How much is that 1GB stick? 'Cause even the 64MB sticks I've seen around here (which is, admittedly, backwater Statesboro, Georgia) cost more than a Flash USB drive with the same capacity.
Which is not to say that there are 1GB Flash drives here.
The same way Macromedia Flash made it feasible to create a whole new genre of cartoons (web-based). If you put easier tools in the hands of the artists, more (and sometimes better) art is created.
That's only true in an environment where the tools are "democratic," that is, are available to everyone.
Flash is relatively inexpensive. Anyone can make a Flash cartoon, and thus, lots of people do. 90% - nay, 95%, or more - of those are crap, but with so many out there it's inevitable that things like Homestar Runne crop up among them.
But not everyone can afford the pricy development kits and licenses that Sony sells for development on their systems. Hell, not everyone can afford those homebrew kits they made available for the PS1, or PS2 Linux.
It is this that tears the "ease of programming" argument to bits -- since it costs so much to make games for the system, only the people who can afford to hire really good programmers do so.
You honestly think GTA3 would've been successful if they were still drawing out individual sprites using assembly, like they used to?
If it were still somehow in 3D, then yes, I think it would. It takes less time to draw 32 or so really good sprite frames than to make one really good 3D model and animate it. Or at least, that's how it seems to me.
I've found that if you're a western (D&D style) RPG fan, the xBox is the way to go.
You may be on to something here, though the big Xbox RPGs of which I'm aware also have PC versions.
The only thing keeping Nintendo alive is Mario and a couple of other never-ending nostalgia franchises, plus their kid-friendly image. Unless the Revolution really changes things, look for Nintendo to lose even more ground.
You discount Nintendo's design strengths too much I think, but are not wholly wrong. It would be nice to see Nintendo do something new and startling again.
The last FPS I greatly enjoyed was Goldeneye (the N64 game, not the recent EA travesty). It has really good costumes, and a few other minor things to recommend it. Since then, it's been difficult for me to get back into the genre (though I did have some fun playing Serious Sam for a while).
The book certainly has its charms, and certainly isn't worthless, but on almost all counts the movie is better. The artistry is more artistic, the magic is more magical, the movie takes out the last section in Oz (the journey to see Glenda), the movie spends longer in Kansas at the beginning and brings up that nice parallel between Oz and Kansas regulars at the end... and in the book, it wasn't a dream, it just ends with Dorothy back in Kansas.
Wonderfully playable? Yes. Unique? Hardly. Gamespot gave game of the year for GC to Paper Mario 2. Fun little game, but used the standard RPG format that's been used for years (don't tell me switching to an airplane to complete exactly 5 puzzles during the game is "Unique". It isn't).
Paper Mario's true uniqueness comes from the derandomized, battle system that offers a play mechanic that involved changing the rules to battle (Badges). It is true that that was also used in the first game, but in game circles people typically don't complain until you've copied something twice.
Metroid was a fantastic game, but built on a series close to 20 years old. Yeah, but the play style was created anew for the game, due to it being in 3D, so it doesn't count.
Just because a game happens to be in the same "universe," or have the same characters, as a previous one doesn't mean it's a brainless copy of the original, especially in Nintendo's case. The Mario series now numbers eight "main" games: Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., SMB2, SMB3, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine. Each has offered considerable differences from the one before.
For any other company this would be amazing, but Nintendo's reputation has gotten so elevated that every game is now expected to be a revolutionary thing. (How many Crash Bandicoots were made with almost identical gameplay?) Which no one can do, not even Nintendo.
But Nintendo does take chances with their core franchises -- and sometimes they pay the price for those chances, like when a bunch of know-nothing gamers snub Wind Waker because of cel shading. But Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean also bugged some gamers. I thought it was terrific, but some complain that it's largely empty. (I would retort: not nearly as empty as Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field, yet OoT is almost universally adored.)
In fact, the only true "new" series invented with the GameCube are Pikmin and Viewtiful Joe (the second from Capcom).
You forgot Animal Crossing, sport, which is Nintendo's biggest advance this year. There's also Cubivore and Doshin the Giant, two games that got extremely short shrift. (Cubivore was almost impossible to find, and Doshin didn't even get a U.S. release.)
Some people like that, but I like the "Jet Set Radios" and "Kalimari Darcies" (sp?) of the world.
