Eternal Champions always struck me as the game series that SEGA created just in case they never got Street Fighter II. I liked both games in the series, but I thought the sequel (Eternal Champions CD) was the better game. I think one of the big reasons why was the Activator. See, all the special moves had to be able to be activated by the Activator, so they mostly ended up being charge moves. (Why, oh why, did they saddle this game with the Activator?!? Can you imagine a family buying two Activators to play it? It was a fighting game, it was supposed to be two player!) The game was still good, but I really wish that it hadn't been chosen as the game to market the Activator. The SEGA-CD version was not marketed as "Activator compatible" I think that the Activator had been abandoned by that point, so the moves had more variety.
Of course, the series was always a red-headed step-child at SEGA as evidenced by its sad end:
With production just getting started on the final chapter of the Eternal Champions trilogy, Latham was stunned to learn that the project was being cancelled. Sega of Japan, in an effort to push their Virtua Fighter franchise in America, decided to can the Saturn Champions game, citing a desire to focus on a single fighting series. I think it has more to do with their coming to the realization that Virtua Fighter was not only an inferior product, but would also not be able to compete with Eternal Champions' popularity in the U.S. While Virtua Fighter was very successful in Japan, there was no contest as to which would have sold better stateside. Sega's eventual decision to farm out the development of Virtua Fighter 3tb on the Dreamcast is proof of this. This was simply another example of Sega of Japan's arrogance and complete cluelessness about the American market, an attitude which would eventually force them out of the hardware business.
I still miss, SEGA, and wish they had survived to this dark, dreary modern age but it's things like this that makes you realize that the deserved what they got (as horrible as it was for console gaming that it happened). I suppose my relationship with SEGA could be called battered-gamer syndrome. "Sorry about that 32X, here's Nights though, will you buy a Saturn? Remember how good it was in the old days..."
I bought it twice, once for PC and once for an Apple laptop. I think it wasn't popular because it was completely different than all the other RTSs out there, totally unique.
I noticed that I just brought it up on my new PC and it looks great.
I have a pretty good Japanese single player map for it called "Marduk Encounter!"
Well, yes, but you run into the same problem there when The Incredibles was rated 'T.' Of course, the E-10 rating wasn't in use yet so maybe it will solve the problem.
I'll respectfully disagree here. Part of the problem is that the United States is designed in such a way that a minority of the total population, in state which happen to have small populations though they may cover large swaths of territory, have a dispraportionate influence on the outcome of elections. So, for example, Kansas has a great political impact on who gets to be president, even though it is just a tiny number of people standing around in a whole bunch of cornfields.
American elections, especially presidential elections, are not particularly democratic by design.
Not that I believe "democracy" is anything other than a way for those in power to bestow legitimacy on themselves, anyway. (I mean the British just re-elected Tony Blair, despite the fact that everyone over there supposedly hates him and considers him a stooge of George Bush.) Its just a newer version of the divine right of kings, and what do you do when the all-powerful people decide to elect the man who decides that we've had enough of this elections nonsense? I guess you just Ave, Caesar and hope you don't get a Caligula or a Nero.
It didn't matter what Take-Two/Rockstar said in their own defense, because this entire story exists because the American news media serves mainly to titilate its audience with twisted facts taken out of context followed by a lot of outright lies.
I've heard this type of thing described as "soccer mom porn."
Right, milder games have been getting M-Ratings for years, mainly because when the rating system came out, M-Rated games basically didn't exist on consoles (they did on PCs). If someone tried to create one, the console gatekeepers would send it back to them and make them censor it. This same kind of hypersensitivity caused games which didn't deserve an M-Rating to get it (no one will ever convince me that the original Mortal Kombat deserved an M-Rating).
So, we have a two tiered M-Rating (overprotective soccer-mom "M" and real "M") and a broken rating system. A parent does have the choice, though, to be safe and not by any M-Rated games for his kids. If you really think the rating system is broken, the best thing to do would be to write the game companies publishing M-Rated games that you want to buy your kids and explain why you aren't buying them. If enough people do that maybe they'll come out with a T-12 rating (something like PG-13).
