Yokoi designed something simple that evolved into what is known as the D-pad. Nintendo then proceeded to patent the design of the D-pad.
This explains why Sony and Microsoft are unable to copy Nintendo's D-pad design - they'd have the stuffing sued out of them. Instead:
Sony hid the middle part of rocker underneath the case. Unfortunately their design makes your thumbs bleed after using it for an hour or two.
Microsoft came up with the circle-with-raised-compass-points design. Unfortunately it's error--prone in that you often hit the diagonals when you don't mean to.
I've heard the patent expired before the Dreamcast's release, hence its controller having a normal D-pad. So Microsoft has no excuse.
Square has always changed things for each FF game. They've always created good games. Some stories are weaker than others, but the gameplay's been rock solid.
I disagree. I think the gameplay has been between bad and mediocre, but the stories are rock solid. However, they certaintly are a proven success.
I hope that Zelda series collection disc becomes a trend over at Nintendo. A Mario series disc would be another logical choice, and so perhaps F-Zero and Star Fox discs.
I've been hoping the next Smash Brothers title includes the original games each of it's characters came from as unlockable bonuses. It'd make sense, I think. Though translating some of the games previously only released in Japan might not be a good use of resources.
Ocarina of Time was like none of the others. It made Hyrule feel like a vast place. Unlike I and III. II did the same. I guess this is why these two are my favorites.
I never played Majora's Mask, but it used OoT's engine. I can understand the two being very similar.
It's not. Your constantly repeating the same three days. It has vastly more interaction with NPCs, as you learn their schedule over the three days and solve the puzzles for them. You get masks that let you transform. And, unfortunately, they no longer have any hard fights.
I've hardly played Wind Waker at all, but it seems very OoT like as well, graphics not withstanding.
The dungeons are fairly similar, though they no longer need to be completed in one sitting. The overworld map is drastically different, as it's now all ocean with islands, which makes a very significant difference in game play.
People were moaning about Lara Croft by the time Tomb Raider III was announced - I am sick to DEATH of Mario as he has been around for probably nearly 20 years.
Yes, but Tomb Raider I, II, and III were essentially the same game with different levels from what I've heard. Nintendo has pretty much never done that.
This whole comment's last shred of validty goes out the window you mention Eidos leaving as a bad thing.
I guess I should've mentioned Capcom then. Or take your pick of any other company that isn't developing for Nintendo.
Capcom?! Capcom has made two Zelda games. Capcom made Resident Evil exclusive to the GameCube. Capcom is coming out with Viewtiful Joe for the GameCube real soon now. Capcom is very much making games for Nintendo.
As for other companies, what other companies? Acclaim, like Eidos, is generally considered to suck. Pretty much all the good third-party publishers still publish games for Nintendo.
Gamecube: Pikmin, Starfox, Zelda, Monkeyball, Super Smash Bros., Mario Sunshine, Metroid. All of these are really good games.
I agree with the rest (except I haven't played Mario Sunshine yet), but Starfox Adventures was pretty dull, IMO. It's very linear, and the fights were worse than Zelda. It gave me a new appreciation for Zelda, since it copied so much from it and was so much worse.
Name one multi-console game that has been a huge hit on the GameCube.
Soul Calibur 2, obviously. Any others?
Soul Calibur 2 is clearly a special case. People who own both a GameCube and PS2 and wanted Soul Calibur 2 probably bought the GameCube version. It had Link, and the PS2 version had Heihachi. People with both who want GTA probably already own it for the PS2, and even if they didn't there's not much reason to buy the GameCube version over the PS2 one.
There's really no reason to think that GTA would be a hit on the GameCube. It would be a kiddy-hostile game on a kiddy-friendly console, coming out over a year after the original versions, and presumbably without any compelling features setting it apart from the other versions. Just being good isn't enough reason for it to sell on the GameCube.
I don't understand this reviewer at all. When the difficulty is set higher, the game actually gets harder! What a concept! This amazing technology should be implemented in as many games as possible.
The problem is that while the enemies get harder on the higher difficulty levels they're not the problem. The problem is not falling off the track. They only have 20 courses and they get quite hard with the 11-15th ones. That's a harsh difficulty curve.
Dude, $35 for a tabletop set is a pretty good deal considering most PC or console games start at around $60, and those games only last 20 hours on average.
