I should perhaps elaborate a little. Sony's paths to getting hobbyist code running on their systems are the Yaroze programmable version of the PSX, and the Linux kit for PS2. Which are far from a lot, but are still better than what Nintendo's offered.
I can paint Nintendo as developer unfriendly -- homebrew developer unfriendly! So is Sony (if you don't have one of their pricy devices) and so is Microsoft (if you're talking about Xbox and not Windows). But those exceptions are, of course, just quibbles, and I didn't mean to imply that Nintendo was more or less unfriendly than the others. I just mentioned the Sony thing because I wanted to be as factually correct as I could, and I still remembered about Yaroze.
Unless, of course, you're talking about hobbyist development. (In which case, why do you need a dev kit?)
You try getting your work on store shelves anywhere without a Nintendo license. The Color Dreams days are long past. And anyway, if one just wants to make games then it's arguable that all that corporate stuff is just a distraction.
The dev kit costs $10-20k. Considering you're going to have a budget of about a million dollars (on the low end) to put out a full 3-d title for the Cube, a ten-thousand-dollar dev kit would be something you'd work into your budget, and it's a one-time expense. Yeah, if you were one person the devkit would be prohibitively costly - but we've already established that they don't license individuals.
And that's part of my beef, you see.
Your example used the Gamecube, which is fairly big technology, but I was thinking myself of the Gameboy Advance. The system is just not that hard to develop for, and it is still in the realm of possibility for one really motivated person to "do it all" for that platform, or at least create a demo for it in order to try to get a company interested. Indeed, it may be the last potential do-it-all platform, excepting maybe the DS.
I wonder why you use the word "stranglehold," as though Nintendo were depriving the world of some precious commodity. Last I checked, computers that can run games are somewhat common.
I use the term "stranglehold" to refer to the proprietary nature of the platform, and how it just seems wrong somehow that not just anyone can make stuff for it. Yeah, I know, if I see something wrong with that then I must seen something wrong with a lot of things too, and I do, but that's an issue for another day.
And also... well, the GBA is in a unique position in the game industry these days, because developing for it is so close to the hardware. You can still develop your whole code in assembly for it if you want. Reading up on some of the technical information for it, painstakingly discovered by hobbyists, I'm reminded of my old Commodore 64 days, and I have to admit, it's got my blood going. It just looks really cool to mess around with, and when you're a frustrated former hobbyist programmer who wants to mess around with something that's actually fun to program for again... maybe that could give you a bit of insight as to why I'm interested in the GBA.
Licensee and developer are tw different things, a licensee will take a nintendo license and make a game with it...
Not in the sense I'm using it. I don't mean a company that is licensed to use Nintendo characters, but someone who is licensed to produce games for Nintendo's systems, as depicted by the "Licensed by Nintendo" text appearing in so many games for their systems. In that sense, then the two terms are almost the same, especially when you restrict them to indicating Nintendo's own corner of the video game industry.
I'd respond to you, however, by going to what I believe was Costikiyan's real point in his talk, that it's not Nintendo themselves that stifle innovation, but rather all the companies do, and have been since the licensing system was invented by -- yes, it was Nintendo, back in the NES days with their lockout chip. (Note: this may actually not be true -- did the Intellivision have a lockout chip? Needs to be investigated. Anyway, they didn't have a Nintendo-style licensing program.)
And independents being hired by a company doesn't necessarily help. Independents aren't hired to work on their own ideas, not unless they play considerable dues, in sweat, energy and employment years, enough so that they are eventually granted a designer position.
But in response to your comment that Nintendo actually tries to enforce some quality controls on their games, actually you're right and wrong. All the companies do this, but none of them really do much other than make sure it doesn't crash in some obvious way. (At least, this is my perception of the industry, I'm sure someone'll correct me if I'm grossly mistaken.)
An example of a game that slipped through the cracks: the otherwise generally-interesting N64 game Space Station Silicon Valley, which had a fairly major bug in that one of the special secret goals needed to get the "real" ending was, in fact, impossible to achieve. I bought the game and was rather annoyed to discover this. I have to wonder where Nintendo's QA was then.
Well the game is similar in theme, in some ways, to Lemmings. Pikmin have about the same life expectancy. But honest forces me to report that Pikmin's play is not actually a great deal like Lemmings. (Neither is it like a real time strategy game either. In fact, I've yet to come up with a good other game to compare it to.)
