Also because Sega was heavily in debt, mostly due to the massive failure of the Saturn and other products. If the company had a healthy balance sheet going into "battle", they probably could have stuck it out, as the DC was fairly popular. However, they needed the DC to be a huge, company-saving home run, which it wasn't.
The 360 fails to outsell the Gamecube, and the original Xbox barely manages to beat the ORIGINAL Gameboy Advance. source.
This isn't a fluke, either. MS is really taking a pounding in Japan, which is a big deal since so many gamers LOVE japanese games.
Re:I think that's what they wanted
on
The 360 Is Too Cheap?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
By hot, I think the poster meant "in the news more than any other product". The average mom and dad saw dozens of news stories that showed the 360 as being a hot product, sold out all over the country. The 360 was the "Tickle Me Elmo" of Christmas 2005. Whether or not it will ultimately be a success, who knows.
Magic is still pretty popular, I believe. They sell the cards at Target and Borders and so forth now though, not at hobby shops. They also have Star Wars board/card/RPGs, Neopets (which is apparently huge), Avalon Hill (Risk, Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, and other games), and other sub-companies.
Microsoft? Who lost somewhere around $4 billion on the Xbox? Whose Xbox 360 is DOA in the eastern markets? The 360 is regularly outsold by the last-gen Gamecube in Japan!
In contrast, Nintendo has almost never posted a negative quarter, sells well worldwide, and recently beat their profit predictions (based on strong DS sales). Yes, any company can drop the ball, but Nintendo has a very good track record in the games sector - better than Microsoft's by far.
Without money from MS Office + Windows, the Xbox line would be in very, very poor shape. In contrast, Sony's gaming division makes a very large percentage of the company's profit. The ONLY company of the three that loses money on gaming is Microsoft.
...except that the revolution controller is modular. It can be a standard controller, the remote, or that FPS two-handed thing. And that's just the ones they have talked about so far.
That's why Sony owns 70% of the market and MS owns as much of the market as Nintendo.
Obviously you are not talking about the HANDHELD market, which is what these reviews are about. Sony owns far, far less than 70% of the handheld market.
Nintendo has been in the game for decades and MS only years, but yet MS has already caught up.
Caught up how? MS lost $4 billion on the first Xbox (so far, they are losing more every day), Nintendo made money on the Gamecube. How would you call that "catching up"? Bottom line - if MS didn't have Windows & Office money to fall back on, the Xbox would have been a huge failure, and there would not have been a 360. This may not be true for this generation, as the 360 is better designed than the Xbox, but it was certainly true for the last.
I'm kidding about that, but seriously- these are 3 important releases for Nintendo that all came out around the same time. I'm sure Liberty City Stories (probably the most important PSP game so far), for example, got a write-up here when it was released. If it didn't, I would call that a sign of bias.
Is there anybody out there who thought the DS would be less popular than it is?
Uhhh... Many, many gaming blogs, press articles and posters on this site downplayed it since the announcement. Many, many people were pre-emptively ceding the portable market to Sony and posting stories, blogs, and comments that ranged from Sony taking 50% of the portable market to about how Nintendo should go the Sega route and stop making hardware all together.
Perhaps hard to remember now, but this is what people were saying before it came out. It did not have a positive buzz at all until people were charmed by the novelty of petting and giving verbal commands to Nintendogs (a game I personally can't get into).
From all reports I've heard from those who own it, the "unorthodox" input device often gets in the way of gameplay, and owners like it in spite of the touchscreen, not because of it.
How does it "get in the way" of gameplay? Do you have any examples? In games I own such as Mario Kart or Advance Wars, you don't really NEED the touch factor, but it doesn't get in the way. I find I don't use the touch screen for anything in Mario Kart except to change the map view, which I could probably do with a button.
The other games I own, however, are Metroid Prime: Hunters & Animal Crossing, which are pretty much unplayable without it, and Age of Empires, which could be played without it, but with some difficulty...
Three of the most popular games on the platform are Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and Brain Training/Brain Age, and those are almost unplayable without the touchpad so I doubt the people who spoke to you reflect the majority of people using the DS.
Also, the PSP appears to be doing very well without it any such "innovative" controllers.
Is it doing that well? According to Joystiq, Japanese sales figures for for the week of 3/20 to 3/26 paint a different picture:
The DS Light + DS sold more than 5x times than the PSP. That may be "well", but I'm not sure it counts as "very well".
