Saving fuel is actually a very important consideration in space flight, for reasons that go well beyond cost. When the shuttle launches, a whole lot of the weight that it's carrying is fuel for the rest of the trip. If moving the launch somewhere else would require 10% more fuel (I just made that number up), no only do you have to pay for that extra gas, you've also decreased the payload capacity by the weight of that fuel, plus probably some increases in the structural weight of the craft to deal with the weight of that extra fuel.
How are things "getting out of hand"? Are gangs of kids dressing up as Mario and spray painting giant mushrooms all over buildings? Did Nintendo buy exclusive rights to NFL teams and then add yoshi to all of their logos?
I've written about this before when people have crapped on Nintendo's use of their franchises, and I'll try to explain it again. Nintendo has developed an extensive and creative "mario universe" and it's one of their greatest assets for game design. Think of their games more as episodes in some big interactive Mario TV series. How can a bunch of geeks who argue over things like star trek 'canon' be so against the continued development of a set of good characters? It's not like they're just copying and pasting artwork from one game to the other. The cast of characters, the environments, and the adventures are always growing and changing, while still staying grounded in something very familiar to most gamers. This familiarity allows us, in a sense, to help keep "suspension of disbelief" while playing, even when completely crazy things happen. When a big ass pirahna plant reached over and bit me for the first time in Mario Kart double dash, it didn't seem out of place to me. It almost made sense. How amazing is that, that something like that made sense to me?
And on the topic of the Mario sports games, Nintendo is taking a completely different direction on sports games. Madden and NBA live are great games and all that, but the ultimate goal that they're pursing is realism, trying to make things match the real world as much as possible. Real football is, to a certain degree, a known quality, it's an ending point, that all the games are trying to meet.
Nintendo, on the other hand, uses a sport as a baseline to start from, and then draws on things like the Mario universe to make a different game. And so we get results that are sometimes goofy, but always creative, and usually pretty fun. Add in to that Nintendo's usual refinement of control, different levels of depth and difficulty, and maybe a bit of nostalgia, and you've got a whole lot of good games.
If not having to start completely from scratch in terms of concept art and characters and landscapes and stuff allows Nintendo more time to refine their gameplay and controls, then I'm all for it. The consistent quality and fun of their franchise games speaks for itself.
Re:Also the last great Mac-only game
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Cyan Worlds Closes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
While the mac game world is but a small asteroid compared to the windows game horde, Myst was not the end of mac-exclusive entertainment. A little company called Bungie produced a number of games exclusively for the mac before eventually transitioning to windows/xbox. Ambrosia software doesn't make the huge retail blockbusters, but Escape Velocity was as engrossing to me as any windows game I've ever played, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks that. There's plenty of even smaller scale, yet incredibly well done shareware games coming out for the mac. I remember having tons of fun playing Airburst with friends while in college.
Sure, the huge publishing companies don't do exclusive mac games anymore. They're all about making the most money possible, they're going to go after the biggest market. But there have been many Mac specific games that I hold in just as high esteem as I do Myst.
So our every other games. And just about every other product in the world. Even big, well funded companies like Microsoft and Apple release stuff that just doesn't sell.
The point is, you're probalby more likely to get rich making a little game like this on your own than you are working your way up through the big game publishers/developers.
And even if you don't have a big hit, what are you out? Probably just some free time, and hopefully you had some fun and learned somethign while making the game. I don't think the guy that wrote Snood spends 40 hours per week working on the game. It was basically a hobby for him that turned into something big. Way to go him.
Well, for me at least, when i was younger, I usually saved up some of the money. Or waited until a birthday or something. Back in the NES days, when I was 8 or 9, how much did games run? $40 maybe? That was a lot of money for a kid. I remember having a chore chart where I earned my allowance, each chore was worth maybe 25 cents, if I did it all week. Say that averages out to 5 cents per chore each day, maybe 10-15 chores on the list. Working for 75 cents/day won't get you very much in the US.
Of course I was happy to pay that much for a game. I didn't have to spend my money on anything else. Now that I can earn enough for a new game in a couple hours, I've got about a zillion other things that I need to pay for. Ah, to be a child again...
They don't even need to raise prices to get raising profits. Online music sales are growing plenty fast, and there's tons more room for growth. This is just them being greedy because they think they can get away with it.
In the article, some music industry jackass basically claimed that Apple is screwing over the labels here, because Apple has revenue on both the music store and the iPod, while the labels just have the store. Nevermind that the labels get almost all of the money from each song the iTMS sells, not to mention the fact that an overwhelming majority of all music sold is through CD's. I don't think Apple gets a half a tenth a percent of a dime from each music CD that gets sold. I dunno. Maybe the labels could consider the bulk of their sales as another source of revenue.
