I really agree with your post, and it sort of hints at some thoughts I've had about Nintendo's use of Mario, and their games. And I think that their mario sports games are the best example of what they're doing right.
Games like Madden and Links are all well and good and sometimes fun, but in the end, what they're trying to do is achieve an impossible goal. They're trying to make a game exactly like a real life sport. Barring some Matrix-ish technology, that can't happen, because no matter how realistic the graphics are, or however smart you make the AI, you're still sitting on a couch in your living room, instead of being outside actually chasing a ball around.
So basically, they're using an actual sport as a goal, and trying to work around the capabilities of a video game to get closer to this impossible target.
On the other hand, if you take something like mario tennis, they're taking a lot of the parts of tennis, and using that as a baseline from which a game is then built. And then they just start piling on different ideas to make things a little crazy and hopefully more fun. The fact that it's tied back into the Mario Universe helps because it provides a source of inspiration, and it, in a sense, validates all the weirdness. Just as geeks can argue for hours about star trek or star wars 'canon', and 'historical accuracy', so there exists this fantasy Mario Universe, which Nintendo has cultivated for a couple decades. While the thought of a piranha plant puking up brown sludge onto a tennis court is pretty weird, it's granted some legitimacy to me by the fact that I've been helping mario battle piranha plants since I was six years old, and I spent hours cleaning up their puke playing Mario Sunshine a few years ago. It's easy for me to suspend disbelief and put myself into Mario's world, because I've already spent so much time there.
The "Mario Universe" is pretty rich in characters and content, and also very open to new elements, so it provides a really good backdrop for many many game types. It also brings a few other, more practical, assets to a game, like the expectation of higher quality, because Nintendo generally assures high quality for the franchise titles. It also allows for more of the creativity to go towards the gameplay, rather than creating new characters for every game. All the characters in mario kart can have different personalities and such to give the game more flavor, but they don't need long cut scenes or excessive dialog for me to learn all those personalities, I already know them. They sort of tried to do that with the Story mode in F-Zero, but that was, by far, the least fun part of the game.
Anyways, that's my quick, and poorly organized explanation of why I'm such a fan of the different mario sports games, and also why I think that Mario is one of the best assets Nintendo has, not only from a revenue point of view, but also from a plain ol' making fun games point of view.
There are some new and original games coming out, it's just that it's sometimes hard to find them, because the big sequels are the ones that get he majority of the hype and advertising. That's kind of a bummer, I'll agree.
I think Nintendo hears what you're saying, and tries to be creative in a lot of ways. That sort of gets overlooked, however, because they tend to then brand all of their ideas with their big franchises, Mario being the number one example. So the PS and Xbox fanboys rant about how 50% of the games available for the GC are just mario games, ignoring the fact that there's a whole lot of variety within the Mario universe.
I don't have anymore of an idea what Nintendo's big Revolution is going to be than any other random guy on the street, but I have found their games to be fairly consistently fresh and fun.
Yeah, HTML just does not guarantee consistent viewing in the way that a PDF does. I've done web design work in coordination with graphic designers, and I would've payed almost any amount of money to get them to understand that.
Yeah, but maybe he needs some software that isn't available on Linux. Maybe he wants to to buy a system and have both the hardware and operating system supported by the same company, so he can call one number for all his problems. Maybe he's tried Linux, tried OSX, and decided that the greater usability of OSX makes up for the cost of new hardware.
He could buy a bunch of mac mini's, say $600 bucks each to get the RAM appropriate upgraded + shipping or whatever. Then he reuses the same monitors/keyboards/etc that he was using.
If the learning curve/retraining time for a switch to OSX is significantly shorter than a switch to Linux (I don't know if it is, it depends on what you're using the computers for), that $600 for each new machine could be money well spent. If you pay an employee $60k per year, when you add in benefits and taxes and all that other stuff, it probably costs the company closer to 100k to keep that employee on. $600 is a drop in the bucket compared to 100k if it helps keeps that employee working more efficiently.
It's a bit of both. And a few other things. Windows is obviously the biggest target, because you've got the most to gain by attacking it. You'll take over more machines, cause there's so many more out there. Not to mention that I'd expect a MacOS worm to spread more slowly, just because if you start scanning random ip addresses and infecting all that macs you find, you're still only going to find them behind a few ip addresses, so that exponential growth curve takes a lot longer to get going.
As for the resilience of the systems themselves, I think it's safe to say that Windows is significantly more vulnerable due to some pretty basic design decisions. But I'm sure other people will respond to you with more detailed descriptions of that then I feel like getting into.
