Wow, you've gotten so many replies I feel kinda bad for adding another one. But no one's addressed this point yet, so here goes.
The PSP is not obviously the better machine. 3D graphics quality is better, but I think it could be said that means less on a portable. The smaller screen sizes make it a lot more difficult to judge rendering quality. This helps the PSP in comparasions with the PS2, but it also helps the DS.
Also, due to the way the portable market has developed (almost completely all Nintendo), 2D gaming is still big in handhelds. If it does come down to 2D gameplay in the portable space, then DS has a clear advantage, since it has a dedicated chip for both screens, and according to Konami (referring to their upcoming sequel to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for the DS), is better at pushing sprites than the PS1.
Finally a minor correction, the DS actually has better 3D graphics than the N64 (though again, it's harder to see this on the smaller screen), but it can only use its 3D hardware on one screen at a time.
Don't count Sony out yet, they started out behind the Dreamcast after all, but it didn't take long to make up for all that lost ground. The portable race this time is more competitive that the DCD/PS2 battle, though.
Ooooh, good call. Also note that the #1 publisher of the year is Electronic Arts, which, despite selling the most games, is now far from admirable from the standpoint of advancing the art of game design.
3) No Stupid Dongle DVD playback... Yes!!! The reason that the first Xbox didn't have built in DVD playback is a simple one, Sony owns the Intellectual Property rights for DVD playback. Nuf said...
Hmmm... in fact, I'm reasonably sure it's because a licence for DVD playback costs money, and rather than roll that into the cost of the base machine, they sold it as an optional extra. Else why sell the dongle at all, which is ultimately just a remote and the license?
And remember: for a while, many Japanese customers bought the PS2 as a DVD player, which caused the console, for a short while after its release and if memory serves, to be unprofitable.
Yeah, but they were twenty different axes. I couldn't sense any overriding agenda here.
In fact, they said nary a word about Nintendo, and I rather expected them to be up there somewhere. They may even deserve a spot up there somewhere, for all their gaming quality, it's been a tough year for them in console sales.
It was rated M because it contains two Mortal Kombat arcade titles, along with NARC. These were the games that kicked off this whole violence in games uproar -- wasn't it a Genesis copy of Mortal Kombat that Leiberman shook in the middle of Congress back in the 90's?
Take note: Microsoft lost one, and it was not a small one.
We tend to discount it now because it's been a couple of years, and Passport's decline has been long and slow, but we were all scared, once, of Passport and what it might mean for the web, with Microsoft's marketing might behind it, with managers' inflated opinion of MS and tendency to give them a pass to do whatever the hell they wanted with their computers.
There's a tendency to view Microsoft as an unstoppable juggernaut, and this opinion is somewhat self-fulfilling. We percieve them as unstoppable, so why bother trying to resist? They may have the occaisional Microsoft Bob, after all, but... look at Windows!
Microsoft loses more battles than you'd think, that's my only point.
Well let's be fair, there's been a number of pro-Nintendo stories as well.
And most of the high-ranked comments have been very pro-Nintendo, something I've noticed on Slashdot in the past. I don't think one can accurately say that the Slashdot audience or editors hates Nintendo. Rather, that Slashdot readers, of the things they like, they like them a lot, and Nintendo is one of those things. So is Halo 2, and Linux, and Open Source, and Star Wars.
Everyone keeps saying "Nintendo makes the best games!!!", completely forgetting that that's all kinds of their opinion. The only real AAA title that came out of Nintendo this year, to me, was Metroid Prime 2.
This is only half-true, that quality issues are matters of opinion.
The only real way to know whether something is a classic or not is through hindsight. Twenty years from now.
How many units did Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot sell? Which is the game most fondly remembered today? That's what I mean.
We can come up with some good guesses now, however. And while there may not be an objective measure of quality, you cannot entirely throw out the design strengths of the games either.
They did some other decent stuff this year, like Pikmin 2 and Paper Mario 2, but otherwise?
Eternal Darkness didn't bust any blocks, but it was great as far as its story goes. Zelda: Wind Waker is absolutely stellar, no matter how many ill-formed "opinions" people spout off about how it looks.
And Pikmin 2, by the way, is incredible, so much of an improvement over the original it isn't funny. Maybe that's just an opinion, but consider it an informed one.
