I wonder (and I don't know either way, but I'm curious) how much of that was Rowling, and how much of that was the multimillion dollar machine that has grown up around her works. I wonder how much she cared, vs. how much the book publishers cared. It's hard to know where decisions like that get made. I like to imagine that she doesn't care particularly either way, being fabulously wealthy now, but that's probably just me projecting how I hope she would act. Guess we'll never know. (Although this being slashdot, I give it even odds that someone will pop up with a link within an hour proving me wrong. Such is life.)
2. Magic System still isn't explained. We have muggles, purebloods, mudbloods, halfbloods, and squibs and yet why certain people can do magic and others can't isn't even hinted at.
Huh. Yeah. Because adding an explanation for how "the force" worked and why some people had it more than others, certainly improved the star wars universe immeasurably. Clearly the introduction of, oh, we'll call them "Magiclorians", would have similarly kicked Rowling's creation into superland as well.
Huh. I actually liked what Molly Weasley did at the end. I thought it was a nice moment for her. It wasn't that she was normally a feared duelist. It was that she was enraged having lost a son that day, and seeing another of her children in danger, she snapped. This was the mother-protecting-her-cubs effect, and I thought it was nice seeing her fiercely defending the people she cared about, after spending so much time seeing her in "housewife mode". In a funny way, it was kind of a character-growth moment for her too, since we (the readers) finally got to see a side of her that we had never seen before.
I'll admit that it would have been satisfying if Neville had been able to take out Bellatrix. But at least Neville got some nice character growth, what with leading the Hogwarts resistance and all. (And I have to say - Even though she didn't get much screen time, Neville's grandma RULED.)
Providing too much violence can cause problems too though, and can be ultimately ineffective. The problem is, the more violence you cause, the more people are appalled at your actions, and more likely to force you into more violence.
Let's think of it in terms of single people, since that's easier.
Suppose you're in a room, with a bunch of other people, and someone punches you. (Or someone else.) And you decide that you need to respond with violence. (We'll assume that everyone in this room is equally good at fighting, just to remove the "well, I kung-fu them all!" from the list of possible responses.)
If you punch him back, then people may nod approvingly, but he'll probably punch you back, and you have a fight that could go either way. If you lose, you lose, and if you win, there is always the chance he'll hold a grudge and come after you later.
If you can restrain him without hurting him until he calms down, then people will probably nod more approvingly, and no one gets hurt. (This is the "best case" scenario, although since restraining is harder than hurting, it's also admittedly less likely, if you're equally good at fighting. Probably helps if you can convince some other people in the room to help you.) (Note that this still potentially has the grudge problem listed above.)
If you whip out your switchblade, and start violently stabbing him, and/or people who been friendly with him recently, then even if you take him out, everyone else in the room is going to look at you and think things like "That person grossly overacted, and responded with a heck of a lot of violence. Am I safe in this room with him? Maybe we should gang up on him, since having a homicidal maniac in our midst isn't safe." Heck, they might even pull out THEIR switchblades at that point.
Now sure, you could argue that "you just need to apply more violence, i. e. kill everyone in the room", but aside from the practical considerations, (no guarantee that, after everyone is against you, and willing to use deadly force, that you could win) is killing the entire room because someone punched you really your idea of a solution?
I realize that these seem like extremes, but if you replace "people in the room" with "countries", I'm sure you can see the parallels.
I found it bad plotting/storytelling that the whole turning point of the final dual (and hence the entire series) depended on something that you were supposed to remember from an earlier book which you read two years ago.
To be fair though, when writing books, it's probably shortsighted to write them taking their initial publish times into account. Sure, if you read them all as they came out, it's a 2 year wait. But anyone who reads them from now on, it's just the previous book. It's only a 2 year wait for those of us trying to read while they were being written. And "Need to remember something from a previous book in order to understand the end" doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Not to get into the Rowling/Tolkien debate that seems to be raging a little further up (apples to oranges, I figure) but even Return of the King picked up where the cliffhanger at the end of Two Towers left off, and didn't mention Gollum much at all, until the end, when you sort of needed to understand him as a character, from previous books, in order to understand the ending.
Making people remember previous books isn't such a bad thing.
Just because the author never sits around and laughs at really bad games, or plays them with friends in social settings, they shouldn't assume no one does.
Ironically enough, this story gets posted just days after I ordered the dreamcast "classic" Illbleed, for the express purpose of having some friends over and mocking it roundly as I force them to play the first level or so. (I have some very fond memories of when it was inflicted on me, so I figure it's time to pass it on.)
Another good example is "detective" from the interactive fiction scene, which was actually bad enough that someone made an MST3K version of it, where as you play, Tom Servo, Crow, etc, mock it along with you. (Ahh, the joys of a text based interface.)
There are definitely game equivalents to Manos: The Hands of Fate. I submit that the author just hasn't looked hard enough.
Last time an established maker of RPGs took a licensed character from another company's platforming franchise (that I can think of, at least) the world was blessed with Super Mario RPG. Which ruled.
So I'm prepared to cut them some slack on the idea, since it's already been proven to me that platformers reimagined as RPGs don't HAVE to suck...
