Animation is just a method not a genre, and in Japan it isn't restricted to Disney style stuff.
Neither is it here in the U.S.
I think the guy was referring to the stereotype of anime, somewhat justifiably, that's built up based off of our more-commonly seen anime, like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragonball-Z, Yu-Yu Hakusho, and a good many more. Those things are to Miyazaki as your typical Internet webcomic artist is to Charles Schulz.
Miyazaki actually expresses disdain for most anime (including his own) in the article, he thinks people are obsessing over it too much, and is concerned about "living virtual lives," as opposed to real, grounded ones.
1. The pre-fab WAV file technique is not always so hot. Midway Arcade Treasures 1 and 2, also developed by Digital Eclipse, have some annoying sound bugs that result in the music cutting out in Smash T.V. and Total Carnage, wrong sound effects played at times in Rampart, and the music sounding like it was recorded in analog and re-digitized in Xenophobe. Most of these games are among the more complicated cases for them to handle, it is true, but I'm not inclined to cut them so much slack here, they've been doing this for a while now.
2. Often, the cabinet art for arcade games turns out to be a misfeature. In some of their previous emulations of golden age Atari vector games, the beam drawings are so faint that it makes it difficult to play. In fact, I think this is just because the cabinet artwork takes up so much of the screen. You can turn it off and reclaim that part of the screen, but in the compilation I own (for Dreamcast), it doesn't save this setting to the memory card.
3. One particular problem, in that regard, is the common modern standard that the Start button also be a pause button. Sounds simple, right? Problem is, the Start button should also start the game. So what the Start button should do changes depending on whether a game has already started or not. How does the emulator know if a game has started or not?
Another rant about Midway Arcade Treasures 2: They added an interesting new "setting" to the games in this compilation that disables continuations and health purchases. This is very useful for games where you want to challenge yourself to get as far as you can on one credit.
But the problem is, their implementation of this feature is just plain buggy. Sometimes Xenophobe will add two credits at game start instead of one (holding down the button mapped to the left trigger at game start seems to do this). Gauntlet II does it as well. Sometimes the emulation will misinterpret a game button press as a buy-in request, and put the emulator in a confused state.
Digital Eclipse's emulation efforts have saved a great many worthy games for general audiences, but most of the time their efforts seem to be *just short* of perfect. They also, for the record, always hide the real game's startup displays and operator settings menus behind their own menus, which sometimes leave out interesting options.
Its weird to see DE get tripped up on problems that MAME doesn't have. I guess this demonstrates that they haven't stolen code, true, but they could still improve their efforts a bit.
On a side note, I don't think anyone would have predicted that open-design games such as Grand Theft Auto, sandbox games such as Battlefield 1942, and innovative customizable games such as Deus Ex would be such huge influences on the future of game design.
GTA is simply an elaboration (though a great one) upon the ideas in the Zelda series.
The biggest disappointment in this generation of games has to be the lack of innovation in artificial intelligence.
Oh so wrong, Altoid-breath! The biggest disappointment this generation is that games are still largely as they were in the LAST generation. The same old genres, for the most part, are still the most popular. Not even Nintendo has escaped this as far as one would expect.
Ugh, the Emotion Engine. What a disappointment. Sure, I've played games in which I felt intense emotions besides fear, anxiety, rage, and excitement. But not that many.
Wow, so someone actually *did* drink Sony's code name marketing Kool Aid? You don't get emotion from a chip, foo! You get it from artistic direction. The best emotion I've ever seen in a game comes from a PS1 game, Grandia, that didn't even use 3D for its characters.
That game oozed with style, and even though it was simple and quick, it became one of my favorites because the main character, Sly, had real character. He wasn't some fuzzy-ass thing with pointed ears and an attitude. He was a smart, slick thief, and a raccoon no less. Not so strangely it worked.
I've never played Sly Cooper, but I want to like it if just because Sucker Punch made Rocket: Robot on Wheels. That said, it sounds like this guy is two steps behind the curve -- not having "attitude" helps something not to be bad, but is not necessarily good by itself. I'm frankly unsure where his racoonness comes into play.
