Smash Bros. You can play it as a party game with a couple of friends smashing buttons frantically. But I've also talked to someone that said there's an incredibly deep competitive game in there as well. He described some of the moves and some of the timings to me that I never would have thought of. It's interesting to find there's a whole other level to that gameplay.

Those really are the best sort of video games. By their nature they adjust their difficulty to your playing style and you're able to complete challenges at your level without having to modify any explicit settings in the options. You don't guess at what difficulty you should be playing under, you just play.

Top Two List of Things to Leave Behind.

[Chyeld]

Top two on my list: MTV (and SpikeTV, and VH1, and every other "entertainment only" network), and the idea that they have intelligible to say about the gaming industry.

The Much Needed 2007 Gaming Trash Heap

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Waggle - Ok, it was amusing for a little while a year ago around the holidays. But it is time to move on. Disco and Pet Rocks and now Waggle.

2. HD-DVD - A format whose only reason for existence was Microsoft's hope of destroying any next gen movie format and thus leading movie buying/renting consumers to use their own movie download services

3. Xbox 360 - Underpowered graphics 640p last gen looking Halo 3 etc, gimped disc storage of only 7 gigs or so(small than last gen), noisy as a jet airplane from the fans and old 12x DVD drive, disc scratching and destroying drives, forced online fees, no standard harddrive, worst defect rate of any console in history. Already dead in Japan and pretty much all of Europe but kept alive by the rabid US based Halo fans.

Re:The Much Needed 2007 Gaming Trash Heap

[Sciros]

You forgot to put "kidnaps babies" and "slashes your tires while you sleep" under the bullshit you listed for Xbox 360.

Re:The Much Needed 2007 Gaming Trash Heap

[Moonpie Madness]

Thing is, a lot of the problems he notes for the 360 are true. The games are just so much better on the 360 that, even with all the negatives, it's the best system to own right now.

Yeah, some huge secret number of these things already broke, and MS hasn't even fixed the core flaw. Yeah, it's loud. And it's quite ugly and doesn't protect its discs from scratching.

But it's got so many top notch games, it's still a great system. Says a lot for the software. The PS3 is the opposite. The game selection is atrocious, even now after Warhawk and Uncharted, this is a boring line-up. The real games everyone was thinking about upon purchase, from MGS4 to Home, have been delayed and delayed. Yet the PS3's so slick and interesting that most owners are happy with their system in spite of the lame game selection.

That's the reason these are still next gen. Because console gaming is all about the PS2. That's the normal system, and until the other ones take its place, which will be awhile, then the PS2 is the current gen.

Re:The Much Needed 2007 Gaming Trash Heap

[Sciros]

Hmmm...

"Underpowered graphics" -- By what standards? Mass Effect and Gears look about as good as anything else.

"640p last gen looking Halo 3" -- Pretty much a lie. Halo 3 is not 640p and I think this has been covered multiple times. It doesn't look last-gen it just doesn't look as good as Gears.

"noisy as a jet airplane from the fans" -- you can hear it but gimme a break! any normal level of game volume will drown out the whirr of the fans which isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be.

"forced online fees" -- WTF? I don't know how voluntarily signing up for a service is "forced."

"Already dead in Japan and pretty much all of Europe but kept alive by the rabid US based Halo fans" -- it's doing just fine in Europe and it's much more than just "kept alive" in the US. Its software sales are doing very, very well here.

Dude that was just FUD trolling.

Re:The Much Needed 2007 Gaming Trash Heap

[Moonpie Madness]

oh, I agree that he was blatantly trolling, but some of his general negative comments are certainly major problems for the 360.

Its graphic are generally awesome, but he's right that Halo 3 was lacking in this area. And 360s are shoddy and unreliable.

but in spite of that, the system is great, which I think is the bigger story.

the best fud is loosely based on truth, the best answer is to give the rest of the story.

The 9 things

[Jim Hall]

It's a short article, but here are the 9 things for those of you who don't want to RTFA:

1. The Phrase "Next-Gen". (It's not "next gen" until the PS4.)
2. "Halo 3". (Similar to the above, Halo is done, the fight is finished, no need to refer to the version anymore.)
3. Bad Virtual Console Releases. (Referring to Nintendo.)
4. Game Delays. (I'm with him in hating delays, but good luck on that one.)
5. Countdown Clocks. (I guess I never noticed a countdown clock on gaming web sites, but maybe that's because I don't really visit web sites for not-yet-released games. I suppose they have them.)
6. Japan-Only Releases. (If the game is done, why not also release it in the US? Maybe it will do well, maybe not. Give it a try.)
7. The PlayStation 2. (Please start pushing developers to the PS3.)
8. 711 selling Video Games. (Doesn't like the idea of being able to buy a Slurpee and a video game in one stop.)
9. Totilo and N'Gai's Love Affair. (These guys are friends and they talk about each other in their articles, but we'd like to hear more about games than the other guy.)

Re:The 9 things

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan-Only Releases. (If the game is done, why not also release it in the US? Maybe it will do well, maybe not. Give it a try.) 1. Region Issues

The US is - uh, a bit puritan. Any and all references to sex must be excised, since what's a kid's game in everywhere that's not the US becomes porno in the US.

Then there's the whole "not English" thing, where the game must be translated into elementary-level English to allow the majority of US readers to understand what's going on.

2. It Costs A Lot More Than You Think

Placing boxes in stores costs a lot. Producing the box and doing marketing (even if it is only to the store) is required if you plan on having the boxes in stores.

Online-only releases can help with this, though, so hopefully we'll see more of that.

What you're really asking is for consoles to get over region-coding, and I'm all for that. But don't expect to see weird and quirky games in stores, it's just not cost-effective.

Re:The 9 things

[iocat]

Next-gen is a perfectly legitimate term to describe the PS3 and 360; it distinguishes them from the Wii and PS2, which are consoles that are still viable development platforms, but are not in the same league as the 360/PS3 in terms of graphical power.

When discussing development with publishers or other developers, there are basically three tiers: PS3/360, Wii/PS2/PSP, and DS. The first tier is usually refered to as "next gen" and that's unlikely to change for a while. Sorry if it's not semantically correct, but them's the breaks. Also, PS2 is still selling tons of software. You can hate on it all you want, but no one is going to stop making PS2 games for a while.

(There is also a fourth tier, which is demographically defined verus being capability defined, which is Wii/DS.)

Re:The 9 things

[AuMatar]

Sorry, you're wrong. THe only next-gen platform is the Wii, its the only platform truely innovating. Xbox360 and PS3 are the same generation as the PS1 and PS2, the only difference is slightly more processing power- yawn.

Re:The 9 things

[mh101]

The whole point with regards to dropping the "next-gen" term as far as I see it isn't to say there's anything wrong with the capabilities of PS3/360/Wii, but rather than they're no longer next gen anymore but rather current gen. All three have been out for over a year after all.

Re:The 9 things

[king-manic]

Sorry, you're wrong. THe only next-gen platform is the Wii, its the only platform truely innovating. Xbox360 and PS3 are the same generation as the PS1 and PS2, the only difference is slightly more processing power- yawn..

Summary of 80% of the wii library thus far:

nes game - button mashing + frantic shaking.

It's not really that big a step. everything done on the wii has appeared else where you're just jumping on a band wagon.

Re:The 9 things

[Hognoxious]

It's sort of covered by 4, but can we add a number 10 - lame Duke Nukem Forever jokes?

Re:The 9 things

[Moonpie Madness]

the ps3 adds motion sensing as well. You didn't know that? It's actually a lot nicer than the wii's in my opinion, because it's not used on its own as much, but rather used to enhance the normal controller. Games like high velocity bowling show that the PS3 is better suited for motion controlling games than the wii. I know how trollish that sounds, but you get more immersed when the game looks realistic.

Anyway, "generation" does not imply virtue. IT implies that the company is making a new edition of machine. The idea that teh -s3 and 360 aren't next gen because you prefer the wiimote is pathetic.

I think nintendo fans are overly impressed with the wii's scarcity and popularity and think that means it is revolutionary. Quite the opposite, in fact. The wii is the cheapest and least challenging system by far. And it's probably not even the most successful.

If you haven't noticed, Sony just won the format war, thanks entirely to the PS3. In games alone it is outselling the wii in many markets, and approaching its sales worldwide (And currently is selling more than the 360). Also, the PS3 is able to download much more expensive merchandise than the wii: movies, big games, furniture in home, etc. The PS3 is going to be responsible for an enormous amount of profit.

I don't prefer the PS3 (there isn't even one game on that thing I want to play), but the wii's certainly not as far ahead of the other systems as people pretend. It's winning a much smaller and less important battle.

Re:The 9 things

[Buran]

I don't think the request is to actually sell all those games in US stores. Just make them work for US buyers so that people who want to buy from other countries can do so. (I'm not a console gamer, but I understand this problem)

Re:The 9 things

[LKM]

I think it would be feasible to get rid of region lock and include an English language version in most games. Some games already do this (Phoenix Wright on the DS, for example), because even some Japanese people appreciate an English language option in order to learn the language. The games don't need to be published over here, just give me the option to buy them and play them in English.

Lol Halo 3 on the list!

[Doug52392]

I can't believe someone like MTV are agreeing with me on this: Halo 3 was WAY too overhyped, and ended up coming no where near good enough with all the hype. It's bad on a corperate level to put SO much hype into "new" products, then come out with a monopilized, overcharged product. Even the "ARG" for Halo 3 sucked.

# 1 should be ethernet cables!

[HappyDrgn]

Really, I was shocked that the Xbox needed a cable running to my living room for net access. Climbing around by attic running 50ft of network cable is not my idea of a "next gen" experience. I realize that you can buy all sorts of things to overcome this, but please can we put a $5 wifi chip into so called "next gen" consoles from now on?

Re:# 1 should be ethernet cables!

[WarwickRyan]

Yeah, fast, reliable, extensible and relatively secure networking is really a thing of the past.

Wireless is fine if you've got no neighbors and only a device or two, but it's really a second rate solution. Especially in an environment where you've got 3+ networked devices, stream video (especially HD) or have devices which interfere with wireless (some microwaves, cordless phones, radiotransmitters).

Re:# 1 should be ethernet cables!

[Thanatos69]

I wouldn't use the wireless anyways. wireless internet just can't be relied on for continuous uptime. Not that you need continuous uptime but if you are in the middle of an hour long game and the wireless goes down for a couple seconds...

Re:# 1 should be ethernet cables!

[grumbel]

Works the other way around too, Wii not having a Ethernet connector is just plain stupid, those things must cost in the range of pennies and I would much prefer to just stick a cable into the Wii instead of using my rather unreliable and slow WLAN router (the "slow" part comes thanks to the DS, which just doesn't work unless I limit the router to 2Mbit).

"Luckily" one can buy those things seperate, but while 30EUR for a Nintendo Ethernet Adapter is already is a little step, 70EUR for Microsofts WLAN Adapter are utterly ridiculous, for half that money one can buy a WLAN bridge. Would be nice somebody at Microsoft gets a clue and include those in later revisions of the XBox360.