I'm starting to think that the DS will be more popular, but for a completely different reason:
Nintendo owns the under-18 set, and portables are simply much more interesting when you both don't personally don't have the money for a good home entertainment setup (such as is used for consoles), and when you have school to go to every day.
Of course, adults go to work, but they tend to have much more dire perils for being caught playing games. (Ranging from getting fired to looking really dorky.)
I hate to break it to you pal, not only are your ideas NOT revolutionary, you also have no freaking clue what a design document looks like. Real design docs go over 200 pages. You've got what...6 paragraphs?
I agree with you in principle, but not in practice. There's no reason to tear this guy down, I'm sure the job market will do that all too well. And if he really WERE professional, then he shouldn't be posting his complete work on the Internet anyway....
I am, too, an unemployed, would-be designer. I actually *have* written up a lengthy design document, around the order of 60-70 pages. So far, it hasn't helped my employment chances any.
I wonder, by the way, what could be said in 200 pages relating to a game design that couldn't be said in 70. Even great designs shouldn't take THAT much verbiage to express, indeed simpler is usually better.
A developer like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, for instance, is constantly being put in the chair of developing his Zelda series.
Okay, here's the thing.
Miyamoto... doesn't actually design that much, anymore.
Check the credits of most of Nintendo's core titles and you'll see that the role of primary designer has been handed down, mostly, to a second generation of Nintendo designers.
Sometimes this results in new ideas, like Majora's Mask's real-time system, and interesting new takes on old ones, like Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean, loaded with secrets on the level of the original game.
Sometimes, however, this results in nervous young programmers, desperate to not mess things up, sticking a little too close to the formula. It doesn't help that gamers are usually a whiny, petulant bunch, ready to rip apart anything different they don't like (mutter cel-shading mutter).
Actually, let me launch on a min-tirade there. What is it about cel-shading that turned off so many gamers? The game itself is pure Zelda, and the ending is the best the series has seen. Do people really want to imagine themselves as being Link to such a degree that, when he's depicted in an animated fashion (I purposely avoid the word "cartoonishly" -- Link has never been cartoonish), they feel cheated? That is not a healthy way to play, the PS2 equivilent of that is people laughing to themselves when they make the protagonish of a GTA game bounces around with a prostitute in a car, then shoot her for cash when she gets out.
Anyway, Miyamoto's influence at Nintendo isn't done, of course, some of the better ideas to come out of there (like for Pikmin for instance) come from him, and he does check up on those guys fairly regularly.
But he's only one man, and 3D games take a lot more manpower to create than 2D.
Sony and Microsoft's fortunes may fluctuate as they fight each other, but Nintendo will always have that core group of gamers. They're like the Apple of the console world. (They even have their iPod-like success story, the Gameboy Advance.)
I do think that Nintendo's next console needs to be something special, and that they should diversify into new game series in addition to continuing the old ones. Animal Crossing and Pikmin/Pikmin 2 are their two major contributions to gaming this generation, both amazing but not blockbusters.
Maybe this mean we'll *finally* get an "official" Mozilla/Firefox Googlebar, complete with Pagerank measurer? It's not like the unofficial one is lacking in features (other than Pagerank), but it's always annoyed me that all Google is willing to support with the official bar is IE.
Someone else also mentioned Google Desktop Search, which will search through your IE cache in its scan of your hard drive but ignores Firefox's. Google has a bit of catching up to do to support Firefox as well as it does IE with extra features....
Sony licensing the UMD means UMD drives are inevitable.
I'm not so sure. The format is basically a smaller DVD that holds less. It's only benefit at the moment is that PSPs can read it......and if you think Sony will leave open a path that allows arbitrary content, even just video files, to be played on their system then I've got a bridge to sell you. They want DVD-like license fees from this thing, not to allow Joe Consumer to use the device for their own purposes.
I see a long road towards widespread adoption for UMD. If the PSP does really well, then that could be a good first step towards getting it adopted, but that's not a sure thing yet.
I agree with the sentiment, but not the statement. You're a gamer even if you just play old NES games. Unqualified statements of console enthusiasm are... unseemly... on Slashdot.
Also, you forgot Pikmin 2.
Re:Everyone's got the wrong headline...
on
Sony PSP Sales Way Up
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From the article:
"I must admit (sales) are not big enough yet," Sony Computer Entertainment president and chief executive Ken Kutaragi told a news conference.