Making M rated games "Ao" is not the answer because Ao is currently for hard core pornography, not for stuff resembling Taxi Driver (the movie). Sure, its fair to argue that GTA should be for adults only, but it definitely isn't hard core pornography.
The used to say the same thing about Synagogues in Nazi Germany and Imperial Russia. In fact, they even created a propaganda book about it, called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
"Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of Jews
have died because of this infamous forgery." -- Rabbi Joseph Teluskin
So, this is the propaganda that is always used when you want to get rid of people, "Sure they sound good in public, but in their secret meetings, they outline their evil plan."
I want to stress how bad al-Qa'ida has been for the world's Muslims, and how much harm its existence has done to them. As a terrorist organization, it is good at acheiving its own goals, but those have nothing to do with helping Joe (or Mohammed) in the street Muslim. They are mainly about:
1. Acheiving Political power for Bin Laden and company.
2. Scoring propaganda points to that end.
Any help to ordinary Muslims is merely a coincidental by product to these two ends. Do you think Bin Laden didn't know what would happen when his organization attacked the United States?
No Shi'ite can support al-Qa'ida because it would force them to change their religion, and the Shi'ites believe just as strongly as the supporters of al-Qa'ida. Why do you think that the U. S. is turning Iraq into a defacto Shi'ite state? Ironically, during the cold war, it was the Shi'ites who were considered the threat due to the loss of Iran, which is why U. S. (which created al-Qa'ida, I'll note, as a force to use against Soviet Russia in Afghanistan) supported Saddam Hussein for all those years.
Some African tribes have women who don't cover their chests. When traveling to the United States, what do you think would happen if they walked on the street like that? They would be arrested.
Actually, you make an excellent point here. One think American missionaries have done, going all around the world to countries where they are not wanted, is tell the native people, "Cover up! The way you are dressed is wicked."
Of course, over time, Americans have liberalized their rules concerning womens dress. For example bikinis are now ok (depending on how much they show), wheras in the past they would have gotten women arrested.
What's my point? Well, we have an American Taliban lurking in the background, currently allied with the Bush administration. When they finally take power, I imagine women's clothing styles will be quite restricted. (Don't believe me? Well, in my local grocery store, the covers of many magazines are covered with white plastic to cover up their "risque" content, and we aren't talking Playboy or Penthouse here. These are the people who were key in electing Bush for the second term, even more than the first.)
I find it ironic that it is the anti-liberal Republican zealots who speak of America's relative liberalism as a selling point against Islam. (To be fair, the neo-cons are very liberal compared to the Dominionists it's an alliance of convenience as long as the Dominionists are pro-Israel. Considering the neocons actual political beliefs, they've made a Devil's bargain, but I suspect they don't take the Dominionists seriously. Fools.)
Yes, this reminds me of the Dreamcast's VGA compatibility. I loved it, the graphic were much better, most people couldn't care less. They wanted their Dreamcasts, PS2s, etc hooked up to their living room TVs even if it was lower definition graphics.
Most of the HD fans on/. remind me of that nut on the Simpsons, "My militia has a secret plan to beat up all sorts of government officials! That'll teach them to drag their feet on high definition TV!" The fact is most people aren't video-philes or audio-philes (hence the popularity of MP3, an audio downgrade from CD which itself was an audio downgrade from vinyl!) and they won't switch to HD TV unless they are forced or the prices are close to inline with regular TV.
This is the reality, unfortunately, you get all the home theater elitists on/. thinking that their view of things is the realistic one.
To use a term from football or soccer as we call it in the states, this is an "own goal." To quote SWOP:
Since the video game Grand Theft Auto accrues points to players for the depiction of the rape and murder of prostitutes, SWOP-USA calls on all parents and all gamers to boycott Grand Theft Auto.
Now, I've only played Vice City but it seems to me that this does not resemble, at all, what happens in that game. If you want a health boost, you drive slowly around street walkers until one gets into your car. Then you drive to a secluded spot, and your health increases as your money goes down. Now, you can murder anyone, as far as I can tell, in Vice City. I can remember chaisawing cops and random people in a mall one night when I was bored. But rape? That doesn't happen, and most of the time randomly murdering anyone, including prostitutes, is a bad idea.
