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Nintendo 3DS Early Impressions
Now that E3 attendees have had a chance to try out the new revision of Nintendo's portable console, critiques of the 3D effect and updated layout are starting to filter in. Opinion thus far has been mostly positive. Wired writes, "The graphics, which are much more advanced than you’d expect from Nintendo, left me pretty much in disbelief. They're on a level with Sony’s PSP, probably even a little better than that. But the eye-popping 3-D effect makes everything that much richer." According to the Guardian's Games blog, it works "beautifully." They add, "You can perceive 3D only if the console is directly in front of you, but this is fine for handheld gaming. I actually found it pretty adaptable in terms of viewing from different vertical positions. It was much more sensitive if the handheld was turned slightly to the left or right, but really, it coped perfectly with the slight shifts and jerks you'd get on a morning commute." During Shigeru Miyamoto's annual dev roundtable, he explained how Nintendo felt that particular types of games, such as shooters, benefit more from the 3D effect than others, and how Nintendo hopes to update as many older games as they can to incorporate 3D gameplay in addition to 3D graphics.
An explosion of porn apps for the 3ds.
(ha)
It really was beautiful. This looks to be for games what Avatar was for 3d movies. Unlike the active shutter 3D demos, this one seemed to suffer far less drawbacks. Including, not having to wear expensive shutter glasses.
The effect actually adds a lot to the perception of the game world in most cases, though there are obviously the instances where it seems like a gimic. But even as a gimic, it makes the 3d world feel all that more real.
And the 3D camera is rather impressive too.
You sound like someone whose gone through the twelve step program. Sorry, your choice of words just creeps me out.
Eat sleep die
I say it's payback. Sony came into the gaming world with little to no respect for developers or the gaming community as a whole. Sony put the focus in on the 3d, and the specs, and the commercialism that we come to expect in the gaming world of today. The gaming world of yesterday had an entirely different ecosphere which in my opinion was better for the developer and the gamers. The gaming industry used to be able making quality games, fun games, which may not have been 3d but which were much more fun because they weren't.
Look at Mortal Kombat and the NBA Jam series. These games were never supposed to be 3d and never were as good when forced into 3d. The graphics actually looked photorealistic when they were 2d and the games were more fun as 2d, so why were these series forced into 3d? Sony had a policy where if your game wasn't 3d they didn't want to let you release it. This is why starting with the PSX and really with the PS2 we saw the death of all 2d gaming, even revolutionary 2d technologies which had photorealistic graphics, because Sony wanted to use their formula of hardware over software.
Now their formula isn't working anymore. Good hardware can only take you so far and we are once again entering into an era where games are supposed to be fun again. I think if Sony were to leave the gaming industry alone on the software level and just make hardware we'd all be better off. Sony has no business making software and no real understanding of the gaming industry as Sony is a hardware company. Perhaps it's time for Sony to follow Sega and move on to specialize in what they are good at, and thats making gaming computers, chips, graphics engines and other hardware components to be used by Nintendo or Microsoft.
Just responding because your post is remarkably offputting if the intention was to refer us to this site.
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It seems like bullshit to me. Establishing 3d on hand helds hardly "destroys" Sony's push for 3D on consoles. If anything it helps establish 3D as a standard part of the gaming experience and supports Sony's push.
The lack of glasses is irrelevant as it's a technology that's only really applicable to handhelds due to the viewing restraints.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I did read through Malstrom's explanation of Nintendo's "Disruption" strategy, and found it quite eye-opening.
However, I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on the hardcore's reaction to NSMBW. Although you may have described the reaction of a portion of the hardcore, all the "hardcore" gamers who I know actually enjoyed NSMBW a lot, praising the way Nintendo wasn't afraid to put in difficult levels, and the way that the multiplayer "co-op" could be easily played competitively, with all the players trying to throw each other off ledges/push them into lava/jump off each others heads. The hardcore is not opposed to 2D gameplay - see the success of Street Fighter IV compared to other 3D fighting games.
This is part of Nintendo's genius -- NSMBW caters to a wide slice of the market.
I must be new here...
Does the 3D screen make the images "pop" out like one of those double concave mirrors or does the image "sink in" so it feels like you look into a box?