These guys just sound so foolish, I wonder if they actually convince themselves to believe what they're saying.
I dunno, can they really be that dumb? Do they not realize that the success of the iTMS hinges on two things, simplicity and the iPod. They can't duplicate the iPod, and they seem to be going against the simplicity aspect. Don't underestimate the psychological value of having every song be the same price, and that price being decent. I can impulse buy a dollar away no sweat. I spend a dollar on the stupid claw machines every time I go to walmart. The last thing they should want us to consider when we're buying one song, in an entirely digital format, is price. That's just one more potential roadblock to make us not spend money.
They won't come up with their own, more popular store. And as for driving consumers back to CD's, if they really think they can stop digital distribution...no, they can't possibly believe that anymore. If they shut down iTMS, they'll get a whole lot of bad publicity, and a whole mess of new people will be driven(back) to p2p.
You're making improper connections. People who live in industrialized countries aren't living longer primarily because of processed foods. You listed most of the other causes, yet always seem to think that processed foods are what made them possible. Sanitation, refrigeration, and medicine have all been a big help, and all three could easily still exist even if we stopped making processed foods tomorrow.
Washing your fruit off with clean tap water does not make them "processed". We're talking about foods made from lots of artificial ingredients, stuck in plastic packaging, and placed in long store shelves. They're convenient, and they taste good cause they're full of lots of concentrated sugars. But they aren't natural, they're chemically way different than anything nature would provide, and so our bodies have not evolved to process them in healthy ways. Fertilized crops aren't the problem, it's the fact that so much of our food cannot be efficiently dealt with by our bodies. And so we become fatasses and get diabetes and stuff.
The solution, the easy one, is to stop eating those manufactured foods. We don't need to go back to everyone growing their own vegetables in their own gardens, but we need to be more intelligent about how the food that is grown ends up in front of the average person. The earth can grow plenty of food. Go talk to some farmers, especially in countries where they aren't subsidized. They're having a rough time because prices are so low. The world is growing more food than it needs. People are only starving for political and economical reasons, not because all the farmland is already being used to capacity.
It's not, but then again, Nintendo doesn't advertise it as a full fledged portable media player. It's like Sony can't decide what they want us to be able to do. Ooohhh, the PSP can play movies! But wait, it doesn't play user-created movies full resolution? You have to buy a big-ass, expensive memory stick to put content on it?
While I have no doubts that the Burnout game and especially the GTA game will help boost sales for the PSP, I don't think they're going to do much for the system in the long term. Frankly put, those games are going to suffer the same problem that a lot of the current PSP games are having. They aren't portable games. Rockstar even said they didn't think of Liberty City Stories as a portable game. I have no doubt that it'll be a good game, it's just that I'd rather play that sort of game on a big screen at home. I'll get better controls, more detail, and probably a more comfy seat to relax in while I play.
Sony fails to realize that a portable system has different potentials and liabilities compared to a home console. Nintendo has always realized it to a degree, and they really leaned on it with the DS, adding features that work much better on a portable than they would on a console. That's why there are better games. And as developers become more comfortable with the dual screens/touch screen, we should find plenty of other cool stuff on the shelves.
The PSP is never going to have a game that's anything more than what the PS2 can do, plus some multiplayer functions. And that's why the DS won out for me. Having the ability to play the same games to go is only appealing if I can't have new games to go instead. I can always play more GTA3 when I get back to my house. I'd rather spend my money on something unique. Who cares which handheld Tony Hawk looks best on, cause it's still going to look better in your living room. I think a lot of people are going to feel that too, if only subconsciously.
Really, the only thing special that the PSP is offering a gamer is portability. The DS offers much more, and for a cheaper too. Unless Sony does a huge about face on something like their stance on homebrew software, they're just selling a smaller version of the PS2. And the PS2 stopped being exciting years ago.
Technically, the Karma might be solid, but as you pointed out with the iPod, "Design" is really what drives sales. And not just in an aesthetic sense either. In terms of UI, and equally important, the size/shape of the device. My old roommate had a Karma that could do some cool stuff, but it was shaped like a big square that wouldn't fit in any pocket except maybe a winter jacket.
It just seemed to me, that with all the work and brain power they put into the device, they were so far off with the damn shape of the thing. The decision to skim on industrial design and just focus on engineering pretty much ruined any chance they had of taking the mass market by storm. And once the iPod got its cultural icon status, Rio had completely lost.