Here are the software sales charts for March 13-19:
1. PS2 Final Fantasy XII 1,764,266
2. DS Animal Crossing Wild World 70,932
3. DS Brain Training 2 67,222
4. DS English Training 39,940
5. DS Brain Training 39,718
6. PS2 Sengoku Musou 2 (Samurai Warrior) 25,295
7. DS Mario Kart DS 17,928
8. DS Seiken Densetsu CoM (Children of Mana) 17,574
9. PS2 Guitar Freaks V 17,520
10. DS Keroro Gunso 15,650
Note that there are 7 DS titles on there, and 0 PSP titles.
US and European numbers may skew less towards the DS, since sales figures are less accesible, but the PSP isn't trouncing the DS here in the western world, either.
It also might be driven by the fact that the vaguely clunky "not a gameboy replacement" handheld with the unorthodox (for a game system) input device has become more popular than anyone could have imagined... and they want to continue that successful trend on their next console.
Initally, I agree with you. However, I still maintain a phenomenon that brings new (And younger) people into the hobby shops is, in the long term, far less devestating than one that keeps people at home. MMORPGs (and possibly online gaming in general) + "the Playstation Generation" have proven to have lasting effects (and are probably more popular now than ever before), while the MTG/CCG craze was largely a fad that has since settled down to a niche market. You can't really claim that MTG is supressing the RPG industry today.
The kind of kid who, 20 years ago would be getting into D&D or a decade ago would be getting into MTG is now in a WoW or Halo 2 guild. Just a sign of changing times.
MTG didn't do as much to the industry as MMORPGs. People playing magic are still hanging in the hobby shops... Exposed to the other games. I knew several peers who jumped from Magic to Warhammer (not exactly an RPG, but still part of the hobby), for example.
However, most people I knew who played RPGs now just play video games alot. Part of this is because as an adult, it's just hard to get 5-6 friends together for 5 hours on anything like a regular basis, of course. But I note that all my friends who complain they don't have time to play RPGs do have time for WoW...
.. and toss all the music you have on it right now, to boot. I don't hear of people doing this often.
Actually no. You would only have to toss the music out if the disc was full. I use my cards interchangably between devices in exactly this fashion. My various devices generally write their data in different folders, and thus don't interfere with the data already on the card.
I generally only do this in cases where, say, my camera is out of space on the card in it and there is something I really want to take a picture of, so it's not like I do it all the time... but it's nice to have the option.
Sure, it's not as large as HDD mp3 players, but can your $350 HDD play ogg files, flac files (LOSSLESS COMPRESSION YAY!)
I'm fairly certain the Creative Zen Vision can play oggs, FLACs, and Xvids. I'm sure there are iRiver models that can handle all these tasks as well - iRiver is usually great with it's codec choices.
On my iPod, the podcasts are listed with the newest one at the top... this is on the "Podcasts" screen, I'm not sure how it would display if you viewed by artist or genre or something.
And yes, in iTunes just click the little download button next to a particular episode of a subscription to download a particular one. And if you don't want one on your iPod that you have downloaded, uncheck it. If you want one back on your iPod that has "expired" (they do this after a certain amount of time), just check it. That's what the checkboxes are for - things that are checked get synced to yor iPod.
The best way I have found to listen to recent podcasts is by making a playlist with them in it. I bet you can also make a smart playlist to play all podcasts from the last 24 hours in chronological order, but i have not tried that since i only listen to 2-3 podcasts.
People think Hollywood movies are crap because they aren't "as good as they used to be". Part of this mentality is that when you think back 20 years, you remember the good movies, and not the bad ones.
Also, i really don't think people "pretend" to enjoy an "unbearable" film to seem to be superior... Perhaps they just don't share the same taste as you?
I would say the difference between Baldur's Gate and Halo is you are using spells and so forth in the former, and guns in the latter. In the same way, I would say that shooting someone with a red shell in Mario Kart just isn't the same as shooting someone with a rail gun in Quake, even if you are technically 'shooting' in each game.