That's asinine

[hudsonhawk]

If you'd take your fanboy goggles off for even a minute you'd see that all 3 consoles bring something new to the table. Massive disc storage, downloadable games / content, note-perfect online capabilities, achievements, motion sensing controls, wireless everything, user chosen music, and hardware so advanced that it enables gameplay in ways that were previously limited by technology (i.e. massive streaming worlds, online coop throughout the entire game, complex physics).

Being pedantic about next-gen versus current-gen is indeed ridiculous. Assigning the title arbitrarily is even worse.

Next-Gen

[ticklejw]

But if we stop using Next-Gen now, we won't have the opportunity to call things Post-Next-Gen in a few years :-(

Misogyny

[crosson]

I think one of the major barriers to the video-game industries quest for mass media acceptance is the stuck-in-the-1980s tendency to portray women as sexual objects with boys-club-only lack of shame.

Re:Misogyny

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean girls don't actually look like they do in video games or anime!? Pics please. I don't believe you.

Re:Misogyny

[sanosuke76]

Heh, you say that as if the fangirls who play Final Fantasy DON'T get all excited about the guys. :p

Re:Misogyny

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

I don't know if you've seen an action movie, listened to hip-hop, bought a men's magazine, seen the way some women dress, and on and on. The entire western cultural understanding of women is severely MPD... one minute they're sex objects, the next they're dignified human beings who deserve respect for their intellect, wisdom, or what have you.

Of course, what we do to men is probably worse.

Re:Misogyny

[Catnapster]

I think one of the major barriers to the video-game industries quest for mass media acceptance is the stuck-in-the-1980s tendency to portray women as sexual objects with boys-club-only lack of shame.

This would make a great deal of sense if:

• Video games weren't part of the mass media.
• The (other) mass media weren't also portraying women as sexual objects as early and often as possible.
• The (other) mass media ever had any shame whatsoever.

Since video games are part of the mass media, the mass media loves to portray women as sexual objects, and the mass media never had any shame, neither your premise nor your argument make any sense.

Re:Misogyny

[IorDMUX]

Indeed.

That is one major reason why I repeatedly applaud Valve for their treatment of Alyx Vance. An equal, intelligent, non-over-sexed partner.

Huzzah.

Re:Misogyny

[fanboy3445]

I hate to say this, but I think it (sexist behavior) goes back a little further than the 80's. Cast not a finger at the Goonies kids when the Howdy-Doody kids committed the same crime. And bear this in mind: I'm a casual gamer, my friends are hardcore gamers...we are *gasp!* kind and respectful of women. Don't blame the gaming industry (and thereby its fanbase) for your personal woes. Remember, you are not alone in the anger about sexism in the mass-media. I personally think 'The View' has a very slanted and disrespectful stance regarding men, but I understand that almost all talk shows and daytime programming has this in mind as a method to please their fanbase, which is overwhelmingly female. I stopped watching that stuff and picked up a book instead. No harm, no foul.

Re:Misogyny

[xtieburn]

Go to metacritic.
Open up all the recent games good and bad for all the different consoles.
Now count how many of them have the typical huge busted scantily clad fantasy women.

I did it. Turns out about 2, and one of them is Lara Croft who has actually been gaining increasingly realistic body measurements. (There are a hell of a lot more muscle bound macho heroes but its a stereotype most men enjoy so carry on with that.) If you think it should be 0 then you are being ridiculous, men like sexy women. Its not a minority opinion, its a major thing in society, and its not going away. Some parts of every medium will always cater to it and to be honest that really isnt that bad a thing.

This like many of the female related 'problems'* in the games industry is a myth bound to a tiny selection of games. There are more busty nude women in just about every other medium.

Games have already hit the mainstream, there are plenty of women involved with them, everything is fine.

*You _still_ get countless articles on how there are no games for women, how women dont play or enjoy games, blah blah blah. Women make up over 44% of gamesplayers. These worries are all a load of bunk, ironically probably driven by geeks desperately overprotective of the 'weaker' sex.

Re:Next-gen

[Anonymous Coward]

> but no real downloadable content push from Microsoft

Aside from the fact that about half the movies I watch are from XBox Live Marketplace. Something your precious mario cartoonware will never do.

Things I would love to see gone...

[Hamster Lover]

Recent game developments I would love to see dismissed forever:

• Non-interactive, long, drawn out, cinematic cut scenes. Just let me play the fucking game.
• Downloadable content that isn't downloaded but only unlocked on the game disc.
• Unrealistic release schedules.
• Timed exclusives.
• Rabid fanboi 360 versus PS3 frame by frame game comparisons. I love great games on any system.
• Shitty, utterly tacked-on Wii games.
• The yearly $60 sports games that feature incremental improvements and roster changes. We should be able to download roster changes by now; keep major changes to the game engine to a release every couple of years.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[Cornflake917]

Non-interactive, long, drawn out, cinematic cut scenes. Just let me play the fucking game. Some people like cut scenes. They can be fun watch (some people like the mix of interactive and non-interactive entertainment) and they can give games more depth.

Unrealistic release schedules. Welcome to the world of capitalism where companies need to keep consumer confidence high in order to do well in the stock market.

The yearly $60 sports games that feature incremental improvements and roster changes. We should be able to download roster changes by now; keep major changes to the game engine to a release every couple of years. Not going to happen. If a game can guarantee profit, it will be made. Regardless, I think you can download roster updates for many sports games on next-gen systems.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[antic]

- Cut scenes that you can't skip (hello Assassin's Creed!)
  - Game trailers that are 50% intro material, 30% outro and all of 20% actual game footage
  - Proper reviews from people that have played the full game (e.g., Gamespot's review of Assassin's Creed neglects to mention a questionable ending and how annoying it gets to hear "Please sir, can I have some money?" or townspeople being hassled by guards)

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people like cut scenes. They can be fun watch (some people like the mix of interactive and non-interactive entertainment) and they can give games more depth. Then buy a fucking DVD player, and toggle inputs between the two. Same experience, but you don't make real gamers sit through cutscenes or, more infuriatingly, sit through twice the loading time so the cutscene can load and then the actual GAME can load.

When I buy a game, I intend to buy a fucking GAME and not some developers delusional attempts at playing Hollywood Director. Every second I'm not actively playing is a second I'm annoyed. Loading times I can put up with (to a degree), but cutscenes are just worthless.

And as for "giving a game more depth", go play Half-Life 2 and tell me that cutscenes are necessary to give a game depth.

They're not. They're just lazy.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[Jack9]

Non-interactive, long, drawn out, cinematic cut scenes. Just let me play the fucking game.

Final Fantasy is BASED on this nowadays. There's no reason to throw out something there's a healthy market for. People like to watch.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[UnknownSoldier]

> - Cut scenes that you can't skip (hello Assassin's Creed!)

- Usually it is the idiotic publisher that mandates this to the developer. It sucks.

- For in-game cutscenes, sometimes it is a lazy developer (programming pointing the finger at designers :) because they don't have the time to verify none of the game scripts break the game when they are skipped.

But I agree, dam annoying, especially when you are playing the game for the 2nd, 3rd time -- completley KILLS replayability. If I wanted to watch a movie, I would of rented one!

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same experience, but you don't make real gamers sit through cutscenes... When I buy a game, I intend to buy a fucking GAME... Totally, I feel the same way about nouns in books. Who needs 'em? I bought the book for the fucking VERBS. I wish they would stop making real readers sit through all this noun, pronoun, preposition, conjunction bullshit.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[grumbel]

### Some people like cut scenes.

The problem aren't cut scenes themselves, since sometimes you need them to tell a complete story (Half Life, I am looking at you...). However cutscenes become a problem when they show you stuff that should have been gameplay, if my hero does something, I want to do it, not watch it play out by itself.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[TriezGamer]

When I buy a game, I intend to buy a fucking GAME and not some developers delusional attempts at playing Hollywood Director. Every second I'm not actively playing is a second I'm annoyed. Loading times I can put up with (to a degree), but cutscenes are just worthless.

My knee-jerk reaction to comments like this is that you should try going outside and playing sports or something -- no loading, no cut-scenes, and the graphics are great.

The point is, cutscenes are not worthless just because you aren't interested in them, and they are not going to go away any time soon. If nothing else, it gives the game some semblance of structure. Taking Halo 3 as an example (just because it's recent) -- if you removed the cutscenes and story entirely, the gameplay is no different -- but feeling some sense of purpose is, for me, critical to the enjoyment of a single-player campaign.

But this is exactly why cut-scenes SHOULD be skippable. People play games for a variety of reasons, and not everyone wants to sit through inordinately long cutscenes just to blow some shit up.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there are plenty of games that demonstrate that cutscenes are completely unnecessary to tell a good story.

The best sign of a bad game designer is when they take control away from the player, for any reason. If you need to remove control from the player to tell the story in a game, you've already failed.

It's a game. Anytime not spent playing the game is time wasted - and that includes loading times, which are forgivable solely because there's no way around them. The same does not hold true for cutscenes.

Re:Things I would love to see gone...

[TriezGamer]

If by 'games' you mean 'everything from a singular first-person perspective', then I'm inclined to agree with you in most circumstances. But not all genres lend themselves well to storytelling within the gameplay itself -- and some storytelling is dependent upon the character performing a specific action, which doesn't work well in certain cases if the player constantly retains control.

Arg, no

[Rix]

Please stop putting cheap ass wifi chips (which only support WEP) in consumer electronics. I really shouldn't have to leave my network open to all comers to use your shit.

Re:Arg, no

[xenocide2]

WPA is stronger encryption, but this does cut both ways. The only thing I own that only supports WEP is the DS, which I suspect was a battery life decision, as it also only runs at 2Mbps and a rather weak signal.

Why not 7-11?

[log1385]

I don't see what's wrong with buying video games at 7-11. It's just a vendor providing merchandise in a new context.

Re:Why not 7-11?

[cowscows]

Just another gamer nerd trying to pretend that his ultra cool and elitist hobby hasn't become a mainstream activity for bazillions of ordinary people.

Get rid of the PS2?

[Doc Lazarus]

Nonsense. The PS2 has a wide library of games that Sony is more than willing to forget to market their misguided and badly handled PS3. There are still a lot of cheap yet fun games coming out for the PS2 and they should go ahead and market it for as long as possible. $20 for a PS2 game is still one heck of a deal in my eyes, and if they get cheaper as the system is eventually phased out, the better. But to dump it outright? Come on, that's just spite over a badly handled rollout of its successor.

Re:Get rid of the PS2?

[Jim Hall]

Actually, I was summarizing the article with "The PlayStation 2. (Please start pushing developers to the PS3.)" For myself, I still enjoy the PS2, and still have several PS2 (and PS1) games that I will occasionally re-play. "Ico", "Shadow of the Colossus", and "Killzone" are at the top of the stack. "Tomb Raider Anniversary" was a great game, and I'll definitely play it again that this year.