The reason why so many people have a problem with GTA is because it treats sex with prostitutes as both no big deal and as generally beneficial. Which would tend to make people see it as something that shouldn't be illegal. Hence lies (about rape) and exaggerations (you get points for killing prostitutes, while killing a prostitute in GTA may be beneficial it also carries in game risks which may make it detrimental).
But the goal of NIMF isn't, for example, to make prostitutes the one class of person in the game who are invulnerable, it is to remove them from the game completely. Removing the ability to portray prostitutes in a game removes the ability to portray them positively.
This is actually very sad, because I imagine the guys at Rockstar North are in favor of decriminalization and also against the murder or maltreatment of prostitutes, so their opinion would be inline with SWOP-USA. (I come to this conclusion from the political content of the game, the hypocracy of right wing congressman Shrub and his mistress porn star Candy Suxxx for example.)
As it happens, Marshall proved nothing of the kind. By the late nineteen eighties Marshalls statistical argument for his ratio of fire had been debunked as a fantastic fraud. I should declare an interest: I was one of the peopleby far the least distinguished, and certainly the one who performed the least original research--who discovered this fact. Although a lot of people have looked for it, no evidence has ever emerged that Marshall had interviewed a single rifle company in the European theater, let alone the four, or five, or six hundred that he at various times claimed to have interviewed. But Marshall had interviewed some in the Pacific, who had fought on Makin Island, and on Kwajalein, and my only real research involved finding the record of what Marshall had there discovered. As it happens, those men showed no striking refusal to firein fact, Marshall discovered that on Makin, at least, they fired far too much, as one might suspect would be the case with green troops: Much aimless shooting by `trigger-happy men occurredIn the early morning its volume increasedA wave of shooting hysteria swept through the area and men started blazing at bushes and trees until the place was `simply ablaze with fireshouted orders to the men to cease firing proved ineffectualflat terrain and limited area made control of fire abnormally difficult.
--- Grossman-ism:
Media Violence and
Mad Social Science
However, it will not matter that it has been debunked, because it represents a very seductive world view (not seductive to me, but to many people). The view was famously articulated by Rousseau as the noble savage.
As a philosophy, it is anti-civilization, anti-science and anti-progress. Video games, in this case, are simply a representative of scientific progress that can be attacked with impunity. The plot is always the same, "In the past human beings were better, but then science and civilization came along and corrupted them."
To quote Fred Smoler:
The Good News is the attractive and inspiriting proposition that most people have a powerful instinctual disinclination to kill other human beings, and under normal conditions, including their own presence on a battlefield in immediate proximity to homicidal strangers, will refuse to do so. The Bad News is that modern media culture produces an abnormal condition in which ordinary children are all too likely to become much more effective killers than, say, a typical American GI facing the SS in Normandy. And Col. Grossman is supremely confident that he can prove both of these contentions. His attempts to do so, in these two fantastic and extremely dispiriting parodies of rational argument, are fascinating illustrations of the intellectual level of much contemporary American social science.
I have to say, that I think everyone is missing something about Nintendo's new controller. It's simplicity is deceptive.
Consider the DS versus the PSP:
PSP analog stick plus buttons.
DS, directional pad, plus buttons, plus touch screen, plus microphone. It has an expansion slot, used for the Metroid Prime pinball rumble pack. (I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo eventually created a gyro controller add-on cartridge, and you can already play WarioWare Twisted on it.)
It has got a more complex control scheme than a PSP.
It's got a ton of control options, but the "simple" games, such as Nintendogs, use the touch screen because it is very intuitive (this is why the mouse caught on with PCs).