I'm not a Nintendo fan in all areas. I could do without the constant, unending stream of Mario Party games, for example. Anything with the word "Hamtaro" in the title I'd like very much to ignore. And Pokemon is a thing that used to appeal to me but doesn't any more, despite the surreal design strengths of every game in the series.
But Nintendo does still make AAA titles. It's true, however, that games matching my own tastes are relatively few in number at the moment.
And for the record, I hated the no-FLUDD levels in Sunshine.
This is entirely off the topic, but...
I loved those levels. Void levels, we call them. If you're sharp, you can absolutely rule at them, though woe be to the gamer who hasn't put in his time on Mario 64.
Well, I did put in my time on those, and lately I finished the giant-rotating-wooden-blocks one in Ricco Bay, after not playing for a year, on the first attempt. Now that's design!
When I first started playing Sunshine, I used to react with dread when I saw a Shine with the word "secret" in the title. Now, I'll obsess on those levels, and actually think they're too easy!
I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that I really like void levels now. Heh.
Hey, I've done Pikmin in 9 days, though I had 114 guys when I did it. I was inspired by a well-written GameFAQs text. But man, I don't think I'll be doing THAT again.
I just got Midway Arcade Treasures 2, a game in which the dpad is a preferred control scheme for most of the included classic arcade titles. The package was also released for PS2 and Xbox however. It plays roughly the same across all of them, because the controllers are all capable of the same things.
By doing this, Nintendo is striking a blow against easy portability across consoles. I'd say this will work against them, although after the brilliant additions made to the DS, I now thing it MAY be possible they have something much better in the works to replace the pad with.
There's a million fact-checkers out there, and the Old Media better wake up to it, or be cast aside.
Actually, I'd say that there's a half-million people who say one thing is true, and another half-million who say the opposite is true. The whole Michael Moore bit, in which Moore and his supporters swear up and down that what they say is true (and I believe them by the way), and Moore himself posts what amounts to his notes on his website, and his opponents do a like amount of swearing that it's not, and create webpages in order to show supporters how wrong, WRONG he is, is an example.
Another example is the whole "Rathergate" mess. Conservablogs made a big deal out of it. Liberalogs complain how it's nothing much. People who are attached to one side listen to what they want to hear and ignore the rest. Daily Kos posted an extensive article saying that, uh-huh, it was indeed possible for the memos to be on the up-and-up.
More and more, so predicts Criswell, it'll become harder to find the true facts without going out and doing all the research yourself, largely negating the purpose of news in the first place.
I think there is still a niche for arcade games, even if they're equal to home hardware, or even underpower relative to them.
Let me phrase this differently, so as to make a new assertion. What did in arcade gaming was not just the tremendous lack of originality in the genre, which came about as a result of arcade manufacturers targeting the obsessive teenage male audience, releasing further and further refinements of the same basic kinds of games, instead of going for a general audience like in the old days.
Also, the industry's failure comes from its inability to reimagine their role in gaming, away from being state-of-the-art purveyors of the finest in electronic gaming, to being a public place to play video games, and to being a center for playing games that are fun and entertaining in small doses, perhaps not games you'd want to pay fifty bucks for, but maybe put down a few quarters.
Arcade games still have the potential to be a place where you can play against people you've never met, in person. Something like Smash Bros. might go over extremely well in an arcade setting, with its hyper-frantic, good-natured, four-player action. Dance Dance Revolution (and all the dance-alikes) does well because it's more fun to show off those kinds of moves in public than in your living room (unless you're having a party, perhaps).
Anyway, that's the only way I can see arcades experiencing a resurgance in popularity. Except maybe by staging a mass return to pinball -- and I'm not joking.
I'm tired of people saying this, because there is a fundamental difference between a movie sequel and a video game "sequel"....
Video games provide a much more diverse range of experiences.
I disagree, most video game sequels do not provide that greatly differing an experience. Nintendo's usually do, but even then, not always.
Capcom, according to a quick search on www.klov.com, made no fewer than seven versions of Street Fighter II, four of Street Fighter EX, three games whose titles begin with "Street Fighter Alpha," three Street Fighter IIIs, five Street Fighter Zeros, and five Super Street Fighters. I've not even gotten into the various versus games (Vs. X-Men, Vs. Marvel, Vs. SNK). Only one Street Fighter (One), though.