I would imagine the ratings system is designed with the idea of influence on impressionable young minds, and the people who make those calls feel like a child is far more likely to get a bad impression from someone shooting a gun than a red turtle shell or a mystical fireball. I think this is probably a good call, though I don't think kids are as impressionable - or as stupid - as adults often seem to think they are. I think the factors that would make a kid pick up a gun and use it probably are a result of something outside of what games they play... that said, ratings, I don't mind that they exist as long as they aren't intrusive to adults.
I never saw that cartoon, but yeah- of course you can have a cartoon that has more grotesquely depicted violence. Many animes, for example. That doesn't change my point that if you depict violence in the more "Mario" sort of way, it has a very different tone. If a cartoon tries to make it's violence more disturbing, well, sure it's going to be so.
Compared to ping pong though? AI might not be the right term for it, but there is a lot of stuff they have to build in... the NPCs have to run, shoot, drive around, etc. With ping pong they just hit a ball. Plus in GTA there are lots of missions, different play modes, etc... This game's budget must be a tiny fraction.
Would quake cease to be violent if instead of calling it dying, you fell over and were then towed back to an upright position by a little dude in a cloud?
As opposed to being hit with a rail gun and exploding into bloody gibs? Yes.
Like I said, there is a difference between cartoonish violence and realistic violence. If Bugs Bunny (or Mario) gets squashed flat then pops back out with a "SWWOOP" sound, the tone is simply NOT the same if his head pops and blood, eyes and brains fly out. Sorry if you disagree, but it just doesn't have the same tone at all.
Note: I am not advocating game censorship. I love violent games, both the realistic and cartoony variety. I just recognize that the two kinds of violence ARE different. If I had kids, I would probably not give them a copy of a violent FPS at age 5. 12-13, sure, probably. But if they were 5, I'd give them something a little more like a cartoon.
Slashdot Mirror
Also because Sega was heavily in debt, mostly due to the massive failure of the Saturn and other products. If the company had a healthy balance sheet going into "battle", they probably could have stuck it out, as the DC was fairly popular. However, they needed the DC to be a huge, company-saving home run, which it wasn't.
Japanese Hardware Sales Chart, 3/20-26/2006:
1 DSL: 119,986
2 NDS: 39,307
3 PS2: 34,169
4 PSP: 31,077
5 GBASP: 5,627
6 GBM: 4,883
7 GCN: 1,458
8 360: 1,415
9 XBX: 108
10 GBA: 98
The 360 fails to outsell the Gamecube, and the original Xbox barely manages to beat the ORIGINAL Gameboy Advance. source.
This isn't a fluke, either. MS is really taking a pounding in Japan, which is a big deal since so many gamers LOVE japanese games.
By hot, I think the poster meant "in the news more than any other product". The average mom and dad saw dozens of news stories that showed the 360 as being a hot product, sold out all over the country. The 360 was the "Tickle Me Elmo" of Christmas 2005. Whether or not it will ultimately be a success, who knows.
Really? All the hobby shops I know of in my area all went out of business except Games Workshop. I assumed that was a nationwide trend.
Magic is still pretty popular, I believe. They sell the cards at Target and Borders and so forth now though, not at hobby shops. They also have Star Wars board/card/RPGs, Neopets (which is apparently huge), Avalon Hill (Risk, Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, and other games), and other sub-companies.
Microsoft? Who lost somewhere around $4 billion on the Xbox? Whose Xbox 360 is DOA in the eastern markets? The 360 is regularly outsold by the last-gen Gamecube in Japan!
In contrast, Nintendo has almost never posted a negative quarter, sells well worldwide, and recently beat their profit predictions (based on strong DS sales). Yes, any company can drop the ball, but Nintendo has a very good track record in the games sector - better than Microsoft's by far.
Without money from MS Office + Windows, the Xbox line would be in very, very poor shape. In contrast, Sony's gaming division makes a very large percentage of the company's profit. The ONLY company of the three that loses money on gaming is Microsoft.
...except that the revolution controller is modular. It can be a standard controller, the remote, or that FPS two-handed thing. And that's just the ones they have talked about so far.
That's why Sony owns 70% of the market and MS owns as much of the market as Nintendo.
Obviously you are not talking about the HANDHELD market, which is what these reviews are about. Sony owns far, far less than 70% of the handheld market.
Nintendo has been in the game for decades and MS only years, but yet MS has already caught up.