You're right. It's outright said in the linked article by a Sony exec that sales haven't ramped up yet! Who's editing these stories?
Considering that the whole PSP vs. DS fracas is one of the more strident arguments going on on Slashdot at the moment, I'm really scratching my head at how this one slipped by.
The last recorded incidence? What about, for example, now? Or do you not think that XBox, PS2 and Gamecube are sharing the market?
The sheer difference of scale here, with Sony so dominating the console video game landscape, that's what I'm referring to as a shut-out. It's just not competitive.
and I dont want to rain in your parade, the DS itself may have had some good reviews but the games definetily did not, check gamerankings.com the DS sales last christmas werent that "spectacular" either (the gba did pretty well though)
The DS did pretty well actually, it just didn't match the GBA's perennial great sales.
As for whether the games were good or not, I'll decide for myself -- sites like gamerankings, which function as aggregators of scores from other review places, are thus notoriously succeptable to the failings of those sources, such as grade inflation to receive first look at a title and groupthink. Much has already been said around these parts of the foibles of game magazine reviews.
The Genesis did pretty well, it led the 16-bit generation by a fair margin until, if I remember correctly (and I may very well not) about two years into the SNES' release, and it was still competitive for a while after. It was the last recorded incidence of two consoles sharing the market without one shutting the other out, more or less.
I think you're going too far with your summation of the "cure" to the problems with gaming journalism. It is certainly possible to write a good review, or even entry-level discussion, of a game without being stupid or obnoxious. I do it semi-often for websites.
Regularly, I try to write the kind of review I'd like to read, and it is easily possible, even in the 800-word limits mentioned by the source article.
The article presents a bad counter-example, giving potential alternate topics for a Half Life 2 review that sound, frankly, like they came from some half-baked literary essay. But it's not necessary to go that far to write a good review or essay for the gaming press.
Imagine if movie reviews were written like the average game review... Ninety percent of the review would be a discussion of the special effects and technical details, with ten percent left for things like plot and characterisation.
To be fair, story is a much larger part of what makes a movie good than a game. Games have been able to get away so long without having good stories because, for many games, they are irrelevant to (and sometimes even get in the way of) gameplay.
That said, most games have intelligence-insulting stories, and even the really good ones usually have poor writing.
Okay, sure, Nintendo spread this hugely pervasive meme, completely unsupported by fact, that console games were completely and totally dead before the NES came along, and no one happened to notice this while it was happening.
The fact that I could, and did, buy Atari 2600 games for less than a buck each at local drugstores during this time, and in fact built up a lot of my library at this time, a couple of years before the NES saw U.S. shores, was just pure coincidence.
It would be wrong to say that Nintendo does not have propaganda (what would Nintendo Power be?), but at least their propaganda is obvious and almost marked as such (the big word "Nintendo" in Nintendo Power's title). But if anyone has propaganda it'd be Microsoft, which has managed to spin its similar-to-Nintendo, far-behind-Sony sales into something akin to a tie with them. If Nintendo had effective propaganda they'd be doing that too, and obviously, they have not.
The game industry tanked because of good ol' supply and demand. They simply supplied too much, while the demand couldn't match.
This is not true, as even the best games couldn't sell at this time. David Crane's Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, an amazing 2600 game with polyphonic music and brilliant design for its time (almost an NES-style adventure game itself), was released on the heels of the game crash, and yet it is much, much less famous than the original Pitfall. Move the crash back a year, and this would have been the game to change the industry forever, and not Super Mario Bros.
If open development really was a problem, then why haven't we ever seen the same problem with PC games? There was never a PC game crash.
Maybe that's because PCs were still being used almost exclusive for business purposes back then? Even home computer games (Apple, Atari, Commodore) never reached the same market share that the 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision did in their heyday.
Slashdot Mirror
How much is that 1GB stick? 'Cause even the 64MB sticks I've seen around here (which is, admittedly, backwater Statesboro, Georgia) cost more than a Flash USB drive with the same capacity.
Which is not to say that there are 1GB Flash drives here.
The same way Macromedia Flash made it feasible to create a whole new genre of cartoons (web-based). If you put easier tools in the hands of the artists, more (and sometimes better) art is created.
That's only true in an environment where the tools are "democratic," that is, are available to everyone.