Submitted for review and/or rebuke: Note that the reason Capcom made so many of these games is because most of them were wildly profitable. Also note that, once you discard scenarios and graphics, many of these games have approximately as much to do with each other as many FPS games have with other FPSes.
Hell, you could argue that it has already happened. A sign? All of the games in the list are sequels; which almost guarantees a base of sales. Some of them are good, some of them aren't, but there's hardly anything new or fresh offered in games nowadays; since seen genres with newer graphics are easy to sell we still see FPS, MMORPGs, GTA (which WAS fun, but i don't want to play the same game for the third time), sport simulations and so. Publishers simply go for the quick buck.
Well some of us have been saying this for years. If the game industry were, overall, as creative as they were back in the golden age, you can be there'd be a lot fewer Nintendo fanatics, myself included, these days.
But even my admiration for Nintendo has limits. Do you know what the most original company ever to produce video games was? The (in my opinion) answer may not be what you expect.
It was Atari Games, an entity that, in my mind, encompasses their early arcade output pre-split-up, and their later, post-split arcade games. So many of their hits were created out of whole braincloth, because there was absolutely nothing like them before. Atari was the most original not just because they were first, but because even as late as the early 90s they were still making incredibly different, fun games. Midway Arcade Treasures (1) has a good handful of them, including Rampart, which I've already bored far too many people discussing, some of them here.
But we can all see where that got them. They made Toobin', KLAX, Gauntlet, Marble Madness and (whimper!) Rampart, but gamers, more and more, became drawn to things like Street Fighter 2, a game that was admittedly well-designed, but inspired way, way too many sequels and knock-offs. It's not like Nintendo's sequels, where they'll throw out all but the core concepts and design a new game around them (example: Yoshi's Island is a direct sequel to Super Mario World!), but more like the same game, with new characters and modestly different rules.
Fighting games, depending on who you ask, are what saved or ruined arcades. My money's on "ruined." This is something of a digression, but it's worth noting that the fighting game boom was one of the contributing factors to the atmosphere of genrefication that are both what's enabled video and computer gaming to become big business, and what's sapped so much of the creativity out of the field.
I experienced no random crashes in the area in question, the "End of the World" area. I *did* experience some periodic sound-related crashes earlier, but it turns out those were due to a misconfiguration (using "Wave Mapper" as the sound output method is not a good idea).
challenging / hard: try finishing the game, it's very hard, you die all the time
Actually it's not *that* hard, really. It's true I've been playing for a long time, but if you know what you're doing, you can ascend in most games.
The key is that "knowing what you are doing" is a very difficult task, you could take a college course on Nethack (if you find one by the way let me know) and still not be that good.
The key elements involve surviving encounters with monsters (soldier ants should be treated with respect at low levels), knowing where to find guarenteed items (luckstone, bag of holding/shield of reflection), getting an artifact and wishes, getting that gray or silver dragon scale mail (which increases raw survivability more than any other item in the game), and avoiding stupid risks (don't drink from fountains, play with cockatrices unnecessarily, stand under the drawbridge when opening it, etc).
I don't think you have any clue why people hate Sony. They hate it because it is a huge company? That's not a reason to hate something.
That depends on who you ask. Big companies are the source of a lot of the problems we face as a culture these days, centering the power of many into the hands of a few.
Their may be some things that they do as a huge company...like anti-comeptition things...but that isn't because of their size, it is because of their business practices.
And, increasingly these days, those business practices are how they got big in the first place. Further, big companies, by throwing their tremendous bulk around, often *must* resort to questionable legal practices as the price of doing business. Like how, if you refuse to do something about trademark abuses, you face the possibility of losing the trademark, and the bigger you are, the wider the sphere you must police. That little thing is the reason why it's a bad idea to start as self-named restaurant if your name happens to be "McDonald."
The act of lobbying Congress, likewise, also picks up sinister undertones when gigantic corporations get involved with it. Do you think Disney would have been able to get their Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act passed if they weren't bloody gigantic? From a business standpoint it was a wise investment, but from a social standpoint it was sucky in a way few other things are. The claim that big companies *should not* have any kind of conscience in their operation makes them dangerous, dangerous things.
This is why I said that a basic attitude of hating big companies can be prudent. Which is not to say one should go the AdBusters route, but that once an organization hits a certain size, people should start turning on their skepticism filter in regards to them.