But I also want to mention that a large portion of the crap that infects people's computers is malware that the user downloads and then actively runs. They aren't, of course, trying to get malware, it's just running along side of some nifty little utility that acts as bait. I think you can make an argument that OSX is less susceptible to that because A) It doesn't need as many "productivity enhancing" add-ons because its interface isn't a huge pile of ugly crap. B) Mac users, on average, are more picky about the functionality and appearance of their software, so something thrown together really quickly isn't likely to gain much traction. and C) Especially with new things like Dashboard, 90% of those stupid little apps, like weather widgets or quote of the day stuff, that'll all be done through widgets, instead of random full fledged applications.
Actually, I think one of the most painful things that Windows tries so hard to be is backwards compatible. They're still supporting a whole lot of legacy junk, that I'm sure they'd love to get away from.
With the jump from 68k to PPC a number of years back, then the more recent jump from classic mac to OSX, Apple has been able to cut away a lot of their past baggage, and do things right the second or third time around.
If MS does a major, intentional compatibility break, there's just some huge problems they'll be causing. First off, supporting all sorts of stuff that stopped working, getting calls from people who don't understand why their software is suddenly breaking, etc. Second, if I'm running a corporation with 30,000 workstations, and the new version of windows coming out would not only require upgrade feeds for the OS, but also for pretty much every other piece of software we use, I'm going to be hesitant to go that route. So maybe I'll just stick with what I've got, and MS loses a big piece of its gravy train. My other option is to say, 'OK, we're going to be basically throwing out all our software and starting over either way, maybe now is a good time to consider switching from MS, tell me more about this Linux stuff. '
It's that big corporate inertia that people always talk about. MS can't be that nimble in their decisions, because there's too much mass to turn. They surprised everyone by jumping onto the internet bandwagon at the last minute, but look at all the problems with security and whatnot that that effort is causing now.
Exactly. IBM used to be the big scary bad guy, but now they're a decent company providing some good products/services. Apple fans hated IBM way before they started hating MS, but now IBM provides processors for PowerMacs, they are big supporters of linux, and they still do a lot of cool R&D.
I don't care if MS dies or not. I just don't want them to be able to use a huge marketshare to slow down progress for everyone else.
Well, yes, the Pippin was a sad chapter, back during a time in which Apple was having a lot of sad chapters. I'd like to think that things would be different now, since Apple is currently selling an actual computer for cheaper than the Pippin was. I also think that if Apple tried for one of those "convergence" boxes, gaming would not factor in, at least not in the first generation. I'd expect TV/DVR/DVD-player/Music/Web Stuff/Content Creation; but not games. Apple doesn't have the clout in the game market to get enough developers to make games for them to launch their own console, and they can't throw away enough money to buy that clout like MS did.
Perhaps if their convergence box was successful, they could negotiate a deal with one of the console makers to sort of combine forces, but I see that as being questionable at best. Definitely not with MS, they don't want to share ownership of everyone's living rooms. The same probably goes with Sony, but then again, the two companies seem to be reasonably friendly. Nintendo would be an interesting match, but I think there's too much culture differences and egos to make that work.
Anyways, the Pippin, besides being overpriced, underpowered, and lacking games; it was also a little before its time. Sort of like the Newton.
Well, Apple is an interesting case, mostly due to their unpredictability. With the iPod, for example, they didn't create the market, which is really the hardest part of creating a new product. (For example, the Segway. A cool product, but people have a hard time seeing what it's good for. So all they hype and marketing was just sort of shrugged or laughed off). Basically, all the other crappier mp3 players that preceeded the ipod got a bunch of consumers wondering about what an mp3 player really could be, and then Apple jumped in and delivered something pretty darn close to that.
The other thing is that with Steve Jobs' love of secrecy, he doesn't mind lying a little bit in order to keep his plans more hazy for the rest of us. He was constantly badmouthing flash players, about how their capacity sucks, and flash memory is too expensive for the amount of space you get. And then all of a sudden Apple comes out with the shuffle, and everyone forgets what they were saying about flash memory a few weeks before.
At this point, I'm thinking that Jobs is lying about his whole being a vegetarian thing, because he doesn't want anyone to guess that OS 10.5 will ship with a side of BBQ ribs. mmmmm...that'd be sweet.
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Was that at least somewhere near the state of the art at the time? I wouldn't have been bothered about learning F3 - 4 - 6 - F7 or whatever so much if I hadn't been going to Format -> Justify left on my mac for the previous five years. Add to this the fact that I was fortunate enough to go to an expensive private school, and they should've provided better.
Oh well, my senior year, they set up a big digital imaging lab full of brand new powermacs. And I basically took over the digital imaging class and that was lots of fun, so I forgive them.