Basically, you have to prove that you make games, and that you have enough money to not go bankrupt any time soon.
If you think that's an unreasonable expectation, I really have to wonder how dedicated you are to making your "outside developer" status a reality.
Bankruptcy, indeed having a company at all, isn't necessarily a requirement to making GBA titles. But you DO have to pay some serious cash to get a development kit, and one look at the warioworld website shows the bar is put higher than your words imply.
Further, you have to remember that the license permission system is largely an artifical construct created by the manfacturers to maintain their stranglehold on the production of games for their system. It's an artificial barrier to entry. You could think of it as a way to ensure another Atari 2600-style glut occurs... but then, the market seems pretty glutted with GBA games anyway, and a lost of them don't seem to be anything special.
Heh. Actually that was the statement that set me against Costikiyan's remarks when I first read it, it was too trite and cheap, stretching facts too far to try to get the audience guffawing. A lot of people seem to like that line, including Cory Doctorow, it was in his quote from the transcript that appeared on BoingBoing. I didn't like it so much, though. For me, whenever someone starts off a talk with a statement like that, then no matter how much I respect him -- and I respect Costikiyan a lot, the man's a Nethack booster and co-created Paranoia after all -- I tend to thunk directly into Skeptic Mode, especially when I know a bit about the guy being discussed.
I'm familiar with Iwata's work, a bit: I've played almost every platformer Kirby game they've made (not all of which involved Iwata of course), and I'm a fan of Smash Bros. He is an actual developer and game player himself, something that the management of no other console manufacturer can state. I knew that Iwata was being completely honest in his statements (also an attribute lacking in many managers). I still think Costikiyan was off the mark with his joke, in fact. It may very well be inertia and ignorance of the company's licensing program that's kept Iwata from changing things there. (Of course, that's a big "may.") He's not really been President of Nintendo for that long so far, after all. Anyway, Costikiyan was referring to Nintendo's policies, and Nintendo's historical relations with developers, in his statements, and using them to illustrate the attitudes of the big manufacturers towards licensing. It's just that, in using the most ready hook available to launch into his points, he picked upon one of the few people in power who may understand the situation well enough to change things -- the man worked for HAL when they only had five developers, eventually ran HAL Laboratories, developed games from the NES through Gamecube eras, has created franchises, worked on games that make radical changes to common assumptions. (Kirby: a platformer where the player can pick up and fly at any time! Smash Bros.: a fighting game without a health bar!)
But while Costikiyan may have opened with a cheap joke, he still made, by and large, insightful and important points. I'm just ranting I guess, sorry about that.
Did I say Slashdot would never post a story about that? But anyway, I didn't look at the article you mentioned very much, sorry if there's some duplication involved here but, you see, I'm not an editor, and these are just comments. So I'm allowed. Nyaah.
I see what you mean. I bought a DS lately, and while I've played the hell out of Mr. Driller Drill Spirits, I think that's out of personal fondness for Mr. Driller games. Mario 64 DS would have been great if they had gotten the touchscreen movement to work just a little better. (Tip to Nintendo: don't move the little control circle around if the user reaches the edge.)
Wario Ware was cool but seems a little lacking compared to the first (I think it's the music actually that's the problem, the original actually rocked but here, with a couple of exceptions, it's not as good in the DS one). Feel the Magic is cool, but seems short-lived and gimmicky.
Nintendogs and Electroplankton (gotta love those names!) seem like they might be a considerable improvement. Namco's Pac Pix looks like it just *may* be cool, but we don't know much about it yet. Nintendo has no less than two "drawing platformers" in the works, the arcade-like Yoshi Touch & Go and Kirby's Magic Paintbrush, that have interesting concepts behind them. And let's not forget Meteos, which in Japan got an absurdly high Famitsu score, something close to straight 9's.
But these are all future releases, it's true that right now it's kind of light for the DS. (Of course, it's still more than what I want to play for the PSP, which can be summed up in one word: Lumines.)
They don't want "english grad student"s to start making games for their system, because then people can complain that platform xyz has alot of shitty games.
Ah, such a dear and warm-hearted response. Now now little one! I'm certain that whatever development attributes I may be lacking, it couldn't possibly equal the similar lack of those readily observable throughout most of the rest of the industry.
As for being an English grad student... well, despite the unfortunate brand name, don't let it fool you -- I suspect I have better programming "skillz" (that is how they're spelling it these days, is it not?) than those responsible for the Mary Kate & Ashley games, and they're on store shelves at WalMart now.