Of course, those games really show what the PS2 is capable of. You can do some amazing things within PS2 limitations, if the developer is willing and able to put in the necessary effort.

But "Fun" is more important than "Impressive". I'd rather play a fun game with less-impressive visuals, than a less-fun game that looks awesome. For games that can do both, great. But if it's got to come down to one or the other, give me "Fun". That's why I sometimes go back to re-play "Spyro the Dragon" (PS1) and bought a copy on PlayStation Network - the graphics aren't that impressive compared to modern games, but the gameplay is so darned fun that I don't care.

That said, I'd like to see more PS3 games coming out. But fewer FPS's.

Re:Get rid of the PS2?

[IgLou]

I wasn't a big fan of that in the article either. Support for the PS 2 is hardly something to point a stick at to Sony. Point the stick to the studios. But the reality there is there are those of us that have the PS 2, like it, still play it and have no interest at this point in moving to a PS 3.

Why don't I? Just as you say, it's about the fun and the games for the PS 2 are still fun (for me anyways).

Re:Get rid of the PS2?

[himurabattousai]

Agreed. It's been said before, and probably will be said again, but the PS2 did well because it played all those PSX games. That capability gave it an instant, humongous, game library. The same is true with Wii and GameCube, which is part of why Wii is selling so well. Since PS3 really has no backwards compatibility, I won't even consider purchasing it.

Some of the latest stuff for PS2 is quite impressive--not because of of the raw power of the system, but because developers got so good at wringing every last bit of performance out of the platform. Okami as we know it would have never been written for PS3, but the limitations of the PS2 hardware forced Capcom/Clover to do something different, and I, for one, am glad they chose to be different. A PS3-centric version probably wouldn't have been nearly as distinctive.

Horsepower leads to laziness, not just with games, but with software in general. Any time that industry experts proclaim that "it is time to move on" like the author of this article suggests, I get a bit queasy. A jump in raw computing ability though it may be, it's also usually a setback in game playability and quality. "It's time to move on" to me says "It's too hard to work within these old constraints."

Re:Get rid of the PS2?

[donaldm]

It is only the 40GB PS3 that does not have PS2 backwards compatibility (IMHO a stupid decision). I have a 60GB PS3 (PAL edition) that has approx 85% to 85% backwards compatibility even so I can confidently go out and buy all new PS2 games knowing they will work on my PS3. In fact most of the games I currently play are PS2 games because my PS3 upscales and smooths them for display on my HDTV. For me my PS3 gives me a huge amount of flexibility in the games I play and saves me a considerable amount of money in the process.

While native games that I like for the PS3 have over the last 9 months (remember I have a PAL PS3) been a bit light-on although IMHO the same applies to the Wii and the Xbox360 I don't blames Sony for that since it is upto Game Developers to develop and publish games. In fact now there are games for the PS3 that I do like, however like all so called next gen consoles their price is fairly high (even similar Wii games are the same price or marginally cheaper) and since there are plenty of new PS2 games still coming out I don't mind if I wait for native PS3 games to drop.

To people that say that Developers should drop support for the PS2 I say why? If a Game Developer still makes money from developing PS2 games I think they have every right to do so. After all the PS2 is still the cheapest supported console available with a huge game library and from a Sony perspective this means that they have three viable gaming machines on the market with the PSP the PS2 and the PS3 compared to the Xbox360 for Microsoft and the DS and Wii for Nintendo.

Re:Get rid of the PS2?

[king-manic]

Since PS3 really has no backwards compatibility, I won't even consider purchasing it.

80% computability on the 80 gig is not backward compatible? I have a 60 gig version and it has 98% compatibility, only the discount 40 gig lacks BC. The 360 is sitting at 40-50%. The wii is at 100% but the library of GC game sis thinner. The wii is selling well on hypeM/b>. I have one and it gathers dust unless i have company. It's amazing when people come over but otherwise the single player games aren't my style (except fire emblem). I highly doubt it's GC games floating the wii because that library was rather thin compared to the xbox and Ps2 libraries.

Re:Next-gen

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dreamcast is the abberation of gen 1.5 with minor online play as standard

Fixed that for you. The original Xbox brought in the ability to play user-defined music, but in any other sense was strictly an also-ran.

Re:Next-gen

[Cornflake917]

PS3 and XBox 360 do "add something new to the board." They add some really spectacular graphics for one thing. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying better graphics is revolutionary or ground breaking but it does add something do the previous generation of consoles. The increased processing power also adds the ability to create larger worlds, more interesting AI, and more accurate physics. I can't speak for PS3's online capabilities, but the way XBox live is integrated with the 360 is actually pretty damn cool and definately has a "next-gen" feeling to it. Example: I can be playing Eternal Sonata (single player) on my 360 and I can see if my friend from Houston starts playing Halo3 with my other friend in NY. I didn't have to do anything besides signing in to my xbl account. Being able to download High-Def TV shows and movies to watch on the XBox 360 is a new and sweet thing too. I don't recall having these capabilities with any previous-gen systems.

While I think the Wii is probably great fun for everyone, what has it added that the PS3, 360 haven't? A new controller scheme (that's not actually that new)?

Don't be an ass. All the new consoles add something new to the table that previous iterations didn't. If you one like one console over the other, good for you, that doesn't mean that the others "don't add anything to the table."

Halo 3?

[Thanatos69]

"Halo 3
Let's all just agree that the fight is finished. No matter what happens after the end of the credits in "Halo 3," we all should be done with this and move on. If you want to continue playing multiplayer, that's fine, but the marketing blitz, the soda, the Burger King promotion, and everything else that came along to hype this bad boy should all be left in 2007, not to be seen again until "Halo 4" inevitably comes out.

I don't know if it's different down in the US but I haven't heard anything about Halo 3 for the past month or so with the exception of adverts in the walmart flyer.

Game Delays are some times better then pushed out.

[Joe The Dragon]

Game Delays are some times better then pushed out carp that is not ready and feels like it is still in Beta.

If it means pushing people to work 80+ hours a week that just leads to buggy code then delay it so the game works and let QA / beta have time and alot of differnt systems to test on.

WEP is pointless

[Rix]

You may as well leave the network open. It's trivial to recover a WEP key.

Re:WEP is pointless

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

While it may not be great, WEP is a far cry from nothing. A WEP key is the difference between random neighbor going "oh, I don't have to pay for internet!" or not. 99% of the population doesn't even know that "WEP" is a kind of encryption, let alone that it's breakable.

Re:WEP is pointless

[trdrstv]

While it may not be great, WEP is a far cry from nothing. A WEP key is the difference between random neighbor going "oh, I don't have to pay for internet!" or not. 99% of the population doesn't even know that "WEP" is a kind of encryption, let alone that it's breakable.

You can also add Mac address filtering to better secure the connection.

Re:WEP is pointless

[sholden]

Anybody who can defeat MAC filtering can defeat WEP. Hence the only reason to use WEP is to encrypt, but anyone who knows how to snoop the transmissions can also defeat WEP. Hence WEP is useless.

Re:WEP is pointless

[Vermifax]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:WEP is pointless

[saphint]

Actually this is the reason why I use a MAC Filter instead of WEP encryption

Re:WEP is pointless

[sholden]

Which word? Hence, is, the, who, can, defeat, to, WEP. Are the ones I used more than once and hence which "keep using" could apply to. So which one am I misusing? What's the real meaning? What's the meaning I seem to be using?

Re:WEP is pointless

[tcolberg]

"Pointless" is the word of which you are mistaking the meaning. Just because a determined cracker can easily break WEP does not mean it is pointless. Most people only make unauthorized connections to a wireless network because the opportunity is there. Most people do not keep a packet sniffer on their computer, let alone know what it is. WEP and MAC filtering, no matter how easy they are to crack, are not pointless because they defeat opportunistic connections.

Some of us have to deal with legacy devices that are WEP-only and will just have to hope that the schmo next door and the old couple across the street don't know about how easy it is to break WEP and to sniff and dupe MAC addresses.

Re:WEP is pointless

[Builder]

The problem is that by having just ONE device in your home that requires WEP, you now have to compromise your entire network - either that, or reconfig your router every time you want to use that one device.

It's just not acceptable for me.

From the Wishful-Thinking department

[FlyByPC]

Things in the gaming world I'd like to see a lot less of in 2008:

• If-it-moves-shoot-it games. Portal was really cool. How about more innovative games like that?
• Emphasis on online games. (Aren't geeks supposed to be antisocial?)
• Handwriting-based mind games (this means you, Brain Age!)
• Sports games.
• Internet-required-to-play or disc-required-to-play security. Including Steam -- although the ability to download a game across the 'Net is very cool. What, are you trying to make us download a cracked copy??
• Console-only games. I'd bet PCs are more popular than any one console...

Re:From the Wishful-Thinking department

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet-required-to-play or disc-required-to-play security. Internet requirements are extremely lame - fuck you, publisher, I don't feel like being spied on every time I play your stupid game. (Valve and Steam are the worst - as demonstrated by their survey, where they apparently collect how people play through the game.)

But complaining about requiring the disk? That's completely ridiculous.

Yeah, requiring the disk has completely killed the portable and console markets, both of which require the player to insert the game disk/cartridge. That's why PC games dominate, and console markets are dieing.

Oh, wait, it's completely the other way around! People are used to needing to use a disk to play. That's like complaining about be required to insert the DVD to watch videos.

Seriously, complaining about requiring the disk is just lame. Console players don't mind needing the disk, DVD watchers don't mind needing the disk. Why should PC gamers be special?

Re:From the Wishful-Thinking department

[4D6963]

Console players don't mind needing the disk, DVD watchers don't mind needing the disk. Why should PC gamers be special?

For the same reason why PC gamers would be pretty pissed off if the latest FPS could only be played with a gamepad? That means because a PC isn't a fucking console, quit comparing apples with oranges goddamnit.

Re:From the Wishful-Thinking department

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the sales data of Bioshock on the xbox360 and Bioshock on the PC. I don't remember what the number s were, but it was something like 500,000 on xb360 and 50,000 on PC. So yeah, everyone has a PC, but only a small number have gaming capable PC's, and an even smaller number play PC games.

Re:Next-gen

[sanosuke76]

In order for it to truly be next-gen, it must become more or less a standard. While the Wii may be setting standards for motion games, it's far from making everyone go "Gee, I really wish I could control all games that way". Maybe for some folks, but for me, I look at the Wii and say, "Thank the Lord I don't have to play games that way." I figure the Wii's user interface is probably more comparable to the Nintendo Zapper for the NES. Sure, it was the first really mainstream zapper peripheral, but it didn't mean that all shooting games started using it. It just became the standard way that light gun games are controlled - it created its own genre. Fast forward to now - light gun games are available on all the major consoles, in one form or another. But people didn't try to bolt light gun controls onto games where it doesn't contribute to the game (light gun controls on Tekken? Erm, no).