The thing is, this convergence box, regardless of who makes it, is going to be somewhere in between a console and a computer in terms of complexity and cost.
Cost is a big issue, because it's one of two things that consoles really have going for them (the other being ease of use, which I'll get to in a moment). Basically, consoles can deliver a whole lot of bang for the buck because they've historically used less powerful hardware, but been much much more optimized specifically for gaming. You can either despecialize the hardware (and become more computer-like), or just throw enough raw power into it that software can pick up the slack. The second option seems to be sony's chosen path, and the high price tags being thrown around for the PS3 reflect that.
Ease of use is the other one. How functional beyond games can something get with a game controller as a primary interface? Once you add a keyboard and a mouse, you're going back to a computer. I guess the point is, this convergence thing is going to be a simplified computer, or a beefed up video game console.
I'd have more faith in a computer company (Apple comes to mind first), successfully paring down their knowledge into something workable than I would a company like Sony kludging together a bunch of different pieces well.
Like the parent post said, the computer is an all in one magic box. It's already here, it's been around for a while, people have experience with it. All that's left is to strip out some of the extra parts and make it easier to use. Sony still has to build something that works first, then strip out the extra stuff, and make it easy to use. That first step is hard.
MS would seem to be in a better position than Sony to do this, except stuff that just works has historically been rather difficult for them.
I'm currently playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, on the gamecube, and it sounds like something that you might appreciate. It's basically an RPG, but with artwork taking cues from the Mario world. They've also played around a lot with the 2d/3d divide, in that the characters are all two dimensional (hence paper mario), yet they live in a sort of 3d world. It's not 3d as in free movement and vision like a fps, but more like the Ninja turtle arcade games (first example that comes to mind). And they often have tons of characters bouncing around the screen at once, and all sorts of silliness.
The game just really amuses me, even if the story is a bit strange in an entirely japanese way. But they had the good sense to have the dialog rewritten for the US, instead of just translating.
I guess I'm rambling, I just like the game, and it sounds like you'd enjoy it too. If you've got access to a gamecube.
Yeah, but athalon, xeon, pentium and the like are basically made up words, where the name becomes identified by the product. By calling the PS2 processor the "Emotion Engine", they were trying to work the other way, sort of prescribing qualities to the hardware so that people would start forming opinions before even getting their hands on the console. So basically, they picked that name to try and build hype.
You can sort of tell that it didn't work, because nobody outside of sony marketing ever talks about the emotion engine. The brandname that matters is Playstation. It was the games that made the PS2 a success, not the processor. that's why the cell is called "Cell", instead of emotion engine 2, or emotion engine extreme, or whatever their amazingly creative marketing people could come up with.
Then go buy a computer. This is about a video games console.
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I had a class called "data processing" my freshman year of high school, and I hated going to it. Maybe just because we were using wordperfect 3.something I think and we had to memorize all these stupid key commands for formatting. This was in 1994, so most of us had some sort of graphical interface on our computers at home. That part of the class was worthless.
But anyways, getting back to the point, I did learn to type in that class, and have found that infinitely useful since then. I went to a good highschool, and I don't consider the whole experience to be as worthless as many people claim their education was, but learning to type was definitely one of the best things high school did for me.
I'd be more likely to take the grandparent post's comments as more than simple whining if they gave some reasons for their skepticism. If they had said (and hopefully truthfully), "I worked for a company trying to develop solid state drives a few years back and I'd be surprised if they've solved the following issues...", then that'd be a worthwhile post.
As it stands, they said nothing useful, just stated that they're not interested in this article. I don't know why people so often feel the need to share their apathy with a bunch of strangers on/., but it sure does seem to happen a lot.
I'm not sure if that's really such a big deal. I think the actual processor is hidden enough that your average consumer isn't too concerned with it. My mom knows that the IBM laptop she had at her old job worked really well, and that the Dell laptop that her new job gave her is a piece of crap. She doesn't care about what's inside the computer. And although I'd bet Intel is the chip manufacturer who's name she could even thing of, if you brought it up, she'd probably assume that all computers have Intel inside, and wouldn't bother to ask.
I can more realistically believe that some of the technologies that Intel hyped up, like MMX or Hyperthreading or whatever might sway a few people. But even that is becoming irrelevant, because just about any computer you pick up from compUSA nowadays is more than powerful enough for day to day stuff.
And with the success of the iPod, that white Apple logo is all they need to put on a box to get the best brand recognition in town right now.
Actually, Sony will tell everyone that the Playstation 5 will be more powerful than four human brains. Then, after it ships eight months late, we'll all agree that it's about half as powerful as one human brain, and that the PSP 3 shoots out its halo-game-cubes in the most deadly fashion if you twist the unit just right.