Caught up how? MS lost $4 billion on the first Xbox (so far, they are losing more every day), Nintendo made money on the Gamecube. How would you call that "catching up"? Bottom line - if MS didn't have Windows & Office money to fall back on, the Xbox would have been a huge failure, and there would not have been a 360. This may not be true for this generation, as the 360 is better designed than the Xbox, but it was certainly true for the last.
Are there that many PSP games out? ;)
I'm kidding about that, but seriously- these are 3 important releases for Nintendo that all came out around the same time. I'm sure Liberty City Stories (probably the most important PSP game so far), for example, got a write-up here when it was released. If it didn't, I would call that a sign of bias.
Is there anybody out there who thought the DS would be less popular than it is?
Uhhh... Many, many gaming blogs, press articles and posters on this site downplayed it since the announcement. Many, many people were pre-emptively ceding the portable market to Sony and posting stories, blogs, and comments that ranged from Sony taking 50% of the portable market to about how Nintendo should go the Sega route and stop making hardware all together.
Perhaps hard to remember now, but this is what people were saying before it came out. It did not have a positive buzz at all until people were charmed by the novelty of petting and giving verbal commands to Nintendogs (a game I personally can't get into).
From all reports I've heard from those who own it, the "unorthodox" input device often gets in the way of gameplay, and owners like it in spite of the touchscreen, not because of it.
How does it "get in the way" of gameplay? Do you have any examples? In games I own such as Mario Kart or Advance Wars, you don't really NEED the touch factor, but it doesn't get in the way. I find I don't use the touch screen for anything in Mario Kart except to change the map view, which I could probably do with a button.
The other games I own, however, are Metroid Prime: Hunters & Animal Crossing, which are pretty much unplayable without it, and Age of Empires, which could be played without it, but with some difficulty...
Three of the most popular games on the platform are Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and Brain Training/Brain Age, and those are almost unplayable without the touchpad so I doubt the people who spoke to you reflect the majority of people using the DS.
Also, the PSP appears to be doing very well without it any such "innovative" controllers.
Is it doing that well? According to Joystiq, Japanese sales figures for for the week of 3/20 to 3/26 paint a different picture:
1 DSL: 119,986
2 NDS: 39,307
3 PS2: 34,169
4 PSP: 31,077
5 GBASP: 5,627
The DS Light + DS sold more than 5x times than the PSP. That may be "well", but I'm not sure it counts as "very well".
Here are the software sales charts for March 13-19:
1. PS2 Final Fantasy XII 1,764,266
2. DS Animal Crossing Wild World 70,932
3. DS Brain Training 2 67,222
4. DS English Training 39,940
5. DS Brain Training 39,718
6. PS2 Sengoku Musou 2 (Samurai Warrior) 25,295
7. DS Mario Kart DS 17,928
8. DS Seiken Densetsu CoM (Children of Mana) 17,574
9. PS2 Guitar Freaks V 17,520
10. DS Keroro Gunso 15,650
Note that there are 7 DS titles on there, and 0 PSP titles.
US and European numbers may skew less towards the DS, since sales figures are less accesible, but the PSP isn't trouncing the DS here in the western world, either.
It also might be driven by the fact that the vaguely clunky "not a gameboy replacement" handheld with the unorthodox (for a game system) input device has become more popular than anyone could have imagined... and they want to continue that successful trend on their next console.
The same thing could have been said about the mouse, too.
Or the DS touchscreen, which works very well.
Also, the Revolution will, according to Nintendo, indeed ship with a standard controller as well, so what's your point?
Initally, I agree with you. However, I still maintain a phenomenon that brings new (And younger) people into the hobby shops is, in the long term, far less devestating than one that keeps people at home. MMORPGs (and possibly online gaming in general) + "the Playstation Generation" have proven to have lasting effects (and are probably more popular now than ever before), while the MTG/CCG craze was largely a fad that has since settled down to a niche market. You can't really claim that MTG is supressing the RPG industry today.
The kind of kid who, 20 years ago would be getting into D&D or a decade ago would be getting into MTG is now in a WoW or Halo 2 guild. Just a sign of changing times.
MTG didn't do as much to the industry as MMORPGs. People playing magic are still hanging in the hobby shops... Exposed to the other games. I knew several peers who jumped from Magic to Warhammer (not exactly an RPG, but still part of the hobby), for example.