And did anyone think to bring a stereo camera and take some photos?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device, when you can get smart phone, pda, or tablet like the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Zune/WM7, Android, or WebOS device that is just as portable, will do a decent job playing games, plus let you surf the net, do your e-mail, and hold your media (music, videos, etc.)?
If I was in charge of Nintendo, I would put a big chunk of flash in the 3DS, and include a browser, e-mail client, and media player. And also make a smart phone version as well.
Do they really think that people want to carry a separate portable gaming device, media player, and pda or smart phone in this day and age? Especially when you consider that you can buy a low end Zune or iPod Touch 8GB in the same price range as a Nintendo DSi.
They gave both Nintendo and newcomer Microsoft a great opportunity to grab a sales niche and publisher and developer support. I doubt we'd be looking at a three-horse race this generation if Sony had its shit together on the PS2.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I'm intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your 3D newsletter.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
>"Nintendo hopes to update as many older games as they can to incorporate 3D gameplay in addition to 3D graphics."
So you can buy all your old games yet again!
VHS
DVD
Blueray
Blueray 3D...
Not "causal", "casual". He's attempting to characterise the supposed hardcore-casual gamer dichotomy as being a fallacy, something I'm inclined to agree with a priori.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
According to the all-knowing Wiki, they've been doing it since 1889. I think Nintendo know how to stay in business. That's the problem really - people think that "big" means "stable". It isn't necessarily true at all, as the latest economic crises have demonstrated. Neither does age make a good company, though, (Woolworths were trading back before Nintendo and yet went bust recently). The question is not even what divisions they serve, or the investment they make - it's how many people want to buy their products. I think Nintendo have *always* had a better grasp of the games market than any other company and they have outlasted EVERYONE, because they understand the market better than anyone. There is barely a person in the US/UK that doesn't recognise and/or hasn't owned a Nintendo device of some kind, and that was true even when I was a kid. Sony, by comparison, are a relative upstart in the gaming arena (company started in the 1950's and is widely spread across dozens of markets, not just the videogaming one - that didn't start until about 1994 with the Playstation). Even SEGA couldn't compete long enough to make a dent, and at one time the gaming market *WAS* Sega and Nintendo.
Nintendo are much more powerful and far richer than you think. Every Wii sold made profit on the hardware, and the games, and the accessories. There's not many companies about today in the video games console market that can say the same thing. Almost every major console or handheld that they've ever produced has been an enormous hit - the only exception that comes to mind is the VirtualBoy which seemed merely badly timed in terms of the technology they had to hand for production. Hell, a crappy game that had been around for decades, was released with the Gameboy and was turned into an overnight success that not much else can touch in comparative terms. Nintendo are no fools. And the markets will release three, four, five new products that will do well enough but not spectacularly. And then Nintendo will reveal something else that nobody thought of / dared release / believed possible.
If anything, I'm slightly disappointed at Nintendo for just jumping on the 3D bandwagon, but it has the taste of "Well, we had this prototype sitting in a dusty cupboard for years and people seem to be on a 3D hype at the moment... see how well you can sell that while we do the real work back here"
Apparently people at Nintendo are reading his blog, because Nintendo's strategy seems to go in the direction Malstrom points :)
I'm pretty sure the Wii came out before his blog started, and that Nintendo/Sega have been into more casual mini-game style games for a lot longer than the Wii. Saying a blog has "opened your eyes" makes it sound more like you are easily brainwashed.
You know it's quite possible for lots of different types of games to co-exist in the world? Same goes for pretty much everything else in life. You don't always have to artificially split everything into two polar opposites and gather yourself to one side of it. You can enjoy the whole spectrum of experience (yes, slight Donnie Darko reference there but it's a good way of saying it) without making everything into some kind of pathetic fan boi Holy War.
which is totally what she said
You may hate it when people name logical fallacies which back up their opinion but it's necessary all to often. We name the fallacies because most people are too stupid to recognize them in the first place and at least given a name to it they can look it up. It's not terribly helpful or informative to tell somebody they've made a bad argument if you don't at least give them a hint as to what the problem is.
This guy has some points, but he misses some important ones.