Flash is relatively inexpensive. Anyone can make a Flash cartoon, and thus, lots of people do. 90% - nay, 95%, or more - of those are crap, but with so many out there it's inevitable that things like Homestar Runne crop up among them.
But not everyone can afford the pricy development kits and licenses that Sony sells for development on their systems. Hell, not everyone can afford those homebrew kits they made available for the PS1, or PS2 Linux.
It is this that tears the "ease of programming" argument to bits -- since it costs so much to make games for the system, only the people who can afford to hire really good programmers do so.
You honestly think GTA3 would've been successful if they were still drawing out individual sprites using assembly, like they used to?
If it were still somehow in 3D, then yes, I think it would. It takes less time to draw 32 or so really good sprite frames than to make one really good 3D model and animate it. Or at least, that's how it seems to me.
I've found that if you're a western (D&D style) RPG fan, the xBox is the way to go.
You may be on to something here, though the big Xbox RPGs of which I'm aware also have PC versions.
The only thing keeping Nintendo alive is Mario and a couple of other never-ending nostalgia franchises, plus their kid-friendly image. Unless the Revolution really changes things, look for Nintendo to lose even more ground.
You discount Nintendo's design strengths too much I think, but are not wholly wrong. It would be nice to see Nintendo do something new and startling again.
Go tell it on the mountain, brother!
The last FPS I greatly enjoyed was Goldeneye (the N64 game, not the recent EA travesty). It has really good costumes, and a few other minor things to recommend it. Since then, it's been difficult for me to get back into the genre (though I did have some fun playing Serious Sam for a while).
The Wizard of Oz.
The book certainly has its charms, and certainly isn't worthless, but on almost all counts the movie is better. The artistry is more artistic, the magic is more magical, the movie takes out the last section in Oz (the journey to see Glenda), the movie spends longer in Kansas at the beginning and brings up that nice parallel between Oz and Kansas regulars at the end... and in the book, it wasn't a dream, it just ends with Dorothy back in Kansas.
Wonderfully playable? Yes. Unique? Hardly. Gamespot gave game of the year for GC to Paper Mario 2. Fun little game, but used the standard RPG format that's been used for years (don't tell me switching to an airplane to complete exactly 5 puzzles during the game is "Unique". It isn't).
Paper Mario's true uniqueness comes from the derandomized, battle system that offers a play mechanic that involved changing the rules to battle (Badges). It is true that that was also used in the first game, but in game circles people typically don't complain until you've copied something twice.
Metroid was a fantastic game, but built on a series close to 20 years old.
Yeah, but the play style was created anew for the game, due to it being in 3D, so it doesn't count.
Just because a game happens to be in the same "universe," or have the same characters, as a previous one doesn't mean it's a brainless copy of the original, especially in Nintendo's case. The Mario series now numbers eight "main" games: Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., SMB2, SMB3, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine. Each has offered considerable differences from the one before.
For any other company this would be amazing, but Nintendo's reputation has gotten so elevated that every game is now expected to be a revolutionary thing. (How many Crash Bandicoots were made with almost identical gameplay?) Which no one can do, not even Nintendo.
But Nintendo does take chances with their core franchises -- and sometimes they pay the price for those chances, like when a bunch of know-nothing gamers snub Wind Waker because of cel shading. But Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean also bugged some gamers. I thought it was terrific, but some complain that it's largely empty. (I would retort: not nearly as empty as Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field, yet OoT is almost universally adored.)
In fact, the only true "new" series invented with the GameCube are Pikmin and Viewtiful Joe (the second from Capcom).
You forgot Animal Crossing, sport, which is Nintendo's biggest advance this year. There's also Cubivore and Doshin the Giant, two games that got extremely short shrift. (Cubivore was almost impossible to find, and Doshin didn't even get a U.S. release.)
Some people like that, but I like the "Jet Set Radios" and "Kalimari Darcies" (sp?) of the world.
I do agree with your opinion on those two games.
I think he'll be interested to hear that he's "at it again."
I'm starting to think that the DS will be more popular, but for a completely different reason:
Nintendo owns the under-18 set, and portables are simply much more interesting when you both don't personally don't have the money for a good home entertainment setup (such as is used for consoles), and when you have school to go to every day.
Of course, adults go to work, but they tend to have much more dire perils for being caught playing games. (Ranging from getting fired to looking really dorky.)