Former Naughty Dog President Jason Ruben once said that the amount of polygons you have on screen doesn't matter anymore, it's what's you do with them. He is often right, and on this point, he is dead on.
Well, lah-de-dah dude, welcome to the obvious party.
New ideas in sports games have really accelerated in the last three years as Visual Concepts and EA have fiercely fought for market dominance. But things could always be better. For instance, in the latest NBA Live, when a new rookie talks to a coach, you should see him doing it and see the reaction of the team players.
Oh, I'm sure that'd add so much to a sports game.
Why hasn't anyone taken a clue from this revolutionary game and made a newer better one?
Hopefully because they're working on their own unique new concepts, but I know better than to invest in such a pipe dream. Probably because they don't "get" it, or think they have but failed due to one of those unique ways developers have of missing the point in so many subtle ways.
Why isn't there some smart developer out there making a better, smarter, faster version of Warren Specter's Deus Ex?
Dude, I think you just nailed it. It was designed by Warren Spector! That is not an easy act to top.
The article talks more about game superficials as it does about true game design. It's not really that hot a story, I'd say. The author sounds like he might be at the beginning of true insight in his gaming journalism career, but I'd give him a few years first -- assuming he's still playing games by then.
But Alexander is a fairly new movie while RE:A has been stewing for a few months. Alexander's critical drubbing has probably given it an artifically low score for the moment.
But then, this is the imdb we're talking about. I don't know if I'd call that an objective measure of quality....
I'm still amazed that the DS comes with something that you could actually compose music on, and people don't seem think this is anything special.
Let me correct this before someone corrects me first...
This was a mistake on my part, the music composition tool is *available* for the DS, as part of a game for it, but doesn't come *with* it, out of the box.
[except when getting sued because they didn't patent, e.g., waiting in line to use the john on an airplane by holding a ticket instead of by standing in the aile.: Patented by IBM and dedicated to the public as a good will measure].
Wow, what an example.
You are great.
HiThere - 15173
You have an amazing wisdom and power.
(An honest compliment, turned into a lame Nintendo game reference. Just another day on Slashdot!)
Oy, tell me about it. I'm kinda annoyed, by the way, that my post got modded Troll, but oh well, these things happen.
I'm still amazed that the DS comes with something that you could actually compose music on, and people don't seem think this is anything special.
All Nintendo has to do is add an export filter to this thing (possible, and easy, considering the wireless connection, though of course that doesn't mean they're gonna do it) and they could actually have a hobbyist musician market for this thing.
Analysts say the new zelda game will be delayed and then passed to the next console Nintendo is working on.
Which analysts? This is interesting news, but I'd like to know where it came from.
Theres no other interesting projects for the cube at sight.
Mario 128 (or whatever they'll call it). Yeah, I still think it's coming, fool that I am. Also, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat.
The same can be said for the other consoles though , GTA:SA finally showed up.
Yeah, but that's a big "finally," it's the third GTA game for the system.
I'm holding out hope that there might be something cool left in this cycle, if just because money is so tight for me right now that my next console might be some time off, regardless of their coolness.
Yes, and this is why there are SO many great games on the Xbox.
Oh, wait a minute....
(This has been your Snark of the Day!)
More seriously, I've played plenty of games on a variety of systems that you could play in triple quadraphonic stereo surround sound using Vogon speakers that utilize the objects around you as natural sounding boards before destroying your planet, and those games would make you wish that, in fact, their sound did destroy the planet, so as to save you from the agony of playing them.
Yeah, and there's also the video cartridges for GameBoy Advance, beloved of all who want to watch low resolution, tiny-screened versions of Pokemon, Nicktoons and kiddy anime for about the same price as it would cost to get the same stuff on DVD, if not more.
A TV tuner, at least, would enable watching *other* bad shows.
Wow, I wasn't aware of that. Seems fairly unlikely actually, though, does the DS even have a video signal that exists in a form that a TV could display without conversion?
And indeed, I really liked Wind Waker's look, I thought it worked really well. Even better, the gameplay was just brilliant and really brought that feeling of exploration back to the series.
But the fact remains, the look of the game became something of a rallying cry for idiots. "Celda! Celda!" And there are a lot of idiots.