Ultimately, that's the direction that the Wii's interface is headed. Sure, Wii's the only player in the game that really has the motion control thing down perfectly at present. But, eventually that'll change - just don't expect all games to switch over to motion control, because for most games it just doesn't add to the experience. And ultimately, that's what user interface design decisions should boil down to.

Re:Super Wii vs, Wii HD.

[trdrstv]

Man, I really hope they call it that.

Honestly I'm hoping for simply "Wii HD". A fully backwords compatible Wii that will display in 720p as a minimum. There would be other enhancements of course, but I think since Nintendo went "Revolutionary" with both their handheld and console I think the next generation will be "Evolutionary".

Number Ten

[Anonymous Coward]

Jack Thompson

Re:The 9 things - Next gen is 2012...

[trdrstv]

Next-gen is a perfectly legitimate term to describe the PS3 and 360; it distinguishes them from the Wii and PS2, which are consoles that are still viable development platforms, but are not in the same league as the 360/PS3 in terms of graphical power.

Graphic power has no bearing when talking about "Next gen" as it is simply a meter of where we are on the evolution of Video game systems. This is the 7th generation of consoles, and being at least "2 christmas shopping seasons" into their life which makes them current gen. Next gen comes during the next hardware refresh.

Think of it this way; you and your brother both start families and have children. Your son/daughter is better looking than you are, was or ever will be. Your brother's kid isn't as good looking as yours, but is very musically inclined, and can play 9 instraments.

Both would be the next generation in your family.

Copy Protection!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this list is targeted at consoles but being a PC gamer...
I do not buy games with copy protection. Though this has severely cut back on my game purchases. Company of Heroes being the last game I bought. And of course they applied protection to the expansion they just released (for some reason) so I will not be buying that.

No game delays means suckier games

[LrdDimwit]

Games get delayed for lots of reasons. Setting aside notoriously pathological cases like DNF, games get delayed often because the development needs more time. I for one would much rather wait, and get a better game in the end, than put up with shovelware.

Take Zelda. The developers learned the hard way that hitting the release date was less important than finishing the game. The Wind Waker was in danger of missing its street date ... so they cut two dungeons that weren't going to be finished in time. Everyone involved now admits that was a big mistake, which led to Twilight Princess' very long incubation period. Just look at the results -- Twilight Princess knocks the socks off of Wind Waker, and many people feel it took the Zelda 64 formula and perfected it.

Interesting tidbit: after Wind Waker turned out the way it did, the director of the game wanted to let the series end there. This is the guy Miyamoto handed the series off to after he didn't want to be forever tied to it anymore, and he wanted to throw in the towel! (I'd pull out a cite, but I gotta run.)

Yeah. Delays suck. And when it's for a reason other than 'the game needs more time', they REALLY suck. But to just say 'there should never be a delay!' is to ignore the deeper reasons why delays happen, and that would be catastrophic.

Re:No game delays means suckier games

[LingNoi]

Even with those points there isn't a need for a delay. If your game is less then 90% done then don't go around screaming that it'll be out by X.

The movie industry doesn't throw out a ton of advertising on a half finished film, but the games industry does this. I'm calling it naive.

Re:No game delays means suckier games

[Damocles the Elder]

There's a difference between "Not delaying" and "Not giving an unrealistically early release date that's inevitably going to get pushed back". And with that, which one of the following looks better?

• We're releasing the game on May 5th! Oh, wait, no, we're releasing it on June 5th. Nope, wait, we're releasing it sometime in August. Wait, no, expect it in Q1 2009."
• Expect a release date some time Q3 2009. Oh, wait, our dev team was on the ball! Expect a release date in Q1 2009.

The Hardcore vs Softcore arguement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

"I like the philosophy on board games: Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master."

Kind of like sex.

Re:The Hardcore vs Softcore arguement :-)

[Sique]

That's what makes them so appealling :)

Re:The 9 things - Next gen is 2012...

[iocat]

Yeah, I understand your point, I'm just telling how the words are actually being used by publishers and developers. It wouldn't be the first time the definition of words have changed -- "next gen" now is a noun that substitutes for 360/PS3 versus an adjective that describes the forthcoming generation of game consoles. Once the PS2 dies, and there is actually a new series of consoles on the horizon (2011 says hi), I'm sure "next gen" will refer to those systems. But right now, "current gen" refers to the PS2 and Wii and "next gen" is widely uses to refer to the 360 and PS3. I'm not saying I agree with it, I understand why it's stupid, but it is the way it is.

..."Recent" game developments?

[metroid composite]

"Non-interactive, long, drawn out, cinematic cut scenes.": Over 10 years old.

"Unrealistic release schedules.": I don't even know how old that one is.

"Timed exclusives.": 30 years old, and usually done for budgetary reasons.

"Rabid fanboi 360 versus PS3 frame by frame game comparisons.": 30 years old, albeit with different systems, and less in-detail, but I do remember fairly detailed comparisons of SNES/Genesis.

"The yearly $60 sports games that feature incremental improvements and roster changes.": 10+ years old.

I mean, not that these aren't good points; I agree with most of them. Seems weird calling them "recent", though.

I say it every time, but...

[CelticWhisper]

Save points.

This absolutely retarded convention should have disappeared with the Genesis and SNES. Why is it, when I was playing Doom on my 486 back in 1994 and could save (and QUIT...you know... STOP PLAYING ) whenever I wanted, that I have to wait 20 minutes until I get to a magical spot blessed by the video game pope before I can save my game and turn off my Playstation 2 , a system that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the save-on-the-fly-capable PC on which I was fragging zombies?

Attention developers:

• Girlfriends happen
• Friends happen
• Dinner happens
• Fatigue happens
• Storms happen, at least in my region, and as a result...
• Power outages happen
• And frankly, me getting sick of playing during a given session happens

And sometimes I want or need to stop playing on a moment's notice. I don't really want to leave the console on eating up power and running up my electric bill, and I also don't want to lose hours of gameplay (some JRPG dungeons do last that long) because you assholes thought it would be cute to not let me save my game and do something else. Your game is not the only thing in the world I want to do for fun, and moods can change, especially after long sessions. Furthermore, I know you can do save-anywhere because SaGa Frontier, LUNAR, and Persona 2 all did it on the PS1.

Death to save points in 2008. Long live save-on-the-fly.

Re:I say it every time, but...

[The_mad_linguist]

Meh, I prefer save points. It ensures that the developers will put in safe areas (nothing sucks more than quicksaving a fifteenth of a second before being shot), and if they're plentiful enough it shouldn't make a difference in time.

I do agree that in RPGs you should be able to save just about anywhere you want outside combat, but it doesn't really make that much sense in other games. As long as there are enough save points that you never have to backtrack more than ten minutes, I'm fine with it (Cave Story is a good example of how to use savepoints well.)

Re:I say it every time, but...

[springbox]

If you're restricted into saving less often then it can make games more interesting. Bioshock would have been less of a joke on hard if the ability to save and load at any point in time was removed. It has its problems but I think it's actually an interesting element of design.

Re:I say it every time, but...

[fbriere]

Save points.

This absolutely retarded convention should have disappeared with the Genesis and SNES. Thank you. You took the words right out of my mouth.

I'm currently playing Metroid Prime 2, and the lack of convenient save points is really starting to piss me off. (At one point, a previously accessible save point is removed prior to a boss battle. Someone at Retro Studios deserves to die for this.)

Two days ago, I was playing Twilight Princess and going through the Cave of Ordeals, which consists of 45 successive fights with no possibility of saving. The only way I could take a break was to pause the game and leave the GameCube running, just like we used to do 20 years ago. That's how far we've come.

(What's sad is that we've already left this behind for portable consoles, and people have come to expect to be able to turn off their DS at a moment's notice. Why can't we do the same for regular consoles?)

Taking this one step further, I wonder if we shouldn't just do away with the whole notion of "game over". It made sense back when we were pumping quarters into a Galaga machine at the arcade, but what purpose does it serve in this day an age? All it does is force me to relive the past five minutes of my life to get to the exact same point where I was before. Isn't there a better way to make games challenging beyond what is little more than a reset button?

Re:I say it every time, but...

[dr00g911]

Crashes happen too, and I'm currently on a rampage against the "checkpoint for a false sense of save security but only allow you to save and quit instead of quicksave" thing that Halo loves.

I replayed the last two hours of Halo 3 twice due to:

- Jump the warthog into the Dawn, cutscene starts loading and "This disc is unreadable, please press A to restart your console"

I mean seriously, how much trouble would it be to add a quicksave at checkpoints instead of making me restart the entire game each time I try and save? I was pretty much was in the moment between the gravemind and the conclusion of the game, and having to quit out every so often just destroys the immersion.

For the record my achievements for campaign complete weren't awarded the first time out and I think that the game gave itself the console equivalent of a divide by zero error when it tried to determine which ending (ie extra 9 or so seconds of legendary cutscene) to play based on listed achievements and the disc read error was utter nonsense.

Add that to Halo 3 flat out refusing to honor my saves until I deleted all Halo related datafiles from my profile and start over and I'm just about ready to say the Windows gaming mantra of "have you installed the update?" is beginning to take hold on the console side too.

Re:I say it every time, but...

[grumbel]

For a tiny few games that might be the case, but for the majority I think a quick-save option is an absolute must-have. The reason for this is very simple: having to replay the same shit over and over again is just plain annoying and frustrating. I have ditched dozens of games exactly because of that, not because they were to hard, but because the lack of a free save game system forced me to replay the *easy* parts over and over and over again. Its not fun or challenging, it annoys and just plain stupid.

I agree that a quick-save system can take the challenge out of a 8bit or 16bit classic almost completly, so it might not be the optimal solution there, however, those games are long gone. Todays games are no longer and hour long and don't require memorizing a level layout and enemy patterns in endless repetition. Today you have the 10-20h games which even if you quick-save your way through the whole game have still enough challenge and length left. Today a quick-save simply removes the needless frustration and brings back the fun into the game. If a boss fight is to hard, you simply save more often and concentrate on the hard part of the fights.

All that said, I think there is room for other save options, when the checkpoints, as in Halo, are close enough together there is not much need for a quick save system and when the levels are short enough like say Mario64DS you don't need one either, especially when you can put the system in stand-by whenever you wish. But a save system like Metroid Prime where you often run around for 30min without a way to save is just completly brain-dead and frustrating. Metroid Prime 3 introduced a few checkpoints, which reduce the frustration, but since they aren't saved to flash, don't help you when you have to stop gaming after 20min, the Wii actually having a stand-by mode, but without a way to use it in-game of course also annoys.

In the end its really very simple: I have never in my life ditched a game because it featured quick-save, but I have done so with many games because they didn't. And while at it, quick-save also provides a way to explore a game in-depth, try crazy stuff and just do whatever you want without risking the last hour of play.

Re:I say it every time, but...

[DirtyHarry]

Absolutely. You are SO right!
It incomprehensible to me why reviewers or players don't address this much more often.