You won't find them on these sites, but BoingBoing had some choice words from Greg Costikiyan (game design pundit and one of the primary guys behind the old Paranoia pen-and-paper RPG) on Iwata's speech. The upshot of his remarks were, basically, sure you're original, but only because the practices of big companies, like Nintendo, made it difficult for other people to take those kinds of risks, by making all their games blockbusters and thus making it difficult for small studios to compete.
At first I thought he had lost it. Thinking about it some more, however, and I can say that actually he's pretty close to the money.
Nintendo has a support website for their developers. While the juicy info is locked off behind site registration (NOT FREE) and such, there is information on what your company can do to gain Nintendo developer status, and what you can do, as an individual developer, to become a licensee. Guess what? They're only looking for established developers.
Let's dissect this for a moment though. In order to program for their system on your own, you must already be an established developer. You can't just tinker, and if you come up with something great, go from there.
I've done some looking into the GBA specs lately, on homebrew sites and such. Here's the secret: the Gameboy Advance is super easy to develop for! You don't even need an official dev kit. Give me a few weeks over the summer and I could easily come up with a working demo of one of my "closet" designs, even though I am not what you would call an "established" developer. (In point of fact, I'm an English grad student.)
But here's my point. It's precisely outsider developers, such as what I'd like to be, who would be most likely to come up with the most inventive and unusual games. And it's established developers who are most likely to give you Guy Game XVIII. Nintendo is not alone in this either -- licensing fees are big bucks, and so are dev kits.
Nintendo is the company, currently existing, that comes up, on the average, with the most innovative games in the industry. I don't think this is arguable. But it all comes from in-house with them. Sony is the only company that has an official path by which a hobbyist can get his own code running on their console -- and it ain't cheap either. Of course Microsoft has tools by which you can develop for Windows, but it's not as easy to pick up on DirectX programming, it seems to me, as it would be to cook something up for the GBA.
Anyway, just a bit of frustrated ranting. You may now resume with your ordinary, everyday existence.
If only Nintendo could really turn that energy into something the marketplace wants to buy. They know PR, but they've lost touch with what consumers actually want.
I'd say the opposite -- their PR sucks, but they know what people would want to buy, were those people to only know they wanted it.
People don't know what they want. They don't know what they would like. That's the entire reason word of mouth is so big in publicizing something -- they trust (rightfully) their friends to tell them what they would like more than ad campaigns. People only have a set of rather conservative preconcieved notions. Nintendo excels at making games that would destroy those notions, were gamers only willing to give them a chance.
I'm sorry to say it, but you are wrong: Mario Kart and Kirby only support LAN play (though Warp Pipe and similar programs can get around this). Phantasy Star Online eps 1 and 2, and Phantasy Star Online C.A.R.D. Revolution, are the only official Gamecube online titles.
You can't make every new game as innovative as Kaitamari Daimatsu or whatever it's called. There are simply not enough ideas and genius developers to pull this out.
You, my friend, are dead wrong.
There was once a time when most new game were different from what came before -- arcades, around late 70s to early 80s. When you don't have much to copy, then you go ahead with anything you can. There has never been as much innovation in video game design since -- and with extremely primitive graphics, need I remind you.
The reason we don't get more Katamari Damacys is because conventional wisdom, that hypnotic bauble beloved of managers, thinks they won't sell. Sometimes they're even right, but that doesn't stop me from avoiding almost anything EXCEPT weird things like that these days.
Also... most developers these days come from a lifetime of playing video games. Those who most want to be game designers are those who've played the most games. The result tends to be a reinforcing cycle, producing a paucity of imagination among developers concerning what a video game could be. Remember that Nintendo's famous Shigeru Miyamoto's educational background wasn't in programming at all, but art.
What looks on the surface to be kid's games quickly turn out to be rather gruesome little Darwinian trials, in the same way Lemmings was gruesome. "Mommy, all my cute little plant people got eaten by the big monster. This isn't a metaphor for life, is it? He wasn't even a boss!"
For instance, the DS. The DS is simply a game boy with two screens, one you can touch. But they tought it as something that is gonna change gaming. How? How exactly is this so much different from past designs that people are gaming differently now?
Hopefully, by pushing developers to make completely different kinds of games. So far there's not a lot of that to be seen (a touch screen does not seem to make a good analog controller), but I'm seriously jazzed about both Yoshi Touch and Go and Kirby's Paintbrush, both games in which drawing paths for your characters is the primary play mechanic.