I wonder how quickly people are going to make the shift to HD-DVD. The quality jump between VHS and DVD was huge, and immediately noticeable. And the big feature, instant fast forward/rewind, sure is nice too. I don't see what the big draw is going to be for HD-DVD, at least not until giant high-def TV's become way more common.
I'm as big a geek as the next slashdotter, but I'm in no hurry at all to move from DVD's.
I think Nintendo is going to run into this same problem with the Metroid Hunters game. I played the demo, and it was alright, but nothing great, because a screen that small only allows for so much detail. Mario64 works ok on the DS because it's a cartoony, stylized 3D, that works with simple shapes and bright contrasting colors. The darker feel of the metroid games won't translate well to a small screen, everything just pixelizes into mush.
But overall, I'm happy with the direction Nintendo took with the DS. They're treating a handheld like its own thing. You can't have a normal touch screen console, because nobody has touch screen televisions. But it can be done on the console, and make it unique, and we're going to get some really interesting games out of it.
I don't think many people are interested in having their favorite games "on the go." If I'm going to be paying more money for a new system, and have to pay even more for the games for the handheld, I'm going to want some new games. Now if the PS3 version of Tony Hawk comes with the PSP version bundled (with no/minimal increase in price), then that'd make more sense to me.
It's like the UMD vs. DVD issue. Why should I buy a movie I probably already have again? Why should I buy a game that I've already got at home just for the road? No thanks.
Understand that people/companies are going to be extremely careful with their spaceflight endeavors. The early stages of space tourism are going to be huge media events, lots of people will be watching. The companies attempting this are well aware of that fact, and know they have to get it right to make their business work. The history of the shuttle shows just how small a margin of error the public is willing to give spacecraft. (The Columbia incident sucked, but it was hardly a good reason to be talking about shutting down the shuttle program. There are a whole host of better reasons for retiring the shuttle, none of which require us to act like sissies.)
How many people do you think died in the early days of aviation? I'm too lazy to look up any sort of numbers, but I'll bet it's waaaay wayyyy more than space flight has claimed. Manned spaceflight has a pretty solid record, and it's going to need to keep that if any sort of tourism industry hopes to develop. There won't be much corner-cutting done.
Exactly. I'd rather play a good game later than a rushed game now. I mean, unless you own a games store, how does Nintendo delaying a game affect your life in any meaningful way? I'm sure you can find something else to do to kill some time while you wait.
Although, to be honest, I got bored of the metroid demo after about five minutes. If you're looking for some gameplay to keep you busy, go pick up the Advance Wars game that dropped yesterday. I've had the GBA Advance Wars2 game for well over a year, and I still play it at least every other day.
I didn't say the lowest common denominator, I said a lower one. There is a difference. And I wasn't specifically talking about the level of "controller savvy" possessed by the gamer, but rather their expectations. The lower level that we're seeing is one of clones and so called "safe bets"; things that strongly resemble what's come before it, so that buyers can compare with their previous experiences. They can look at images on a website and say, "oh yeah, I've played this sort of game before, it was pretty neat. And this one has better graphics and more levels. Cool." It doesn't require a big leap of faith to part with your money. If you liked FFVI, you can be pretty sure you'll find more of what you enjoyed in FFVII.
And well, No one wants "crappy" graphics, sorry. Even if they aren't the most important thing, it's nice for things to look nice, even if it's more stylized than realistic. And I'm not entirely sure that the casual gamer market can't handle anything more complicated than Tetris. The trick is the design a good learning curve, one that's fun the whole way. Nintendo is really good at that. Which is why I hope you're right about the Revolution. I'm a big fan of Nintendo, and have faith in them to continue to make some fun games. Just like they do now.
It's only hard to get a game made for consoles without a huge budget. There are lots of people making innovative computer games and making them available for download. Granted, most of these games don't involve enormous virtual worlds created by dozens of artists, but that doesn't mean they're not still fun. I got as much fun out of Snood as I did out of Unreal Tournament 2004.
The grandparent commenter seems to be longing for those simpler "one-trick" gameplay types. Shareware has never stopped trying to fill that niche, you don't even have to work all that hard to find it. It's easier to download stuff off the web than drive to GameStop anyways.