Yes, most developers today think "casual" is a synonymous for "retard". Casual games = games for retards. And they produce games only retards want to play, and are surprised why they missed the huge casual market.
But worse than that, passionate developers create an awesome hardcore game. Then the marketing team looks at it and says "But... but it's too difficult for casuals(=retards). You must make it easier. Remove that confusing weapon system. Replace that steep learning curve with autopilot. Drop that extended tree, it requires too much decision-making!" - and as result they release a game that was hardcore, had tons of talent and effort put into it, but so dumbed down only retards will play it. And as it tanks, they wonder why - "we have appealed both to the hardcore community and to the ret^H^H^Hcasuals! Why does nobody like it?" - well, it's too broken and dumbed down to hardcores, and casuals believe it's a hardcore game... or find it too dumbed down too.
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Agreed - what the hardcore gamers (and I'm probably no longer one, but a few short years ago when I had the time, I'd happily put in 75+ hours a week gaming, kept an up-to-date gaming rig, followed the new consoles, etc) are generally opposed to is the lazy approach some developers take to just dialling it in and relying on cheap marketing fizz to sale their empty gaming experience. That's not limited to "casual" games, of course, there are plenty example of "proper" games that do this, but it does seem like there are an awful lot of casual cookie cutter style games with little or no substance but which get churned out one after another and rely on sheer quantity to make a profit. Mario is an example of a game which someone new to gaming can pick up and enjoy, yet has enough depth that even seasoned gamers can find a challenge in there. I think people who just dismiss all casual games/gamers out of hand are not "hardcore gamers" they're "bigots", and they're not confined to the gaming world by any means (that's not to say a portion, or even a large portion, of hardcore gamers are not bigots, but to tar them all with the same brush is to commit the same mistake).
Exactly - Sony committed the same crime both Sega and Nintendo committed in the 90's, they believed their own hype, that they were too big to be challenged and that developers should be honoured to develop for their machines. It might not have hurt them greatly during the PS2 phase (but as you say, we can only guess how dominant they could have been if they'd played it differently - Nintendo was out for the count back then), but they certainly no longer have it all their own way.
Because the inability to create an aesthetically pleasing website of course invalidates one's opinion.
"If you tilt the unit away from your face so it's almost at a 180-degree angle, you can still see the 3-D effect."
How the fsck do you manage to see the screen when you've turned it completely away from your face?
Buh? I'm not sure how many more than 140 million consoles Sony could have sold if they'd "had [their] shit together on the PS2". Microsoft's entry into the market with the Xbox was through the sacrificing of roughly $1.5 billion, and the Gamecube was more or less a non-event until the same hardware was repackaged as the Wii.
The reason it's a 3 horse race at the moment is because Sony cocked up with a late delivered and needlessly complex PS3 coming up against a "good enough" Wii and the Xbox 360 taking the early sales lead by a long shot in the US. It's certainly not because of a lack of PS2 success.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
So why is it "3d"
Because otherwise, Sony wouldn't digitally sign it for booting on the retail console.
Also, because it's more expensive to draw every player in 2D at every angle. NBA Jam on 16-bit systems used a generic basketball player body scaled to about five sizes along with unique character heads. To add a new player, only the head needed to be redrawn at all angles. But now at least the upmarket players expect more than eight angles and numbers on uniforms, and at some point, it becomes easier for the artists just to make an octahedron, pull at it until it becomes a head, and wrap a texture around it.
The thought that someone is going to take a counter-argument and go and look up some fallacy, and that they'll consider that helpful and informative, is silly.
Non-trivial arguments about the real world aren't simple enough to apply logical rules to, and mistakes in logic are easier to recognize by pointing them out with respect to the specific case, rather than by the generalized case.
The idea that you can define a set of axioms and predicates and use rules of inference to prove that the 3DS is an attempt to "destroy" Sony, or something else in a real-world debate, is really crazy, so I don't think concepts from hard-nosed logic and proof are actually useful.
Also people all too often refer to "fallacy" like a fancy word for "mistake" (see the response before this one "a priori"), or to dismiss someone's argument in an intentionally inaccessible way, which comes across like condescending nonsense.