Of course Nintendo themselves are not tiny. This is largely a digression away from the Sony/Nintendo portable battle into bigger things.
PART TWO: Sony vs. Nintendo
Both have good games...PS2 has more games, so even if you argue the average game of PS2 is worse than that of Nintnendo, there are so many more games, that could mean there are more good games for the PS2 than Nintendo.
"Could be" still doesn't mean "is." Average game quality is relevant because most people don't take the time to find out about a game before buying it, and so the better average quality, the better chance they'll have something they enjoy.
But also remember, the glut of crappy games was one of the factors that contributed to the video game crash back in 1983. It does indeed tear down the good games, slightly, when a bad one is released.
I used the average quality as a shorthand description of the overall quality of the consoles' respective libraries. Overall, Nintendo consoles simply have better games, though it is difficult to make a direct comparasion because a number of the Gamecube's best releases this time are genre defiers (Metroid Prime, Super Monkey Ball, Eternal Darkness).
If you only count the best on each console against the best on the other it is difficult to argue in Sony's favor, at least that's how I see it. Maybe that would have been a better way to express my point.
I am not going to claim that since I have not played every game on both consoles and I doubt you have either.
But I read web reviews, and I've played a lot of games.
I've beaten, by my estimates, over 300 games, those that can be beaten, and played hundreds more, dating back to the Atari 2600 days. After a while, you can sort of tell from the buzz around a game as to whether it'll be worth playing or not. This sense is not infallible, of course, but it works most of the time.
When a review for a game takes pains to talk about how sharp the graphics look but fails to describe gameplay, or uses words, to draw from a recent awards ceremony, like "Slammin," it doesn't take a genius to see that, re
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Gamecube launch at $200?
Wow, you've gotten so many replies I feel kinda bad for adding another one. But no one's addressed this point yet, so here goes.
The PSP is not obviously the better machine. 3D graphics quality is better, but I think it could be said that means less on a portable. The smaller screen sizes make it a lot more difficult to judge rendering quality. This helps the PSP in comparasions with the PS2, but it also helps the DS.
Also, due to the way the portable market has developed (almost completely all Nintendo), 2D gaming is still big in handhelds. If it does come down to 2D gameplay in the portable space, then DS has a clear advantage, since it has a dedicated chip for both screens, and according to Konami (referring to their upcoming sequel to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for the DS), is better at pushing sprites than the PS1.
Finally a minor correction, the DS actually has better 3D graphics than the N64 (though again, it's harder to see this on the smaller screen), but it can only use its 3D hardware on one screen at a time.
Don't count Sony out yet, they started out behind the Dreamcast after all, but it didn't take long to make up for all that lost ground. The portable race this time is more competitive that the DCD/PS2 battle, though.
The last time I messed up my PS2 was when my cat ran into it and it fell about a foot and a half to the floor.
Wow, what does your cat have against Sony?
Lousy fankitten!
Wait, Sony has made a good game? I'm sure they've published plenty, but made? I don't think so.
Ico.
Ooooh, good call. Also note that the #1 publisher of the year is Electronic Arts, which, despite selling the most games, is now far from admirable from the standpoint of advancing the art of game design.
3) No Stupid Dongle DVD playback... Yes!!! The reason that the first Xbox didn't have built in DVD playback is a simple one, Sony owns the Intellectual Property rights for DVD playback. Nuf said...
Hmmm... in fact, I'm reasonably sure it's because a licence for DVD playback costs money, and rather than roll that into the cost of the base machine, they sold it as an optional extra. Else why sell the dongle at all, which is ultimately just a remote and the license?
And remember: for a while, many Japanese customers bought the PS2 as a DVD player, which caused the console, for a short while after its release and if memory serves, to be unprofitable.
Yeah, but they were twenty different axes. I couldn't sense any overriding agenda here.
In fact, they said nary a word about Nintendo, and I rather expected them to be up there somewhere. They may even deserve a spot up there somewhere, for all their gaming quality, it's been a tough year for them in console sales.
It was rated M because it contains two Mortal Kombat arcade titles, along with NARC. These were the games that kicked off this whole violence in games uproar -- wasn't it a Genesis copy of Mortal Kombat that Leiberman shook in the middle of Congress back in the 90's?
Take note: Microsoft lost one, and it was not a small one.