This just doesn't impress me that much. You gotta be near a wireless hub to watch video, you can only see what makes it through Sony's narrow rights filter, and it's unlikely you'll be able to save a copy of what you watch.
A TV tuner, a piece of technology you could get way back for TurboDuos and Game Gears, would actually be cooler. There's already one announced for the DS, but that doesn't mean much since a third party will probably make one for the PSP in short order.
I'm serious guys, this is just so awesomely cool. I can't believe there are so many people down on this here, they're releasing a cartridge with a full music composition tool in it! Here's a sampling of comments:
"Is this Nintendo's way to prove that the DS can be more than just a video game player?"
Oy, what's with all the antagonism? Does everything have to be through the reacting-to-Sony filter? One thing about Nintendo, you can't honestly say they plan products just to react to other companies.
"I have to ask if there's going to be any practical way to get your MIDI compositions off the DS (as opposed to sharing between DS's) once they're done."
It'd be cool to get them off my DS, yes, but c'mon! Remember the many hours kids spent with Mario Paint? (Link is to a large, but familiar, Quicktime file.) Fun creation software for game systems is a huge, largely untapped, market, and one of the ways that video gaming can actually make a positive impact on this tired old world. I'd think that Slashdot's strong individualistic streak would turn people out in this game's favor.
Plus, since the DS has wireless, and the composition mode probably has multi-system playback, I figure it's only a matter of time before someone hacks together a program that intercepts the intersystem play stream and saves it in a file.
"...about half of the titles for DS right now are odd enough to make Sega shake their head."
And why do I love Sega? It ain't because of Sonic Adventure!
"It's not the first time we have seen a music composer on a PDA. No that is not a typo. The DS is a god damn PDA."
Thanks for that insightful comment. Labels are fun, kids!
ARGH! Don't you guys see how COOL this is?! Is that worth nothing?
Isn't is possible that the GTA game is going to be top-down like the first two and the recent GBA game were?
That would be deadly. People expect 2D from the Gameboy Advance, but they won't be expecting it from the PSP. Whatever the strengths of the top-down games, there's such a public perception of the GTA games being 3D these days that, were Rockstar to go the top-down only route, people would probably see it as a tremendous failing of the system. It would be the PSP's version of Zelda cel shading (and would be just as nonsensical). I think that Sony knows this however, so it's almost certain to be 3D anyway.
Assuming it IS 3D... this is definitely great news for the PSP crowd, but still won't definitively hand them the crown. It does mean I may get a PSP myself someday... but nah, if GTA was a system seller for me I'd have gotten a PS2. I'm still (personally) firmly on the DS side of things here.
The fact of the matter is, Sony has perhaps THE best license in gaming with the GTA series. Those games are good enough so that buying a system solely to play them is worthwhile.
I'd still the best license is Zelda, but no matter. What about Final Fantasy?
I disagree about quite a few of those games. Mario Party 6 is far superior to 5. My wife loves it. Also, Mario Tennis is supposedly great. Quite a few of my friends love it.
It may be superior to 5, but it remains that it's still the sixth game, and the one before it was the fifth, in a series that hasn't really changed all that much since the original. Sure there may be new kinds of spaces and an inventory and weird extra rules, but it's difficult to justify Nintendo's milking this particular cow so much, except to point out that Hudson is the company that pretty much makes the Mario Party games.
I think the real issue is that Mario/others don't have the pull they once had as a franchise, so Nintendo is spreading them out while they still can. They will need to find a new franchise character, or more likely, find a franchise game like the PS2 has with GTA games.
What makes a franchise a franchise? (Oh, how I hate that word!) Mario himself is nothing, just a shell for a particular type of high-quality gameplay.
He and his friends came about in a very ad hoc fashion. They needed a guy with a mustache and overalls for Donkey Kong, so poof, we have Mario. They needed a second Mario for a funky game involving two player co-op play, so they changed the overalls to green and thus you have Luigi. When they wanted to make a more epic style of game, with long, horizontally-scrolling areas and more variety, they sucked in a whole lotta weed and made up the Mushroom Kingdom, their eternal tormentor Koopa/Bowser, and its oft-kidnapped, terminally-pink ruler. (In fact, before SMB, there wasn't a whole lot of princess-rescuing in video games.)