Mainly it's too often used to turn the vocab of logic and proof into an underhanded debating tactic, which seems like the opposite of what it's supposed to be for.
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Story time!
Sega got its start in 1940, to provide coin-operated games for the American military to put on their bases. They were, quite literally, a child born out of World War II. While they had their ups and downs, they never really encountered any serious business success problems until the 90's.
Nintendo, on the other hand, got it's start in 1889 as a playing card company. By the time Sega came around, Nintendo was already a granola chomper looking for its mid-life crisis convertible. They had a taxi company, a hotel chain, a tv network, a food company...and they all failed horribly. Nintendo brought itself back from having only 60 yen in stocks. I don't think Sackboy and a few Helghast are going to be much of a problem.
Living With a Nerd
The predictable consequence that the gamecube and dreamcast failed and the PS2 still sells?
The GameCube did not fail. It made plenty of money for Nintendo, and then it got a clock speed upgrade and a Bluetooth receiver and became the disruptive Wii. Dreamcast, on the other hand, was FUDded to death by Sony.
Same here. I've played FPS, MMOs, RTS pretty hardcore over the years, even been in competition teams, yet I still love my casual games. Anyone who suddenly changes their likes for a blog is a fairly shallow person indeed.
I'd say that the GP is the person who's blog they're trying to promote. This Sean person seems like someone who has never been good at games, but likes them. Nothing wrong with that, but you don't have to rag on the hardcore gaming market just to compensate.
Anyway, OT this should be so... 3DS seems like the best platform for 3D so far. Glasses free is how it always should be. There's no conspiracy there of Nintendo "actively seeking to destroy SCE", they don't like Sony, but it's not a destruction tack. Otherwise they wouldn't release bottom of the market gear, you know, opposite end of the spectrum to Sony.
I dislike Sony as much as the next person, but I know where their priorities and pricing is positioned. To dispute this would be to lie to yourself.
The wiser people at Microsoft and Sony are pissing themselves right now.
The 3DS is better in literally every stat than the PSP, even the PSPgo. Better graphics, better screen, bigger data files (2GB max at launch opposed to 1.8GB UMDs), better input (analog stick, dpad, AND touch), better everything.
Nintendo spent a time with weaker graphics to perfect a "gimmick", and once it became cheap to increase the graphics, did.
Meanwhile, on the "big boy stage", both of the other big 3 are busy trying to desperately imitate the "gimmick" of motion control that they spent the past few years mocking Nintendo for doing. Meanwhile, Nintendo's perfecting it.
It's cheap, from an IP standpoint, to add more graphical power. You don't really need to research it, for example.
And now, it's cheap from a hardware standpoint, too.
That 8 bit chiptune version of the Jaws Theme you hear is Nintendo, stalking Sony and Microsoft's lunch.
The Wii3D or whatever their next console is going to be is going to do the same thing the 3DS did to the PSP, to the PS3 and the 360. Take a gimmick they have perfected, perhaps add another gimmick, but increase the graphics and remove the one advantage the other two have.
A friend of mine who worked for a major software company in a division that was very much connected to video games told me something interesting a few years ago.
There was concern that video games were running full speed into a dead end and there wasn't anything anybody could do about it. At the time there really wasn't such thing as a 'casual gamer', you either played games or you didn't. And those who played games were demanding ever increasing realistic graphics, massive games, orchestrated music and rendered cutscenes. Basically for most gamers to be satisfied a game would have to cost increasing millions in development costs. It was becoming tougher and tougher to develop a game that would make a profit unless you were one of the big guys developing the next sequel. And eventually even they would have to deal with the issue too.
The big problem was that the number of people in the gaming market wasn't really increasing. Part of this he guessed was the result of these bigger and more impressive games requiring newer, more complex and more expensive hardware that scared a lot of people away from gaming.
With this soon to be unsustainable trend, him and his colleagues guessed that the gaming industry would collapse in as little as 5 to 10 years unless something drastic happened. He had even started sharpening his skills in other areas in the event he would have to jump ship.