But the touch screen itself is a complex piece of technology compared to what came before. However, its complexity is hidden from the user. Does anyone remember Seaman for the Dreamcast? In that game you have a hand you control on screen using the joystick and various buttons. It is a clunky, clumsy control scheme, though the game is still good. Now, imagine Seaman on the DS (or Revolution). The control scheme is the same, but it appears less complex to the user. On the DS, you use your own actual finger or the stylus to tap on the 'glass.' What's really happened is that you've gone from a more primative control to a more sophisticated one.
Like the DS, the Revolution control will have an expansion slot. The Revolution control will be able to duplicate the function of a Wavebird, and will also be able to do other stuff. Nintendo is attempting to appeal to a wider audience by removing the clunkiness that inhibits current control schemes making it possible to get to the game without fighting the interface.
I've been playing a lot of Killer 7 lately. When I play it, I think how much better a game it would be if I used a Revolution controller. (That specific example is tailor made, but I also think a more conventional title, Metroid Prime would control better.)
I don't count Sony out, I'm sure they won't die without a fight. (And if they sense their death approaching, I'm sure they'll try to drag down the video game industry with them, because they are right bastards.)
Oops, should've wrote "games shouldn't be considered exclusively children's activities." It's important to improve children's minds, but I don't think you should ever stop improving your mind.
Games are shouldn't be considered childrens activities, they improve the mind. More sophisticated games have never been primarily children's activities. I remember I was recently in Atlanta's Chinatown and two people in a Chinese restaurant were playing Xiangqi (these were adult men). I believe Hiroshi Yamauchi himself is a top ranked Go player, and lest we forget, Nintendo got it's start manufacturing HanaFuda cards, especially profitable because the Yakuza insisted on a fresh deck for each game they played. (Yakuza itself means something like busted flush in a game played with HanaFuda cards.)
On the other hand, games for adults have always had a seedy and disreputable reputation, either because of gambling or "devil worship" (in the case of the original RPGs, which were definitely intended for adults at the time check the art in the game manuals if you don't believe it.). So, I'm not sure if that's much better.
Another problem was that the first IBM clone I ever saw sucked at graphics. I have a brother 7 years younger than me. I grew up with an Atari 800 as my primary game machine, he grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System as his primary game machine. I've always been comfortable around computers, he's always been slightly afraid of them.
Now, there may be many factors that made me somewhat of a hacker* and him not at all, but I can't help but think that that change had a huge psychological impact.
*This is not intended as bragging. It also doesn't mean I like to break into computers.
Yes, I had this horrified, disappointed reaction when my Dad bought a brand new, expensive 8088. It couldn't really do graphics at all! It was similar to watching the Nintendo Gameboy win the portable console war against the Atari Lynx (but actually I respected the Gameboy more than that 8088!).
Did you ever try programming player-missile graphics? I got as far as creating sprites and moving them around the screen with my trusty joystick. (Who knows what happened then, I probably had to quit to study for some test in school or something.) I never did get as far as the all imporant collision detection but it was fun to get that far.
My first computer was an Atari 800 with a tape drive. I later got a floppy drive for it and there was much rejoicing. To be fair, I did have to share it with my Dad. My Dad liked to type in programs from Compute! magazine, which was quite annoying when we only had the tape drive, as he would tie the computer up for days typing in a long program and and not saving it. ( I wanted to play Crush, Crumble and Chomp! or Temple of Apshai.)
To understand this, you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro -- back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes - they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good 'cause they ate his food -- what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.
If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here.
-- Malcolm X: "Message To The Grass Roots"
Roger Toussaint, leader of the Transit Workers Union, addressing the mayor of New York:
But what about our conducting an "illegal" strike? What about the law? You are all over the media with high-minded talk about "illegal" behavior, castigating criminals and screaming that no one is above the law. Your hypocrisy knows no bounds... You must hope everyone has forgotten your biography: "Bloomberg on Bloomberg..." I guess illegality is in the eye of the beholder.
Naturally, I had to check this out for myself. Did the mayor of New York really boast about getting his company off the ground "all without permission, violating every fire law, building code and union regulation on the books"?
On page 59 of this rather schlocky-looking memoir, Mayor Bloomberg admits to all of the above, adding, "it's amazing we didn't burn down some office..."