Everything that is Mario, however, came about in this fashion. Yoshi? A powerup in Super Mario World. Wario? Strangely likable antagonist in Super Mario Land 2. A lot of the enemies from the series have also filled other roles as time goes on, especially ol' Lakitu and his multipurpose fishing line.
But my point in all this is, the Mario universe, such as it is, was never created to be the subject of a franchise. The developers, at least, just made it up as they went along, and arguably that did nothing to hurt them. That's why there's not a whole lot of cohesion in the Mario universe, and why some enemies turn into friends, even Bowsie himself, depending on the game. The labelling of everything as Mario This or Mario That is a mostly recent thing.
Mario has evolved into, not quite a franchise, but a brand name. I'm not too happy about that either, but I guess that's okay. It still won't stop me from running out and picking up Mario 128 on that distant, glorious day it finally, finally comes out.
Then why was Atari Games v. Nintendo about Tengen's "Rabbit" modchip? And why was Klax published by Atari Games (arcade), Tengen (early home versions), and Midway (more recent GBC port)? It appears you have it backwards.
Ah, you may be correct then -- but note that I did express some doubt as to whether I was accurate about the Tengen/Atari (computer) connection.
Atari Games, however, remains one of the more original companies to have produced games, I don't see how anyone can argue with that. (And it would mean that I was right about more than one thing, so, nyaah.)
Tengen, I think, was a part of the Atari that sold home computers and consoles, while Atari Games was pretty much solely an arcade company (later, around the N64 era, one that worked on its own home ports). I tended to like the arcade Atari a bit more than the other one.
Yep. I can't begin to tell you how much time we've (that is, me and my friends) put into both Advance Wars and Animal Crossing, it's well into hundreds of hours for each of them. Golden Sun is a bit too by-the-numbers RPG for my tastes, though. Also, technically Advance Wars is the continuation of the ancient Famicom (then Super Famicom and also Gameboy) Wars line, which was Japan-only for years and years.
Other notable Nintendo standouts, recently, have been:
Pikmin and Pikmin 2: This type of gameplay was created for these games, and it works extremely well. Budding game designers should look very hard at these, for I know of no game that illustrates more clearly how to create a new mode a play out of bits and pieces of what came before it, combined with new concepts.
Super Smash Bros. and Smash Bros. Melee: It's easy to forget these, especially Melee which has been on bargain racks for a couple of years now, but I'm not aware of a better multiplayer game.
But Nintendo has been quiet with new kinds of gaming lately, I suspect because they're pouring their corporate energy into something big, possibly that long-rumored new incarnation of Mario. (I really hate the word "franchise" by the way, it's largely a marketing term.)
"Nintendo is the most original and innovative game developer there is!"
They are, among the currently surviving companies. (For my money, up until the mid 90's Atari Games was more consistently original, but they aren't around any more.) This is simply not arguable, there's too much evidence against it, though admittedly not as much in this generation as past ones. But still, calling people who don't agree with you fanboys detracts from your argument more than anything.
Konami makes the DDR games. They got permission to put Mario in their game, but it's still their baby.
But if you really want to criticize Nintendo, then this is how you do it:
What Nintendo *is* guilty of is making so many things for their system these days a Mario Something, and for beating the dead horse on some series. Mario Party 6, hmm... we stopped enjoying them after #2. And beyond Kart, Mario sports games don't appeal to me so much. Now we have Mario Golf (2, or is it 3?), Mario Tennis (ditto), soon Mario Baseball, and so on.
Now it's true that I would like to see some new kinds of games out of Nintendo. We've seen some of it lately, such as Wario Ware and the Pikmin games, but not as much as Nintendo is known for in the past. Here's hoping we see more of the old Nintendo, and soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Animation is just a method not a genre, and in Japan it isn't restricted to Disney style stuff.
Neither is it here in the U.S.
I think the guy was referring to the stereotype of anime, somewhat justifiably, that's built up based off of our more-commonly seen anime, like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragonball-Z, Yu-Yu Hakusho, and a good many more. Those things are to Miyazaki as your typical Internet webcomic artist is to Charles Schulz.