[update] My bad. I did further research, and was finally able to find reference to catching Mew just through catching everything else, in the Japanese version. My apologies.
My other points still stand though - I admit I'm on weaker ground now that I know that it was actually originally part of the game, and removed for american release (and subsequent japanese re-release, actually.) But even so, I still stand by what I said about Nintendo actively working to foster out of game interaction.
The only one I can think of that fits your description of "a powerful bonus pokemon that can learn any skill" would be Mew, #151. Which, as far as I can tell from internet sites, has never been available through any means except as a bonus from nintendo events.
(My apologies if you meant a different one, or if my research just missed it.)
Again though, I'm not totally sure what the issue is here. So the developers put in some "special event bonuses" that they could use as promotions later. Some special game content that you could only access if you went to a nintendo promotional event. (Or hacked the game with a gameshark/whatever)
So?
Actually, that seems like a fairly clever way of setting things up, from where I sit. Since it's on a cartridge, it's not like they can issue patches or updates. So they just left some bits open, that they could twiddle later, as incentives/rewards for showing up at their events. Lots of games have done this sort of thing, from the "mirror match" code in the original street fighter SNES, to the mortal combat 3 codes for the arcade machines, etc.
Forgive my lack of outrage, I guess. But again, I'm not really sure why I should be annoyed. It's not like people finish the game, and go "man, that game just didn't have enough content. If only there were ONE MORE I could catch, then my game experience would be complete..." It is a BONUS. Something EXTRA, a backdoor they left so they could give you a REWARD in their game, for doing something, or coming to an event, etc.
(And as for which one costs more money, the gameshark or the event, when they had the Mew event at Toys 'R Us, it was free, you just had to show up on the right day, when they were having a party to celebrate the launch of a movie or something.)
So if you want to talk incentives, here's what I get out of pokemon: The game rewards you for: - Talking to your friends (to find all the absurd number of sidequests/creature locations/etc) - Trading with your friends (because of the artificially induced scarcity of certain types between the versions) - Go to nintendo events, and presumably meet other people with similar interests. (To get event pokemon)
Hmm. You know, as far as "better for games as a whole", that's not too bad a model. If you ask me, nintendo has done an outrageously good job of fostering social communities around their game, both through their game design, and their events. Which is probably part of why it does well, since hobbies (both games, and otherwise) tend to be reinforced tremendously if you know a bunch of people with the same hobby.
Why is it taken as a given that all users should be able to find "everything" in the game?
Many successful games (Pokemon is a textbook example) just include such a huge number of side quests and widgets and minipuzzles that almost NO ONE solves them all, because they don't even find them all. Heck, even most Xbox-360 games contain lots of accomplishments, many of which are nearly impossible for all but the hardest of core players. (Guitar Hero 2 - Complete Buckethead on Expert. Yeah. Right.)
Why is this a bad thing? Why do people have... almost the sense of entitelement?... that a game is unreasonable if they can't see all of it?
A good example is Valkyrie Profile, which contained a secret ending that was BRILLIANT, but that only happened if the user figured out some really crazy things, and put a lot of clues together. In practice, it was very hard to find without hints, a strategy guide, or a friend who told you about it, and how it worked.
But imagine what it would be like to be a person who figured it out. To them, that a-ha moment would MAKE THE GAME for them. And if everyone else just proceeded through the "normal" path and never saw it, and never knew it was there, what of it? Why is this a bad design decision, saying "95% of users will have a pretty good experience, and 5% will have an AWESOME one, made at least partly awesome from the feeling of satisfaction of having figured out something truly hard."?
Games aren't (or at least don't have to be) like books - you can have a perfectly valid, enjoyable, and even complete experience without seeing everything the game has to offer. So what if the game has some love for the one person who bothers to translate all of the runes, or collect all 144 bugs, or whatever. As long as it doesn't actively block you from completing the main path of the game, why is there a problem? So what if there are side quests that you never even know where there, and "need" a strategy guide to find. Why is your finding them so important?
(Note that this only applies to OPTIONAL side quests - I have very little patience for things that actually block you from the main game path, that are unintuitive and block the user from progressing.)
So... just out of curiosity, in your personal worldview, what's the motivation for environmentalists to take away your freedoms? Is it still because "they hate freedom", or do you have a more creative justification for why people concerned about the environment would want to destroy your civil liberties?
Even if you go the "market" argument, doesn't that sort of fall apart when you examine it from a market standpoint?
As I understand it, your argument is basically "there is [probably?] a demand for these things, so therefore, there must be a supply of them, because people would want to start making them, in order to make money off of the demand."
Ok. Fair enough. (weak, but I can see where you're going.)
On the other hand, let's consider: Market pressures direct people to find the *cheapest* way to satisfy a demand. (This is elementary stuff - if everyone is clamoring for T-shirts, and expects to buy them for around $10, I'm going to make much more money selling $5 t-shirts, than if I sell $9 ones.)
So... what do you think is cheaper to produce in the long run? * Movies depicting murder, where you have to pay some actors to enact some twisted fantasy * Movies of people actually getting murdered, where you have to ACTUALLY KILL SOMEONE, and if you get caught, are sent to jail, where you presumably can't make more movies. (or money) (And you've even just provided a nice video recording for evidence)
See where this is going?