I hate to break it to you pal, not only are your ideas NOT revolutionary, you also have no freaking clue what a design document looks like. Real design docs go over 200 pages. You've got what...6 paragraphs?
I agree with you in principle, but not in practice. There's no reason to tear this guy down, I'm sure the job market will do that all too well. And if he really WERE professional, then he shouldn't be posting his complete work on the Internet anyway....
I am, too, an unemployed, would-be designer. I actually *have* written up a lengthy design document, around the order of 60-70 pages. So far, it hasn't helped my employment chances any.
I wonder, by the way, what could be said in 200 pages relating to a game design that couldn't be said in 70. Even great designs shouldn't take THAT much verbiage to express, indeed simpler is usually better.
A developer like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, for instance, is constantly being put in the chair of developing his Zelda series.
Okay, here's the thing.
Miyamoto... doesn't actually design that much, anymore.
Check the credits of most of Nintendo's core titles and you'll see that the role of primary designer has been handed down, mostly, to a second generation of Nintendo designers.
Sometimes this results in new ideas, like Majora's Mask's real-time system, and interesting new takes on old ones, like Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean, loaded with secrets on the level of the original game.
Sometimes, however, this results in nervous young programmers, desperate to not mess things up, sticking a little too close to the formula. It doesn't help that gamers are usually a whiny, petulant bunch, ready to rip apart anything different they don't like (mutter cel-shading mutter).
Actually, let me launch on a min-tirade there. What is it about cel-shading that turned off so many gamers? The game itself is pure Zelda, and the ending is the best the series has seen. Do people really want to imagine themselves as being Link to such a degree that, when he's depicted in an animated fashion (I purposely avoid the word "cartoonishly" -- Link has never been cartoonish), they feel cheated? That is not a healthy way to play, the PS2 equivilent of that is people laughing to themselves when they make the protagonish of a GTA game bounces around with a prostitute in a car, then shoot her for cash when she gets out.
Anyway, Miyamoto's influence at Nintendo isn't done, of course, some of the better ideas to come out of there (like for Pikmin for instance) come from him, and he does check up on those guys fairly regularly.
But he's only one man, and 3D games take a lot more manpower to create than 2D.
Sony and Microsoft's fortunes may fluctuate as they fight each other, but Nintendo will always have that core group of gamers. They're like the Apple of the console world. (They even have their iPod-like success story, the Gameboy Advance.)
I do think that Nintendo's next console needs to be something special, and that they should diversify into new game series in addition to continuing the old ones. Animal Crossing and Pikmin/Pikmin 2 are their two major contributions to gaming this generation, both amazing but not blockbusters.
If they die, I'm sure they'll just drop offscreen and go down to 2 lives from 3.
Dammit! Where's a turtle shell and a staircase when we need it?
Maybe this mean we'll *finally* get an "official" Mozilla/Firefox Googlebar, complete with Pagerank measurer? It's not like the unofficial one is lacking in features (other than Pagerank), but it's always annoyed me that all Google is willing to support with the official bar is IE.
Someone else also mentioned Google Desktop Search, which will search through your IE cache in its scan of your hard drive but ignores Firefox's. Google has a bit of catching up to do to support Firefox as well as it does IE with extra features....
Sony licensing the UMD means UMD drives are inevitable.
...and if you think Sony will leave open a path that allows arbitrary content, even just video files, to be played on their system then I've got a bridge to sell you. They want DVD-like license fees from this thing, not to allow Joe Consumer to use the device for their own purposes.
I'm not so sure. The format is basically a smaller DVD that holds less. It's only benefit at the moment is that PSPs can read it...
I see a long road towards widespread adoption for UMD. If the PSP does really well, then that could be a good first step towards getting it adopted, but that's not a sure thing yet.
Damn near every unit shipped has been sold. This is the history of the PSP.
But that is not said, at least not plainly, in the article. At the very least, there should be a link to sales figures up there to illustrate that.
I agree with the sentiment, but not the statement. You're a gamer even if you just play old NES games. Unqualified statements of console enthusiasm are... unseemly... on Slashdot.
Also, you forgot Pikmin 2.
From the article:
"I must admit (sales) are not big enough yet," Sony Computer Entertainment president and chief executive Ken Kutaragi told a news conference.
You're right. It's outright said in the linked article by a Sony exec that sales haven't ramped up yet! Who's editing these stories?