And Nintendo does copy others, though of course they don't admit when they're doing it, and less than other manufacturers. Videogaming is sufficently young that you can't help but copy the competition some of the time.
That rant aside, I just wanted to put in my opinion on the above statement. Developers cannot rely on the latest graphics and more powerful machines? Correct me if I am wrong, but Half-Life 2, EverQuest 2, Doom 3, Far Cry and a few upcoming games (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. etc) rely almost completely on the latest technology. While it might not make for the best games it is a tried and true method to attract new gamers.
But they're all iterations of the same basic kinds of technology, tech that's starting to give us diminishing returns. Revolution will be trying (John Cleese voice) something completely different.
The great thing about this tactic is that, if performed right, it could take Revolution completely out of the same competition space dominated by Sony. Make it a must-have for whatever ultra-cool features it might have, and many people will make it their second system after PS3, and people who ordinarily never play videogames may even become interested in it.
At least, that's what I hope will happen. Rah, Nintendo!
Breaking WiFi only mitigates the connection's security down to the level of wired Ethernet. You still have to exploit vulnerabilities beyond that point to gain access to a system.
And remember, we WANT this to happen! Breaking security, in this case, means less a hacker stealing bank passwords than us getting to run our own code on Revolution. THAT would be GREAT.
Wolfenstein: id's update of the class doesn't really have a lot to do with it other than setting. Even so, Mario 64 is an earlier example than the one the parent gave.
Dragon's Lair was a substantially different kind of game, actually a cartoon with a (very) simple game shoehorned into it. But you're right that Wind Waker wasn't the first cartoony game, though it pulled it off particularly well.
Lots of people have replied to you so far, but what can I say, I love the game.
To me, the game's biggest innovation is that it's just as much a platform game as a fighting game. No other fighter has as much use for vertical maneuverability.
I also agree with Smash's other defenders, it is a game in which a skilled player can utterly rule. And yet, thankfully, unlike in other fighters combos are only a very small part of the system. And some characters have some very devilish secrets, like Zelda's mid-air "lightning kick" that's deadly if it's performed from exactly the right distance.
I do know people who think the biggest flaw with Smash Melee (the Gamecube version) is that it's too fast. Compared to it, the fast-paced N64 original is downright methodical.
Yeah, that's the really cool thing about Iwata, besides the fact that he doesn't have a little "?!" after his title. I have to wonder what Yamaguchi was smoking when he hired an actual developer, and one of Nintendo's better ones, to be company president, but the idealistic part of me loves it. Take that Peter Principle!
Of course, it could also be said that you need different skills to be a great developer and a great executive. Gates never did that much coding after all, and probably no one within three feet of org chart of the top spot at Sony knows what a compiler is, but business (and its Machivellian attributes) are things they know all too well.
Assuming (a) the consumer actually needs a USB drive and (b) there's enough extra space on the USB drive for the consumer's needs. Even if those are both true, that only works the first time the consumer buys a USB game.
I'm confident that once the public finds out they can have their very own Emily Dickenson electronic virtual pet on their keychain, and have it connect to other literary virtual pets, that the legenary American drive for consumption will cause everyone to run out and buy ten each.
Er... well, that's the THEORY at least. Heh.
(Actually I've been working, off and on, on a game design that would just LOVE the kind of hardware that would make a pocket Emily Dickenson possible. Some day, Gadget, some day! Mrroowowr!)
Like I said a few days ago - google is in the business of making money, not helping you find things on the internet - that is just a side effect.
I do not buy into this, not in the way you express it. Google got where they are today by not doing precisely those things that were rampant with other search engines: offering paid rankings, putting obnoxious image and flash ad banners on their results sites, popups, etc.
Those other sites were in the business of making money, not helping you find things on the Internet, too. Then Google came along and recognized how you don't MAKE money in search unless you put the customer ahead of short-term profit concerns, opened a modest business, and then ate the other search engines' respective lunches in three quick bites. Google's search superiority caused this? It was unquestionably a factor, but I'd havev gladly used Altavista instead if their ethical policies from around the time of Google's birth were reversed.
Put more concisely: if you're running a business, sure you're in it to make money, but making sure your customers don't hate you in the process is a necessary part of that.
Slashdot Mirror
I should perhaps elaborate a little. Sony's paths to getting hobbyist code running on their systems are the Yaroze programmable version of the PSX, and the Linux kit for PS2. Which are far from a lot, but are still better than what Nintendo's offered.