Miyazaki actually expresses disdain for most anime (including his own) in the article, he thinks people are obsessing over it too much, and is concerned about "living virtual lives," as opposed to real, grounded ones.
1. The pre-fab WAV file technique is not always so hot. Midway Arcade Treasures 1 and 2, also developed by Digital Eclipse, have some annoying sound bugs that result in the music cutting out in Smash T.V. and Total Carnage, wrong sound effects played at times in Rampart, and the music sounding like it was recorded in analog and re-digitized in Xenophobe. Most of these games are among the more complicated cases for them to handle, it is true, but I'm not inclined to cut them so much slack here, they've been doing this for a while now.
2. Often, the cabinet art for arcade games turns out to be a misfeature. In some of their previous emulations of golden age Atari vector games, the beam drawings are so faint that it makes it difficult to play. In fact, I think this is just because the cabinet artwork takes up so much of the screen. You can turn it off and reclaim that part of the screen, but in the compilation I own (for Dreamcast), it doesn't save this setting to the memory card.
3.
One particular problem, in that regard, is the common modern standard that the Start button also be a pause button. Sounds simple, right? Problem is, the Start button should also start the game. So what the Start button should do changes depending on whether a game has already started or not. How does the emulator know if a game has started or not?
Another rant about Midway Arcade Treasures 2:
They added an interesting new "setting" to the games in this compilation that disables continuations and health purchases. This is very useful for games where you want to challenge yourself to get as far as you can on one credit.
But the problem is, their implementation of this feature is just plain buggy. Sometimes Xenophobe will add two credits at game start instead of one (holding down the button mapped to the left trigger at game start seems to do this). Gauntlet II does it as well. Sometimes the emulation will misinterpret a game button press as a buy-in request, and put the emulator in a confused state.
Digital Eclipse's emulation efforts have saved a great many worthy games for general audiences, but most of the time their efforts seem to be *just short* of perfect. They also, for the record, always hide the real game's startup displays and operator settings menus behind their own menus, which sometimes leave out interesting options.
Its weird to see DE get tripped up on problems that MAME doesn't have. I guess this demonstrates that they haven't stolen code, true, but they could still improve their efforts a bit.
On a side note, I don't think anyone would have predicted that open-design games such as Grand Theft Auto, sandbox games such as Battlefield 1942, and innovative customizable games such as Deus Ex would be such huge influences on the future of game design.
GTA is simply an elaboration (though a great one) upon the ideas in the Zelda series.
The biggest disappointment in this generation of games has to be the lack of innovation in artificial intelligence.
Oh so wrong, Altoid-breath! The biggest disappointment this generation is that games are still largely as they were in the LAST generation. The same old genres, for the most part, are still the most popular. Not even Nintendo has escaped this as far as one would expect.
Ugh, the Emotion Engine. What a disappointment. Sure, I've played games in which I felt intense emotions besides fear, anxiety, rage, and excitement. But not that many.
Wow, so someone actually *did* drink Sony's code name marketing Kool Aid? You don't get emotion from a chip, foo! You get it from artistic direction. The best emotion I've ever seen in a game comes from a PS1 game, Grandia, that didn't even use 3D for its characters.
That game oozed with style, and even though it was simple and quick, it became one of my favorites because the main character, Sly, had real character. He wasn't some fuzzy-ass thing with pointed ears and an attitude. He was a smart, slick thief, and a raccoon no less. Not so strangely it worked.
I've never played Sly Cooper, but I want to like it if just because Sucker Punch made Rocket: Robot on Wheels. That said, it sounds like this guy is two steps behind the curve -- not having "attitude" helps something not to be bad, but is not necessarily good by itself. I'm frankly unsure where his racoonness comes into play.
Former Naughty Dog President Jason Ruben once said that the amount of polygons you have on screen doesn't matter anymore, it's what's you do with them. He is often right, and on this point, he is dead on.
Well, lah-de-dah dude, welcome to the obvious party.