Re:I say it every time, but...

[Floritard]

What a pointless rant. In my experience, save points are on average about 15-20 minutes apart. Any less than that and you can pretty much say goodbye to any hope of creating immersion in a game. If you can't sit down for more than 20 minutes at a time to play a game then you sir either have a thriving social life (unlikely considering the nature and passion of your post about video games) or an incredibly short attention span. Why not go play some Brain Age instead? Or bite the bullet and shuck that 15 minutes of gameplay you just went through? Would it kill you? Some of us like to experience our games in proper chapters and don't need to jump in and out at the drop of a hat.

Save points aren't just there to screw with you. They provide the story with pacing and ensure all that time they spent building up some aspect of the gameplay isn't wasted by a temporal discontinuity that is completely out of their control. If you're playing a game that can just be jumped in and out of, odds are it isn't very deep anyway.

And if power outages are really that much of a concern for you, there are myriad solutions at hand.

Re:Next-Gen

[mqduck]

Don't forget Ultra-Next-Gen and the inevitable Retro-Next-Gen revival.

Re:Next-Gen

[mqduck]

Oh, another amusing thing: One of the main emulator sites is NGEmu.com (you know, Next Gen Emulation). And the "NG" they were referring to when the site started was the PSX.

Agreed

[PixelScuba]

Thank you, I have written about this several times. The video game industry is even worse than the film industry when it comes to trivializing and objectifying women. At least in film, women with "undesirable" figures can land parts and be leads in motion pictures... in the gaming industry, modelers and board executives create their sexual fantasies and incorporate them into the game. Damn near every female game character is some archetypal short, buxom, hyper-sexualized character to fulfill the designer, artist and players sexual fantasies. Why isn't Alyx Vance a little husky? Why is Lara Croft a sex bomb with huge breasts when her figures and career tells me should would probably be closer to flat chested and sinewy.

The video game industry is stuck being the fantasy playground of horny young males... and I don't see this terrible trend changing any time soon. Why make a realistic character when you can just model the girl of your dreams... and on the flip side, what horny male teen wants to play a game with a lead character that looks like Kathy Bates?

Re:Agreed

[ravenshrike]

Why isn't Alyx Vance a little husky? Maybe because the lack of extremely processed and fortified nutrition combined with the fact that she runs around 24/7 means that with a normal metabolism, she wouldn't be a little husky.

Re:Agreed

[DeadChobi]

If they made a game starring a character shaped like Kathy Bates, then the game should center around the character trying to keep an author locked in her house until he completes his last book.

Re:Agreed

[Morkano]

I certainly don't disagree with you or the GP, but it's important to keep in mind it's not just females they're doing it to. How many games feature males that aren't the stereotypical muscle-bound badass? It's stereotypes all around.

Re:Agreed

[grumbel]

### Damn near every female game character is some archetypal short, ...

The problem isn't just that the female characters aren't realistic, the problem is that the games aren't. The male characters in games aren't any less stylized then the female ones and same can be said about basically every element of the plot or game in general. As long as games don't even try to tell a story, you don't have to be surprised that its all guys with big fat guns and girls with barely enough cloth to cover them up.

But I doubt that this will happen anytime soon, we had the adventure genre with all its storytelling goodness around for quite some years, it died out for most part and hasn't really come back to shape again. Storytelling simply doesn't sell enough games to make it attractive for publishers and unless those realize that there are gaming markets beside the big blockbuster titles this won't change.

Re:Agreed

[JoshJ]

I didn't think Alyx was that over-the-top. Sure, she's not ugly, but then again they generally don't make the males be ugly either. Alyx had a fairly average build and would look completely out of place in DOA Volleyball.

Look at the guys in video games and can you honestly say it's sexism so much as it is "we just don't want to make you play the ugly person"?

Pretty much every game with a buttload of NPCs actually has ugly NPCs of both genders.

Re:Agreed

[king-manic]

Damn near every female game character is some archetypal short, buxom, hyper-sexualized character to fulfill the designer, artist and players sexual fantasies. Why isn't Alyx Vance a little husky? Why is Lara Croft a sex bomb with huge breasts when her figures and career tells me should would probably be closer to flat chested and sinewy. Conversely why isn't kratos a bit tubby with glasses? How come Solid snake isn't 5'0? Why isn't Link obese? It's because they're selling fantasy. Lara croft i agree is just lame. But Alyx Vance at least looks like a girl i might meet outside of a strip club. I think Alyx vance highlights how far they've come from the Tomb raider days. Frankly I'd have some more problem buying into a game if we have a 5'0 350 lb man or woman hoofing it across a broken cityscape at full sprint for a 15 min session.

Re:Agreed

[Alsee]

what horny male teen wants to play a game with a lead character that looks like Kathy Bates?

I'm somewhat surprised, and greatly relieved, not to find a reply here with a non-rhetorical answer to that particular rhetorical question.

-

Re:Agreed

[mvdwege]

However, the stereotype of the muscle-bound bad-ass caters to a male fantasy. The stereotype of the oversexualised female also caters to a male fantasy. You start to see a pattern? It's not a big problem, as things go, but it is there, nonetheless.

Mart

Re:Agreed

[Stormwatch]

Why isn't Alyx Vance a little husky?

Because it would be a bit silly to have a furry character in Half-Life.

Re:Agreed

[moloko_synthemesc]

Heck, I'm nearly 40, and not so horny compared to 20 years ago, but even I don't want to play a game with a lead character that looks like Kathy Bates. Imagine looking at her backside for 20 or more hours...games are just different than film.

About that...
Number one on my list of things to leave behind is the game industry's current focus on making games more like movies. It's mostly an issue of presentation, like lens flares and motion blur, but also things like the overuse of cutscenes with sweeping cameras etc. Why imitate something that's generally inferior?

Truly it's the most brain dead list in years

[Moraelin]

Ya know, I'm already fairly tired of "Top X Worst Y" types of list, that seem to serve the only purpose of showing that the author can talk smack. Generally. But this one is the most brain-dead and clueless I've seen in years. And yes, I did RTFA, but I'll use you summary just because I'm too lazy to write my own.

1. The Phrase "Next-Gen". (It's not "next gen" until the PS4.)

This is the only one which actually has a point, so I thought I'd give it a nod before moving on to the real offenders. Though even here, good luck getting marketers to quit using meaningless buzzwords.

2. "Halo 3". (Similar to the above, Halo is done, the fight is finished, no need to refer to the version anymore.)

Actually, IMHO your summary here is slightly inexact. What he demands is that they stop hyping and advertising Halo 3, and start hyping again when they release Halo 4. He has nothing against the version number, and his expecting a Halo 4 kinda doesn't imply that he sees the fight as finished. He's just tired of hearing about Halo 3.

Well, sadly

A) that's just capitalism in action. If MS thinks they can still sell Halo 3, how's that different from still advertising last year's model of car, or last year's CD of some band?

B) that advertising pays for some other things he's getting cheaper or for free. E.g., since the site name seems to imply having something to do with MTV, I'd like to see how MTV would survive without massive advertising. All those music videos are, effectively, advertising for whichever band the recording companies manufactured this year.

3. Bad Virtual Console Releases. (Referring to Nintendo.)

WTF? It's not like it even costs much to release a ROM for an emulator. But more importantly, what's _his_ problem there? It's not like anyone forces him to play or buy those anyway. Plus, being that they're ancient games, he should be able to find tons of reviews and whatnot.

Plus, here's the fun part: not everyone has the same tastes. What's crap for him and he doesn't want re-released, could be someone else's nostalgia moment. Even something like "Donkey Kong Jr. Math," well, why not? Some mom or dad might think that that's useful for their 6 year old.

4. Game Delays. (I'm with him in hating delays, but good luck on that one.)

Now this is truly brain dead. Those delays don't happen as some premeditated marketing ploy, they happen because people are bad at guessing the future. The fact is, even if you could know exactly how much code you'll need to write (you don't), and exactly how long it would take to _write_ it, you can't guess what bugs you'll have to fix. Therefore, nor how much time you'll spend fixing those.

Then there are the inevitable design changes. Some things it's easier to just see how it looks in the game, before you decide how you'll do it. Some things sound good in theory, but you'll find out that they suck when you sic the playtesters on it. Etc.

Sure, there are ways to make things more maintainable and reduce the surprises, but even that isn't 100% bullet proof. And good luck with getting the game industry to follow best practices anyway. Especially when:

A) you have the publisher telling you that it _has_ to be ready within X months and Y dollars, you just don't have the time or budget for UML diagrams and funky frameworks, and

B) you have to push the edge in terms of graphics and whatnot (because screenshots sell), but still have a finite budget of CPU cycles and GPU gigatexels/second, and you know everyone will moan if the frame rate is even 1 less FPS than in another similar game. So, you know, you end up doing evil hacks just to meet those constraints.

Seriously, short of hideously overestimating (which the publisher will reject from the start) or being able to see in the future, it just won't happen.

5. Countdown Clocks. (I guess I never notice

Re:Truly it's the most brain dead list in years

[Miltazar]

6. Japan-Only Releases. (If the game is done, why not also release it in the US? Maybe it will do well, maybe not. Give it a try.) Just to add some more info here, even if there was obvious demand for a japan only game over here, sometimes its just impossible. One game which is basically like super smash bros. except with a horde of anime characters from dozens of different anime fight eachother. Its really fun, most anime's are out over here via toon network or some other thing. Problem is that the license holders for the anime in Japan is one company whereas over here its 5-10 different companies. Its just too expensive/difficult/etc to get a license agreement that big for a game that most likely would do average but not blockbuster. Stuff like that happens quite a bit.

Re:Truly it's the most brain dead list in years

[ZorbaTHut]

No, not exactly. He says they should outright kill the PS2.

At any rate, it's another WTF. If it still sells and makes a profit, why on Earth would any company want to kill it?

I agree with most of your points, but not this one. He's saying that the PS3 would be in a much better position if the PS2 was gone. Right now they're raking in their short-term profits (PS2 sales) and sacrificing their long-term profits (extra adoption of the PS3). He thinks that Sony is shooting themselves in the foot badly here, and they're going to regret their current actions in a year or two when the PS3 is relegated to third place even more firmly than it is right now.

Just because something is profitable now does not necessarily mean it's a good idea.

Re:Truly it's the most brain dead list in years

[Guppy06]

"But more importantly, what's _his_ problem there? It's not like anyone forces him to play or buy those anyway. Plus, being that they're ancient games, he should be able to find tons of reviews and whatnot."

Personally, I'm tired of seeing games like Ys: Books I & II and Phantasy Star II, good games that have already been released in English (multiple times) continue to be Japanese exclusives on the Virtual Console. And I've been less than impressed with Sony's PS1 offerings on the PlayStation Store as well. At this point, there are more Japan exclusives for the Virtual Console that I'd be willing to pay money for than there are North American releases that I already have paid for.