I can paint Nintendo as developer unfriendly -- homebrew developer unfriendly! So is Sony (if you don't have one of their pricy devices) and so is Microsoft (if you're talking about Xbox and not Windows). But those exceptions are, of course, just quibbles, and I didn't mean to imply that Nintendo was more or less unfriendly than the others. I just mentioned the Sony thing because I wanted to be as factually correct as I could, and I still remembered about Yaroze.
Unless, of course, you're talking about hobbyist development. (In which case, why do you need a dev kit?)
You try getting your work on store shelves anywhere without a Nintendo license. The Color Dreams days are long past. And anyway, if one just wants to make games then it's arguable that all that corporate stuff is just a distraction.
The dev kit costs $10-20k. Considering you're going to have a budget of about a million dollars (on the low end) to put out a full 3-d title for the Cube, a ten-thousand-dollar dev kit would be something you'd work into your budget, and it's a one-time expense. Yeah, if you were one person the devkit would be prohibitively costly - but we've already established that they don't license individuals.
And that's part of my beef, you see.
Your example used the Gamecube, which is fairly big technology, but I was thinking myself of the Gameboy Advance. The system is just not that hard to develop for, and it is still in the realm of possibility for one really motivated person to "do it all" for that platform, or at least create a demo for it in order to try to get a company interested. Indeed, it may be the last potential do-it-all platform, excepting maybe the DS.
I wonder why you use the word "stranglehold," as though Nintendo were depriving the world of some precious commodity. Last I checked, computers that can run games are somewhat common.
I use the term "stranglehold" to refer to the proprietary nature of the platform, and how it just seems wrong somehow that not just anyone can make stuff for it. Yeah, I know, if I see something wrong with that then I must seen something wrong with a lot of things too, and I do, but that's an issue for another day.
And also... well, the GBA is in a unique position in the game industry these days, because developing for it is so close to the hardware. You can still develop your whole code in assembly for it if you want. Reading up on some of the technical information for it, painstakingly discovered by hobbyists, I'm reminded of my old Commodore 64 days, and I have to admit, it's got my blood going. It just looks really cool to mess around with, and when you're a frustrated former hobbyist programmer who wants to mess around with something that's actually fun to program for again... maybe that could give you a bit of insight as to why I'm interested in the GBA.
Licensee and developer are tw different things, a licensee will take a nintendo license and make a game with it...
Not in the sense I'm using it. I don't mean a company that is licensed to use Nintendo characters, but someone who is licensed to produce games for Nintendo's systems, as depicted by the "Licensed by Nintendo" text appearing in so many games for their systems. In that sense, then the two terms are almost the same, especially when you restrict them to indicating Nintendo's own corner of the video game industry.
Oh man, good answer.
I'd respond to you, however, by going to what I believe was Costikiyan's real point in his talk, that it's not Nintendo themselves that stifle innovation, but rather all the companies do, and have been since the licensing system was invented by -- yes, it was Nintendo, back in the NES days with their lockout chip. (Note: this may actually not be true -- did the Intellivision have a lockout chip? Needs to be investigated. Anyway, they didn't have a Nintendo-style licensing program.)
And independents being hired by a company doesn't necessarily help. Independents aren't hired to work on their own ideas, not unless they play considerable dues, in sweat, energy and employment years, enough so that they are eventually granted a designer position.
But in response to your comment that Nintendo actually tries to enforce some quality controls on their games, actually you're right and wrong. All the companies do this, but none of them really do much other than make sure it doesn't crash in some obvious way. (At least, this is my perception of the industry, I'm sure someone'll correct me if I'm grossly mistaken.)
An example of a game that slipped through the cracks: the otherwise generally-interesting N64 game Space Station Silicon Valley, which had a fairly major bug in that one of the special secret goals needed to get the "real" ending was, in fact, impossible to achieve. I bought the game and was rather annoyed to discover this. I have to wonder where Nintendo's QA was then.
Well the game is similar in theme, in some ways, to Lemmings. Pikmin have about the same life expectancy. But honest forces me to report that Pikmin's play is not actually a great deal like Lemmings. (Neither is it like a real time strategy game either. In fact, I've yet to come up with a good other game to compare it to.)
Basically, you have to prove that you make games, and that you have enough money to not go bankrupt any time soon.