-- When the spirit meets the letter
Well, that's kind of a harsh judgement considering that both the creators of Resident Evil and Silent Hill stated that they were consciously trying to imitate American forms of horror. (In the case of Resident Evil it was Dawn of the Dead in the case of Silent Hill it was modern American horror literature, which is why you find things like Matheson St. and Bachman St. in the original Silent Hill.)
They are coming out with and E-10 rating now to cover the regular PG rating. (T was originally supposed to cover PG, but the same thing happened to movies when Gremlins made them invent the PG-13 rating.)
Part of the problem is that when the rating system originally came out I think there were no console games that actually deserved an "M" rating. I don't think either the SegaCD game Night Trap or the original Mortal Kombat deserved it (I see as much cartoon blood on The Simpsons). They got it though, so you end up with an inflated view of ratings. (Some recent games are like this too, like The Typing of the Dead which I was comfortable giving to my 10 year old because I wanted her to learn typing and I played it and just though it was silly.)
However, the rating system does seem to confuse the people who are the real problem, overprotective Moms and Dads.
The best way to show the mendacity of this who thing is something I reference in my sig. It seems that almost every new horror or gory film that comes out gets an unrated "Director's Cut" that is sold in stores. The one that really got my goat was Doom, because I know if Doom III the game had been released unrated no stores would carry it, but I can pick up the unrated movie at Best Buy! I can also pick up really disturbing stuff like Audition in the same store!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the series was always a red-headed step-child at SEGA as evidenced by its sad end:
I still miss, SEGA, and wish they had survived to this dark, dreary modern age but it's things like this that makes you realize that the deserved what they got (as horrible as it was for console gaming that it happened). I suppose my relationship with SEGA could be called battered-gamer syndrome. "Sorry about that 32X, here's Nights though, will you buy a Saturn? Remember how good it was in the old days..."Sony, at least until they merge into one unholy abomination called MicroSony.
I noticed that I just brought it up on my new PC and it looks great.
I have a pretty good Japanese single player map for it called "Marduk Encounter!"
Well, yes, but you run into the same problem there when The Incredibles was rated 'T.' Of course, the E-10 rating wasn't in use yet so maybe it will solve the problem.
American elections, especially presidential elections, are not particularly democratic by design.
Not that I believe "democracy" is anything other than a way for those in power to bestow legitimacy on themselves, anyway. (I mean the British just re-elected Tony Blair, despite the fact that everyone over there supposedly hates him and considers him a stooge of George Bush.) Its just a newer version of the divine right of kings, and what do you do when the all-powerful people decide to elect the man who decides that we've had enough of this elections nonsense? I guess you just Ave, Caesar and hope you don't get a Caligula or a Nero.
My political views? I'm a pessimistic anarchist.
So, we have a two tiered M-Rating (overprotective soccer-mom "M" and real "M") and a broken rating system. A parent does have the choice, though, to be safe and not by any M-Rated games for his kids. If you really think the rating system is broken, the best thing to do would be to write the game companies publishing M-Rated games that you want to buy your kids and explain why you aren't buying them. If enough people do that maybe they'll come out with a T-12 rating (something like PG-13).
Making M rated games "Ao" is not the answer because Ao is currently for hard core pornography, not for stuff resembling Taxi Driver (the movie). Sure, its fair to argue that GTA should be for adults only, but it definitely isn't hard core pornography.
"Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of Jews have died because of this infamous forgery." -- Rabbi Joseph Teluskin
So, this is the propaganda that is always used when you want to get rid of people, "Sure they sound good in public, but in their secret meetings, they outline their evil plan."
I want to stress how bad al-Qa'ida has been for the world's Muslims, and how much harm its existence has done to them. As a terrorist organization, it is good at acheiving its own goals, but those have nothing to do with helping Joe (or Mohammed) in the street Muslim. They are mainly about:
1. Acheiving Political power for Bin Laden and company.
2. Scoring propaganda points to that end.
Any help to ordinary Muslims is merely a coincidental by product to these two ends. Do you think Bin Laden didn't know what would happen when his organization attacked the United States?