We tend to discount it now because it's been a couple of years, and Passport's decline has been long and slow, but we were all scared, once, of Passport and what it might mean for the web, with Microsoft's marketing might behind it, with managers' inflated opinion of MS and tendency to give them a pass to do whatever the hell they wanted with their computers.
There's a tendency to view Microsoft as an unstoppable juggernaut, and this opinion is somewhat self-fulfilling. We percieve them as unstoppable, so why bother trying to resist? They may have the occaisional Microsoft Bob, after all, but... look at Windows!
Microsoft loses more battles than you'd think, that's my only point.
Well let's be fair, there's been a number of pro-Nintendo stories as well.
And most of the high-ranked comments have been very pro-Nintendo, something I've noticed on Slashdot in the past. I don't think one can accurately say that the Slashdot audience or editors hates Nintendo. Rather, that Slashdot readers, of the things they like, they like them a lot, and Nintendo is one of those things. So is Halo 2, and Linux, and Open Source, and Star Wars.
And Lego!
Everyone keeps saying "Nintendo makes the best games!!!", completely forgetting that that's all kinds of their opinion. The only real AAA title that came out of Nintendo this year, to me, was Metroid Prime 2.
This is only half-true, that quality issues are matters of opinion.
The only real way to know whether something is a classic or not is through hindsight. Twenty years from now.
How many units did Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot sell? Which is the game most fondly remembered today? That's what I mean.
We can come up with some good guesses now, however. And while there may not be an objective measure of quality, you cannot entirely throw out the design strengths of the games either.
They did some other decent stuff this year, like Pikmin 2 and Paper Mario 2, but otherwise?
Eternal Darkness didn't bust any blocks, but it was great as far as its story goes. Zelda: Wind Waker is absolutely stellar, no matter how many ill-formed "opinions" people spout off about how it looks.
And Pikmin 2, by the way, is incredible, so much of an improvement over the original it isn't funny. Maybe that's just an opinion, but consider it an informed one.
I'm not a Nintendo fan in all areas. I could do without the constant, unending stream of Mario Party games, for example. Anything with the word "Hamtaro" in the title I'd like very much to ignore. And Pokemon is a thing that used to appeal to me but doesn't any more, despite the surreal design strengths of every game in the series.
But Nintendo does still make AAA titles. It's true, however, that games matching my own tastes are relatively few in number at the moment.
And for the record, I hated the no-FLUDD levels in Sunshine.
This is entirely off the topic, but...
I loved those levels. Void levels, we call them. If you're sharp, you can absolutely rule at them, though woe be to the gamer who hasn't put in his time on Mario 64.
Well, I did put in my time on those, and lately I finished the giant-rotating-wooden-blocks one in Ricco Bay, after not playing for a year, on the first attempt. Now that's design!
When I first started playing Sunshine, I used to react with dread when I saw a Shine with the word "secret" in the title. Now, I'll obsess on those levels, and actually think they're too easy!
I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that I really like void levels now. Heh.
And dammit, I LIKE the Dreamcast! I've been through Grandia II four times to date, and Crazy Taxi is one of my all-time favorites.
Hey, I've done Pikmin in 9 days, though I had 114 guys when I did it. I was inspired by a well-written GameFAQs text. But man, I don't think I'll be doing THAT again.
That's what Nintendo is probably doing here.
I just got Midway Arcade Treasures 2, a game in which the dpad is a preferred control scheme for most of the included classic arcade titles. The package was also released for PS2 and Xbox however. It plays roughly the same across all of them, because the controllers are all capable of the same things.
By doing this, Nintendo is striking a blow against easy portability across consoles. I'd say this will work against them, although after the brilliant additions made to the DS, I now thing it MAY be possible they have something much better in the works to replace the pad with.
It's going to be an interesting E3, in any case.
There's a million fact-checkers out there, and the Old Media better wake up to it, or be cast aside.
Actually, I'd say that there's a half-million people who say one thing is true, and another half-million who say the opposite is true. The whole Michael Moore bit, in which Moore and his supporters swear up and down that what they say is true (and I believe them by the way), and Moore himself posts what amounts to his notes on his website, and his opponents do a like amount of swearing that it's not, and create webpages in order to show supporters how wrong, WRONG he is, is an example.