Let's try one more:
Pretend for a moment that you are a consumer of such things. What do you think you're more likely to prefer? * An professional film that has undergone the normal cutting/editing process in a studio that we have come to expect from visual media * A grainy camcorder image, with no editing, and if something goes wrong in the scene, too bad, since it's hard to "un-kill" someone to get them to do a re-take.
So... yeah. I think that you're right, you CAN make an argument about the existence of snuff films based on market pressure, but if you follow it through, I'm not sure the logic leads where you say it does...
Side note - You're being pretty pointed and confrontational yourself there, bucko.
Nice! I was going to try to bring up medicine as something that you COULD die from, if you couldn't buy, but you not only beat me to it, but you provided some nice citations to boot.
Masterful RPGs can be masterful for different reasons.
I'm certainly not going to argue that Chrono Trigger, or Panzer Dragoon Saga aren't masterpieces of their craft. But a couple of thoughts for you:
1) Different parts of RPGs are held up as awesome. Very few games are groundbreaking on ALL fronts. Chrono Trigger, for example, had pretty standard graphical faire for the time. (Not a complaint, but a statement.) What made it awesome was an interesting storyline (that actually managed to handle time travel well), well-executed storytelling that preserved the illusion that the player was in charge, and some neat improvements to standard RPG battling. (Double and Tripple attacks!) Oh, and marvelous music by Mitsuda and Uematsu.
Pokemon games do not have groundbreaking story. Or music. But they have a battle system that is as deep as anything in the genre, as well as a sheer, unprecedented DENSITY of stuff to do, in the form of side quests, missions, or just widgets to play with. No game I have ever played felt as deep (in the game-design meaning of deep, as in, lots of layers to explore) as the most recent pokemon games.
So to sum up this point, just because panzer dragoon and chrono are awesome, doesn't mean that pokemon can't be a different kind awesome, while still being legitimately awesome.
2) So a bunch of 10 year olds are buying pokemon, instead of playing "old classics". Boo hoo. What do you think they'll go looking for in 5 years, when they're wishing they had more games that featured turn-based battles, giant worlds to explore every nook and cranny of, and towns full of "I am a walking signpost" style people? Where will they turn, when they say "man, gaining XP to go up in level and get new powers sure was fun. I wonder if there are any other games like that?"
Think of Pokemon as a gateway game. You can get them into the harder stuff later, but for now, is getting them used to ideas like "having a 'party' of characters", or "this is my item 'inventory'" or even "I have x 'hit points' before I fall down" such a bad thing?
Yeah, just throwing my hat into the ring as a slashdot reader who plays pokemon, unapologetically.
I started because I write and design games for a living, and figured "if it's still around after all these years, there is probably somthing behind it." (That was back in the ruby/sapphire days.)
I kept playing, because under the cute presentation, is a surprisingly deep game, of the same nature as Magic the Gathering. (The game of "you have a wide library of abilities, and a limited number of slots to put them into; build a deck/monster/whatever. Oh, and the abilities combine in interesting ways.")
Pokemon actually manages to make turn-based RPG-style combat WORK in one-on-one battles. (Which almost always suck in RPGs, since they degenerate into "attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-heal-attack-at tack-attack..." strings.) There is a surprisingly deep game under the cuteness, and you can actually talk about "high level play" in pokemon, and be completely serious.
Consider: They need images and animations for each one of the 150 things in the game. AND for each of the previous 200+ that they released already that it needs to be compatable with. AND for each of the new ones that havne't been released yet, that they built in to be earned at exclusive nintendo events.
Remember. We're talking about needing multiple animations for 490 or so different little guys. That's a lot of resources there, both in ROM budget, as well as art production.
Is it any wonder that they went with a paired down approach? (Currently each one has 3 sprites - 2 "frontal" views, used in animation, and 1 "over the shoulder" view.)
I actually think the current strategy is fairly clever, and a good example of "good programming", where they took limitations and constraints, and figured out some clever ways around them.
Their solution (for people not familiar with the game) is actually kind of neat:
They provide 2 unique sprites for each thing. Then, they create animations based around those two bitmaps, and transformations of them. (scaling, skewing, moving, etc.) the effect is actually fairly reasonable, and has got to be a lot cheaper, storage wise, than trying to store actual animations of the same length. (My compliments to the artists, actually, who managed to make a surprisingly expressive bunch of animations out of 2 drawings, and some transforms.)
(The draw of having the characters animated is always what the console hookups are for, where the storage of optical media can be put towards providing all the animations, for all 490ish pokemon, doing any of the several hundred attacks that any given one might know. That's what Battle revolution, coloseum, etc. are for.)
As for innovation, they innovated about the same way as most of the games so far: Slowly and incrementally. (A few things got upgraded, a few things got tweaked, but by in large, the formula remains consistant. Which, as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, is what people want, often.)
I, for one, relish the thought of being a bad enough dude to save 3D Ronnie.
But yeah, seriously. Ask permission to use the white house in a game? Who exactly would you ask? I'm pretty sure that an argument could be made that it belongs to all americans, as its continued upkeep is, as far as I know, taxpayer funded... (Much as that thought pains me, as of late...)