Actually, new video games normally start at $50, and there are hundreds of them available for $20 or less. The average of 20 hours strikes me as extremely low, but it's the kind of stat that's pretty much impossible to know.
Invest in a couple of books and dice and you've got basically infinite playing time.
Quality of entertainment is much, much more important than length of entertainment.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs
If you're into fansubs, you may prefer GreenCine to Netflix. They have a great selection of anime - I have yet to find an anime that's been released on DVD in North America that they don't stock.
They are a bit more expensive, and have a slower shipping time to Los Angeles. It's worth it for me though.
Eye-Candy is considered more important than playability.
It's the same situation in the board game industry. Everyone's played monopoly (which is a lousy game), but who here has even heard of Puerto Rico or Settlers of Catan which are two of the best games on the market now.
The problem with this analogy is that Settlers of Catan has more eye-candy than Monopoly. Indeed, high physical quality of the components is pretty much the board game equivalent of eye-candy, and is generally found hand-in-hand with playability because both are common in German board games.
I'm a fan of Irregular Webcomic, which seems more innovative than any of the examples mentioned in the article. The comics are pictures taken with a camera, rather than drawn. Generally pictures of Legos or painted miniatures, with some shots of the script's creator in there.
Lots of funny strips, especially the Star Wars ones.
I also curse the companies not willing to take risks. Blizzard comes to mind here. Cancelling Warcraft Adventures (because Lucasarts showed a semi 3d adventure game)
They didn't cancel Warcraft Adventures because of Lucasarts, they canceled it because it wasn't going to be a good game.
Finally, the game industry hasn't had a "Blair Witch" of sorts; that is to say that there hasn't been a surprise lower-budget hit to suddenly sell millions of copies.
What about "Deer Hunter"? I don't know how many copies it sold, but it was the #1 selling PC game for some time.
I find it amusing, and somewhat sad, that people look for parallels between video games and movies more often than parallels between video games and other games. What about game magazines like GAMES magazine or Counter magazine? Doesn't anyone think there is something to be learned from them?
Ondo, part of the fallacy of your argument is that you assume these consoles are somehow written/built in such a way that makes its games imposible to emulate - or, rather, not possible to emulate as effectively.
They are. Emulation != porting. If you could pop your PS2 GTA:VC disc in your computer and use it to play the game, that would be emulation. No effort required by the game publisher, and totally impossible right now.
Duh? But there's no other term for it at the moment so that's what I use.
It's called "porting". You know this, as you use the word later on in the same sentence. In your rant, you used an actual emulator as an example of why this would be of benefit, so you clearly were talking about emulation. You're pretending Nintendo can get the benefits of porting (decent performance) and emulation (simplicity) at the same time. They can't.
I didn't say console hardware, I said hardware. And as better hardware comes out, older hardware gets cheaper. Meaning good hardware is becoming cheaper.
No, "good" is being redefined to be better than it used to be. Good hardware today is a lot better than good hardware five years ago, but it's not cheaper. The fact that good hardware from five years ago is now cheaper is why computers can emulate old consoles, but it doesn't help them at all with emulating new ones, which is what you claimed would become more practical as hardware got cheaper.
The performance wouldn't suffer if the software was written properly.
That's not emulation. It has nothing to do with emulation. That's writing the software for a different platform. As for why they shouldn't do this, I'll just quote your rant:
The most common argument against this that development time for games would increase tenfold. After all, consoles are manufactured with very specific hardware and the game programmers only have to write their games for that hardware. Convenient setup, makes game programming easy.
There are many other reasons for this as well.
The only point I'm trying to prove here is that in the long run for the consumer and the makers, it's be better to drop consoles altogether and use computers.
And I'm disproving most of your points, because you don't know what you're talking about.
With the ever decreasing price of hardware that one would need to run these kinds of games, this idea becomes ever more practical.
Think outside the box for once in your life! Let me make it more clear.
Recognize reality.
Let's say a Nintendo 64 is running a 400mhz processor with a GeForce 2 equivelent.
There's no reason why a 1ghz processor GeForce 4 computer couldn't compile and run the Nintendo 64 bios/OS
There are far, far more differences between the N64 and a PC then there are between different generations of PC. Even an Xbox, which is the closest console to a PC, shares memory between the graphics card and the CPU, which lets it do things far faster then a PC which would have to send the data from one set of RAM to the other.
It's just software!
No it's not. It's software and hardware working in combination. Yes, anything that runs on a GameCube could be run on a PC, but performance would suffer a great deal, which isn't acceptable.