Seriously, I don't think doing something like this would be a positive step for a company to take. They'd get a whole lot of publicity out of it right at the beginning, but pretty soon it'd become a major eyesore, and there'd be a lot of loathing towards them for putting it there. Looking at it would get old really quick.
There'd probably be some significant protesting outside their HQ and whatnot. There would be calls for boycotting, which would probably gain some traction, as people become more and more tired of it.
If some company did it, and it was only visible up there for a few days, they'd get some serious publicity, and if they let it die while it was still a novelty, they'd get mostly good press and an excited public. I'd check a website to find out when it'd be overhead, and then go watch it pass over a few times. Just as long as it doesn't stay long enough to become an eyesore.
After a few of these advertisements happened, it'd cease to be a novelty, and the excitement of seeing one would wear off, and people would turn against them.
It would have to have some sort of ability to modify its physical shape. I don't think it'd be possible to use a controller where you couldn't locate the different buttons just by feel.
If it was just like a touch screen that each game configured, you'd have to constantly be looking down at your hands, it'd be much harder to develop muscle memory, and it would seriously detract from the fun. Plus, how would you know how hard to push the button down. Would just brushing over it be enough? Could it be pressure sensitive? Although I'm sure nintendo could come up with some new game types that worked in that sort of setup, it would not be the least bit desirable for older games.
All of Nintendo's controllers are what I would call "backwards compatible" with all of its predecessors. They've basically been changing the general shape, and adding/moving buttons. The only think missing would be the select button from the NES/SNES, but there's plenty of new buttons to choose from to substitute for it.
The revolutionary part is going to have to be in addition to everything we've already got. I think the gyroscopic movement sensing stuff is the most likely of all the rumors I've heard, and if that is the case, I have faith in Nintendo to really develop that idea into something beyond the novelty that it's been in the past, and into potential for some really cool gameplay.
yeah, but it wasn't really mainstream. Modders weren't getting their work put into retail boxes and then sold. I made levels for Wolfenstein 3D back in the day, but not too many people cared.
It's sort of like the shareware example that I gave in my previous post. There are plenty of people distributing software online and making some decent money at it. But it hasn't really reached its stride yet.
The ads might not be terribly intrusive, but this whole idea sounds like it'll be making it easier for people to blur the separation between content and advertisements. Google may suggest that you put your ads at the bottom, below all the content, but it's going to be tough to regulate that.
I know they're a business, and making money is important to their survival, and expecting them to do only the most altruistic things would be naive. This move, however, seems to go against the "vision" that Google has sort of created around themselves, they're a flashlight that helps us navigate the dark and messy internet. Muddying up other websites like this has the potential to do seems counterproductive to these goals.
*shrug* But they've got shareholders now, they need to constantly be adding revenue streams. Such is life.
Someone's going to do something like that, with a really great game, and it'll be a big deal. It probably won't be one of the major studios, maybe an unknown company with a good idea for a game. It'll be cheap for the amount of gameplay that you get, convenient to download, and they'll make bucketloads of money. It already happens on a small scale with shareware. Apparently the Snood guy made plenty off of that game. But it'll take a mid-sized company to make a higher caliber game that everyone really takes notice of.
Then the next few crops of big name games will go on talking about how they're going to support that as well, not do a great job at it, but eventually it'll become expected and normal. Maybe not purely digital distribution, but as a useable and easy option.
Sort of like how modding took off with CounterStrike. All of a sudden after that, everyone was talking about how their new game was going to be the most moddable ever. Now it's a pretty standard feature, intrinsic to a game's design.
While it would certainly be fun to play around with, I think allowing any old code to run could hurt Nintendo's reputation. One of the biggest advantages of console gaming over PC's is everything working without a hassle. This requires stringent testing of games, and a lot of hard work. The saying goes that the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the work, and that's reflected in a majority of open source software. It's hard to buckle down and put in that extra layer of polish when you're not getting paid. Not to mention the threat of malware and whatnot that letting unsigned code run could pose. I'd be less than thrilled when something I tried went and erased my memory card without asking. Or messed up some of the old SuperNintendo games I downloaded off their new online dealie. There are steps that could be taken to make this less likely, but there are plenty of people who live to find their way around these things.
It'd be fun for some people, but I don't think the whole idea of it makes that much sense. There's already a good system for hobbyists to make games for. It's called the PC. Or even the Mac. God knows we could use some more games over here in Apple land. There are lots more tools, lots more options, and lots of already written code to play with. Freelance gaming would not benefit that much from free access to the Revolution.