Alright, this may fall more under the "fewer Japanese exclusives" argument, but between the three major players, Nintendo has the best ability to tap into the golden age of video games, and all us filthy gaijins are getting is shovelware. All that's left is a major announcement that Acclaim games will be available. Can we at least get Mother already?

Re:Truly it's the most brain dead list in years

[Moonpie Madness]

I don't get it. Scrap PS2 for PS3 sales?

The PS3 would do better with the PS2 gone, but the PS2 makes more money than the PS3 would even if the PS2 were gone. Sony is diversifying to maximize profits.

PS2 owners are late adopters, and a very low percentage of them have moved to the 360, so though Sony has not done a very good job so far with PS3, their market position is much better than internet forums seem to realize.

They sold twice as many consoles worldwide as Microsoft last month. Only because they are diversified.

And also, I would never buy another Sony console if they did as MS did and completely stopped supporting my system before it was the right time. XBOX 1.0 users got screwed. 360 owners are probably going to get screwed as well. PS3 owners have confidence that, even if the PS3 doesn't dominate, Sony will support them for ten years. Abandoning the PS2 now would ruin a major distinction Sony enjoys. For what? The PS2 owners who aren't able to get a wii?

Sounds stupid. Sony makes royalties from every PS2 console out there that buys software. They don't have to subsidize the box. It's free money at this point. This is what all the loss leader stuff was building up for. This is what MS is dreaming will happen to them. people say Nintendo is the only console maker that sells for profit, but Sony does it too with PS2.

Re:Truly it's the most brain dead list in years

[KDR_11k]

Well, the PS3 is getting beaten by its competitors, the PS2 at least has a gigantic userbase. If they killed the PS2 those PS2 games would just end up going to the Wii or the 360, not the PS3.

Re:Next-Gen

[GrpA]

Actually, lately I've been noticing the console fans referring to the PC as "Next-Gen".

During the reign of the previous kings, PS2 and Xbox, the PC didn't really accelerate that far ahead.

The PS2 came out in March 2000 and was truly groundbreaking then. This was during the era of the GEFORCE and GEFORCE 2 cards... That's still TNT stuff.
Sure, they were fast back then but certainly not the next generation.

IMHO, the first cards to really push the envelope were the R300 series ( Radeon through to 9800 ) although that was late 2003 by release and 2004 by the time people started to really buy them - just three years ago.

Although these cards had the power to bring next-gen titles to the PC, look how far behind the consoles the PCs were, and the games market was still designing games for the mid-level to low-level market - ie, still catering to people with GeForce 1 cards - still where the top-of-the-line PCs were in 2000 when the PS2 was so powerful.

The problem was that the difference in performance between low and high end cards was several orders of magnitude.

This trend continued right up until 2006, when two critical factors came together all at the same time.

Vista and Better manufacturing process for GPUs

Vista needs more resources that a high-end FPS! and that gives you just enough power to run! More so it has an exclusivity on DX10, which needs a high end card (there are no low-end card supporting DX-10). And game manufacturers are taking advantage - unfortunately in more ways that one - of this situation.

And since then, the manufacturing processes have allowed for mid-to-low end cards that perform within 30% of the speed of the present next-gen cards - and they are flooding the market. Just take a look at the specs of the new 8800GT or HD3850/3870

This results in new game engines designed to use both Vista and Next-gen cards, while not playing on older cards at all, due to constraints of memory and speed.

Think about what that means for a moment - PC gaming has taken it's first step towards a whole new paradigm - one we haven't seen since the original processor-rendered games started to support open-GL way back in the early nineties.

This means that not only have the consoles come out with next-gen consoles that are now here, the PC skipped right past them to set it's current benchmark way past the very best capabilities of the latest consoles.

Just take a look at Bioshock at HD resolution or Crysis with everything turned on. Call of duty 4 shows how realistic game AI can be made to appear.

The result is that the consoles are no longer next-gen from an industry-wide perspective.

The PC is.

And the PC is only at the current level of iteration... Newer engines designed to combine multiple CPUs and GPUs and new GPU tecnologies that should arrive in 6 to 12 months will accelerate the PC far beyond what consoles could ever be capable of.

As a result, lately I hear console owners ( PS3 and 360 ) talking about next-gen games, referring to PC games they hope they might be able to port to the consoles.

I'm sure the technology will get there as console programming techniques improve but since they don't have the raw power of a PC, they need the finesse.

At a guess, the response to Bioshock on the PC and the consoles has set a trend. If game distributers release a game multi-platform, people just buy the PC version and rubbish the consoles version now. How would you feel if you only had a 360 and your mates with PCs kept telling you how much better it was on the PC. Even if you didn't have a PC, I bet you wouldn't want to buy it.

That can't be good for console sales.

And I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the significant lateness of Assassin's Creed release for the PC.

Of course, we'll see three things happen, I beleive.

1. The PC will be locked out of some console games releases - even if it was originally due for multiplatform release.

2. Th

my list

[J-1000]

• Joypad controls for FPS games
• Exclusive sports licensing agreements
• Cartoon nudity
• Movies based on video games (does that count?)
• Invasive copy protection schemes
• Strategy guides
• Gamestop
• Gamespot

Re:my list

[tepples]

Joypad controls for FPS games Do you think all players of first-person shooters in social situations want to have to use four consoles, four TVs, and four copies of the game?

Exclusive sports licensing agreements It depends. Has EA snapped up the Canadian Football League yet?

Cartoon nudity Why? The animated medium lets storytellers tell stories involving sexual assault without as much backlash from moral guardians.

I have to agree

[vethia]

I have to hand it to you on that one. Save points suck. I understand when it's part of the game's strategy to make you start over from a certain point if you die, but if you have to leave the console, you shouldn't be penalized for it. It's possible, too: look at handhelds. Final Fantasy V on the Gameboy allows you to do a real save on the world map or at a save point, but at any point you can "quicksave," which shuts off the console after saving your progress. You can come back to the game, but when you do that quicksave data is erased, meaning that you either have to quicksave again or find a real save point when you turn off the console.

Then there's the PSP, which actually caches wherever you are in a game when you turn off the console, whether you saved or not. I'm not sure if it requires a memory stick to do this (my guess is yes, but I've never tried it). It's a big advantage, especially because the thing doesn't have a warning before you run out of battery, it just flashes a battery icon and immediately shuts itself off.

NOW LOADING

[tepples]

- Cut scenes that you can't skip (hello Assassin's Creed!) Would you rather the screen just be blanked for several seconds? A properly engineered game engine will use a cut scene to cover loading, and a lot of the cut scenes in Super Mario Galaxy do just this.

Re:NOW LOADING

[TriezGamer]

While this is partially true, with the length of the majority of cut-scenes the loading would be completed LONG before the cutscene ends. I would rather sit through a 5 second black screen than a 10 minute cutscene I've already seen.

Re:NOW LOADING

[antic]

If necessary, yes. But I doubt this is necessary for Assassin's Creed. Many of the cutscenes exit when finished leaving you in the same world/level as before. And most of them are really quite long, overly wordy and as a subsequent reply suggests, kill replayability.

I recently finished Assassin's Creed. After the last save point, there's an extended conversation (unskippable) and then before you can return to the Animus to muck around, you have to discover something and then go through another cutscene. So, I'd done all that and then watched the resulting credits, and then quit.

The other evening, I went to show a level and gameplay to a friend. Fired it up, it resumed at the last save and then proceeded to play the second-last cutscene, force me to discover the "something" and then sit through another cutscene. And then play the extensive credits which were unskippable. None of that was covering background loading. Pretty annoying.

Re:NOW LOADING

[Reapy]

Ha, that happened to me too! I wanted to play for 20 min before I had to leave for somewhere. I had done all that bs, and then left the game, thinking my saved game would take me back to the "after credits" state. Oh no. It took about 15 minutes to pass the cut scene and the end credits, and by that time, I had to go.

The best way to get around this is to jump into the game, and do something until you get a "saving game" message. That way, when you quit, you do come back to the animus end state.

Re:NOW LOADING

[antic]

Ridiculous, eh? Still, as we both know, it's bullshit game design and shouldn't be happening at all!

I quite enjoyed Assassin's Creed, but with a few simple changes (skippable cutscenes, being able to move quicker in the lab, more variety in townsfolk comments) it would've been much improved.

From the blood on the wall/floor, I'd say that the sequel is going to be set in Yonaguni (Japan's "Atlantis") which should prove interesting. Might be a little like Tenchu?

Where are big monitors for 4 players on one PC?

[tepples]

[I'd like to see a lot less of] Emphasis on online games [and] Console-only games. On a PC, how do you do multiplayer without an Internet connection and without requiring the host of a party to buy multiple PCs? If you want to plug four gamepads into a machine to play a Bomberman or Smash Bros. style game, you need a monitor that's big enough to seat four people around, and in my experience, that means 25 inches diagonal or larger. But most PC owners, even owners of a PC whose video card has a TV output, do not connect their PCs to a television. This is why almost any party-style game from a publisher that has a license on one of the consoles won't see a Windows or Mac release.

Re:Where are big monitors for 4 players on one PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

On a PC, how do you do multiplayer without an Internet connection and without requiring the host of a party to buy multiple PCs?

Seriously?

Seriously?

Back in my day we carried our own damn PCs uphill both ways in the snow to LAN parties.

Or do your parents not let you have your own computer?

Re:Where are big monitors for 4 players on one PC?

[tepples]

Or do your parents not let you have your own computer? It's not me whose parents who don't let me have my own computer and take it out of the house. It's my cousins, ages 6 to 14, who live 300 miles away and are in town for an annual extended-family party. We're getting tired of Super Smash Bros. Melee all the time.

Re:Where are big monitors for 4 players on one PC?

[FlyByPC]

[I'd like to see a lot less of] Emphasis on online games [and] Console-only games. On a PC, how do you do multiplayer without an Internet connection and without requiring the host of a party to buy multiple PCs? You don't. I'd like to see more single-player games. Portal, Oblivion, Syberia, Myst...

Battery life; streaming vs. installing

[tepples]

Yeah, requiring the disk has completely killed the portable and console markets, both of which require the player to insert the game disk/cartridge. What kind of battery life do you get out of a PSP playing games from UMD? What kind of battery life do you get out of a notebook computer playing games from an optical disc vs. playing games from the hard disk?

That's like complaining about be required to insert the DVD to watch videos. Not it's not. DVDs stream completely from the optical disc. Games for the Windows OS, on the other hand, often need to be installed, and they still need the optical disc.

Re:Battery life; streaming vs. installing

[Anonymous Coward]

Battery life? You're whining about battery life?

Here's a hint: if you're gaming on a laptop on battery, the optical drive is the least of your concerns. It will spin up once, then it's off. The real power drains come from the CPU and GPU, and to some degree the audio system. The optical drive is a really small concern.

Secondly, why would you game off battery? If you're going to be gaming, plug the thing in. Laptops are more portable than desktops, but they're not exactly as portable as, well, portables.