Current emualtors are only slower and require better hardware than the actual console because emulators also have to run on top of an existing OS; as well as run while other programs are running.
This is totally false. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. You can't have one set of hardware behave identically to another incompatible set of hardware without extra code that takes extra time to execute.
To quote from your rant again:
Now, can someone tell me why it seems like I'm the only one who's thought of this?
You're not, your just the only one sufficiently crazy and ignorant to think it would work.
Your rant is wrong all over, but fundamentally falls apart on one point.
Emulators are slower than native code. By a lot. There isn't a PC available that can emulate the PS2, GameCube, or Xbox. (Yes, the Xbox has a mostly PC architecture. Still can't emulate it because the graphics card and the main system use the same RAM, unlike PCs.)
To quote from the article:
people would begin to realize that all consoles are are dumbed down computers that have to be replaced every six months.
If you tried to write an emulator, you'd realize that consoles are custom-engineered cutting-edge hardware specifically designed to run games, and that a general-purpose computer with roughly equivalent functionality is going to cost far more, and that an emulator requires not just roughly equivalent functionality, but far superior functionality.
(Incidentally, consoles get updated roughly every five years, not every six months.)
But as was also mentioned in/. recently, a lot of people see MMOs as a hang-out just as malls were in the 80s. And if so, then the argument for keyboard and mouse is again sustained.
Not even close. The Xbox and the PS2 both have headsets, which are better than a keyboard for chatting.
"If anything, I see bundled MMO service networks that are modeled like Direct TV - where you pay a monthly subscription and get at least 5 MMOs."
Evidently, Mr. McMillan is under the impression that each day contains 96 hours instead of the normal 24, because that is what would be required for anyone to balance successfully the play of five MMOGs.
As opposed to all those people who successfully balance watching every channel on Direct TV in just 24 hours a day.
The fact that people can't play all of them is part of what could make it possible to offer multiple ones for one low price. You may get far more subscribers, but each one only uses up about as many resources as a subscriber to an individual game would, so the price could be roughly the same as the price for an individual game.
Slashdot Mirror
Yokoi designed something simple that evolved into what is known as the D-pad. Nintendo then proceeded to patent the design of the D-pad.
This explains why Sony and Microsoft are unable to copy Nintendo's D-pad design - they'd have the stuffing sued out of them. Instead:
Sony hid the middle part of rocker underneath the case. Unfortunately their design makes your thumbs bleed after using it for an hour or two.
Microsoft came up with the circle-with-raised-compass-points design. Unfortunately it's error--prone in that you often hit the diagonals when you don't mean to.
I've heard the patent expired before the Dreamcast's release, hence its controller having a normal D-pad. So Microsoft has no excuse.
I refuse to pay to play a game online that I've already paid to buy.
Then buy from companies who refuse to pay to maintain a game they already paid to make. There are plenty to choose from.
Square has always changed things for each FF game. They've always created good games. Some stories are weaker than others, but the gameplay's been rock solid.
I disagree. I think the gameplay has been between bad and mediocre, but the stories are rock solid. However, they certaintly are a proven success.
I hope that Zelda series collection disc becomes a trend over at Nintendo. A Mario series disc would be another logical choice, and so perhaps F-Zero and Star Fox discs.
I've been hoping the next Smash Brothers title includes the original games each of it's characters came from as unlockable bonuses. It'd make sense, I think. Though translating some of the games previously only released in Japan might not be a good use of resources.
Ocarina of Time was like none of the others. It made Hyrule feel like a vast place. Unlike I and III. II did the same. I guess this is why these two are my favorites.
I never played Majora's Mask, but it used OoT's engine. I can understand the two being very similar.
It's not. Your constantly repeating the same three days. It has vastly more interaction with NPCs, as you learn their schedule over the three days and solve the puzzles for them. You get masks that let you transform. And, unfortunately, they no longer have any hard fights.
I've hardly played Wind Waker at all, but it seems very OoT like as well, graphics not withstanding.
The dungeons are fairly similar, though they no longer need to be completed in one sitting. The overworld map is drastically different, as it's now all ocean with islands, which makes a very significant difference in game play.
People were moaning about Lara Croft by the time Tomb Raider III was announced - I am sick to DEATH of Mario as he has been around for probably nearly 20 years.
Yes, but Tomb Raider I, II, and III were essentially the same game with different levels from what I've heard. Nintendo has pretty much never done that.