Another example is the whole "Rathergate" mess. Conservablogs made a big deal out of it. Liberalogs complain how it's nothing much. People who are attached to one side listen to what they want to hear and ignore the rest. Daily Kos posted an extensive article saying that, uh-huh, it was indeed possible for the memos to be on the up-and-up.
More and more, so predicts Criswell, it'll become harder to find the true facts without going out and doing all the research yourself, largely negating the purpose of news in the first place.
You're involved with this project too? Sir, allow me to tip my hat to you and the rest of the team. This is just so cool.
It's almost enough to make me want to watch QVC to see about picking one up.
I think there is still a niche for arcade games, even if they're equal to home hardware, or even underpower relative to them.
Let me phrase this differently, so as to make a new assertion. What did in arcade gaming was not just the tremendous lack of originality in the genre, which came about as a result of arcade manufacturers targeting the obsessive teenage male audience, releasing further and further refinements of the same basic kinds of games, instead of going for a general audience like in the old days.
Also, the industry's failure comes from its inability to reimagine their role in gaming, away from being state-of-the-art purveyors of the finest in electronic gaming, to being a public place to play video games, and to being a center for playing games that are fun and entertaining in small doses, perhaps not games you'd want to pay fifty bucks for, but maybe put down a few quarters.
Arcade games still have the potential to be a place where you can play against people you've never met, in person. Something like Smash Bros. might go over extremely well in an arcade setting, with its hyper-frantic, good-natured, four-player action. Dance Dance Revolution (and all the dance-alikes) does well because it's more fun to show off those kinds of moves in public than in your living room (unless you're having a party, perhaps).
Anyway, that's the only way I can see arcades experiencing a resurgance in popularity. Except maybe by staging a mass return to pinball -- and I'm not joking.
I'm tired of people saying this, because there is a fundamental difference between a movie sequel and a video game "sequel". ...
Video games provide a much more diverse range of experiences.
I disagree, most video game sequels do not provide that greatly differing an experience. Nintendo's usually do, but even then, not always.
Capcom, according to a quick search on www.klov.com, made no fewer than seven versions of Street Fighter II, four of Street Fighter EX, three games whose titles begin with "Street Fighter Alpha," three Street Fighter IIIs, five Street Fighter Zeros, and five Super Street Fighters. I've not even gotten into the various versus games (Vs. X-Men, Vs. Marvel, Vs. SNK). Only one Street Fighter (One), though.
Submitted for review and/or rebuke: Note that the reason Capcom made so many of these games is because most of them were wildly profitable. Also note that, once you discard scenarios and graphics, many of these games have approximately as much to do with each other as many FPS games have with other FPSes.
Hell, you could argue that it has already happened. A sign? All of the games in the list are sequels; which almost guarantees a base of sales. Some of them are good, some of them aren't, but there's hardly anything new or fresh offered in games nowadays; since seen genres with newer graphics are easy to sell we still see FPS, MMORPGs, GTA (which WAS fun, but i don't want to play the same game for the third time), sport simulations and so. Publishers simply go for the quick buck.
Well some of us have been saying this for years. If the game industry were, overall, as creative as they were back in the golden age, you can be there'd be a lot fewer Nintendo fanatics, myself included, these days.
But even my admiration for Nintendo has limits. Do you know what the most original company ever to produce video games was? The (in my opinion) answer may not be what you expect.
It was Atari Games, an entity that, in my mind, encompasses their early arcade output pre-split-up, and their later, post-split arcade games. So many of their hits were created out of whole braincloth, because there was absolutely nothing like them before. Atari was the most original not just because they were first, but because even as late as the early 90s they were still making incredibly different, fun games. Midway Arcade Treasures (1) has a good handful of them, including Rampart, which I've already bored far too many people discussing, some of them here.
But we can all see where that got them. They made Toobin', KLAX, Gauntlet, Marble Madness and (whimper!) Rampart, but gamers, more and more, became drawn to things like Street Fighter 2, a game that was admittedly well-designed, but inspired way, way too many sequels and knock-offs. It's not like Nintendo's sequels, where they'll throw out all but the core concepts and design a new game around them (example: Yoshi's Island is a direct sequel to Super Mario World!), but more like the same game, with new characters and modestly different rules.