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I really agree with your post, and it sort of hints at some thoughts I've had about Nintendo's use of Mario, and their games. And I think that their mario sports games are the best example of what they're doing right.
Games like Madden and Links are all well and good and sometimes fun, but in the end, what they're trying to do is achieve an impossible goal. They're trying to make a game exactly like a real life sport. Barring some Matrix-ish technology, that can't happen, because no matter how realistic the graphics are, or however smart you make the AI, you're still sitting on a couch in your living room, instead of being outside actually chasing a ball around.
So basically, they're using an actual sport as a goal, and trying to work around the capabilities of a video game to get closer to this impossible target.
On the other hand, if you take something like mario tennis, they're taking a lot of the parts of tennis, and using that as a baseline from which a game is then built. And then they just start piling on different ideas to make things a little crazy and hopefully more fun. The fact that it's tied back into the Mario Universe helps because it provides a source of inspiration, and it, in a sense, validates all the weirdness. Just as geeks can argue for hours about star trek or star wars 'canon', and 'historical accuracy', so there exists this fantasy Mario Universe, which Nintendo has cultivated for a couple decades. While the thought of a piranha plant puking up brown sludge onto a tennis court is pretty weird, it's granted some legitimacy to me by the fact that I've been helping mario battle piranha plants since I was six years old, and I spent hours cleaning up their puke playing Mario Sunshine a few years ago. It's easy for me to suspend disbelief and put myself into Mario's world, because I've already spent so much time there.
The "Mario Universe" is pretty rich in characters and content, and also very open to new elements, so it provides a really good backdrop for many many game types. It also brings a few other, more practical, assets to a game, like the expectation of higher quality, because Nintendo generally assures high quality for the franchise titles. It also allows for more of the creativity to go towards the gameplay, rather than creating new characters for every game. All the characters in mario kart can have different personalities and such to give the game more flavor, but they don't need long cut scenes or excessive dialog for me to learn all those personalities, I already know them. They sort of tried to do that with the Story mode in F-Zero, but that was, by far, the least fun part of the game.
Anyways, that's my quick, and poorly organized explanation of why I'm such a fan of the different mario sports games, and also why I think that Mario is one of the best assets Nintendo has, not only from a revenue point of view, but also from a plain ol' making fun games point of view.
There are some new and original games coming out, it's just that it's sometimes hard to find them, because the big sequels are the ones that get he majority of the hype and advertising. That's kind of a bummer, I'll agree.
I think Nintendo hears what you're saying, and tries to be creative in a lot of ways. That sort of gets overlooked, however, because they tend to then brand all of their ideas with their big franchises, Mario being the number one example. So the PS and Xbox fanboys rant about how 50% of the games available for the GC are just mario games, ignoring the fact that there's a whole lot of variety within the Mario universe.
I don't have anymore of an idea what Nintendo's big Revolution is going to be than any other random guy on the street, but I have found their games to be fairly consistently fresh and fun.
Yeah, HTML just does not guarantee consistent viewing in the way that a PDF does. I've done web design work in coordination with graphic designers, and I would've payed almost any amount of money to get them to understand that.
Yeah, but maybe he needs some software that isn't available on Linux. Maybe he wants to to buy a system and have both the hardware and operating system supported by the same company, so he can call one number for all his problems. Maybe he's tried Linux, tried OSX, and decided that the greater usability of OSX makes up for the cost of new hardware.
He could buy a bunch of mac mini's, say $600 bucks each to get the RAM appropriate upgraded + shipping or whatever. Then he reuses the same monitors/keyboards/etc that he was using.
If the learning curve/retraining time for a switch to OSX is significantly shorter than a switch to Linux (I don't know if it is, it depends on what you're using the computers for), that $600 for each new machine could be money well spent. If you pay an employee $60k per year, when you add in benefits and taxes and all that other stuff, it probably costs the company closer to 100k to keep that employee on. $600 is a drop in the bucket compared to 100k if it helps keeps that employee working more efficiently.
It's a bit of both. And a few other things. Windows is obviously the biggest target, because you've got the most to gain by attacking it. You'll take over more machines, cause there's so many more out there. Not to mention that I'd expect a MacOS worm to spread more slowly, just because if you start scanning random ip addresses and infecting all that macs you find, you're still only going to find them behind a few ip addresses, so that exponential growth curve takes a lot longer to get going.
As for the resilience of the systems themselves, I think it's safe to say that Windows is significantly more vulnerable due to some pretty basic design decisions. But I'm sure other people will respond to you with more detailed descriptions of that then I feel like getting into.