This whole comment's last shred of validty goes out the window you mention Eidos leaving as a bad thing.
I guess I should've mentioned Capcom then. Or take your pick of any other company that isn't developing for Nintendo.
Capcom?! Capcom has made two Zelda games. Capcom made Resident Evil exclusive to the GameCube. Capcom is coming out with Viewtiful Joe for the GameCube real soon now. Capcom is very much making games for Nintendo.
As for other companies, what other companies? Acclaim, like Eidos, is generally considered to suck. Pretty much all the good third-party publishers still publish games for Nintendo.
Gamecube: Pikmin, Starfox, Zelda, Monkeyball, Super Smash Bros., Mario Sunshine, Metroid. All of these are really good games.
I agree with the rest (except I haven't played Mario Sunshine yet), but Starfox Adventures was pretty dull, IMO. It's very linear, and the fights were worse than Zelda. It gave me a new appreciation for Zelda, since it copied so much from it and was so much worse.
Name one multi-console game that has been a huge hit on the GameCube.
Soul Calibur 2, obviously. Any others?
Soul Calibur 2 is clearly a special case. People who own both a GameCube and PS2 and wanted Soul Calibur 2 probably bought the GameCube version. It had Link, and the PS2 version had Heihachi. People with both who want GTA probably already own it for the PS2, and even if they didn't there's not much reason to buy the GameCube version over the PS2 one.
There's really no reason to think that GTA would be a hit on the GameCube. It would be a kiddy-hostile game on a kiddy-friendly console, coming out over a year after the original versions, and presumbably without any compelling features setting it apart from the other versions. Just being good isn't enough reason for it to sell on the GameCube.
I don't understand this reviewer at all. When the difficulty is set higher, the game actually gets harder! What a concept! This amazing technology should be implemented in as many games as possible.
The problem is that while the enemies get harder on the higher difficulty levels they're not the problem. The problem is not falling off the track. They only have 20 courses and they get quite hard with the 11-15th ones. That's a harsh difficulty curve.
Dude, $35 for a tabletop set is a pretty good deal considering most PC or console games start at around $60, and those games only last 20 hours on average.
Actually, new video games normally start at $50, and there are hundreds of them available for $20 or less. The average of 20 hours strikes me as extremely low, but it's the kind of stat that's pretty much impossible to know.
Invest in a couple of books and dice and you've got basically infinite playing time.
Quality of entertainment is much, much more important than length of entertainment.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs
If you're into fansubs, you may prefer GreenCine to Netflix. They have a great selection of anime - I have yet to find an anime that's been released on DVD in North America that they don't stock.
They are a bit more expensive, and have a slower shipping time to Los Angeles. It's worth it for me though.
Eye-Candy is considered more important than playability.
It's the same situation in the board game industry. Everyone's played monopoly (which is a lousy game), but who here has even heard of Puerto Rico or Settlers of Catan which are two of the best games on the market now.
The problem with this analogy is that Settlers of Catan has more eye-candy than Monopoly. Indeed, high physical quality of the components is pretty much the board game equivalent of eye-candy, and is generally found hand-in-hand with playability because both are common in German board games.
I'm a fan of Irregular Webcomic, which seems more innovative than any of the examples mentioned in the article. The comics are pictures taken with a camera, rather than drawn. Generally pictures of Legos or painted miniatures, with some shots of the script's creator in there.
Lots of funny strips, especially the Star Wars ones.
I also curse the companies not willing to take risks. Blizzard comes to mind here. Cancelling Warcraft Adventures (because Lucasarts showed a semi 3d adventure game)
They didn't cancel Warcraft Adventures because of Lucasarts, they canceled it because it wasn't going to be a good game.
Finally, the game industry hasn't had a "Blair Witch" of sorts; that is to say that there hasn't been a surprise lower-budget hit to suddenly sell millions of copies.
What about "Deer Hunter"? I don't know how many copies it sold, but it was the #1 selling PC game for some time.
I find it amusing, and somewhat sad, that people look for parallels between video games and movies more often than parallels between video games and other games. What about game magazines like GAMES magazine or Counter magazine? Doesn't anyone think there is something to be learned from them?
Ondo, part of the fallacy of your argument is that you assume these consoles are somehow written/built in such a way that makes its games imposible to emulate - or, rather, not possible to emulate as effectively.