Fighting games, depending on who you ask, are what saved or ruined arcades. My money's on "ruined." This is something of a digression, but it's worth noting that the fighting game boom was one of the contributing factors to the atmosphere of genrefication that are both what's enabled video and computer gaming to become big business, and what's sapped so much of the creativity out of the field.
Follow up on Grandia via emulation:
I experienced no random crashes in the area in question, the "End of the World" area. I *did* experience some periodic sound-related crashes earlier, but it turns out those were due to a misconfiguration (using "Wave Mapper" as the sound output method is not a good idea).
challenging / hard: try finishing the game, it's very hard, you die all the time
Actually it's not *that* hard, really. It's true I've been playing for a long time, but if you know what you're doing, you can ascend in most games.
The key is that "knowing what you are doing" is a very difficult task, you could take a college course on Nethack (if you find one by the way let me know) and still not be that good.
The key elements involve surviving encounters with monsters (soldier ants should be treated with respect at low levels), knowing where to find guarenteed items (luckstone, bag of holding/shield of reflection), getting an artifact and wishes, getting that gray or silver dragon scale mail (which increases raw survivability more than any other item in the game), and avoiding stupid risks (don't drink from fountains, play with cockatrices unnecessarily, stand under the drawbridge when opening it, etc).
I used to try to make something similar to this with old Construx parts and golf balls, but this is much cooler.
Alas, just another cool thing I missed out on because I grew up in damnable Georgia.
PART ONE: Big Companies.
I don't think you have any clue why people hate Sony. They hate it because it is a huge company? That's not a reason to hate something.
That depends on who you ask. Big companies are the source of a lot of the problems we face as a culture these days, centering the power of many into the hands of a few.
Their may be some things that they do as a huge company...like anti-comeptition things...but that isn't because of their size, it is because of their business practices.
And, increasingly these days, those business practices are how they got big in the first place. Further, big companies, by throwing their tremendous bulk around, often *must* resort to questionable legal practices as the price of doing business. Like how, if you refuse to do something about trademark abuses, you face the possibility of losing the trademark, and the bigger you are, the wider the sphere you must police. That little thing is the reason why it's a bad idea to start as self-named restaurant if your name happens to be "McDonald."
The act of lobbying Congress, likewise, also picks up sinister undertones when gigantic corporations get involved with it. Do you think Disney would have been able to get their Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act passed if they weren't bloody gigantic? From a business standpoint it was a wise investment, but from a social standpoint it was sucky in a way few other things are. The claim that big companies *should not* have any kind of conscience in their operation makes them dangerous, dangerous things.
This is why I said that a basic attitude of hating big companies can be prudent. Which is not to say one should go the AdBusters route, but that once an organization hits a certain size, people should start turning on their skepticism filter in regards to them.
Of course Nintendo themselves are not tiny. This is largely a digression away from the Sony/Nintendo portable battle into bigger things.
PART TWO: Sony vs. Nintendo
Both have good games...PS2 has more games, so even if you argue the average game of PS2 is worse than that of Nintnendo, there are so many more games, that could mean there are more good games for the PS2 than Nintendo.
"Could be" still doesn't mean "is." Average game quality is relevant because most people don't take the time to find out about a game before buying it, and so the better average quality, the better chance they'll have something they enjoy.
But also remember, the glut of crappy games was one of the factors that contributed to the video game crash back in 1983. It does indeed tear down the good games, slightly, when a bad one is released.
I used the average quality as a shorthand description of the overall quality of the consoles' respective libraries. Overall, Nintendo consoles simply have better games, though it is difficult to make a direct comparasion because a number of the Gamecube's best releases this time are genre defiers (Metroid Prime, Super Monkey Ball, Eternal Darkness).
If you only count the best on each console against the best on the other it is difficult to argue in Sony's favor, at least that's how I see it. Maybe that would have been a better way to express my point.
I am not going to claim that since I have not played every game on both consoles and I doubt you have either.
But I read web reviews, and I've played a lot of games.
I've beaten, by my estimates, over 300 games, those that can be beaten, and played hundreds more, dating back to the Atari 2600 days. After a while, you can sort of tell from the buzz around a game as to whether it'll be worth playing or not. This sense is not infallible, of course, but it works most of the time.
When a review for a game takes pains to talk about how sharp the graphics look but fails to describe gameplay, or uses words, to draw from a recent awards ceremony, like "Slammin," it doesn't take a genius to see that, re