But I also want to mention that a large portion of the crap that infects people's computers is malware that the user downloads and then actively runs. They aren't, of course, trying to get malware, it's just running along side of some nifty little utility that acts as bait. I think you can make an argument that OSX is less susceptible to that because A) It doesn't need as many "productivity enhancing" add-ons because its interface isn't a huge pile of ugly crap. B) Mac users, on average, are more picky about the functionality and appearance of their software, so something thrown together really quickly isn't likely to gain much traction. and C) Especially with new things like Dashboard, 90% of those stupid little apps, like weather widgets or quote of the day stuff, that'll all be done through widgets, instead of random full fledged applications.
Actually, I think one of the most painful things that Windows tries so hard to be is backwards compatible. They're still supporting a whole lot of legacy junk, that I'm sure they'd love to get away from.
With the jump from 68k to PPC a number of years back, then the more recent jump from classic mac to OSX, Apple has been able to cut away a lot of their past baggage, and do things right the second or third time around.
If MS does a major, intentional compatibility break, there's just some huge problems they'll be causing. First off, supporting all sorts of stuff that stopped working, getting calls from people who don't understand why their software is suddenly breaking, etc. Second, if I'm running a corporation with 30,000 workstations, and the new version of windows coming out would not only require upgrade feeds for the OS, but also for pretty much every other piece of software we use, I'm going to be hesitant to go that route. So maybe I'll just stick with what I've got, and MS loses a big piece of its gravy train. My other option is to say, 'OK, we're going to be basically throwing out all our software and starting over either way, maybe now is a good time to consider switching from MS, tell me more about this Linux stuff. '
It's that big corporate inertia that people always talk about. MS can't be that nimble in their decisions, because there's too much mass to turn. They surprised everyone by jumping onto the internet bandwagon at the last minute, but look at all the problems with security and whatnot that that effort is causing now.
Exactly. IBM used to be the big scary bad guy, but now they're a decent company providing some good products/services. Apple fans hated IBM way before they started hating MS, but now IBM provides processors for PowerMacs, they are big supporters of linux, and they still do a lot of cool R&D.
I don't care if MS dies or not. I just don't want them to be able to use a huge marketshare to slow down progress for everyone else.
Wait? So anger is the way to escape the Dark Side? So confused...
Well, yes, the Pippin was a sad chapter, back during a time in which Apple was having a lot of sad chapters. I'd like to think that things would be different now, since Apple is currently selling an actual computer for cheaper than the Pippin was. I also think that if Apple tried for one of those "convergence" boxes, gaming would not factor in, at least not in the first generation. I'd expect TV/DVR/DVD-player/Music/Web Stuff/Content Creation; but not games. Apple doesn't have the clout in the game market to get enough developers to make games for them to launch their own console, and they can't throw away enough money to buy that clout like MS did.
Perhaps if their convergence box was successful, they could negotiate a deal with one of the console makers to sort of combine forces, but I see that as being questionable at best. Definitely not with MS, they don't want to share ownership of everyone's living rooms. The same probably goes with Sony, but then again, the two companies seem to be reasonably friendly. Nintendo would be an interesting match, but I think there's too much culture differences and egos to make that work.
Anyways, the Pippin, besides being overpriced, underpowered, and lacking games; it was also a little before its time. Sort of like the Newton.
Well, Apple is an interesting case, mostly due to their unpredictability. With the iPod, for example, they didn't create the market, which is really the hardest part of creating a new product. (For example, the Segway. A cool product, but people have a hard time seeing what it's good for. So all they hype and marketing was just sort of shrugged or laughed off). Basically, all the other crappier mp3 players that preceeded the ipod got a bunch of consumers wondering about what an mp3 player really could be, and then Apple jumped in and delivered something pretty darn close to that.
The other thing is that with Steve Jobs' love of secrecy, he doesn't mind lying a little bit in order to keep his plans more hazy for the rest of us. He was constantly badmouthing flash players, about how their capacity sucks, and flash memory is too expensive for the amount of space you get. And then all of a sudden Apple comes out with the shuffle, and everyone forgets what they were saying about flash memory a few weeks before.
At this point, I'm thinking that Jobs is lying about his whole being a vegetarian thing, because he doesn't want anyone to guess that OS 10.5 will ship with a side of BBQ ribs. mmmmm...that'd be sweet.
Was that at least somewhere near the state of the art at the time? I wouldn't have been bothered about learning F3 - 4 - 6 - F7 or whatever so much if I hadn't been going to Format -> Justify left on my mac for the previous five years. Add to this the fact that I was fortunate enough to go to an expensive private school, and they should've provided better.
Oh well, my senior year, they set up a big digital imaging lab full of brand new powermacs. And I basically took over the digital imaging class and that was lots of fun, so I forgive them.