It's a little more complicated than that, but also not as bad as you make it sound. As games have gone more mainstream, like other forms of media, a lot of them have started to pander to the widest possible audience, in order to make more money. The focus has often times gone to graphics, because they've been easy to improve, the results can be immediately understood, and it's easy to advertise that sort of thing in magazines and whatnot. Gameplay is a much more subjective thing. While everyone can appreciate the progress being made in graphics, an evolution of gameplay that you enjoy may seem like a step backwards to me. And either way, good luck writing a satisfactory explanation of it on the back of the retail box.
But like the movie and music industries, while a lot of the big name stuff has "gone hollywood". there's still plenty of people out there doing it cause they love it. Economic forces have relegated these independent outfits more to computers than consoles, but they're still there. Just like there's plenty of weird, experimental, and crazy indie music, there's lots of indie games out there. Sure, a lot of it's crap, but one of the side effects of innovating is that plenty of what you come up with doesn't work. You're not going to find these sorts of games sitting on the shelves at CompUSA, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
The mass market is always going to pander to a lower common denominator. That's almost what the definition of what mass market is. And that's fine, because plenty of people want fluff. Occasionally I want fluff too, real life offers me plenty of substance somedays, and I generally try to view video games as a diversion, not another project for me to get emotionally involved in.
There are plenty of good games being made. Some are simple, some are complex. Some are evolutionary, some are revolutionary. Some will appeal to only a few, others will appeal to millions. If you can't find games that you like, either you're not looking very hard, or your expectations have somehow gotten horribly skewed.
I think the point is, the only thing that can beat a good buzz-word is a good buzz-acronym. Yeah, Atom...that sounds pretty cool. But RSS, holy crap, it must stand for something totally complex and awesome and revolutionary.
RSS. Just say it to yourself over and over again. It rolls off the tongue. Next to a well designed acronym such as that, Atom just seems really simple.
Which only goes to prove that the real evil in video games is Nintendo. As Sony has wrestled away their marketshare, youth have become better behaved, learning good values from their playstations; instead of the smut that Nintendo wants to hoist on us.
We all know Mario was only trying to track down Princess Peach because when a ho doesn't give her pimp his money, he's gotta find that bitch and smack her down.
And with Nintendogs coming out soon for the DS, soon American children will all be introduced to the horrible world of bestiality. It's so sad.
Just as an interesting aside that your comment reminded me of, I was watching Real TV, or at least a similar show, basically video clips of crazy stuff happening. Anyways, there's one of a teenage ice hockey game going on where a fight breaks out. Big brawl, involving a number of players from both sides. One kid out there thinks that the fighting is stupid and a waste of time, so to protest and stop the fight, he takes his shirt off, and drops his pants, while skating around the rink.
That probably wouldn't have been my first idea had I been in his case, but people started cheering for him, and everyone stopped fighting to see what was going on. So his plan worked. What made it more interesting, however, was that someone in the stands didn't approve, and called the cops. And the cops arrested him for indecent exposure, and took him to jail.
I'm not anti-sport, or even anti-violent sports like hockey and football, but I think that it's amazing that in the midst of all that fighting, the guy that goes to jail is the pacifist who felt like taking his clothes off. It wasn't really lewd or sexual(unlike the infamous superbowl incident). He caused a fight to stop. He stopped people from trying to hurt each other. And someone found that offensive enough to call the cops. That just, to me, says something very strange about our culture.
I agree, but you can find plenty of examples of companies with lots of extra money throwing legal weight around, even without a good reason.
I don't know what CNet's financials look like, but Google has a lot of extra cash sitting around since their IPO. Could they put a small percent of a percent of their money into giving CNet a hard time? It wouldn't be unprecedented in the world of business.
They're not doing anything evil, they're just showing their disapproval for another company in the proper way. If they were evil, they'd have sued them, instead they're deciding to just not do business with them, which is certainly within their rights.
Now, you can argue whether or not they're getting a bit to huffy about something that's a minor deal. Information may be available to the public, but that doesn't mean it's particularly friendly or polite to publish it widely. It's not illegal to be an jerk, but sometimes it's not the best idea, and there are often consequences. I know journalists like to pretend that they're somehow exempt from any consequences, but that's not how it works.
I think Nintendo sees this, and they're positioning themselves the be an alternative to it. They've been pretty straightforward about saying that their console won't be built to push the most traiangles, so that means you don't have to hire extra artists to design all those polygons. And if they do this online distribution well, and let smaller developers have a crack at it, they could develop quite the community around the Revolution. Sure, most of those smaller developers won't be selling two million copies of their game in the first weekend like Halo, but they won't be spending $20 million just to ship the darn thing either.