Pretending to do something that you don't normally get much of a chance to do. Like be a counterterrorism agent, alien supersoldier, or rock star giving a concert at stonehenge.
Blizzard sets some minimum specs. Because they're blizzard, and they want to reach the biggest audiance possible, they set the minimum specs as low as they can.
They're already doing that.
What people are complaining about is that blizzard isn't letting them turn their higher-than-minimum-specs (fast computer, nice graphics card, etc) into a tangible game benifit. (Larger relative screen size, more objects on screen at the same time, etc.)
Of course there are minimum specs. It's just that if you exceed them, the benifits you get are going to be things like shinier graphics, or cooler explosions, or other things that don't translate directly into in-game advantage.
And rightly so, from a competition standpoint. Since they can't (like consoles can) make sure that everyone has the same system specs to make it "fair", all they can really do is make sure that system specs don't change gameplay.
So to circle back to your analogy, it's more like saying Baseball, in an effort to remain competitive, is continuing to disallow rocket boots, or pneumatic cyborg pitching arms, or other ways to increase your "game" by simply throwing money at it.
Show me a teacher who only puts in the hours 8-4, and I'll show you a teacher that the administration feels "isn't putting in the effort", and "is only doing the minimum needed to get by".
And the thing is, they're right. 8-4 is just the time they are required to be AT SCHOOL, in the room. Any teacher worth their salt spends plenty of extra time making sure that their lessons are prepared for the next day (or week) and that they are generally ready for anything the class can throw at them. Teaching doesn't just "happen"; it requires a tremendous amount of prep and organizational work.
Also, the vacation is lengthy, but fairly inflexible. Hope you don't want to take any time off OTHER than what the district says, or you've got some problems. Want to take a month off in March instead? Too bad! It's definitely a trade off.
Don't get me wrong, the vacation time is nice, but it has its flip side, and if you think it's a 40 hour a week job, you're deluding yourself. (Or talking about the crappy teachers who DO deserve the low end.)
Which brings us to... "but why should experienced teachers get more money than the new teachers. They are doing the same job"
Erm.
EXCUSE ME?
Let me turn it around, and see if I can point out just a little bit of hubris on your part. Why should an experienced software developer get more money than a new one? They're doing the same job? Why should an experienced ANYONE get more money?
Answer: Because they do it better. Because years of experience mean that they will generally be more efficient at whatever the job is, do it better, with fewer errors, and have more bandwith to deal with more things. They will also have the experience to deal with the stranger situations that pop up, and will generally require less supervision and be more valuable employees. If you somehow think that this doesn't apply to teachers just as much as it applies to anyone else, then you have a very distorted view of teaching.
Easy: It makes the game uncompetative because suddenly, the game depends on more than just player skill. Being able to see a larger window of the battlefield at once is a HUGE tactical advantage. If you and I are playing, and the most I can zoom out before my machine starts chugging is 150%, while you can zoom out to 400%, then you're seeing much more of the battlefield at a time than I am.
This means that success in the game depends on both player skill, AND player computer power.
Not a good combination if you're trying to make a game built around the idea of competitive multiplay.
Not that I don't agree that there is value in crossovers, (that's what smash brothers IS really, is answering the age old question "who would win in a fight, character A, or character B?") but your argument doesn't really work: Fire Emblem WAS a nintendo game, and so Marth and Roy are as much Nintendo characters as Pikachu is. Granted, [just like pokemon] it wasn't developed by nintendo, but it was published by them, which gives them license to use the characters...
Now, we already know that solid snake (who is definitely NOT a nintendo character) is in brawl, and it seems likely that Sonic will be as well. So crossovers are all well and good and likely. But fire emblem isn't really a good example of precedent.
That is the kind of post that I always imagine or wish I could write as a response to idiocy. Well reasoned, with facts to back it up, and hitting all the important points rapid fire.
Thank you sir, for providing a complete and total rhetorical beat-down, of the sort that I can never seem to manage myself. It was clearly needed in this case.
Let's look at this a different way. Pretend the 360 doesn't even exist. Guitar hero came out for the PS2 as well, if you'll recall.
Are you saying that GH2 didn't have enough songs in it to be worth selling? That it was "half finished" with a mere 70 songs or so?
Forgive me, but playing it, it sure feels like a full featured game to me. Doesn't seem "half finished, full priced" at all. And "content that should have been included in the first place"? Where are you getting that exactly? It wasn't in the PS2 version. Why should thouse extra songs have "been in the first place", exactly, besides that "you wants them"? It's not like the 360 version is significantly more expensive than the PS2, and so you're "owed" songs. (They're within $10, according to EBgames, and that's with the PS2 one having been out for a while.)
The ONLY reason that (as far as I can tell) you [and others] are complaining, is that you're annoyed that, now that they've provided their full game, they have the audacity to give you the OPTION of adding more content to it, at some price that they set, which doesn't even seem that far out. (I agree with the assessment of "not especially generous, but not unfair, either.") I feel pretty strongly that you got a full game out of the deal either way, even if you don't buy stuff.