The thing is, this convergence box, regardless of who makes it, is going to be somewhere in between a console and a computer in terms of complexity and cost.
Cost is a big issue, because it's one of two things that consoles really have going for them (the other being ease of use, which I'll get to in a moment). Basically, consoles can deliver a whole lot of bang for the buck because they've historically used less powerful hardware, but been much much more optimized specifically for gaming. You can either despecialize the hardware (and become more computer-like), or just throw enough raw power into it that software can pick up the slack. The second option seems to be sony's chosen path, and the high price tags being thrown around for the PS3 reflect that.
Ease of use is the other one. How functional beyond games can something get with a game controller as a primary interface? Once you add a keyboard and a mouse, you're going back to a computer. I guess the point is, this convergence thing is going to be a simplified computer, or a beefed up video game console.
I'd have more faith in a computer company (Apple comes to mind first), successfully paring down their knowledge into something workable than I would a company like Sony kludging together a bunch of different pieces well.
Like the parent post said, the computer is an all in one magic box. It's already here, it's been around for a while, people have experience with it. All that's left is to strip out some of the extra parts and make it easier to use. Sony still has to build something that works first, then strip out the extra stuff, and make it easy to use. That first step is hard.
MS would seem to be in a better position than Sony to do this, except stuff that just works has historically been rather difficult for them.
I'm currently playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, on the gamecube, and it sounds like something that you might appreciate. It's basically an RPG, but with artwork taking cues from the Mario world. They've also played around a lot with the 2d/3d divide, in that the characters are all two dimensional (hence paper mario), yet they live in a sort of 3d world. It's not 3d as in free movement and vision like a fps, but more like the Ninja turtle arcade games (first example that comes to mind). And they often have tons of characters bouncing around the screen at once, and all sorts of silliness.
The game just really amuses me, even if the story is a bit strange in an entirely japanese way. But they had the good sense to have the dialog rewritten for the US, instead of just translating.
I guess I'm rambling, I just like the game, and it sounds like you'd enjoy it too. If you've got access to a gamecube.
Yeah, but athalon, xeon, pentium and the like are basically made up words, where the name becomes identified by the product. By calling the PS2 processor the "Emotion Engine", they were trying to work the other way, sort of prescribing qualities to the hardware so that people would start forming opinions before even getting their hands on the console. So basically, they picked that name to try and build hype.
You can sort of tell that it didn't work, because nobody outside of sony marketing ever talks about the emotion engine. The brandname that matters is Playstation. It was the games that made the PS2 a success, not the processor. that's why the cell is called "Cell", instead of emotion engine 2, or emotion engine extreme, or whatever their amazingly creative marketing people could come up with.
Then go buy a computer. This is about a video games console.
I had a class called "data processing" my freshman year of high school, and I hated going to it. Maybe just because we were using wordperfect 3.something I think and we had to memorize all these stupid key commands for formatting. This was in 1994, so most of us had some sort of graphical interface on our computers at home. That part of the class was worthless.
But anyways, getting back to the point, I did learn to type in that class, and have found that infinitely useful since then. I went to a good highschool, and I don't consider the whole experience to be as worthless as many people claim their education was, but learning to type was definitely one of the best things high school did for me.
I'd be more likely to take the grandparent post's comments as more than simple whining if they gave some reasons for their skepticism. If they had said (and hopefully truthfully), "I worked for a company trying to develop solid state drives a few years back and I'd be surprised if they've solved the following issues...", then that'd be a worthwhile post.
/., but it sure does seem to happen a lot.
As it stands, they said nothing useful, just stated that they're not interested in this article. I don't know why people so often feel the need to share their apathy with a bunch of strangers on
It's borderline trolling. Don't defend it.
I'm not sure if that's really such a big deal. I think the actual processor is hidden enough that your average consumer isn't too concerned with it. My mom knows that the IBM laptop she had at her old job worked really well, and that the Dell laptop that her new job gave her is a piece of crap. She doesn't care about what's inside the computer. And although I'd bet Intel is the chip manufacturer who's name she could even thing of, if you brought it up, she'd probably assume that all computers have Intel inside, and wouldn't bother to ask.
I can more realistically believe that some of the technologies that Intel hyped up, like MMX or Hyperthreading or whatever might sway a few people. But even that is becoming irrelevant, because just about any computer you pick up from compUSA nowadays is more than powerful enough for day to day stuff.
And with the success of the iPod, that white Apple logo is all they need to put on a box to get the best brand recognition in town right now.
Actually, Sony will tell everyone that the Playstation 5 will be more powerful than four human brains. Then, after it ships eight months late, we'll all agree that it's about half as powerful as one human brain, and that the PSP 3 shoots out its halo-game-cubes in the most deadly fashion if you twist the unit just right.