New ideas in sports games have really accelerated in the last three years as Visual Concepts and EA have fiercely fought for market dominance. But things could always be better. For instance, in the latest NBA Live, when a new rookie talks to a coach, you should see him doing it and see the reaction of the team players.
Oh, I'm sure that'd add so much to a sports game.
Why hasn't anyone taken a clue from this revolutionary game and made a newer better one?
Hopefully because they're working on their own unique new concepts, but I know better than to invest in such a pipe dream. Probably because they don't "get" it, or think they have but failed due to one of those unique ways developers have of missing the point in so many subtle ways.
Why isn't there some smart developer out there making a better, smarter, faster version of Warren Specter's Deus Ex?
Dude, I think you just nailed it. It was designed by Warren Spector! That is not an easy act to top.
The article talks more about game superficials as it does about true game design. It's not really that hot a story, I'd say. The author sounds like he might be at the beginning of true insight in his gaming journalism career, but I'd give him a few years first -- assuming he's still playing games by then.
But Alexander is a fairly new movie while RE:A has been stewing for a few months. Alexander's critical drubbing has probably given it an artifically low score for the moment.
But then, this is the imdb we're talking about. I don't know if I'd call that an objective measure of quality....
I'm still amazed that the DS comes with something that you could actually compose music on, and people don't seem think this is anything special.
Let me correct this before someone corrects me first...
This was a mistake on my part, the music composition tool is *available* for the DS, as part of a game for it, but doesn't come *with* it, out of the box.
[except when getting sued because they didn't patent, e.g., waiting in line to use the john on an airplane by holding a ticket instead of by standing in the aile.: Patented by IBM and dedicated to the public as a good will measure].
Wow, what an example.
You are great.
HiThere - 15173
You have an amazing wisdom and power.
(An honest compliment, turned into a lame Nintendo game reference. Just another day on Slashdot!)
Oy, tell me about it. I'm kinda annoyed, by the way, that my post got modded Troll, but oh well, these things happen.
I'm still amazed that the DS comes with something that you could actually compose music on, and people don't seem think this is anything special.
All Nintendo has to do is add an export filter to this thing (possible, and easy, considering the wireless connection, though of course that doesn't mean they're gonna do it) and they could actually have a hobbyist musician market for this thing.
I'm amazed, but understand, that the parent post is the one modded insightful, and its parent is the one marked funny....
Analysts say the new zelda game will be delayed and then passed to the next console Nintendo is working on.
Which analysts? This is interesting news, but I'd like to know where it came from.
Theres no other interesting projects for the cube at sight.
Mario 128 (or whatever they'll call it). Yeah, I still think it's coming, fool that I am. Also, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat.
The same can be said for the other consoles though , GTA:SA finally showed up.
Yeah, but that's a big "finally," it's the third GTA game for the system.
I'm holding out hope that there might be something cool left in this cycle, if just because money is so tight for me right now that my next console might be some time off, regardless of their coolness.
The movies are not related to the games in any way.
Thank you God! I can't help but think those films drove more people away from the games than attracted.
All I can say that's positive about the movie is this: it's better than Torque.
Yes, and this is why there are SO many great games on the Xbox.
Oh, wait a minute....
(This has been your Snark of the Day!)
More seriously, I've played plenty of games on a variety of systems that you could play in triple quadraphonic stereo surround sound using Vogon speakers that utilize the objects around you as natural sounding boards before destroying your planet, and those games would make you wish that, in fact, their sound did destroy the planet, so as to save you from the agony of playing them.
And yet, RE4 doesn't take place in Raccoon City.
Yeah, and there's also the video cartridges for GameBoy Advance, beloved of all who want to watch low resolution, tiny-screened versions of Pokemon, Nicktoons and kiddy anime for about the same price as it would cost to get the same stuff on DVD, if not more.
A TV tuner, at least, would enable watching *other* bad shows.
Wow, I wasn't aware of that. Seems fairly unlikely actually, though, does the DS even have a video signal that exists in a form that a TV could display without conversion?
And indeed, I really liked Wind Waker's look, I thought it worked really well. Even better, the gameplay was just brilliant and really brought that feeling of exploration back to the series.
But the fact remains, the look of the game became something of a rallying cry for idiots. "Celda! Celda!" And there are a lot of idiots.