You may feel that their prices are too high for add on songs. But I still can't visualize the mental contortions required to get from that, to "clearly vindicates people worried that microtransactions would lead to half finished games". I can only conclude that you are either actively trolling, haven't actually played Guitar Hero 2 and are just complaining on principal, or are misinformed.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder (and I don't know either way, but I'm curious) how much of that was Rowling, and how much of that was the multimillion dollar machine that has grown up around her works. I wonder how much she cared, vs. how much the book publishers cared. It's hard to know where decisions like that get made. I like to imagine that she doesn't care particularly either way, being fabulously wealthy now, but that's probably just me projecting how I hope she would act. Guess we'll never know. (Although this being slashdot, I give it even odds that someone will pop up with a link within an hour proving me wrong. Such is life.)
Huh. Yeah. Because adding an explanation for how "the force" worked and why some people had it more than others, certainly improved the star wars universe immeasurably. Clearly the introduction of, oh, we'll call them "Magiclorians", would have similarly kicked Rowling's creation into superland as well.
Huh. I actually liked what Molly Weasley did at the end. I thought it was a nice moment for her. It wasn't that she was normally a feared duelist. It was that she was enraged having lost a son that day, and seeing another of her children in danger, she snapped. This was the mother-protecting-her-cubs effect, and I thought it was nice seeing her fiercely defending the people she cared about, after spending so much time seeing her in "housewife mode". In a funny way, it was kind of a character-growth moment for her too, since we (the readers) finally got to see a side of her that we had never seen before.
I'll admit that it would have been satisfying if Neville had been able to take out Bellatrix. But at least Neville got some nice character growth, what with leading the Hogwarts resistance and all. (And I have to say - Even though she didn't get much screen time, Neville's grandma RULED.)
Providing too much violence can cause problems too though, and can be ultimately ineffective. The problem is, the more violence you cause, the more people are appalled at your actions, and more likely to force you into more violence.
Let's think of it in terms of single people, since that's easier.
Suppose you're in a room, with a bunch of other people, and someone punches you. (Or someone else.) And you decide that you need to respond with violence. (We'll assume that everyone in this room is equally good at fighting, just to remove the "well, I kung-fu them all!" from the list of possible responses.)
If you punch him back, then people may nod approvingly, but he'll probably punch you back, and you have a fight that could go either way. If you lose, you lose, and if you win, there is always the chance he'll hold a grudge and come after you later.
If you can restrain him without hurting him until he calms down, then people will probably nod more approvingly, and no one gets hurt. (This is the "best case" scenario, although since restraining is harder than hurting, it's also admittedly less likely, if you're equally good at fighting. Probably helps if you can convince some other people in the room to help you.) (Note that this still potentially has the grudge problem listed above.)
If you whip out your switchblade, and start violently stabbing him, and/or people who been friendly with him recently, then even if you take him out, everyone else in the room is going to look at you and think things like "That person grossly overacted, and responded with a heck of a lot of violence. Am I safe in this room with him? Maybe we should gang up on him, since having a homicidal maniac in our midst isn't safe." Heck, they might even pull out THEIR switchblades at that point.
Now sure, you could argue that "you just need to apply more violence, i. e. kill everyone in the room", but aside from the practical considerations, (no guarantee that, after everyone is against you, and willing to use deadly force, that you could win) is killing the entire room because someone punched you really your idea of a solution?
I realize that these seem like extremes, but if you replace "people in the room" with "countries", I'm sure you can see the parallels.
Making people remember previous books isn't such a bad thing.
Oh man.
I'm SO glad I'm not the only one with a social group that likes to shout "Want some RYE? Coursh ya do!" at inopportune times.
Just because the author never sits around and laughs at really bad games, or plays them with friends in social settings, they shouldn't assume no one does.
Ironically enough, this story gets posted just days after I ordered the dreamcast "classic" Illbleed, for the express purpose of having some friends over and mocking it roundly as I force them to play the first level or so. (I have some very fond memories of when it was inflicted on me, so I figure it's time to pass it on.)
Another good example is "detective" from the interactive fiction scene, which was actually bad enough that someone made an MST3K version of it, where as you play, Tom Servo, Crow, etc, mock it along with you. (Ahh, the joys of a text based interface.)
There are definitely game equivalents to Manos: The Hands of Fate. I submit that the author just hasn't looked hard enough.
Normally I'd agree, but, to be fair...
Last time an established maker of RPGs took a licensed character from another company's platforming franchise (that I can think of, at least) the world was blessed with Super Mario RPG. Which ruled.
So I'm prepared to cut them some slack on the idea, since it's already been proven to me that platformers reimagined as RPGs don't HAVE to suck...
[update]
My bad. I did further research, and was finally able to find reference to catching Mew just through catching everything else, in the Japanese version. My apologies.
My other points still stand though - I admit I'm on weaker ground now that I know that it was actually originally part of the game, and removed for american release (and subsequent japanese re-release, actually.) But even so, I still stand by what I said about Nintendo actively working to foster out of game interaction.
Are you sure about that?
The only one I can think of that fits your description of "a powerful bonus pokemon that can learn any skill" would be Mew, #151. Which, as far as I can tell from internet sites, has never been available through any means except as a bonus from nintendo events.