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Saving fuel is actually a very important consideration in space flight, for reasons that go well beyond cost. When the shuttle launches, a whole lot of the weight that it's carrying is fuel for the rest of the trip. If moving the launch somewhere else would require 10% more fuel (I just made that number up), no only do you have to pay for that extra gas, you've also decreased the payload capacity by the weight of that fuel, plus probably some increases in the structural weight of the craft to deal with the weight of that extra fuel.
How are things "getting out of hand"? Are gangs of kids dressing up as Mario and spray painting giant mushrooms all over buildings? Did Nintendo buy exclusive rights to NFL teams and then add yoshi to all of their logos?
I've written about this before when people have crapped on Nintendo's use of their franchises, and I'll try to explain it again. Nintendo has developed an extensive and creative "mario universe" and it's one of their greatest assets for game design. Think of their games more as episodes in some big interactive Mario TV series. How can a bunch of geeks who argue over things like star trek 'canon' be so against the continued development of a set of good characters? It's not like they're just copying and pasting artwork from one game to the other. The cast of characters, the environments, and the adventures are always growing and changing, while still staying grounded in something very familiar to most gamers. This familiarity allows us, in a sense, to help keep "suspension of disbelief" while playing, even when completely crazy things happen. When a big ass pirahna plant reached over and bit me for the first time in Mario Kart double dash, it didn't seem out of place to me. It almost made sense. How amazing is that, that something like that made sense to me?
And on the topic of the Mario sports games, Nintendo is taking a completely different direction on sports games. Madden and NBA live are great games and all that, but the ultimate goal that they're pursing is realism, trying to make things match the real world as much as possible. Real football is, to a certain degree, a known quality, it's an ending point, that all the games are trying to meet.
Nintendo, on the other hand, uses a sport as a baseline to start from, and then draws on things like the Mario universe to make a different game. And so we get results that are sometimes goofy, but always creative, and usually pretty fun. Add in to that Nintendo's usual refinement of control, different levels of depth and difficulty, and maybe a bit of nostalgia, and you've got a whole lot of good games.
If not having to start completely from scratch in terms of concept art and characters and landscapes and stuff allows Nintendo more time to refine their gameplay and controls, then I'm all for it. The consistent quality and fun of their franchise games speaks for itself.
While the mac game world is but a small asteroid compared to the windows game horde, Myst was not the end of mac-exclusive entertainment. A little company called Bungie produced a number of games exclusively for the mac before eventually transitioning to windows/xbox. Ambrosia software doesn't make the huge retail blockbusters, but Escape Velocity was as engrossing to me as any windows game I've ever played, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks that. There's plenty of even smaller scale, yet incredibly well done shareware games coming out for the mac. I remember having tons of fun playing Airburst with friends while in college.
Sure, the huge publishing companies don't do exclusive mac games anymore. They're all about making the most money possible, they're going to go after the biggest market. But there have been many Mac specific games that I hold in just as high esteem as I do Myst.
So our every other games. And just about every other product in the world. Even big, well funded companies like Microsoft and Apple release stuff that just doesn't sell.
The point is, you're probalby more likely to get rich making a little game like this on your own than you are working your way up through the big game publishers/developers.
And even if you don't have a big hit, what are you out? Probably just some free time, and hopefully you had some fun and learned somethign while making the game. I don't think the guy that wrote Snood spends 40 hours per week working on the game. It was basically a hobby for him that turned into something big. Way to go him.
Well, for me at least, when i was younger, I usually saved up some of the money. Or waited until a birthday or something. Back in the NES days, when I was 8 or 9, how much did games run? $40 maybe? That was a lot of money for a kid. I remember having a chore chart where I earned my allowance, each chore was worth maybe 25 cents, if I did it all week. Say that averages out to 5 cents per chore each day, maybe 10-15 chores on the list. Working for 75 cents/day won't get you very much in the US.
Of course I was happy to pay that much for a game. I didn't have to spend my money on anything else. Now that I can earn enough for a new game in a couple hours, I've got about a zillion other things that I need to pay for. Ah, to be a child again...
They don't even need to raise prices to get raising profits. Online music sales are growing plenty fast, and there's tons more room for growth. This is just them being greedy because they think they can get away with it.
In the article, some music industry jackass basically claimed that Apple is screwing over the labels here, because Apple has revenue on both the music store and the iPod, while the labels just have the store. Nevermind that the labels get almost all of the money from each song the iTMS sells, not to mention the fact that an overwhelming majority of all music sold is through CD's. I don't think Apple gets a half a tenth a percent of a dime from each music CD that gets sold. I dunno. Maybe the labels could consider the bulk of their sales as another source of revenue.