This just doesn't impress me that much. You gotta be near a wireless hub to watch video, you can only see what makes it through Sony's narrow rights filter, and it's unlikely you'll be able to save a copy of what you watch.
A TV tuner, a piece of technology you could get way back for TurboDuos and Game Gears, would actually be cooler. There's already one announced for the DS, but that doesn't mean much since a third party will probably make one for the PSP in short order.
They both can transmit wirelessly. Neither can produce television broadcasts however.
This is great.
This is GREAT!
I'm serious guys, this is just so awesomely cool. I can't believe there are so many people down on this here, they're releasing a cartridge with a full music composition tool in it! Here's a sampling of comments:
"Is this Nintendo's way to prove that the DS can be more than just a video game player?"
Oy, what's with all the antagonism? Does everything have to be through the reacting-to-Sony filter? One thing about Nintendo, you can't honestly say they plan products just to react to other companies.
"I have to ask if there's going to be any practical way to get your MIDI compositions off the DS (as opposed to sharing between DS's) once they're done."
It'd be cool to get them off my DS, yes, but c'mon! Remember the many hours kids spent with Mario Paint? (Link is to a large, but familiar, Quicktime file.) Fun creation software for game systems is a huge, largely untapped, market, and one of the ways that video gaming can actually make a positive impact on this tired old world. I'd think that Slashdot's strong individualistic streak would turn people out in this game's favor.
Plus, since the DS has wireless, and the composition mode probably has multi-system playback, I figure it's only a matter of time before someone hacks together a program that intercepts the intersystem play stream and saves it in a file.
"...about half of the titles for DS right now are odd enough to make Sega shake their head."
And why do I love Sega? It ain't because of Sonic Adventure!
"It's not the first time we have seen a music composer on a PDA. No that is not a typo. The DS is a god damn PDA."
Thanks for that insightful comment. Labels are fun, kids!
ARGH! Don't you guys see how COOL this is?! Is that worth nothing?
Isn't is possible that the GTA game is going to be top-down like the first two and the recent GBA game were?
That would be deadly. People expect 2D from the Gameboy Advance, but they won't be expecting it from the PSP. Whatever the strengths of the top-down games, there's such a public perception of the GTA games being 3D these days that, were Rockstar to go the top-down only route, people would probably see it as a tremendous failing of the system. It would be the PSP's version of Zelda cel shading (and would be just as nonsensical). I think that Sony knows this however, so it's almost certain to be 3D anyway.
Assuming it IS 3D... this is definitely great news for the PSP crowd, but still won't definitively hand them the crown. It does mean I may get a PSP myself someday... but nah, if GTA was a system seller for me I'd have gotten a PS2. I'm still (personally) firmly on the DS side of things here.
The fact of the matter is, Sony has perhaps THE best license in gaming with the GTA series. Those games are good enough so that buying a system solely to play them is worthwhile.
I'd still the best license is Zelda, but no matter. What about Final Fantasy?
I disagree about quite a few of those games. Mario Party 6 is far superior to 5. My wife loves it. Also, Mario Tennis is supposedly great. Quite a few of my friends love it.
It may be superior to 5, but it remains that it's still the sixth game, and the one before it was the fifth, in a series that hasn't really changed all that much since the original. Sure there may be new kinds of spaces and an inventory and weird extra rules, but it's difficult to justify Nintendo's milking this particular cow so much, except to point out that Hudson is the company that pretty much makes the Mario Party games.
I think the real issue is that Mario/others don't have the pull they once had as a franchise, so Nintendo is spreading them out while they still can. They will need to find a new franchise character, or more likely, find a franchise game like the PS2 has with GTA games.
What makes a franchise a franchise? (Oh, how I hate that word!) Mario himself is nothing, just a shell for a particular type of high-quality gameplay.
He and his friends came about in a very ad hoc fashion. They needed a guy with a mustache and overalls for Donkey Kong, so poof, we have Mario. They needed a second Mario for a funky game involving two player co-op play, so they changed the overalls to green and thus you have Luigi. When they wanted to make a more epic style of game, with long, horizontally-scrolling areas and more variety, they sucked in a whole lotta weed and made up the Mushroom Kingdom, their eternal tormentor Koopa/Bowser, and its oft-kidnapped, terminally-pink ruler. (In fact, before SMB, there wasn't a whole lot of princess-rescuing in video games.)