Then you whine about games installing, which reduces battery use. Please, keep your whining consistent.

Requiring people to use the disk didn't exactly kill consoles and certainly hasn't killed portables. The only people effected are people too freaking lazy to swap disks. It's four seconds of your time, you can deal with it.

I'm ashamed of you people...

[Khyber]

Not one of you has mentioned "DROP DRM" yet (Yes, I RTFA)

Seriously. I hate having to insert a CD every time I want to play a game that has ALL of it's data installed on my hard drive.

How big is a PS2 memory card?

[tepples]

Why is it, when I was playing Doom on my 486 back in 1994 and could save (and QUIT...you know... STOP PLAYING ) whenever I wanted, that I have to wait 20 minutes until I get to a magical spot blessed by the video game pope before I can save my game and turn off my Playstation 2 , a system that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the save-on-the-fly-capable PC on which I was fragging zombies?

Because your 1994 PC had a 300 MB hard drive, while the PlayStation 2 has an 8 MB flash memory card. In addition, as of 2008, games for Nintendo DS are still generally limited to a 256 KiB save file, though admittedly it's less of a problem because DS games have a robust sleep mode triggered by closing the lid.

How about this compromise: The game continuously saves your progress, so that you never lose more than a minute of play. But you can't load a given state more than once, and when your character dies, it saves after that so that you have to either use a different character or start the campaign over.

From the Patented to Hell and Other Things Dept...

[Khyber]

Your first concept would be nice except we still have issues of shit like companies patenting things in games, like camera controls, and other inane shit. Good luck on your first point until that crap gets cleared.

Agreed with second point. I miss good single-player games, like STALKER. That was hella fun. And online RPGs suck. You're supposed to be in someone else's world, not a world filled with other annoying asshole 13 year olds that yell nothign but "gay" "fag" and other things.

I don't know about the third point, as I've never played the game.

Good luck with #4. EA's gonna choke that as much as a wanker in a porn shop.

THANK YOU. Fucking DRM. Eventually the discs get scratched from insertion and removal. But hey, that's why I pirate games now instead of paying for them - the game companies can't allow you any control, so I go with cracked copies, and until the industry realizes this, I will continue to pirate games. Their greed ends at my front door and wallet.

As for console-only games, I dunno. I tend to think of the computer as something more sacred than a console, and the less morons on the computer/internet the better. Oh, and don't forget, we have emulators. Not totally perfect, but we are indeed making progress!

So don't save as often

[Sycraft-fu]

Nobody is making you creep and save. If you want to play a more save-point oriented game, just do that. I'll do things like that for fun on a shooter that I'm really go at. I'll go for no saves except for on levels or when it autosaves. However, if I want to get up in the middle of something, I can still save right there.

Having saves anywhere doesn't preclude the player from not using that, it just adds an additional option. If you want to creep and save, go ahead. If you don't, don't.

Re:So don't save as often

[tmalone]

I think Lunar 2 did this correctly, at least on the Sega CD. You could save anywhere outside of combat but you spent magic points in order to do it. These points are what you used to level up certain spells, so by saving too often you made the game more difficult. Still, if you had to stop playing, you could sacrifice the points and just fight a couple of extra battles when you started playing again to even the score. It made the game less tiresome to play (you never felt like going into a dungeon meant you would be chained to your TV for the next half hour) but also made it less beneficial for you to save every five minutes. This only works in games in which you accumulate things like experience points or money. It would make it really annoying if you lost ammo or something in a shooter every time you saved.

Re:So don't save as often

[Reapy]

Another way this was handled was in the fire emblem games. In between missions you could save and load like normal. During the mission you could only "suspend" the game. Which meant it saved your game, then took you to the menu. When you loaded the game, it erased your suspended state. This way you have the difficulty, while also being able to stop instantly without losing progress. More games that use save points as check points in gameplay, should have this suspend option. Although it might just be for technical or time limitations that these features can't be added.

Retrospective on the Super Nintendo

[Wilson_6500]

Back in the day, you didn't feel too stupid saying "Super Nintendo" or "Super NES" or "ess-ness" because, well, you were probably about 10 and everyone else (all the kids) had to say it in some silly-sounding way, too. You'd have the occasional eye-rolling when someone said their shibboleth differently (for instance, I grew up around Super NES kids, and the ess-ness and--god forbid!--ess-en-ee-ess kids were laughed at), but that was how things went. "Super Nintendo" was long and dorky-sounding, and so were most of the alternatives, but I'll be damned if people didn't stick by THIER saying as the coolest of them all.

The Wii, though, can't really be abbreviated. There's little ambiguity about it being just "Wii", so everyone who wants to go buy one will probably be calling it the "Super Wii" no matter how silly they think it sounds. There's probably something to be said about the unambiguous, unifying name of the Wii standing in stark contrast to the pride-wars waged over the Super NES, and about how it reflects the gregarious character of the console.

Ah, of course, there's always the age-old "mom exception": people out of the loop did and probably will forever call the newest Nintendo console "that new Nintendo."

By "online"...

[Wilson_6500]

I'm betting he meant "multiplayer." I don't think that guy is alone in wanting to see more games with fulfilling single player content, even if it means taking a hit for having no multiplayer options. Take, for instance, STALKER--I don't think anyone would've cried much if the developers had spent their time implementing some of the features that they had to drop, rather than trying to cobble together and then support a workable multiplayer experience. Of course, single-player games don't make Microsoft money via Live, and you can't charge for them by the month.

On the flip side, it'd be _great_ if we could see more cooperative multiplayer games. I'm kinda looking at you again, STALKER. People claim that you can have fun with MMOs if your friends play them, but MMOs have their own problems, natch. I mean, I had fun with FFXI, but my friends are into WoW. It's not like I can reasonably play a little WoW with them, and then they play a little FFXI with me like we can do with, for instance, Ghost Recon 3 and System Shock 2.

Also, it's not as if it's just party games that aren't coming to the PC. For people who care, it took Gears of War quite a while to make it to the PC--same with Halo 2 (and it was Vista-only, if I remember right), and Halo 3's still not here yet. There's also Assassin's Creed and, worst of all, Mass Effect. I could probably come up with a few more (maybe some PS3 games) if I sat and thought for a while--and don't get me started on the whole "consolitis" thing PC gamers make so much fuss about.

Can we also leave behind...

[popo]

...androgynous japanime heroes with long hair, dapper clothes and swords the size of a small car?

I'm looking at you Square/Enix

Re:Can we also leave behind...

[Killjoy_NL]

Heh remember their first target audience though, extra sales outside Japan are a bonus which show there are enough ppl who like this stuff
(including me, wheeeeeeeeeee)

Remember, you don't have to buy the game :)

Re:Can we also leave behind...

[xalres]

That's just one of the conventions that are indemic to JRPGs that I think should go away.

- Random monster encounters. Seriously, I've thrown away games I just bought because I couldn't move my character more than 10 feet at a time without being forced into combat with a Massive Golem of Ass-Raping.

- Plot??! I forget what game it was, but at the end it turned out I was only a dream of a dream of my dead dad...who was also a demon, or some crap. It's either way too convoluted and existential or the usual "there is a great evil threatening to destroy the world/galaxy/universe and only one fated person can stop it, but only if he has a +8 sword."

- Really really REALLY long dungeon encounters with no way to save your progress.

It's pronounced:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sness.

Re:It's pronounced:

[Anonymous Coward]

snez

Re:It's pronounced:

[Dogtanian]

You'd have the occasional eye-rolling when someone said their shibboleth differently (for instance, I grew up around Super NES kids, and the ess-ness and--god forbid!--ess-en-ee-ess kids were laughed at), but that was how things went. Sness. snez It's pronounced "Throatwarbler Mangrove", and that's an end to it.

The phrase "next-gen"

[Punto]

is necessary. Maybe not literally "next-gen", but the reality is that we have 2 different leagues of development: the wii and psp (also the "old PCs", and according to sony, the ps2), that are still viable platforms, are on one league, and the 360 and ps3 (and the top of the line PCs) are on another.

This might not comply with the current marketing hype (sorry, the wii is not "next-gen"), but the fact is that some companies have to develp for the next-gen league, because they're too big and can't support themselves unless they release $60 games, and some companies are too small to afford the people required to develop the stuff needed for a next-gen product (huge poly-count, 256k ram limit, etc). Or maybe they just want to stay on the "prev-gen" to grab the money left by the big companies moving on to the next-gen.

Either way, we'll continue to see releases for both categories, probably from different companies.

Just to name a few...

[Bones3D_mac]

Hmm...

- Poor AI Coding -

Considering this generation is supposed to be the one that renders further graphical improvements irrelevent, we should be seeing more attention paid toward improving core gaming elements, such as better NPC AIs. Even if you have to sacrifice some visual quality to do it, making a fun game should outweigh making a pretty game.

- Locked, On-Disc Game Content -

The whole idea of calling content that's been on the game disc since day one "downloadable" is extremely underhanded and motivated entirely by greed alone. I agreed to pay the additional $10 per game for the next gen experience you promised me. Don't turn around and ask me for more money to access the content I already own.

- Proprietary Game Development -

We're now in an age where many gamers are just as competent about the mechanics of a game as the game designers themselves. Instead of locking us out, let us in to create and distribute our own custom content to other users. The end user could well become the best source of innovation in an industry notorious for becoming too complacent with formulas that work, rather than experimenting with untested concepts.

- Games Based On Past Wars -

While we've seen some gems such as the Call of Duty series, the games themselves are becoming a blur with one another simply because the protagonist and antagonists are always the same, just with slightly different controls. Instead, why not create ficticious battles or introduce antichronistic advantages/disadvantages to each side. (For example, a small WWII axis forces army with late 20th/early 21st century weaponry vs the allied forces armed only with time correct weaponry and shear numbers.)

- Tedious Game Clichés -

Perhaps it's time we consider putting some game play styles to rest, such as party-themed mini-games (especially on the Wii) and the ever dreaded escort mission. Why should the user have to pay for lazy game development by enduring crap that only serves fill in the total game play hour odometer.

- Franchise sharing -

Ok, the whole Mario vs Sonic argument died the day Sega killed off the Dreamcast. After we get our fill of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, I do not want to hear any more on the subject... period.

- Console Exclusivity -

Mostly referring to 3rd party titles favoring one console over the others. Instead, stop asking us to choose and just make the game for the system I do own. The PS3 owners aren't going to rush out and buy a 360 over one game, and 360 owners aren't about to do the same for the PS3. If they don't already own one, they probably never will.

- HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray -

Given that the loss of Blu-Ray in the format wars would crush Sony under the PS3's weight, this battle is unlikely to die anytime soon. One side eventually needs to conceed or else both will lose out to a 3rd choice that is more easily adopted by the traditional DVD users out there. At the moment, HD-DVD edges out Blu-Ray in this respect due to the ease of creating hybrid DVD/HD-DVD discs for distribution in one box.

Why? Here is nice and detailed explanation

[denzacar]

Save me!