If you think that's an unreasonable expectation, I really have to wonder how dedicated you are to making your "outside developer" status a reality.
Bankruptcy, indeed having a company at all, isn't necessarily a requirement to making GBA titles. But you DO have to pay some serious cash to get a development kit, and one look at the warioworld website shows the bar is put higher than your words imply.
Further, you have to remember that the license permission system is largely an artifical construct created by the manfacturers to maintain their stranglehold on the production of games for their system. It's an artificial barrier to entry. You could think of it as a way to ensure another Atari 2600-style glut occurs... but then, the market seems pretty glutted with GBA games anyway, and a lost of them don't seem to be anything special.
Heh. Actually that was the statement that set me against Costikiyan's remarks when I first read it, it was too trite and cheap, stretching facts too far to try to get the audience guffawing. A lot of people seem to like that line, including Cory Doctorow, it was in his quote from the transcript that appeared on BoingBoing. I didn't like it so much, though. For me, whenever someone starts off a talk with a statement like that, then no matter how much I respect him -- and I respect Costikiyan a lot, the man's a Nethack booster and co-created Paranoia after all -- I tend to thunk directly into Skeptic Mode, especially when I know a bit about the guy being discussed.
I'm familiar with Iwata's work, a bit: I've played almost every platformer Kirby game they've made (not all of which involved Iwata of course), and I'm a fan of Smash Bros. He is an actual developer and game player himself, something that the management of no other console manufacturer can state. I knew that Iwata was being completely honest in his statements (also an attribute lacking in many managers). I still think Costikiyan was off the mark with his joke, in fact. It may very well be inertia and ignorance of the company's licensing program that's kept Iwata from changing things there. (Of course, that's a big "may.") He's not really been President of Nintendo for that long so far, after all. Anyway, Costikiyan was referring to Nintendo's policies, and Nintendo's historical relations with developers, in his statements, and using them to illustrate the attitudes of the big manufacturers towards licensing. It's just that, in using the most ready hook available to launch into his points, he picked upon one of the few people in power who may understand the situation well enough to change things -- the man worked for HAL when they only had five developers, eventually ran HAL Laboratories, developed games from the NES through Gamecube eras, has created franchises, worked on games that make radical changes to common assumptions. (Kirby: a platformer where the player can pick up and fly at any time! Smash Bros.: a fighting game without a health bar!)
But while Costikiyan may have opened with a cheap joke, he still made, by and large, insightful and important points. I'm just ranting I guess, sorry about that.
Did I say Slashdot would never post a story about that? But anyway, I didn't look at the article you mentioned very much, sorry if there's some duplication involved here but, you see, I'm not an editor, and these are just comments. So I'm allowed. Nyaah.
I see what you mean. I bought a DS lately, and while I've played the hell out of Mr. Driller Drill Spirits, I think that's out of personal fondness for Mr. Driller games. Mario 64 DS would have been great if they had gotten the touchscreen movement to work just a little better. (Tip to Nintendo: don't move the little control circle around if the user reaches the edge.)
Wario Ware was cool but seems a little lacking compared to the first (I think it's the music actually that's the problem, the original actually rocked but here, with a couple of exceptions, it's not as good in the DS one). Feel the Magic is cool, but seems short-lived and gimmicky.
Nintendogs and Electroplankton (gotta love those names!) seem like they might be a considerable improvement. Namco's Pac Pix looks like it just *may* be cool, but we don't know much about it yet. Nintendo has no less than two "drawing platformers" in the works, the arcade-like Yoshi Touch & Go and Kirby's Magic Paintbrush, that have interesting concepts behind them. And let's not forget Meteos, which in Japan got an absurdly high Famitsu score, something close to straight 9's.
But these are all future releases, it's true that right now it's kind of light for the DS. (Of course, it's still more than what I want to play for the PSP, which can be summed up in one word: Lumines.)
Hmmmm... noted, thanks.
They don't want "english grad student"s to start making games for their system, because then people can complain that platform xyz has alot of shitty games.
Ah, such a dear and warm-hearted response. Now now little one! I'm certain that whatever development attributes I may be lacking, it couldn't possibly equal the similar lack of those readily observable throughout most of the rest of the industry.
As for being an English grad student... well, despite the unfortunate brand name, don't let it fool you -- I suspect I have better programming "skillz" (that is how they're spelling it these days, is it not?) than those responsible for the Mary Kate & Ashley games, and they're on store shelves at WalMart now.