Everything that is Mario, however, came about in this fashion. Yoshi? A powerup in Super Mario World. Wario? Strangely likable antagonist in Super Mario Land 2. A lot of the enemies from the series have also filled other roles as time goes on, especially ol' Lakitu and his multipurpose fishing line.
But my point in all this is, the Mario universe, such as it is, was never created to be the subject of a franchise. The developers, at least, just made it up as they went along, and arguably that did nothing to hurt them. That's why there's not a whole lot of cohesion in the Mario universe, and why some enemies turn into friends, even Bowsie himself, depending on the game. The labelling of everything as Mario This or Mario That is a mostly recent thing.
Mario has evolved into, not quite a franchise, but a brand name. I'm not too happy about that either, but I guess that's okay. It still won't stop me from running out and picking up Mario 128 on that distant, glorious day it finally, finally comes out.
Then why was Atari Games v. Nintendo about Tengen's "Rabbit" modchip? And why was Klax published by Atari Games (arcade), Tengen (early home versions), and Midway (more recent GBC port)? It appears you have it backwards.
Ah, you may be correct then -- but note that I did express some doubt as to whether I was accurate about the Tengen/Atari (computer) connection.
Atari Games, however, remains one of the more original companies to have produced games, I don't see how anyone can argue with that. (And it would mean that I was right about more than one thing, so, nyaah.)
Tengen was not the same thing as Atari Games.
Tengen, I think, was a part of the Atari that sold home computers and consoles, while Atari Games was pretty much solely an arcade company (later, around the N64 era, one that worked on its own home ports). I tended to like the arcade Atari a bit more than the other one.
Advance Wars, Golden Sun, and Animal Crossing
Yep. I can't begin to tell you how much time we've (that is, me and my friends) put into both Advance Wars and Animal Crossing, it's well into hundreds of hours for each of them. Golden Sun is a bit too by-the-numbers RPG for my tastes, though. Also, technically Advance Wars is the continuation of the ancient Famicom (then Super Famicom and also Gameboy) Wars line, which was Japan-only for years and years.
Other notable Nintendo standouts, recently, have been:
Pikmin and Pikmin 2: This type of gameplay was created for these games, and it works extremely well. Budding game designers should look very hard at these, for I know of no game that illustrates more clearly how to create a new mode a play out of bits and pieces of what came before it, combined with new concepts.
Super Smash Bros. and Smash Bros. Melee: It's easy to forget these, especially Melee which has been on bargain racks for a couple of years now, but I'm not aware of a better multiplayer game.
But Nintendo has been quiet with new kinds of gaming lately, I suspect because they're pouring their corporate energy into something big, possibly that long-rumored new incarnation of Mario. (I really hate the word "franchise" by the way, it's largely a marketing term.)
Okay fanboys, repeat after me:
"Nintendo is the most original and innovative game developer there is!"
They are, among the currently surviving companies. (For my money, up until the mid 90's Atari Games was more consistently original, but they aren't around any more.) This is simply not arguable, there's too much evidence against it, though admittedly not as much in this generation as past ones. But still, calling people who don't agree with you fanboys detracts from your argument more than anything.
Konami makes the DDR games. They got permission to put Mario in their game, but it's still their baby.
But if you really want to criticize Nintendo, then this is how you do it:
What Nintendo *is* guilty of is making so many things for their system these days a Mario Something, and for beating the dead horse on some series. Mario Party 6, hmm... we stopped enjoying them after #2. And beyond Kart, Mario sports games don't appeal to me so much. Now we have Mario Golf (2, or is it 3?), Mario Tennis (ditto), soon Mario Baseball, and so on.
Now it's true that I would like to see some new kinds of games out of Nintendo. We've seen some of it lately, such as Wario Ware and the Pikmin games, but not as much as Nintendo is known for in the past. Here's hoping we see more of the old Nintendo, and soon.