Caution though. Your question will seem more and more silly as you read on.

Sadly it's still not that simple

[Moraelin]

Sadly it's still not that simple.

If Sony thought that everyone who can't find a PS2, will go buy a PS3, yeah, they would have killed it already. Unfortunately, even from a position of monopoly (which Sony doesn't have), that's still not an easy stunt to pull. See MS's trouble convincing people to get Vista instead of XP.

In practice, if they couldn't buy a PS2 any more, a lot of people would do one of the following:

- go buy an XBox or Wii instead. (So Sony would be sacrificing their profits for the sake of raising MS's or Nintendo's.)

- if it was bought as a Christmas gift for some friend or relative, they'd go buy some other toy instead. (Same as above.)

- get told to use an emulator to play the PS2 games they want to play. (And emulators are one thing that make Sony nervous, for a variety of reasons. Not all of them retarded.)

Etc.

Ditto for developers. A lot of people already bought the tools and got the know-how for PS2 games. If they'd rather make another PS2 game and you don't want to publish it, it's not guaranteed that they'll move on to the PS3. Some might figure out that if they have to learn new stuff and buy new tools anyway, they might as well do it for the best-selling console, not for the PS3.

Plus there is some trickle effect in old games bought. Everyone who buys a PS2 might go and grab a copy of some Final Fantasy game or Gran Turismo or whatever. There are a _lot_ of PS2 games which Sony already paid for, and even if they get a 5$ profit off selling a half-price copy, it's still more than nothing.

Re:Sadly it's still not that simple

[ZorbaTHut]

Oh, I never said it was simple :) Just that there are, sometimes, reasons not to sell products, even if you make money off them.

Re:Next-gen

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? I'll just use my Wii to play games and download pirated movies on my PC.

Re:Next-gen

[Moonpie Madness]

Don't feed the troll, pal. The PS3 even has motion sensitivity and optional IR sensors and a very nice camera. If anything, the PS3 add too much extra stuff. This guy's just trying to piss everyone off. The truth is, everyone likes the wii, but it's adding the least to gaming. Where's the breakthrough story? The game that really gets in my head? Video games are this generation's story teller around the campfire. The wii has add wiisports, an awesome game, but with no soul. Nintendo can do better. My sincere opinion. Zelda is a gamecube game, and Metroid didn't really expand the tale of Samus in a profound way. Where's the new tale? The 360 enables stories to be told deeply. Gears and Bioshock were vivid. The PS3 is getting this too with Uncharted and... uh Resistance, and you can tell people want MGS4 for the tale. It's not as though we think High Velocity Bowling and Geometry Wars really defined this new generation. They are soulless pretty games. The next gen is marked by new vivid ways to tell new stories. The wii is next gen, and I'm sure the stories are soon to come. 'till then, it's not next gen in spirit.

Save points

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to complain about save points too, but there are good reasons many games still have them. For example:

• Without them, in some games, your dumb ass will overwrite your save file with one in which you're stuck and cannot win the game. I probably shouldn't admit to this, but I've done it several times. My worst was 40 hours into an RPG. Words cannot express the anger.
• Storytelling reasons. How would you feel if your favorite TV show took commercial breaks in the middle of scenes, the middle of sentences? It'd ruin everything! Now imagine how the makers of the show would feel; their hard work is what's being butchered. If they could, they would take steps to make sure this doesn't happen. Even pulling up the menu to constantly hit "save" breaks the flow of some games, to say nothing of taking a two-day break.
• Save points ruin the challenge of some games. Imagine playing a Mario game without save points. Every time you come up against a hard jump you would pull up the menu, save, jump to the next platform, save again; repeat fifty times a level. Good platformers are usually only hard because a sequence of maneuvers is difficult, not because any one maneuver is difficult. The same often goes for beat-em-ups, FPSs, Gradius-style shoot-em-ups, racing games, and many others. Don't try and tell me you wouldn't abuse it: that great sense of frustration when you're stuck on one stage for a long time is what makes Mario games fun, but if you could make it easy by saving every step of the way, you would do it. That's because once the game allows you to, suddenly that's how you're supposed to play, in the mind of every player in the world.

Really, that's the bottom line. The developer's job is to make the game a fun experience. By putting in the option to save the game at any time, you could say he's giving you more freedom and that can only be a good thing. But really he is saying, "Use this whenever it looks like you might die soon: that is the way to have fun playing this game." For some games that is true, and for some games it is not, for various reasons. And if it's not, the developer shouldn't be saying it. Naturally there's a judgement call to be made, because everyone who's ever played a game with save points (including all game developers) knows how annoying they can be. But they're definitely the lesser evil sometimes.

Re:The 9 things - Next gen is 2012...

[kisrael]

I rarely here Wii being lumped w/ PS2 and not 360/PS3.
Maybe we hang out at different places.
Most people acknowledge the Wii is less powerful than the other 2 current systems,
but then again some folks want to put the PS3 in a class by itself.

Re:Next-gen

[tim_mcc]

Then you ought to try out some other Wii games.

You're correct in saying that motion controls and the IR pointing ability aren't good for all games. So it's a good job some of the saner developers realise this :)

Think of the IR thing as a mouse, it's really cool for FPS stuff (it's the only console I've played an FPS on that hasn't felt completely clumsy, but maybe that's my shoddy coordination when using analogue sticks), and it's really great for games where you need to point at things (like buttons).

The motion stuff is abused by most games, but it's a really neat fit in some places. It's just taking a while for some of the studios to figure out how to work with the hardware the Wii has to offer.

Example of games that I think got the control scheme right:

- Metroid Prime 3 (FPS): IR & Motion
- Super Paper Mario (Adventure/Platformer): D-PAD and buttons only
- Excite Truck (Racing): Motion only
- Brain Academy ('Casual'): IR only

Re:The 9 things- #7

[Lerc]

Sony ditching the PS2 is a mistake, Dropping support altogether hurts consumers and they will remember that when they buy the next generation. Why buy a PS3 if sony Screwed you on the PS2 by dropping support?

Sony should not drop support for the PS2 They should shift its profile.

Direct Developers away from attempting realistic 3d Views. It can't compete with the new generation and shouldn't try.

On the other hand there is a wealth of game opportunities for Stylized views, 2d games, or even game styles that don't need high framerates.

Let developers go more experimental, add something new in gameplay, not in bells and whistles.

Re:Super Wii vs, Wii HD.

[Ravengm]

But then there are still a lot of people without HD capabilities (myself included) that will be unable to use the system. Since Nintento's target group for the Wii is the "casual gamer", it seems that they'd want to have HD as an option, not a necessity. The only access I have to HD currently is a small 480p TV I bought for my dorm room, which would mean no Wii for me. Granted, by the time next-gen consoles come out, many more people will have access to HD, but chances are there will still be a significant number of people lacking said capabilities, even with the digital broadcasting changes forcing people to purchase new TVs.

Re:Super Wii vs, Wii HD.

[trdrstv]

But then there are still a lot of people without HD capabilities (myself included) that will be unable to use the system. Since Nintento's target group for the Wii is the "casual gamer", it seems that they'd want to have HD as an option, not a necessity. The only access I have to HD currently is a small 480p TV I bought for my dorm room, which would mean no Wii for me. Granted, by the time next-gen consoles come out, many more people will have access to HD, but chances are there will still be a significant number of people lacking said capabilities, even with the digital broadcasting changes forcing people to purchase new TVs.

I think by 2011-2012 (next gen time frame) Nintendo will support higher resolutions, maybe not even 1080p, but 720p and include an anti-aliasing chip with the system. An HDTV wouldn't be required to get more enjoyment out of the system, as there will be more advancements in the motion detection, or 3D positioning such as What Johnny Lee cooked up . I think "Wii HD" though would convey that it's an extention of the Wii line and if you have have an HDTV you will get more value out of it.

DVD Drive

[LKM]

Nintendo mentioned at one point that they had issues getting enough of the DVD drives. These are custom-made slot-loading DVD drives which can also read the smaller Gamecube discs. Other possible suspects are the IR cam and the two motion sensors in the controllers.

Viral Wii

[LKM]

The way I remember it, the buzz really started a couple months after the console actually went on the market

Which is when normal people started to realize that this Wii thing their son or nephew bought was a lot more fun than they expected it to be.

The Wii isn't a success due to marketing, or due to shortages, or even due to the press it's getting. It's a success because it's viral. It's interesting to see people playing Wii Bowling, and it's easy to get into Wii Tennis. The thing is inviting and addicting.

The 360 *does* have a bunch of issues

[LKM]

Let me start by saying that I own a 360. And that GP was probably trolling. But he does have some points:

• Halo 3, especially in single-player mode, does not look as good as other current FPS
• The 360 is, no doubt, way too loud, especially with a DVD in the drive. The sound level of that thing is ridiculous
• Many games on the 360 really make little sense without online play, so most players would be stupid not to pay for Gold, which kind of does mean that you need Gold if you want to really use your 360
• The 360 does mainly sell in the US. It's doing okay in Europe (although worse than it should be doing), but it's basically dead in Japan

English Lesson

[LKM]

Next-gen is a perfectly legitimate term to describe the PS3 and 360; it distinguishes them from the Wii and PS2, which are consoles that are still viable development platforms, but are not in the same league as the 360/PS3 in terms of graphical power.

I think your English skills are a bit lacking. Let me help you with this:

dictionary.com: generation /dnren/
1. the entire body of individuals born and living at about the same time: the postwar generation.

PS3, 360 and Wii are part of the same console generation.

Your definition of "current-gen" is wrong.

[LKM]

Yeah, I understand your point, I'm just telling how the words are actually being used by publishers and developers.

Except they're not. 360, PS3 and Wii are current-gen systems. Xbox, PS2 and Cube are last-gen systems. Everybody uses the words like this, except fanboys who feel the need to complain about Nintendo at every opportunity.

Re:The 9 things - Next gen is 2012...

[LKM]

Most people acknowledge the Wii is less powerful than the other 2 current systems

Everyone acknowledges this. It has nothing to do, however, with whether the three are in the same generation. This is a temporal question, not a question of power.

And in the wilderness! Quick, take a picture!

[LKM]

Here's how you recognize a fanboy: He claims something worse is actually better for some weird reason. Now observe:

the ps3 adds motion sensing as well. You didn't know that? It's actually a lot nicer than the wii's in my opinion, because it's not used on its own as much

Not entirely pointless

[LKM]

You may as well leave the network open. It's trivial to recover a WEP key.

But the intention is obviously different. If I find an open Wifi, I assume the owner is okay with me using it to check my mail. If it's WEP-encrypted, I assume he doesn't want me using it.

Capitalism doesn't make things good per se

[LKM]

Another WTF. It's just capitalism in action. Just because something is a normal result of capitalism doesn't mean nobody is allowed to complain about it.

"Ow, it's raining again, this sucks."
"WTF, rain is just the laws of physics in action, you can't demand that gravity stops just because you don't want raindrops falling on your head!"