However, most people I knew who played RPGs now just play video games alot. Part of this is because as an adult, it's just hard to get 5-6 friends together for 5 hours on anything like a regular basis, of course. But I note that all my friends who complain they don't have time to play RPGs do have time for WoW...
.. and toss all the music you have on it right now, to boot. I don't hear of people doing this often.
Actually no. You would only have to toss the music out if the disc was full. I use my cards interchangably between devices in exactly this fashion. My various devices generally write their data in different folders, and thus don't interfere with the data already on the card.
I generally only do this in cases where, say, my camera is out of space on the card in it and there is something I really want to take a picture of, so it's not like I do it all the time... but it's nice to have the option.
Sure, it's not as large as HDD mp3 players, but can your $350 HDD play ogg files, flac files (LOSSLESS COMPRESSION YAY!)
I'm fairly certain the Creative Zen Vision can play oggs, FLACs, and Xvids. I'm sure there are iRiver models that can handle all these tasks as well - iRiver is usually great with it's codec choices.
On my iPod, the podcasts are listed with the newest one at the top... this is on the "Podcasts" screen, I'm not sure how it would display if you viewed by artist or genre or something.
And yes, in iTunes just click the little download button next to a particular episode of a subscription to download a particular one. And if you don't want one on your iPod that you have downloaded, uncheck it. If you want one back on your iPod that has "expired" (they do this after a certain amount of time), just check it. That's what the checkboxes are for - things that are checked get synced to yor iPod.
The best way I have found to listen to recent podcasts is by making a playlist with them in it. I bet you can also make a smart playlist to play all podcasts from the last 24 hours in chronological order, but i have not tried that since i only listen to 2-3 podcasts.
People think Hollywood movies are crap because they aren't "as good as they used to be". Part of this mentality is that when you think back 20 years, you remember the good movies, and not the bad ones.
Also, i really don't think people "pretend" to enjoy an "unbearable" film to seem to be superior... Perhaps they just don't share the same taste as you?
I knew a guy who played in a band called "boy wonder" in Pennsylvania. They changed their name to "boywunder".. any relation to your story?
Ascendancy- what a great game! I always hoped they would make a sequel.
I do agree with much of what you are saying, however.
I would say the difference between Baldur's Gate and Halo is you are using spells and so forth in the former, and guns in the latter. In the same way, I would say that shooting someone with a red shell in Mario Kart just isn't the same as shooting someone with a rail gun in Quake, even if you are technically 'shooting' in each game.
I would imagine the ratings system is designed with the idea of influence on impressionable young minds, and the people who make those calls feel like a child is far more likely to get a bad impression from someone shooting a gun than a red turtle shell or a mystical fireball. I think this is probably a good call, though I don't think kids are as impressionable - or as stupid - as adults often seem to think they are. I think the factors that would make a kid pick up a gun and use it probably are a result of something outside of what games they play... that said, ratings, I don't mind that they exist as long as they aren't intrusive to adults.
I never saw that cartoon, but yeah- of course you can have a cartoon that has more grotesquely depicted violence. Many animes, for example. That doesn't change my point that if you depict violence in the more "Mario" sort of way, it has a very different tone. If a cartoon tries to make it's violence more disturbing, well, sure it's going to be so.
Compared to ping pong though? AI might not be the right term for it, but there is a lot of stuff they have to build in... the NPCs have to run, shoot, drive around, etc. With ping pong they just hit a ball. Plus in GTA there are lots of missions, different play modes, etc... This game's budget must be a tiny fraction.
Would quake cease to be violent if instead of calling it dying, you fell over and were then towed back to an upright position by a little dude in a cloud?
As opposed to being hit with a rail gun and exploding into bloody gibs? Yes.
Like I said, there is a difference between cartoonish violence and realistic violence. If Bugs Bunny (or Mario) gets squashed flat then pops back out with a "SWWOOP" sound, the tone is simply NOT the same if his head pops and blood, eyes and brains fly out. Sorry if you disagree, but it just doesn't have the same tone at all.
Note: I am not advocating game censorship. I love violent games, both the realistic and cartoony variety. I just recognize that the two kinds of violence ARE different. If I had kids, I would probably not give them a copy of a violent FPS at age 5. 12-13, sure, probably. But if they were 5, I'd give them something a little more like a cartoon.