Considering that the whole PSP vs. DS fracas is one of the more strident arguments going on on Slashdot at the moment, I'm really scratching my head at how this one slipped by.
The last recorded incidence? What about, for example, now? Or do you not think that XBox, PS2 and Gamecube are sharing the market?
The sheer difference of scale here, with Sony so dominating the console video game landscape, that's what I'm referring to as a shut-out. It's just not competitive.
and I dont want to rain in your parade, the DS itself may have had some good reviews but the games definetily did not, check gamerankings.com the DS sales last christmas werent that "spectacular" either (the gba did pretty well though)
The DS did pretty well actually, it just didn't match the GBA's perennial great sales.
As for whether the games were good or not, I'll decide for myself -- sites like gamerankings, which function as aggregators of scores from other review places, are thus notoriously succeptable to the failings of those sources, such as grade inflation to receive first look at a title and groupthink. Much has already been said around these parts of the foibles of game magazine reviews.
That said, Mario 64 DS got 88%, which is not bad.
Remember, the proper way to spell Xbox is "XBOX." Always to remember to spell Xbox like "XBOX." Never spell Xbox like this: "Xbox."
Always, always, spell Xbox correctly.
----
In other words, I'll decide for myself how to capitalize some lame corporation's product, their marketing and trademark departments be damned.
The Genesis did pretty well, it led the 16-bit generation by a fair margin until, if I remember correctly (and I may very well not) about two years into the SNES' release, and it was still competitive for a while after. It was the last recorded incidence of two consoles sharing the market without one shutting the other out, more or less.
It probably has to do with the fact that Xboxen are marketed at a higher aged demographic (I'm 34 today, f'rinstance).
Ah, I assume that explains DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball does it?
(Time to do some flame ducking myself, woo-hoo!)
I think you're going too far with your summation of the "cure" to the problems with gaming journalism. It is certainly possible to write a good review, or even entry-level discussion, of a game without being stupid or obnoxious. I do it semi-often for websites.
Regularly, I try to write the kind of review I'd like to read, and it is easily possible, even in the 800-word limits mentioned by the source article.
The article presents a bad counter-example, giving potential alternate topics for a Half Life 2 review that sound, frankly, like they came from some half-baked literary essay. But it's not necessary to go that far to write a good review or essay for the gaming press.
Imagine if movie reviews were written like the average game review...
Ninety percent of the review would be a discussion of the special effects and technical details, with ten percent left for things like plot and characterisation.
To be fair, story is a much larger part of what makes a movie good than a game. Games have been able to get away so long without having good stories because, for many games, they are irrelevant to (and sometimes even get in the way of) gameplay.
That said, most games have intelligence-insulting stories, and even the really good ones usually have poor writing.
Sounds like official Nintendo propaganda.
Oh for the love of....
Okay, sure, Nintendo spread this hugely pervasive meme, completely unsupported by fact, that console games were completely and totally dead before the NES came along, and no one happened to notice this while it was happening.
The fact that I could, and did, buy Atari 2600 games for less than a buck each at local drugstores during this time, and in fact built up a lot of my library at this time, a couple of years before the NES saw U.S. shores, was just pure coincidence.
It would be wrong to say that Nintendo does not have propaganda (what would Nintendo Power be?), but at least their propaganda is obvious and almost marked as such (the big word "Nintendo" in Nintendo Power's title). But if anyone has propaganda it'd be Microsoft, which has managed to spin its similar-to-Nintendo, far-behind-Sony sales into something akin to a tie with them. If Nintendo had effective propaganda they'd be doing that too, and obviously, they have not.
The game industry tanked because of good ol' supply and demand. They simply supplied too much, while the demand couldn't match.
This is not true, as even the best games couldn't sell at this time. David Crane's Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, an amazing 2600 game with polyphonic music and brilliant design for its time (almost an NES-style adventure game itself), was released on the heels of the game crash, and yet it is much, much less famous than the original Pitfall. Move the crash back a year, and this would have been the game to change the industry forever, and not Super Mario Bros.
If open development really was a problem, then why haven't we ever seen the same problem with PC games? There was never a PC game crash.
Maybe that's because PCs were still being used almost exclusive for business purposes back then? Even home computer games (Apple, Atari, Commodore) never reached the same market share that the 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision did in their heyday.