They are. Emulation != porting. If you could pop your PS2 GTA:VC disc in your computer and use it to play the game, that would be emulation. No effort required by the game publisher, and totally impossible right now.
Duh? But there's no other term for it at the moment so that's what I use.
It's called "porting". You know this, as you use the word later on in the same sentence. In your rant, you used an actual emulator as an example of why this would be of benefit, so you clearly were talking about emulation. You're pretending Nintendo can get the benefits of porting (decent performance) and emulation (simplicity) at the same time. They can't.
I didn't say console hardware, I said hardware. And as better hardware comes out, older hardware gets cheaper. Meaning good hardware is becoming cheaper.
No, "good" is being redefined to be better than it used to be. Good hardware today is a lot better than good hardware five years ago, but it's not cheaper. The fact that good hardware from five years ago is now cheaper is why computers can emulate old consoles, but it doesn't help them at all with emulating new ones, which is what you claimed would become more practical as hardware got cheaper.
The performance wouldn't suffer if the software was written properly.
That's not emulation. It has nothing to do with emulation. That's writing the software for a different platform. As for why they shouldn't do this, I'll just quote your rant:
The most common argument against this that development time for games would increase tenfold. After all, consoles are manufactured with very specific hardware and the game programmers only have to write their games for that hardware. Convenient setup, makes game programming easy.
There are many other reasons for this as well.
The only point I'm trying to prove here is that in the long run for the consumer and the makers, it's be better to drop consoles altogether and use computers.
And I'm disproving most of your points, because you don't know what you're talking about.
With the ever decreasing price of hardware that one would need to run these kinds of games, this idea becomes ever more practical.
Console hardware isn't becoming cheaper, it's becoming better.
Think outside the box for once in your life! Let me make it more clear.
Recognize reality.
Let's say a Nintendo 64 is running a 400mhz processor with a GeForce 2 equivelent.
There's no reason why a 1ghz processor GeForce 4 computer couldn't compile and run the Nintendo 64 bios/OS
There are far, far more differences between the N64 and a PC then there are between different generations of PC. Even an Xbox, which is the closest console to a PC, shares memory between the graphics card and the CPU, which lets it do things far faster then a PC which would have to send the data from one set of RAM to the other.
It's just software!
No it's not. It's software and hardware working in combination. Yes, anything that runs on a GameCube could be run on a PC, but performance would suffer a great deal, which isn't acceptable.
Current emualtors are only slower and require better hardware than the actual console because emulators also have to run on top of an existing OS; as well as run while other programs are running.
This is totally false. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. You can't have one set of hardware behave identically to another incompatible set of hardware without extra code that takes extra time to execute.
To quote from your rant again:
Now, can someone tell me why it seems like I'm the only one who's thought of this?
You're not, your just the only one sufficiently crazy and ignorant to think it would work.
Your rant is wrong all over, but fundamentally falls apart on one point.
Emulators are slower than native code. By a lot. There isn't a PC available that can emulate the PS2, GameCube, or Xbox. (Yes, the Xbox has a mostly PC architecture. Still can't emulate it because the graphics card and the main system use the same RAM, unlike PCs.)
To quote from the article:
people would begin to realize that all consoles are are dumbed down computers that have to be replaced every six months.
If you tried to write an emulator, you'd realize that consoles are custom-engineered cutting-edge hardware specifically designed to run games, and that a general-purpose computer with roughly equivalent functionality is going to cost far more, and that an emulator requires not just roughly equivalent functionality, but far superior functionality.
(Incidentally, consoles get updated roughly every five years, not every six months.)
But as was also mentioned in /. recently, a lot of people see MMOs as a hang-out just as malls were in the 80s. And if so, then the argument for keyboard and mouse is again sustained.
Not even close. The Xbox and the PS2 both have headsets, which are better than a keyboard for chatting.
"If anything, I see bundled MMO service networks that are modeled like Direct TV - where you pay a monthly subscription and get at least 5 MMOs."
Evidently, Mr. McMillan is under the impression that each day contains 96 hours instead of the normal 24, because that is what would be required for anyone to balance successfully the play of five MMOGs.
As opposed to all those people who successfully balance watching every channel on Direct TV in just 24 hours a day.
The fact that people can't play all of them is part of what could make it possible to offer multiple ones for one low price. You may get far more subscribers, but each one only uses up about as many resources as a subscriber to an individual game would, so the price could be roughly the same as the price for an individual game.