You won't find them on these sites, but BoingBoing had some choice words from Greg Costikiyan (game design pundit and one of the primary guys behind the old Paranoia pen-and-paper RPG) on Iwata's speech. The upshot of his remarks were, basically, sure you're original, but only because the practices of big companies, like Nintendo, made it difficult for other people to take those kinds of risks, by making all their games blockbusters and thus making it difficult for small studios to compete.
At first I thought he had lost it. Thinking about it some more, however, and I can say that actually he's pretty close to the money.
Nintendo has a support website for their developers. While the juicy info is locked off behind site registration (NOT FREE) and such, there is information on what your company can do to gain Nintendo developer status, and what you can do, as an individual developer, to become a licensee. Guess what? They're only looking for established developers.
Let's dissect this for a moment though. In order to program for their system on your own, you must already be an established developer. You can't just tinker, and if you come up with something great, go from there.
I've done some looking into the GBA specs lately, on homebrew sites and such. Here's the secret: the Gameboy Advance is super easy to develop for! You don't even need an official dev kit. Give me a few weeks over the summer and I could easily come up with a working demo of one of my "closet" designs, even though I am not what you would call an "established" developer. (In point of fact, I'm an English grad student.)
But here's my point. It's precisely outsider developers, such as what I'd like to be, who would be most likely to come up with the most inventive and unusual games. And it's established developers who are most likely to give you Guy Game XVIII. Nintendo is not alone in this either -- licensing fees are big bucks, and so are dev kits.
Nintendo is the company, currently existing, that comes up, on the average, with the most innovative games in the industry. I don't think this is arguable. But it all comes from in-house with them. Sony is the only company that has an official path by which a hobbyist can get his own code running on their console -- and it ain't cheap either. Of course Microsoft has tools by which you can develop for Windows, but it's not as easy to pick up on DirectX programming, it seems to me, as it would be to cook something up for the GBA.
Anyway, just a bit of frustrated ranting. You may now resume with your ordinary, everyday existence.
If only Nintendo could really turn that energy into something the marketplace wants to buy. They know PR, but they've lost touch with what consumers actually want.
I'd say the opposite -- their PR sucks, but they know what people would want to buy, were those people to only know they wanted it.
People don't know what they want. They don't know what they would like. That's the entire reason word of mouth is so big in publicizing something -- they trust (rightfully) their friends to tell them what they would like more than ad campaigns. People only have a set of rather conservative preconcieved notions. Nintendo excels at making games that would destroy those notions, were gamers only willing to give them a chance.
I'm sorry to say it, but you are wrong: Mario Kart and Kirby only support LAN play (though Warp Pipe and similar programs can get around this). Phantasy Star Online eps 1 and 2, and Phantasy Star Online C.A.R.D. Revolution, are the only official Gamecube online titles.
You can't make every new game as innovative as Kaitamari Daimatsu or whatever it's called. There are simply not enough ideas and genius developers to pull this out.
You, my friend, are dead wrong.
There was once a time when most new game were different from what came before -- arcades, around late 70s to early 80s. When you don't have much to copy, then you go ahead with anything you can. There has never been as much innovation in video game design since -- and with extremely primitive graphics, need I remind you.
The reason we don't get more Katamari Damacys is because conventional wisdom, that hypnotic bauble beloved of managers, thinks they won't sell. Sometimes they're even right, but that doesn't stop me from avoiding almost anything EXCEPT weird things like that these days.
Also... most developers these days come from a lifetime of playing video games. Those who most want to be game designers are those who've played the most games. The result tends to be a reinforcing cycle, producing a paucity of imagination among developers concerning what a video game could be. Remember that Nintendo's famous Shigeru Miyamoto's educational background wasn't in programming at all, but art.
Pikmin and Pikmin 2.
What looks on the surface to be kid's games quickly turn out to be rather gruesome little Darwinian trials, in the same way Lemmings was gruesome. "Mommy, all my cute little plant people got eaten by the big monster. This isn't a metaphor for life, is it? He wasn't even a boss!"
For instance, the DS. The DS is simply a game boy with two screens, one you can touch. But they tought it as something that is gonna change gaming. How? How exactly is this so much different from past designs that people are gaming differently now?
Hopefully, by pushing developers to make completely different kinds of games. So far there's not a lot of that to be seen (a touch screen does not seem to make a good analog controller), but I'm seriously jazzed about both Yoshi Touch and Go and Kirby's Paintbrush, both games in which drawing paths for your characters is the primary play mechanic.