Seriously, I don't think doing something like this would be a positive step for a company to take. They'd get a whole lot of publicity out of it right at the beginning, but pretty soon it'd become a major eyesore, and there'd be a lot of loathing towards them for putting it there. Looking at it would get old really quick.
There'd probably be some significant protesting outside their HQ and whatnot. There would be calls for boycotting, which would probably gain some traction, as people become more and more tired of it.
If some company did it, and it was only visible up there for a few days, they'd get some serious publicity, and if they let it die while it was still a novelty, they'd get mostly good press and an excited public. I'd check a website to find out when it'd be overhead, and then go watch it pass over a few times. Just as long as it doesn't stay long enough to become an eyesore.
After a few of these advertisements happened, it'd cease to be a novelty, and the excitement of seeing one would wear off, and people would turn against them.
That's how I imagine it at least.
It would have to have some sort of ability to modify its physical shape. I don't think it'd be possible to use a controller where you couldn't locate the different buttons just by feel.
If it was just like a touch screen that each game configured, you'd have to constantly be looking down at your hands, it'd be much harder to develop muscle memory, and it would seriously detract from the fun. Plus, how would you know how hard to push the button down. Would just brushing over it be enough? Could it be pressure sensitive? Although I'm sure nintendo could come up with some new game types that worked in that sort of setup, it would not be the least bit desirable for older games.
All of Nintendo's controllers are what I would call "backwards compatible" with all of its predecessors. They've basically been changing the general shape, and adding/moving buttons. The only think missing would be the select button from the NES/SNES, but there's plenty of new buttons to choose from to substitute for it.
The revolutionary part is going to have to be in addition to everything we've already got. I think the gyroscopic movement sensing stuff is the most likely of all the rumors I've heard, and if that is the case, I have faith in Nintendo to really develop that idea into something beyond the novelty that it's been in the past, and into potential for some really cool gameplay.
yeah, but it wasn't really mainstream. Modders weren't getting their work put into retail boxes and then sold. I made levels for Wolfenstein 3D back in the day, but not too many people cared.
It's sort of like the shareware example that I gave in my previous post. There are plenty of people distributing software online and making some decent money at it. But it hasn't really reached its stride yet.
The ads might not be terribly intrusive, but this whole idea sounds like it'll be making it easier for people to blur the separation between content and advertisements. Google may suggest that you put your ads at the bottom, below all the content, but it's going to be tough to regulate that.
I know they're a business, and making money is important to their survival, and expecting them to do only the most altruistic things would be naive. This move, however, seems to go against the "vision" that Google has sort of created around themselves, they're a flashlight that helps us navigate the dark and messy internet. Muddying up other websites like this has the potential to do seems counterproductive to these goals.
*shrug* But they've got shareholders now, they need to constantly be adding revenue streams. Such is life.
Someone's going to do something like that, with a really great game, and it'll be a big deal. It probably won't be one of the major studios, maybe an unknown company with a good idea for a game. It'll be cheap for the amount of gameplay that you get, convenient to download, and they'll make bucketloads of money. It already happens on a small scale with shareware. Apparently the Snood guy made plenty off of that game. But it'll take a mid-sized company to make a higher caliber game that everyone really takes notice of.
Then the next few crops of big name games will go on talking about how they're going to support that as well, not do a great job at it, but eventually it'll become expected and normal. Maybe not purely digital distribution, but as a useable and easy option.
Sort of like how modding took off with CounterStrike. All of a sudden after that, everyone was talking about how their new game was going to be the most moddable ever. Now it's a pretty standard feature, intrinsic to a game's design.
While it would certainly be fun to play around with, I think allowing any old code to run could hurt Nintendo's reputation. One of the biggest advantages of console gaming over PC's is everything working without a hassle. This requires stringent testing of games, and a lot of hard work. The saying goes that the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the work, and that's reflected in a majority of open source software. It's hard to buckle down and put in that extra layer of polish when you're not getting paid. Not to mention the threat of malware and whatnot that letting unsigned code run could pose. I'd be less than thrilled when something I tried went and erased my memory card without asking. Or messed up some of the old SuperNintendo games I downloaded off their new online dealie. There are steps that could be taken to make this less likely, but there are plenty of people who live to find their way around these things.
It'd be fun for some people, but I don't think the whole idea of it makes that much sense. There's already a good system for hobbyists to make games for. It's called the PC. Or even the Mac. God knows we could use some more games over here in Apple land. There are lots more tools, lots more options, and lots of already written code to play with. Freelance gaming would not benefit that much from free access to the Revolution.