These guys just sound so foolish, I wonder if they actually convince themselves to believe what they're saying.
I dunno, can they really be that dumb? Do they not realize that the success of the iTMS hinges on two things, simplicity and the iPod. They can't duplicate the iPod, and they seem to be going against the simplicity aspect. Don't underestimate the psychological value of having every song be the same price, and that price being decent. I can impulse buy a dollar away no sweat. I spend a dollar on the stupid claw machines every time I go to walmart. The last thing they should want us to consider when we're buying one song, in an entirely digital format, is price. That's just one more potential roadblock to make us not spend money.
They won't come up with their own, more popular store. And as for driving consumers back to CD's, if they really think they can stop digital distribution...no, they can't possibly believe that anymore. If they shut down iTMS, they'll get a whole lot of bad publicity, and a whole mess of new people will be driven(back) to p2p.
You're making improper connections. People who live in industrialized countries aren't living longer primarily because of processed foods. You listed most of the other causes, yet always seem to think that processed foods are what made them possible. Sanitation, refrigeration, and medicine have all been a big help, and all three could easily still exist even if we stopped making processed foods tomorrow.
Washing your fruit off with clean tap water does not make them
"processed". We're talking about foods made from lots of artificial ingredients, stuck in plastic packaging, and placed in long store shelves. They're convenient, and they taste good cause they're full of lots of concentrated sugars. But they aren't natural, they're chemically way different than anything nature would provide, and so our bodies have not evolved to process them in healthy ways. Fertilized crops aren't the problem, it's the fact that so much of our food cannot be efficiently dealt with by our bodies. And so we become fatasses and get diabetes and stuff.
The solution, the easy one, is to stop eating those manufactured foods. We don't need to go back to everyone growing their own vegetables in their own gardens, but we need to be more intelligent about how the food that is grown ends up in front of the average person. The earth can grow plenty of food. Go talk to some farmers, especially in countries where they aren't subsidized. They're having a rough time because prices are so low. The world is growing more food than it needs. People are only starving for political and economical reasons, not because all the farmland is already being used to capacity.
It's not, but then again, Nintendo doesn't advertise it as a full fledged portable media player. It's like Sony can't decide what they want us to be able to do. Ooohhh, the PSP can play movies! But wait, it doesn't play user-created movies full resolution? You have to buy a big-ass, expensive memory stick to put content on it?
While I have no doubts that the Burnout game and especially the GTA game will help boost sales for the PSP, I don't think they're going to do much for the system in the long term. Frankly put, those games are going to suffer the same problem that a lot of the current PSP games are having. They aren't portable games. Rockstar even said they didn't think of Liberty City Stories as a portable game. I have no doubt that it'll be a good game, it's just that I'd rather play that sort of game on a big screen at home. I'll get better controls, more detail, and probably a more comfy seat to relax in while I play.
Sony fails to realize that a portable system has different potentials and liabilities compared to a home console. Nintendo has always realized it to a degree, and they really leaned on it with the DS, adding features that work much better on a portable than they would on a console. That's why there are better games. And as developers become more comfortable with the dual screens/touch screen, we should find plenty of other cool stuff on the shelves.
The PSP is never going to have a game that's anything more than what the PS2 can do, plus some multiplayer functions. And that's why the DS won out for me. Having the ability to play the same games to go is only appealing if I can't have new games to go instead. I can always play more GTA3 when I get back to my house. I'd rather spend my money on something unique. Who cares which handheld Tony Hawk looks best on, cause it's still going to look better in your living room. I think a lot of people are going to feel that too, if only subconsciously.
Really, the only thing special that the PSP is offering a gamer is portability. The DS offers much more, and for a cheaper too. Unless Sony does a huge about face on something like their stance on homebrew software, they're just selling a smaller version of the PS2. And the PS2 stopped being exciting years ago.
Technically, the Karma might be solid, but as you pointed out with the iPod, "Design" is really what drives sales. And not just in an aesthetic sense either. In terms of UI, and equally important, the size/shape of the device. My old roommate had a Karma that could do some cool stuff, but it was shaped like a big square that wouldn't fit in any pocket except maybe a winter jacket.
It just seemed to me, that with all the work and brain power they put into the device, they were so far off with the damn shape of the thing. The decision to skim on industrial design and just focus on engineering pretty much ruined any chance they had of taking the mass market by storm. And once the iPod got its cultural icon status, Rio had completely lost.