No Shi'ite can support al-Qa'ida because it would force them to change their religion, and the Shi'ites believe just as strongly as the supporters of al-Qa'ida. Why do you think that the U. S. is turning Iraq into a defacto Shi'ite state? Ironically, during the cold war, it was the Shi'ites who were considered the threat due to the loss of Iran, which is why U. S. (which created al-Qa'ida, I'll note, as a force to use against Soviet Russia in Afghanistan) supported Saddam Hussein for all those years.
Of course, over time, Americans have liberalized their rules concerning womens dress. For example bikinis are now ok (depending on how much they show), wheras in the past they would have gotten women arrested.
What's my point? Well, we have an American Taliban lurking in the background, currently allied with the Bush administration. When they finally take power, I imagine women's clothing styles will be quite restricted. (Don't believe me? Well, in my local grocery store, the covers of many magazines are covered with white plastic to cover up their "risque" content, and we aren't talking Playboy or Penthouse here. These are the people who were key in electing Bush for the second term, even more than the first.)
I find it ironic that it is the anti-liberal Republican zealots who speak of America's relative liberalism as a selling point against Islam. (To be fair, the neo-cons are very liberal compared to the Dominionists it's an alliance of convenience as long as the Dominionists are pro-Israel. Considering the neocons actual political beliefs, they've made a Devil's bargain, but I suspect they don't take the Dominionists seriously. Fools.)
Most of the HD fans on /. remind me of that nut on the Simpsons, "My militia has a secret plan to beat up all sorts of government officials! That'll teach them to drag their feet on high definition TV!" The fact is most people aren't video-philes or audio-philes (hence the popularity of MP3, an audio downgrade from CD which itself was an audio downgrade from vinyl!) and they won't switch to HD TV unless they are forced or the prices are close to inline with regular TV.
This is the reality, unfortunately, you get all the home theater elitists on /. thinking that their view of things is the realistic one.
The reason why so many people have a problem with GTA is because it treats sex with prostitutes as both no big deal and as generally beneficial. Which would tend to make people see it as something that shouldn't be illegal. Hence lies (about rape) and exaggerations (you get points for killing prostitutes, while killing a prostitute in GTA may be beneficial it also carries in game risks which may make it detrimental).
But the goal of NIMF isn't, for example, to make prostitutes the one class of person in the game who are invulnerable, it is to remove them from the game completely. Removing the ability to portray prostitutes in a game removes the ability to portray them positively.
This is actually very sad, because I imagine the guys at Rockstar North are in favor of decriminalization and also against the murder or maltreatment of prostitutes, so their opinion would be inline with SWOP-USA. (I come to this conclusion from the political content of the game, the hypocracy of right wing congressman Shrub and his mistress porn star Candy Suxxx for example.)
However, it will not matter that it has been debunked, because it represents a very seductive world view (not seductive to me, but to many people). The view was famously articulated by Rousseau as the noble savage.
As a philosophy, it is anti-civilization, anti-science and anti-progress. Video games, in this case, are simply a representative of scientific progress that can be attacked with impunity. The plot is always the same, "In the past human beings were better, but then science and civilization came along and corrupted them."
To quote Fred Smoler:
No, they really need to study COINTELPRO and its successors if they want to avoid public relations debacles like that.
Consider the DS versus the PSP:
PSP analog stick plus buttons.
DS, directional pad, plus buttons, plus touch screen, plus microphone. It has an expansion slot, used for the Metroid Prime pinball rumble pack. (I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo eventually created a gyro controller add-on cartridge, and you can already play WarioWare Twisted on it.)
It has got a more complex control scheme than a PSP.
It's got a ton of control options, but the "simple" games, such as Nintendogs, use the touch screen because it is very intuitive (this is why the mouse caught on with PCs).
But the touch screen itself is a complex piece of technology compared to what came before. However, its complexity is hidden from the user. Does anyone remember Seaman for the Dreamcast? In that game you have a hand you control on screen using the joystick and various buttons. It is a clunky, clumsy control scheme, though the game is still good. Now, imagine Seaman on the DS (or Revolution). The control scheme is the same, but it appears less complex to the user. On the DS, you use your own actual finger or the stylus to tap on the 'glass.' What's really happened is that you've gone from a more primative control to a more sophisticated one.