(My apologies if you meant a different one, or if my research just missed it.)
Again though, I'm not totally sure what the issue is here. So the developers put in some "special event bonuses" that they could use as promotions later. Some special game content that you could only access if you went to a nintendo promotional event. (Or hacked the game with a gameshark/whatever)
So?
Actually, that seems like a fairly clever way of setting things up, from where I sit. Since it's on a cartridge, it's not like they can issue patches or updates. So they just left some bits open, that they could twiddle later, as incentives/rewards for showing up at their events. Lots of games have done this sort of thing, from the "mirror match" code in the original street fighter SNES, to the mortal combat 3 codes for the arcade machines, etc.
Forgive my lack of outrage, I guess. But again, I'm not really sure why I should be annoyed. It's not like people finish the game, and go "man, that game just didn't have enough content. If only there were ONE MORE I could catch, then my game experience would be complete..." It is a BONUS. Something EXTRA, a backdoor they left so they could give you a REWARD in their game, for doing something, or coming to an event, etc.
(And as for which one costs more money, the gameshark or the event, when they had the Mew event at Toys 'R Us, it was free, you just had to show up on the right day, when they were having a party to celebrate the launch of a movie or something.)
So if you want to talk incentives, here's what I get out of pokemon:
The game rewards you for:
- Talking to your friends (to find all the absurd number of sidequests/creature locations/etc)
- Trading with your friends (because of the artificially induced scarcity of certain types between the versions)
- Go to nintendo events, and presumably meet other people with similar interests. (To get event pokemon)
Hmm. You know, as far as "better for games as a whole", that's not too bad a model. If you ask me, nintendo has done an outrageously good job of fostering social communities around their game, both through their game design, and their events. Which is probably part of why it does well, since hobbies (both games, and otherwise) tend to be reinforced tremendously if you know a bunch of people with the same hobby.
So what exactly was your beef with it again?
Why is it taken as a given that all users should be able to find "everything" in the game?
... that a game is unreasonable if they can't see all of it?
Many successful games (Pokemon is a textbook example) just include such a huge number of side quests and widgets and minipuzzles that almost NO ONE solves them all, because they don't even find them all. Heck, even most Xbox-360 games contain lots of accomplishments, many of which are nearly impossible for all but the hardest of core players. (Guitar Hero 2 - Complete Buckethead on Expert. Yeah. Right.)
Why is this a bad thing? Why do people have... almost the sense of entitelement?
A good example is Valkyrie Profile, which contained a secret ending that was BRILLIANT, but that only happened if the user figured out some really crazy things, and put a lot of clues together. In practice, it was very hard to find without hints, a strategy guide, or a friend who told you about it, and how it worked.
But imagine what it would be like to be a person who figured it out. To them, that a-ha moment would MAKE THE GAME for them. And if everyone else just proceeded through the "normal" path and never saw it, and never knew it was there, what of it? Why is this a bad design decision, saying "95% of users will have a pretty good experience, and 5% will have an AWESOME one, made at least partly awesome from the feeling of satisfaction of having figured out something truly hard."?
Games aren't (or at least don't have to be) like books - you can have a perfectly valid, enjoyable, and even complete experience without seeing everything the game has to offer. So what if the game has some love for the one person who bothers to translate all of the runes, or collect all 144 bugs, or whatever. As long as it doesn't actively block you from completing the main path of the game, why is there a problem? So what if there are side quests that you never even know where there, and "need" a strategy guide to find. Why is your finding them so important?
(Note that this only applies to OPTIONAL side quests - I have very little patience for things that actually block you from the main game path, that are unintuitive and block the user from progressing.)
So... just out of curiosity, in your personal worldview, what's the motivation for environmentalists to take away your freedoms? Is it still because "they hate freedom", or do you have a more creative justification for why people concerned about the environment would want to destroy your civil liberties?
Even if you go the "market" argument, doesn't that sort of fall apart when you examine it from a market standpoint?
As I understand it, your argument is basically "there is [probably?] a demand for these things, so therefore, there must be a supply of them, because people would want to start making them, in order to make money off of the demand."
Ok. Fair enough. (weak, but I can see where you're going.)
On the other hand, let's consider: Market pressures direct people to find the *cheapest* way to satisfy a demand. (This is elementary stuff - if everyone is clamoring for T-shirts, and expects to buy them for around $10, I'm going to make much more money selling $5 t-shirts, than if I sell $9 ones.)
So... what do you think is cheaper to produce in the long run?
* Movies depicting murder, where you have to pay some actors to enact some twisted fantasy
* Movies of people actually getting murdered, where you have to ACTUALLY KILL SOMEONE, and if you get caught, are sent to jail, where you presumably can't make more movies. (or money) (And you've even just provided a nice video recording for evidence)
See where this is going?
Let's try one more:
Pretend for a moment that you are a consumer of such things. What do you think you're more likely to prefer?
* An professional film that has undergone the normal cutting/editing process in a studio that we have come to expect from visual media
* A grainy camcorder image, with no editing, and if something goes wrong in the scene, too bad, since it's hard to "un-kill" someone to get them to do a re-take.