And Nintendo does copy others, though of course they don't admit when they're doing it, and less than other manufacturers. Videogaming is sufficently young that you can't help but copy the competition some of the time.
That rant aside, I just wanted to put in my opinion on the above statement. Developers cannot rely on the latest graphics and more powerful machines? Correct me if I am wrong, but Half-Life 2, EverQuest 2, Doom 3, Far Cry and a few upcoming games (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. etc) rely almost completely on the latest technology. While it might not make for the best games it is a tried and true method to attract new gamers.
But they're all iterations of the same basic kinds of technology, tech that's starting to give us diminishing returns. Revolution will be trying (John Cleese voice) something completely different.
The great thing about this tactic is that, if performed right, it could take Revolution completely out of the same competition space dominated by Sony. Make it a must-have for whatever ultra-cool features it might have, and many people will make it their second system after PS3, and people who ordinarily never play videogames may even become interested in it.
At least, that's what I hope will happen. Rah, Nintendo!
Breaking WiFi only mitigates the connection's security down to the level of wired Ethernet. You still have to exploit vulnerabilities beyond that point to gain access to a system.
And remember, we WANT this to happen! Breaking security, in this case, means less a hacker stealing bank passwords than us getting to run our own code on Revolution. THAT would be GREAT.
Wolfenstein: id's update of the class doesn't really have a lot to do with it other than setting. Even so, Mario 64 is an earlier example than the one the parent gave.
Dragon's Lair was a substantially different kind of game, actually a cartoon with a (very) simple game shoehorned into it. But you're right that Wind Waker wasn't the first cartoony game, though it pulled it off particularly well.
Lots of people have replied to you so far, but what can I say, I love the game.
To me, the game's biggest innovation is that it's just as much a platform game as a fighting game. No other fighter has as much use for vertical maneuverability.
I also agree with Smash's other defenders, it is a game in which a skilled player can utterly rule. And yet, thankfully, unlike in other fighters combos are only a very small part of the system. And some characters have some very devilish secrets, like Zelda's mid-air "lightning kick" that's deadly if it's performed from exactly the right distance.
I do know people who think the biggest flaw with Smash Melee (the Gamecube version) is that it's too fast. Compared to it, the fast-paced N64 original is downright methodical.
Yeah, that's the really cool thing about Iwata, besides the fact that he doesn't have a little "?!" after his title. I have to wonder what Yamaguchi was smoking when he hired an actual developer, and one of Nintendo's better ones, to be company president, but the idealistic part of me loves it. Take that Peter Principle!
Of course, it could also be said that you need different skills to be a great developer and a great executive. Gates never did that much coding after all, and probably no one within three feet of org chart of the top spot at Sony knows what a compiler is, but business (and its Machivellian attributes) are things they know all too well.
...or the lastest "Eventu-Win" RPG.
Now, now! You forgot the little "tm" sign after "Eventu-Win," and the Square-Enix copyright notice.
Assuming (a) the consumer actually needs a USB drive and (b) there's enough extra space on the USB drive for the consumer's needs. Even if those are both true, that only works the first time the consumer buys a USB game.
I'm confident that once the public finds out they can have their very own Emily Dickenson electronic virtual pet on their keychain, and have it connect to other literary virtual pets, that the legenary American drive for consumption will cause everyone to run out and buy ten each.
Er... well, that's the THEORY at least. Heh.
(Actually I've been working, off and on, on a game design that would just LOVE the kind of hardware that would make a pocket Emily Dickenson possible. Some day, Gadget, some day! Mrroowowr!)
Like I said a few days ago - google is in the business of making money, not helping you find things on the internet - that is just a side effect.
I do not buy into this, not in the way you express it. Google got where they are today by not doing precisely those things that were rampant with other search engines: offering paid rankings, putting obnoxious image and flash ad banners on their results sites, popups, etc.
Those other sites were in the business of making money, not helping you find things on the Internet, too. Then Google came along and recognized how you don't MAKE money in search unless you put the customer ahead of short-term profit concerns, opened a modest business, and then ate the other search engines' respective lunches in three quick bites. Google's search superiority caused this? It was unquestionably a factor, but I'd havev gladly used Altavista instead if their ethical policies from around the time of Google's birth were reversed.
Put more concisely: if you're running a business, sure you're in it to make money, but making sure your customers don't hate you in the process is a necessary part of that.