Maybe it won't get that much smaller. Maybe they'll use the space saved for something else (larger battery, different/extra connector?)
Maybe they'll just make it thinner. That'd still make it fit in a pocket better, while still keeping the same ui hardware.
I wonder how quickly people are going to make the shift to HD-DVD. The quality jump between VHS and DVD was huge, and immediately noticeable. And the big feature, instant fast forward/rewind, sure is nice too. I don't see what the big draw is going to be for HD-DVD, at least not until giant high-def TV's become way more common.
I'm as big a geek as the next slashdotter, but I'm in no hurry at all to move from DVD's.
I think Nintendo is going to run into this same problem with the Metroid Hunters game. I played the demo, and it was alright, but nothing great, because a screen that small only allows for so much detail. Mario64 works ok on the DS because it's a cartoony, stylized 3D, that works with simple shapes and bright contrasting colors. The darker feel of the metroid games won't translate well to a small screen, everything just pixelizes into mush.
But overall, I'm happy with the direction Nintendo took with the DS. They're treating a handheld like its own thing. You can't have a normal touch screen console, because nobody has touch screen televisions. But it can be done on the console, and make it unique, and we're going to get some really interesting games out of it.
I don't think many people are interested in having their favorite games "on the go." If I'm going to be paying more money for a new system, and have to pay even more for the games for the handheld, I'm going to want some new games. Now if the PS3 version of Tony Hawk comes with the PSP version bundled (with no/minimal increase in price), then that'd make more sense to me.
It's like the UMD vs. DVD issue. Why should I buy a movie I probably already have again? Why should I buy a game that I've already got at home just for the road? No thanks.
Understand that people/companies are going to be extremely careful with their spaceflight endeavors. The early stages of space tourism are going to be huge media events, lots of people will be watching. The companies attempting this are well aware of that fact, and know they have to get it right to make their business work. The history of the shuttle shows just how small a margin of error the public is willing to give spacecraft. (The Columbia incident sucked, but it was hardly a good reason to be talking about shutting down the shuttle program. There are a whole host of better reasons for retiring the shuttle, none of which require us to act like sissies.)
How many people do you think died in the early days of aviation? I'm too lazy to look up any sort of numbers, but I'll bet it's waaaay wayyyy more than space flight has claimed. Manned spaceflight has a pretty solid record, and it's going to need to keep that if any sort of tourism industry hopes to develop. There won't be much corner-cutting done.
Exactly. I'd rather play a good game later than a rushed game now. I mean, unless you own a games store, how does Nintendo delaying a game affect your life in any meaningful way? I'm sure you can find something else to do to kill some time while you wait.
Although, to be honest, I got bored of the metroid demo after about five minutes. If you're looking for some gameplay to keep you busy, go pick up the Advance Wars game that dropped yesterday. I've had the GBA Advance Wars2 game for well over a year, and I still play it at least every other day.
I didn't say the lowest common denominator, I said a lower one. There is a difference. And I wasn't specifically talking about the level of "controller savvy" possessed by the gamer, but rather their expectations. The lower level that we're seeing is one of clones and so called "safe bets"; things that strongly resemble what's come before it, so that buyers can compare with their previous experiences. They can look at images on a website and say, "oh yeah, I've played this sort of game before, it was pretty neat. And this one has better graphics and more levels. Cool." It doesn't require a big leap of faith to part with your money. If you liked FFVI, you can be pretty sure you'll find more of what you enjoyed in FFVII.
And well, No one wants "crappy" graphics, sorry. Even if they aren't the most important thing, it's nice for things to look nice, even if it's more stylized than realistic. And I'm not entirely sure that the casual gamer market can't handle anything more complicated than Tetris. The trick is the design a good learning curve, one that's fun the whole way. Nintendo is really good at that. Which is why I hope you're right about the Revolution. I'm a big fan of Nintendo, and have faith in them to continue to make some fun games. Just like they do now.
It's only hard to get a game made for consoles without a huge budget. There are lots of people making innovative computer games and making them available for download. Granted, most of these games don't involve enormous virtual worlds created by dozens of artists, but that doesn't mean they're not still fun. I got as much fun out of Snood as I did out of Unreal Tournament 2004.
The grandparent commenter seems to be longing for those simpler "one-trick" gameplay types. Shareware has never stopped trying to fill that niche, you don't even have to work all that hard to find it. It's easier to download stuff off the web than drive to GameStop anyways.