So... yeah. I think that you're right, you CAN make an argument about the existence of snuff films based on market pressure, but if you follow it through, I'm not sure the logic leads where you say it does...
Side note - You're being pretty pointed and confrontational yourself there, bucko.
Nice! I was going to try to bring up medicine as something that you COULD die from, if you couldn't buy, but you not only beat me to it, but you provided some nice citations to boot.
Burnsauce!
Masterful RPGs can be masterful for different reasons.
I'm certainly not going to argue that Chrono Trigger, or Panzer Dragoon Saga aren't masterpieces of their craft. But a couple of thoughts for you:
1) Different parts of RPGs are held up as awesome. Very few games are groundbreaking on ALL fronts. Chrono Trigger, for example, had pretty standard graphical faire for the time. (Not a complaint, but a statement.) What made it awesome was an interesting storyline (that actually managed to handle time travel well), well-executed storytelling that preserved the illusion that the player was in charge, and some neat improvements to standard RPG battling. (Double and Tripple attacks!) Oh, and marvelous music by Mitsuda and Uematsu.
Pokemon games do not have groundbreaking story. Or music. But they have a battle system that is as deep as anything in the genre, as well as a sheer, unprecedented DENSITY of stuff to do, in the form of side quests, missions, or just widgets to play with. No game I have ever played felt as deep (in the game-design meaning of deep, as in, lots of layers to explore) as the most recent pokemon games.
So to sum up this point, just because panzer dragoon and chrono are awesome, doesn't mean that pokemon can't be a different kind awesome, while still being legitimately awesome.
2) So a bunch of 10 year olds are buying pokemon, instead of playing "old classics". Boo hoo. What do you think they'll go looking for in 5 years, when they're wishing they had more games that featured turn-based battles, giant worlds to explore every nook and cranny of, and towns full of "I am a walking signpost" style people? Where will they turn, when they say "man, gaining XP to go up in level and get new powers sure was fun. I wonder if there are any other games like that?"
Think of Pokemon as a gateway game. You can get them into the harder stuff later, but for now, is getting them used to ideas like "having a 'party' of characters", or "this is my item 'inventory'" or even "I have x 'hit points' before I fall down" such a bad thing?
Yeah, just throwing my hat into the ring as a slashdot reader who plays pokemon, unapologetically.
t tack-attack..." strings.) There is a surprisingly deep game under the cuteness, and you can actually talk about "high level play" in pokemon, and be completely serious.
I started because I write and design games for a living, and figured "if it's still around after all these years, there is probably somthing behind it." (That was back in the ruby/sapphire days.)
I kept playing, because under the cute presentation, is a surprisingly deep game, of the same nature as Magic the Gathering. (The game of "you have a wide library of abilities, and a limited number of slots to put them into; build a deck/monster/whatever. Oh, and the abilities combine in interesting ways.")
Pokemon actually manages to make turn-based RPG-style combat WORK in one-on-one battles. (Which almost always suck in RPGs, since they degenerate into "attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-heal-attack-a
Yeah, the problem I think, is one of space.
Consider: They need images and animations for each one of the 150 things in the game. AND for each of the previous 200+ that they released already that it needs to be compatable with. AND for each of the new ones that havne't been released yet, that they built in to be earned at exclusive nintendo events.
Remember. We're talking about needing multiple animations for 490 or so different little guys. That's a lot of resources there, both in ROM budget, as well as art production.
Is it any wonder that they went with a paired down approach? (Currently each one has 3 sprites - 2 "frontal" views, used in animation, and 1 "over the shoulder" view.)
I actually think the current strategy is fairly clever, and a good example of "good programming", where they took limitations and constraints, and figured out some clever ways around them.
Their solution (for people not familiar with the game) is actually kind of neat:
They provide 2 unique sprites for each thing. Then, they create animations based around those two bitmaps, and transformations of them. (scaling, skewing, moving, etc.) the effect is actually fairly reasonable, and has got to be a lot cheaper, storage wise, than trying to store actual animations of the same length. (My compliments to the artists, actually, who managed to make a surprisingly expressive bunch of animations out of 2 drawings, and some transforms.)
(The draw of having the characters animated is always what the console hookups are for, where the storage of optical media can be put towards providing all the animations, for all 490ish pokemon, doing any of the several hundred attacks that any given one might know. That's what Battle revolution, coloseum, etc. are for.)
As for innovation, they innovated about the same way as most of the games so far: Slowly and incrementally. (A few things got upgraded, a few things got tweaked, but by in large, the formula remains consistant. Which, as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, is what people want, often.)
I, for one, relish the thought of being a bad enough dude to save 3D Ronnie.
But yeah, seriously. Ask permission to use the white house in a game? Who exactly would you ask? I'm pretty sure that an argument could be made that it belongs to all americans, as its continued upkeep is, as far as I know, taxpayer funded... (Much as that thought pains me, as of late...)
Yeah, um, that's pretty much what games are for.
Pretending to do something that you don't normally get much of a chance to do. Like be a counterterrorism agent, alien supersoldier, or rock star giving a concert at stonehenge.
That's exactly the point, actually.
Blizzard sets some minimum specs. Because they're blizzard, and they want to reach the biggest audiance possible, they set the minimum specs as low as they can.