Like the DS, the Revolution control will have an expansion slot. The Revolution control will be able to duplicate the function of a Wavebird, and will also be able to do other stuff. Nintendo is attempting to appeal to a wider audience by removing the clunkiness that inhibits current control schemes making it possible to get to the game without fighting the interface.
I've been playing a lot of Killer 7 lately. When I play it, I think how much better a game it would be if I used a Revolution controller. (That specific example is tailor made, but I also think a more conventional title, Metroid Prime would control better.)
I don't count Sony out, I'm sure they won't die without a fight. (And if they sense their death approaching, I'm sure they'll try to drag down the video game industry with them, because they are right bastards.)
Oops, should've wrote "games shouldn't be considered exclusively children's activities." It's important to improve children's minds, but I don't think you should ever stop improving your mind.
Games are shouldn't be considered childrens activities, they improve the mind. More sophisticated games have never been primarily children's activities. I remember I was recently in Atlanta's Chinatown and two people in a Chinese restaurant were playing Xiangqi (these were adult men). I believe Hiroshi Yamauchi himself is a top ranked Go player, and lest we forget, Nintendo got it's start manufacturing HanaFuda cards, especially profitable because the Yakuza insisted on a fresh deck for each game they played. (Yakuza itself means something like busted flush in a game played with HanaFuda cards.)
On the other hand, games for adults have always had a seedy and disreputable reputation, either because of gambling or "devil worship" (in the case of the original RPGs, which were definitely intended for adults at the time check the art in the game manuals if you don't believe it.). So, I'm not sure if that's much better.
Dreamcasts are fun this way too. I've seen so many interesting applications come out for Dreamcast, and it seems like figuring out what the limitations of what this cheap little computer can do are part of the fun. I was watching the old Fleisher Superman cartoons on mine last night....
Now, there may be many factors that made me somewhat of a hacker* and him not at all, but I can't help but think that that change had a huge psychological impact.
*This is not intended as bragging. It also doesn't mean I like to break into computers.
Did you ever try programming player-missile graphics? I got as far as creating sprites and moving them around the screen with my trusty joystick. (Who knows what happened then, I probably had to quit to study for some test in school or something.) I never did get as far as the all imporant collision detection but it was fun to get that far.
My first computer was an Atari 800 with a tape drive. I later got a floppy drive for it and there was much rejoicing. To be fair, I did have to share it with my Dad. My Dad liked to type in programs from Compute! magazine, which was quite annoying when we only had the tape drive, as he would tie the computer up for days typing in a long program and and not saving it. ( I wanted to play Crush, Crumble and Chomp! or Temple of Apshai.)
Well, that's kind of a harsh judgement considering that both the creators of Resident Evil and Silent Hill stated that they were consciously trying to imitate American forms of horror. (In the case of Resident Evil it was Dawn of the Dead in the case of Silent Hill it was modern American horror literature, which is why you find things like Matheson St. and Bachman St. in the original Silent Hill.)
Part of the problem is that when the rating system originally came out I think there were no console games that actually deserved an "M" rating. I don't think either the SegaCD game Night Trap or the original Mortal Kombat deserved it (I see as much cartoon blood on The Simpsons). They got it though, so you end up with an inflated view of ratings. (Some recent games are like this too, like The Typing of the Dead which I was comfortable giving to my 10 year old because I wanted her to learn typing and I played it and just though it was silly.)
However, the rating system does seem to confuse the people who are the real problem, overprotective Moms and Dads.
The best way to show the mendacity of this who thing is something I reference in my sig. It seems that almost every new horror or gory film that comes out gets an unrated "Director's Cut" that is sold in stores. The one that really got my goat was Doom, because I know if Doom III the game had been released unrated no stores would carry it, but I can pick up the unrated movie at Best Buy! I can also pick up really disturbing stuff like Audition in the same store!