It's a little more complicated than that, but also not as bad as you make it sound. As games have gone more mainstream, like other forms of media, a lot of them have started to pander to the widest possible audience, in order to make more money. The focus has often times gone to graphics, because they've been easy to improve, the results can be immediately understood, and it's easy to advertise that sort of thing in magazines and whatnot. Gameplay is a much more subjective thing. While everyone can appreciate the progress being made in graphics, an evolution of gameplay that you enjoy may seem like a step backwards to me. And either way, good luck writing a satisfactory explanation of it on the back of the retail box.
But like the movie and music industries, while a lot of the big name stuff has "gone hollywood". there's still plenty of people out there doing it cause they love it. Economic forces have relegated these independent outfits more to computers than consoles, but they're still there. Just like there's plenty of weird, experimental, and crazy indie music, there's lots of indie games out there. Sure, a lot of it's crap, but one of the side effects of innovating is that plenty of what you come up with doesn't work. You're not going to find these sorts of games sitting on the shelves at CompUSA, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
The mass market is always going to pander to a lower common denominator. That's almost what the definition of what mass market is. And that's fine, because plenty of people want fluff. Occasionally I want fluff too, real life offers me plenty of substance somedays, and I generally try to view video games as a diversion, not another project for me to get emotionally involved in.
There are plenty of good games being made. Some are simple, some are complex. Some are evolutionary, some are revolutionary. Some will appeal to only a few, others will appeal to millions. If you can't find games that you like, either you're not looking very hard, or your expectations have somehow gotten horribly skewed.
I think the point is, the only thing that can beat a good buzz-word is a good buzz-acronym. Yeah, Atom...that sounds pretty cool. But RSS, holy crap, it must stand for something totally complex and awesome and revolutionary.
RSS. Just say it to yourself over and over again. It rolls off the tongue. Next to a well designed acronym such as that, Atom just seems really simple.
Which only goes to prove that the real evil in video games is Nintendo. As Sony has wrestled away their marketshare, youth have become better behaved, learning good values from their playstations; instead of the smut that Nintendo wants to hoist on us.
We all know Mario was only trying to track down Princess Peach because when a ho doesn't give her pimp his money, he's gotta find that bitch and smack her down.
And with Nintendogs coming out soon for the DS, soon American children will all be introduced to the horrible world of bestiality. It's so sad.
Just as an interesting aside that your comment reminded me of, I was watching Real TV, or at least a similar show, basically video clips of crazy stuff happening. Anyways, there's one of a teenage ice hockey game going on where a fight breaks out. Big brawl, involving a number of players from both sides. One kid out there thinks that the fighting is stupid and a waste of time, so to protest and stop the fight, he takes his shirt off, and drops his pants, while skating around the rink.
That probably wouldn't have been my first idea had I been in his case, but people started cheering for him, and everyone stopped fighting to see what was going on. So his plan worked. What made it more interesting, however, was that someone in the stands didn't approve, and called the cops. And the cops arrested him for indecent exposure, and took him to jail.
I'm not anti-sport, or even anti-violent sports like hockey and football, but I think that it's amazing that in the midst of all that fighting, the guy that goes to jail is the pacifist who felt like taking his clothes off. It wasn't really lewd or sexual(unlike the infamous superbowl incident). He caused a fight to stop. He stopped people from trying to hurt each other. And someone found that offensive enough to call the cops. That just, to me, says something very strange about our culture.
I agree, but you can find plenty of examples of companies with lots of extra money throwing legal weight around, even without a good reason.
I don't know what CNet's financials look like, but Google has a lot of extra cash sitting around since their IPO. Could they put a small percent of a percent of their money into giving CNet a hard time? It wouldn't be unprecedented in the world of business.
They're not doing anything evil, they're just showing their disapproval for another company in the proper way. If they were evil, they'd have sued them, instead they're deciding to just not do business with them, which is certainly within their rights.
Now, you can argue whether or not they're getting a bit to huffy about something that's a minor deal. Information may be available to the public, but that doesn't mean it's particularly friendly or polite to publish it widely. It's not illegal to be an jerk, but sometimes it's not the best idea, and there are often consequences. I know journalists like to pretend that they're somehow exempt from any consequences, but that's not how it works.
I think Nintendo sees this, and they're positioning themselves the be an alternative to it. They've been pretty straightforward about saying that their console won't be built to push the most traiangles, so that means you don't have to hire extra artists to design all those polygons. And if they do this online distribution well, and let smaller developers have a crack at it, they could develop quite the community around the Revolution. Sure, most of those smaller developers won't be selling two million copies of their game in the first weekend like Halo, but they won't be spending $20 million just to ship the darn thing either.