They're already doing that.
What people are complaining about is that blizzard isn't letting them turn their higher-than-minimum-specs (fast computer, nice graphics card, etc) into a tangible game benifit. (Larger relative screen size, more objects on screen at the same time, etc.)
Of course there are minimum specs. It's just that if you exceed them, the benifits you get are going to be things like shinier graphics, or cooler explosions, or other things that don't translate directly into in-game advantage.
And rightly so, from a competition standpoint. Since they can't (like consoles can) make sure that everyone has the same system specs to make it "fair", all they can really do is make sure that system specs don't change gameplay.
So to circle back to your analogy, it's more like saying Baseball, in an effort to remain competitive, is continuing to disallow rocket boots, or pneumatic cyborg pitching arms, or other ways to increase your "game" by simply throwing money at it.
Sorry, but had to bring something up here:
Show me a teacher who only puts in the hours 8-4, and I'll show you a teacher that the administration feels "isn't putting in the effort", and "is only doing the minimum needed to get by".
And the thing is, they're right. 8-4 is just the time they are required to be AT SCHOOL, in the room. Any teacher worth their salt spends plenty of extra time making sure that their lessons are prepared for the next day (or week) and that they are generally ready for anything the class can throw at them. Teaching doesn't just "happen"; it requires a tremendous amount of prep and organizational work.
Also, the vacation is lengthy, but fairly inflexible. Hope you don't want to take any time off OTHER than what the district says, or you've got some problems. Want to take a month off in March instead? Too bad! It's definitely a trade off.
Don't get me wrong, the vacation time is nice, but it has its flip side, and if you think it's a 40 hour a week job, you're deluding yourself. (Or talking about the crappy teachers who DO deserve the low end.)
Which brings us to...
"but why should experienced teachers get more money than the new teachers. They are doing the same job"
Erm.
EXCUSE ME?
Let me turn it around, and see if I can point out just a little bit of hubris on your part. Why should an experienced software developer get more money than a new one? They're doing the same job? Why should an experienced ANYONE get more money?
Answer: Because they do it better. Because years of experience mean that they will generally be more efficient at whatever the job is, do it better, with fewer errors, and have more bandwith to deal with more things. They will also have the experience to deal with the stranger situations that pop up, and will generally require less supervision and be more valuable employees. If you somehow think that this doesn't apply to teachers just as much as it applies to anyone else, then you have a very distorted view of teaching.
Easy: It makes the game uncompetative because suddenly, the game depends on more than just player skill. Being able to see a larger window of the battlefield at once is a HUGE tactical advantage. If you and I are playing, and the most I can zoom out before my machine starts chugging is 150%, while you can zoom out to 400%, then you're seeing much more of the battlefield at a time than I am.
This means that success in the game depends on both player skill, AND player computer power.
Not a good combination if you're trying to make a game built around the idea of competitive multiplay.
Not that I don't agree that there is value in crossovers, (that's what smash brothers IS really, is answering the age old question "who would win in a fight, character A, or character B?") but your argument doesn't really work: Fire Emblem WAS a nintendo game, and so Marth and Roy are as much Nintendo characters as Pikachu is. Granted, [just like pokemon] it wasn't developed by nintendo, but it was published by them, which gives them license to use the characters...
Now, we already know that solid snake (who is definitely NOT a nintendo character) is in brawl, and it seems likely that Sonic will be as well. So crossovers are all well and good and likely. But fire emblem isn't really a good example of precedent.
THANK YOU.
That is the kind of post that I always imagine or wish I could write as a response to idiocy. Well reasoned, with facts to back it up, and hitting all the important points rapid fire.
Thank you sir, for providing a complete and total rhetorical beat-down, of the sort that I can never seem to manage myself. It was clearly needed in this case.
Erm. Excuse me?
Let's look at this a different way. Pretend the 360 doesn't even exist. Guitar hero came out for the PS2 as well, if you'll recall.
Are you saying that GH2 didn't have enough songs in it to be worth selling? That it was "half finished" with a mere 70 songs or so?
Forgive me, but playing it, it sure feels like a full featured game to me. Doesn't seem "half finished, full priced" at all. And "content that should have been included in the first place"? Where are you getting that exactly? It wasn't in the PS2 version. Why should thouse extra songs have "been in the first place", exactly, besides that "you wants them"? It's not like the 360 version is significantly more expensive than the PS2, and so you're "owed" songs. (They're within $10, according to EBgames, and that's with the PS2 one having been out for a while.)
The ONLY reason that (as far as I can tell) you [and others] are complaining, is that you're annoyed that, now that they've provided their full game, they have the audacity to give you the OPTION of adding more content to it, at some price that they set, which doesn't even seem that far out. (I agree with the assessment of "not especially generous, but not unfair, either.") I feel pretty strongly that you got a full game out of the deal either way, even if you don't buy stuff.
You may feel that their prices are too high for add on songs. But I still can't visualize the mental contortions required to get from that, to "clearly vindicates people worried that microtransactions would lead to half finished games". I can only conclude that you are either actively trolling, haven't actually played Guitar Hero 2 and are just complaining on principal, or are misinformed.