At one point there was some hope for the Game Cube. Nintendo had attempted to bring in new gamers with its less intimidating system and if it had worked would have provided developers with a more profitable system to create games for. The more casual gamers brought in by the Game Cube would haven't had the same demands as traditional gamers in terms of graphics and power and could have reduced the financial strain involved with creating the blockbusters that hardcore gamers were expecting. Unfortunately it failed. Traditional gamers shunned the system for its family friendly style and Nintendo was never really able to sell it to the families well enough to create the influx of casual gamers they were hoping to get.
When the GameCube failed there were some in the industry that were getting ready to pack their bags, and I'm sure a collective sigh a relief when the Wii managed to succeed where the GC could not. With an influx of new gamers whose only demand for a game that it be fun, the industry is healthier than it has ever been. A few years ago there were huge portions of the population who wouldn't have been able to pick up a video game without their friends turning their nose up at them. Now it's socially acceptable for almost anyone to play video games. We're now seeing scores of games that are relying more upon innovation and fun and less on graphical power and it's changing the industry from the bottom up.
If Sony killed the video game industry with the PS2, then Nintendo revived it with the Wii.
Sony itself will destroy Sony.
That is, the films and music divisions of Sony are impairing the technology divisions of the company, and there's no clear way out of that mess.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Mainly it's too often used to turn the vocab of logic and proof into an underhanded debating tactic, which seems like the opposite of what it's supposed to be for.
Ah, you've fallen prey to the fallacy of the unbounded middle.
An extremely stupid design, that being the Cell. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with the idea of a processors like that, but that the design was new, unproven, and unknown. You do not put a brand new, first gen architecture like that in a consumer product. IBM was using it for PCIe boards for research and toying with it in some servers, not going mass market with it. Also, you'll note, IBM decided that it was a failed experiment, they aren't going to continue development. Not the sort of thing to put in a consumer device.
However it gets worse. Sony had somehow talked themselves in to the fact that the Cell would be good enough for 3D graphics. Originally it was not to be the CPU, it was to be the GPU. I don't know if they just had really bad numbers or if they were willfully ignorant to the fact that GPUs did the kind of math graphics need way better than the Cell could (though the Cell is better at them than a normal CPU). Well, this became apparent and Sony did the stupid thing of making the Cell the CPU, rather than scrapping it for a PPC CPU.
Now they needed a graphics chip, so they went to nVidia. Problem was, they were late. It takes a long time to do design of hardware. The hardware that you see coming out today has been in the pipe for years, you can't just change it all at the last second. So what nVidia could offer them was a slightly modified version of their next gen computer chipset, the 7900 series. They couldn't do the full customization you want for a console in the time they had. As such the PS3 got a graphics chip not as suited for console use as it would have had they contracted it in the beginning. A major feature you can note in this regard is divided CPU/GPU RAM. You don't want that in a console since RAM is at a premium. When you've got only 512MB, you want it all unified. However nVidia couldn't redesign the RAM controller in the time provided so the PS3 has to operate as 256MB/256MB which means in many cases not as much RAM for high detail textures and so on.
It was just a poor series of design choices all around. In the end it was not only expensive, but hard to program for. Xbox 360 titles were being developed in Visual Studio, something developers have vast experience with and going from PC to 360 was almost as simple as clicking a cross compile button. The PS3 had poor tools and nobody understood how to use it. The Cell might have a lot of untapped power, but there was no knowledge base on how to program to access that.
Not the same hardware:
1) smaller (less expensive) feature size on the chip
2) saved money put into extra ports and chips (Wifi, SD, USB, Bluetooth)
3) somewhat better graphics
Nintendo was smart, they used tech to save money and provide a marginal improvement in raw power and "extras" and standard features.
Additionally they used an inexpensive to make, but fairly modern accelerometers along with an interesting take on pointing.
The Wii-Mote (as a pointer) isn't the first gun add-on, but it is 1) inexpensive, 2) quite lag-free, and 3) fairly accurate
There is more to tech than pumping pixels, and physics. Nintendo decided the ideal way to go about it was to make a base unit that was affordable and had extras come standard.
Also, the wii-mote + nunchuck is a great controller. If only more games would focus on buttons instead of waggles (a lot of games would make do with the 4 buttons that are easy to reach IMO)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg