The real problem seems to be rather that except in the case of some phenomenal exclusive, Nintendo console owners routinely send Nintendo releases through the roof in sales while ignoring third-party games, regardless of how good they are.
I'm not certain this is the case.
Case in point: Arguably the best US DS launch title was Sega's Feel the Magic, but despite positive impressions almost everywhere you went, it was criminally undersold compared to Super Mario 64 DS, a remake of an old game that really wasn't all that suited for the DS to begin with.
But the old game, don't forget, was Super Mario 64, the first true 3D platformer, and still one of the more revered games ever made. The years since then have magnified perceptions of the original's brilliance into something legendary. There are few people who didn't wish the original game was even longer. Meanwhile Feel The Magic, for all its good qualities, was kind of short and gimmicky.
People who bought Mario 64 DS already knew it offered a long and satisfying play experience, while Feel the Magic is, in every review I've seen of it, described as "short."
Your system is probably faster than mine, but it runs great on my computer. Lots of problems with ePSXe can be solved by using the right plugins. For sound, I use Eternal SPU 1.41. Maybe it could help?
(Sorry about the previous, run-on post, I accidently picked the wrong formatting option. This is the same thing, but with comprehensible line breaks.)
I'm working on a retrospective review of Grandia II (which may also cover the first game), and one of the points I'm trying to get across in it is the extremely high quality of the writing, much better than the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Symphonia. It's the best-written RPG I can name, with the possible exception of Earthbound/Mother 2. Grandia characters tend to have really well-defined, utterly charming personalities, and glorious amounts of text for them to shine through. And a lot of this text is hidden, at least in Grandia II -- players are rewarded, if not with items then with backstory and humor, for going back to old areas after major events happen, and when the party roster changes, and chatting everyone up again.
In one memorable instance, in a dungeon early on in the game, one particular character joins right before the dungeon boss and leaves right after it. If the player is insane enough to, after the character joins but before fighting Mr. Grumpy, backtrack all the way out of the dungeon and wander around town, well wouldn't you know it, the writers actually wrote several conversations, many of them hilarious, for everyone in town specifically for that eventuality. That's what I call attention to detail, though of course you're free to come up with your own description.
And yet, in G II at least, if you don't care for the story at all you can almost go from one combat area straight to the next. And the combat is so deep that, once you figure out exactly how to time attacks and customize your characters appropriately, you can actually complete entire dungeons, late in the game, without taking a single hitpoint of damage! You can even do this with some of the bosses.
I never did get into Lunar (their most famous series), but the Grandia games have given me a lot of respect for Game Arts. Here's hoping we get Grandia III one of these days, and that there's nothing "Xtreme" about it.
On the "End of the World" area: I'll be coming up on that area before long, shoot me out an email in a few days to remind me and I'll let you know if I encounter any freezes there.
I'm working on a retrospective review of Grandia II (which may also cover the first game), and one of the points I'm trying to get across in it is the extremely high quality of the writing, much better than the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Symphonia. It's the best-written RPG I can name, with the possible exception of Earthbound/Mother 2. Grandia characters tend to have really well-defined, utterly charming personalities, and glorious amounts of text for them to shine through. And a lot of this text is hidden, at least in Grandia II -- players are rewarded, if not with items then with backstory and humor, for going back to old areas after major events happen, and when the party roster changes, and chatting everyone up again.
In one memorable instance, in a dungeon early on in the game, one particular character joins right before the dungeon boss and leaves right after it. If the player is insane enough to, after the character joins but before fighting Mr. Grumpy, backtrack all the way out of the dungeon and wander around town, well wouldn't you know it, the writers actually wrote several conversations, many of them hilarious, for everyone in town specifically for that eventuality. That's what I call attention to detail, though of course you're free to come up with your own description.
And yet, in G II at least, if you don't care for the story at all you can almost go from one combat area straight to the next. And the combat is so deep that, once you figure out exactly how to time attacks and customize your characters appropriately, you can actually complete entire dungeons, late in the game, without taking a single hitpoint of damage! You can even do this with some of the bosses.
I never did get into Lunar (their most famous series), but the Grandia games have given me a lot of respect for Game Arts. Here's hoping we get Grandia III one of these days, and that there's nothing "Xtreme" about it.
On the "End of the World" area: I'll be coming up on that area before long, shoot me out an email in a few days to remind me and I'll let you know if I encounter any freezes there.
Bleem ran on quite modest hardware by today's standards, Pentium IIs and less than 500mhz, with minimum requirements being 200mhz.
My own system runs Grandia from ePSXe very well. It's 1.5 ghz with 256mb of RAM, which is nowhere near top-of-the-line these days. If you've got something like that, or even a little less, you should be able to get it to work at full speed.
Grandia's the only game I've played with it so far. I'll be giving Final Fantasy Anthology a try before long, as well as Parappa if I can find it. I've been playing with keyboard all this time, which isn't much of a problem with Grandia or most RPGs. I haven't noticed lag, but I haven't been playing with a USB controller.
One of the problems with the emulator is that it has plugins for a wide variety of video cards, and you have to sort through them all to find the one for your system. You'll also have to get a CD plugin and a sound plugin for good sound. All these are free and downloadable, but it's a bit of work to get started. Most of these things have a barrelful of options and selections to make as well, which is good if you like to tinker, and bad if you're trying to figure out which of those dozens of settings is causing your game to freeze up after fifteen minutes of play.
One thing you can do with ePSXe is use a program like ISOproducer to create ISOs of your Playstation disks, then play them off the ISOs. I'm starting to do this with Grandia in order to keep my originals in better shape, it's simply too wonderful a game to risk losing as the years go by.
Which is more mature - GTA San Andreas or Animal Crossing? I bet that nearly every single one of you would say GTA but I disagree with all of you. Yes, even you. Animal Crossing is a far more mature game in many ways.
This is the most insightful thing in the article (which contains some errors -- Nintendo didn't develop the Power Glove, it was just available for their system).
The definition of maturity has become somewhat clouded, what with the MPAA's and the ESRB's ludicrous rating systems. They have caused people to equate violent and sexual content with maturity, which is foolish.
The point of those systems isn't to say that these elements are mature, but that the viewer/player should be of at least this maturity level before being exposed to them. Which itself is awfully condesending to the consumer, but is at least less stupid than the common assumption.
Maturity is not what kinds of objectionable content you put in your work. It is an outlook, a way of being sure of yourself despite what you see, a tendency to look out for others before yourself, the ability to behave rationally, respectfully, thoughtfully. Judge it this way, and I can name thirty-year-olds who might not be considered worthy of playing Grand Theft Auto.
But Animal Crossing rewards all those attributes listed above, while many things in the GTA games, despite all their considerable design strengths, do much to tear them down.
And that is why it's a much more mature game, cartoon animals and all, than GTA.
The concept of loving a corporation is completely beyond me. It goes beyond fanaticism into zealot territory.
But Nintendo fans don't actually love the corporation. They love its games.
It's actually something of a tightrope for the company. Stop making excellent games, desecrate the memory of Mario and Samus and Link, do them a disservice, and fans (such as are left) will abandon the big-N in droves. This comes out of Nintendo's internal developer culture. That, there, is Nintendo's corporate strength.
Take a moment to note that the Mario series, despite the relatively-lackluster response with which Mario Sunshine was met, is still in much better shape than Crash Bandicoot, which some thought, once upon a time, could be actually a legitimate rival for the rubbery plumber.
I personally think it's mostly Ninty fanboys that are the most negative about the PSP, becuase it's a real threat to N's last big market.
There is probably some truth to this, but a lot of people attack the DS as well, and for similar reasons.
Gimmicks *can* make a system successful, if they prove to be more than just gimmicks. The jury's still out on whether developers can make effective use of that microphone and touchscreen. Jam with the Band looks like it could be something truly unique and beautiful....
but sony? other than evercrack what harm have they done to the geek open source community?
Slashdot is a lot more than the open source community. They did release a PS2 version of Linux, but they still made sure to keep their own proprietary layer running beneath it, which was missing the point.
The people who don't like Sony do it because:
A. They are a huge company and it's very easy to hate them (even rightfully) for that, and
B. They have worse games, on the average, than Nintendo.
Do not underestimate the importance of point B! Sony has good games, true. Even some great ones -- GTA, Ico, Katamari Damarcy. They're certainly ahead of Microsoft in this regard now. But they still have catching up to do with Nintendo.
Also... well, this is probably just me, but I kind of get a slimy feeling when I see a commercial for a game called "Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal." Say what you want about Nintendo, but you never get the feeling that they're pandering to their audience. (Well, except maybe in the case of the Mario Party games.)
Indeed. But one should also take care to avoid anti-fanboyism, tearing something down specifically because it looks like it needs tearing.
Nintendo's iron-fisted behavior back with NES licensing is ancient history these days. Their Tetris actions are defendable, since Atari didn't technically have the legal right to make a console version of the game. Delaying the SNES may have been a mistake from their view, but not from ours, since we got to see a good number of very nice Genesis games including the original ToeJam & Earl.
Your list is merely a number of examples of things Nintendo did "wrong" without any overall connecting thread, which is of course highly subjective and which you can do just as easily for Sony or Microsoft so it proves nothing.
For example, you could make a point about Nintendo's pandering to the purtanical aspects of American culture by noting their old strict and nonsensical censorship policies, which neutered the NES release of Maniac Mansion among other things, and that they did not survive for long into the SNES era anyway due to competition from Sega. That would also tie in the Mortal Kombat point from later.
As for the article... there are still certain game design qualities that Nintendo is known for. They do make great games. They have a more consistant track record for quality than any other publisher at this time. Even their misses (Mario Party n, anyone?) are games that the other console manufacturers would kill for. They're the only remaining console manufacturer that, themselves, develops and publishes the best games for their system.
This, in fact, could be one of the biggest things working against them. Since they make their own sellers, that tends to mean they don't need to worry about giving third-parties a good deal, which means fewer overall games, which leads to a perception that there are not a lot of titles for the system.
My all-time favorite RPG series has got to be Grandia. It's MUCH better-written than Final Fantasy (and just about any other RPG I could name except maybe Earthbound), I like the music more, the characters are works of art, and the battle system is actually fun instead of a mere punishment factor against leveling up.
Yet, my Playstation hasn't worked for years, and I went with Gamecube in the current generation, so no PS2 backwards compatibility for me. So I haven't actually been able to play the original Grandia in all that time.
This is why I was so pleased to find out about ePSXe, a Playstation emulator that can play actual PSX disks inserted in a computer's hard drive. As time passes and the motors inside of optical drives break down, ultimately this will be the only way to play these old games.
(Preemptive caveat: I know what the Sony guys have said, that the original PS format will live forever. My response is that no, it won't, there's no way in hell Sony will continue to allow themselves to be beholden to the original PS format forever, as the profit available for supporting then declines further and further they can and will abandon the old PS1 format someday, it's just a question of when.)
Sony, of course, sued Bleem!, the commercial Playstation emulator, to smithereens. Yet ultimately I think this worked against them, because the net (and debatable) sales loss from piracy was probably less than the potential sales gain from letting people play Playstation games on their computer for $50 bucks, the price of the emulator, instead of $150 bucks, the then-price of the PSX.
Interesting to note that now, five years later, I'm playing through Grandia on a free emulator instead.
Also, neither does Gmail, which disables image display by default.
Gmail, by the way, has a really sharp spam filter, I I've gotten less than one spam message a week on my normal account for months now. It (probably) works because it can use Baynesian filtering where the imputs are the spam reports of tens of thousands of users.
"Hi, umm, Microsoft Support? Yeah, I'm trying to run this program called Gimp, and it seems to keep erroring out because of XYZ." Could you imagine flooding their phone lines with calls for OSS apps. It'd drive them bonkers.
Well, the tech support drones are just ordinary people, likely. It'd only supply sufficent driverage, bonkerwise, if the trend became widespread enough that they heard about it further up the latter, and that'd just give the higher-ups at MS greater incentive to disallow all signed code in future versions of Windows, which would shut out a lot of open source and freeware developers.
Further, if OSS programs *did* become a sizable percentage of Microsoft tech support calls... well, let's just say that it's not difficult at all to see how the MS propaganda mill would spin that to their advantage.
That's essentially the model that h2g2 uses, it has a vast "unedited" Guide that's quirky and idiosyncratic and funny and sometimes untrustworthy, and an "edited" guide that contains articles that have been looked over by staff and been approved. Articles are plainly marked by whether they're in the Edited or Unedited sections.
For this to work in Wikipedia, they'd probably have to introduce a flag that will identify a page as Edited. Searches would probably have to turn up Edited first, or prominently in some way, maybe with a little icon by their titles. Anyone would be able to modify an Edited page, but the result would be an unedited version of that page. Each pages' last approval would be the "official" one for that page.
Nintendo's long been known for the durability of their handhelds. The original Gameboy was extremely durable under ordinary, and some extraordinary, conditions. They probably make the most durable portable consumer electronics of anyone. On the other hand, I've had opportunity to use a Sony Network Walkman. I was constantly worried about dropping it on a hard tile floor. I don't think the little hatch that holds the battery in can withstand even moderate shock. I have a HPC that fell out of my backpack once onto concrete, and while it'll still able to power up, it's just not useable now; a hinge snapped out of place, and it's seems nigh-impossible to snap it back. I've also seen a Palm device with a power button that broke off, requiring that one press the bubble switch inside with a stylus to turn it on and off. More portable manufacturers should take lessons from Nintendo's construction.
Unlike consoles, portables have to be able to take this kind of abuse. It's not always possible to make sure they won't get subject to these kinds of stresses, you can only take so many precautions before you're effectively treating your portable like a console. While it's probably only a matter of time before an enterprising 3rd party manufacturer comes up with some kind of protective frame for the PSP, that just adds even more to the price, while making the unit bulkier in the process.
Word is, from BoingBoing a few months ago, that a recent round of Apple laptops suffered from screen issues that sound similar to these that are being experienced in PSPs, and denied there was a problem for a while. Not sure how Sony will handle the situation, but I suspect they'll be better at it than Apple was in replacing C. Doctorow's iBook.
Oh dear lord let's hear more about the big movie-only sequel to Final Freaking Fantasy VII.
I lost interest in Final Fantasy games some time ago, it is true, but I could see all this ruckus a bit more sympathetically if this were a game. It's like a gigantic cut-scene! Full motion video was the LEAST interesting part of the original game. (Most interesting part? Materia system.)
But if they resurrect Aeris in this, my opinion of the series will drop an additional point. Considering that the big Final Fantasy guy over at Square is supposed to have quit recently, I wouldn't place any bets against that happening.
The N64 had some great software, arguably more than the Gamecube does, taking everything into account. Only problem was, most of it was *by* Nintendo.
N64: Mario 64, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie, Paper Mario, Starfox 64, and the first Mario Party. I'm sure I'm missing some.
GC: Zelda: Wind Waker (which a lot of people have a stupid bias against), Pikmin & Pikmin 2, Metroid Prime & Prime 2, Super Monkey Ball & 2, Eternal Darkness, and now three RPGs. Many of these have limited overall appeal. It had a very light-weight launch, with Luigi's Mansion as the supposed "big" game. Super Monkey Ball was the best thing out of the initial collection, which is great mind you, and I've seen a lot of people have a whole lot of fun with it, but... it's hard.
Mario Sunshine didn't have the revolutionary impact that Mario 64 did, and I think that hurt the system more than anything. The next Gamecube Mario could have anything in it at all and it's difficult to see it making much difference to the system's fortunes.
I think the reason the PSX sold better than the N64 can be best summed up with: Final Fantasy, fighting games, and sports games, and the advantages optical media made possible to those genres. Sure there are other games that did well for it, but in retrospect it's difficult to point to a series that was popular now that was as popular then. PS platformers can't hold a candle to the N64s (there's a reason the fortunes of Crash Bandicoot have declined as of late), and no other adventure game has yet come close to Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But the N64 only ever got one real RPG, towards the end of its life, and last generation was the time RPGs finally started getting real street cred in the U.S. (Unfortunately for me, that was right about the time I started getting sick of them.)
The PS2 widened the lead with the 3D GTA games, most of all, which are the main reasons I'd even consider getting a PS2 these days, but also the more recent FFs and, of course, sports.
Now Sony has built Playstation into a brand name, and it's going to be more difficult to dethrone them next time. Nintendo's next console is codenamed Revolution, so I hear, so maybe they're planning some kind of DS-style gimmick with it. That just *might* do it, if it's a great one. They're certainly being tight-lipped enough about it.
Ridge Racer's control scheme, from what I heard, is actually taken from the N64 version of the game. But I played neither, so I admit I could be mistaken here.
N64 was the big console of the era. Lots of people held off from the Saturn and the Playstation to wait for it (as the N64 was perpetually delayed, and always just around the corner). In the first year of the N64's life, it outsold the PSX by far.
But the later sentences of this assertion don't necessarily imply the first one is correct. The PSX still sold a lot more systems and games than the N64 did. I'm not happy about it either, but it's a fact. I don't see how the N64 can be the "big" console of the previous generation if this is true.
Hmm... I imagine that other, creative solutions might be possible as well. Such as rendering on both screens at half-time.
Display a scene on one screen, save a framebuffer of that and keep showing it there, then display on the other screen on the next frame. It'd be choppy, but could work on both screens.
Metroid Hunters: First Hunt also shows cinemas that split between the screens, so apparently video is possible on both.
But it seems obvious that the designed intention was 3D on one screen and 2D on the other, or 2D on both -- both screens get their own 2D hardware, at least according to these guys.
I think this next system they are developing will be their Dreamcast; that is, their last chance at a home console; make or break time.
I hate to say it but you're on the ball with that remark.
The working title I've heard for their next console is Nintendo Revolution. At this rate, it damn well better be. It would be cool if they had some super-deluxe new DS-style gimmicks included with it. Remains to be seen what they actually do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem seems to be rather that except in the case of some phenomenal exclusive, Nintendo console owners routinely send Nintendo releases through the roof in sales while ignoring third-party games, regardless of how good they are.
I'm not certain this is the case.
Case in point: Arguably the best US DS launch title was Sega's Feel the Magic, but despite positive impressions almost everywhere you went, it was criminally undersold compared to Super Mario 64 DS, a remake of an old game that really wasn't all that suited for the DS to begin with.
But the old game, don't forget, was Super Mario 64, the first true 3D platformer, and still one of the more revered games ever made. The years since then have magnified perceptions of the original's brilliance into something legendary. There are few people who didn't wish the original game was even longer. Meanwhile Feel The Magic, for all its good qualities, was kind of short and gimmicky.
People who bought Mario 64 DS already knew it offered a long and satisfying play experience, while Feel the Magic is, in every review I've seen of it, described as "short."
I do check my spam folder for false positives, and occaisionally they do happen. But they've gotten very rare, for me, as of late.
Your system is probably faster than mine, but it runs great on my computer. Lots of problems with ePSXe can be solved by using the right plugins. For sound, I use Eternal SPU 1.41. Maybe it could help?
(Sorry about the previous, run-on post, I accidently picked the wrong formatting option. This is the same thing, but with comprehensible line breaks.)
I'm working on a retrospective review of Grandia II (which may also cover the first game), and one of the points I'm trying to get across in it is the extremely high quality of the writing, much better than the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Symphonia. It's the best-written RPG I can name, with the possible exception of Earthbound/Mother 2. Grandia characters tend to have really well-defined, utterly charming personalities, and glorious amounts of text for them to shine through. And a lot of this text is hidden, at least in Grandia II -- players are rewarded, if not with items then with backstory and humor, for going back to old areas after major events happen, and when the party roster changes, and chatting everyone up again.
In one memorable instance, in a dungeon early on in the game, one particular character joins right before the dungeon boss and leaves right after it. If the player is insane enough to, after the character joins but before fighting Mr. Grumpy, backtrack all the way out of the dungeon and wander around town, well wouldn't you know it, the writers actually wrote several conversations, many of them hilarious, for everyone in town specifically for that eventuality. That's what I call attention to detail, though of course you're free to come up with your own description.
And yet, in G II at least, if you don't care for the story at all you can almost go from one combat area straight to the next. And the combat is so deep that, once you figure out exactly how to time attacks and customize your characters appropriately, you can actually complete entire dungeons, late in the game, without taking a single hitpoint of damage! You can even do this with some of the bosses.
I never did get into Lunar (their most famous series), but the Grandia games have given me a lot of respect for Game Arts. Here's hoping we get Grandia III one of these days, and that there's nothing "Xtreme" about it.
On the "End of the World" area: I'll be coming up on that area before long, shoot me out an email in a few days to remind me and I'll let you know if I encounter any freezes there.
I'm working on a retrospective review of Grandia II (which may also cover the first game), and one of the points I'm trying to get across in it is the extremely high quality of the writing, much better than the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Symphonia. It's the best-written RPG I can name, with the possible exception of Earthbound/Mother 2. Grandia characters tend to have really well-defined, utterly charming personalities, and glorious amounts of text for them to shine through. And a lot of this text is hidden, at least in Grandia II -- players are rewarded, if not with items then with backstory and humor, for going back to old areas after major events happen, and when the party roster changes, and chatting everyone up again. In one memorable instance, in a dungeon early on in the game, one particular character joins right before the dungeon boss and leaves right after it. If the player is insane enough to, after the character joins but before fighting Mr. Grumpy, backtrack all the way out of the dungeon and wander around town, well wouldn't you know it, the writers actually wrote several conversations, many of them hilarious, for everyone in town specifically for that eventuality. That's what I call attention to detail, though of course you're free to come up with your own description. And yet, in G II at least, if you don't care for the story at all you can almost go from one combat area straight to the next. And the combat is so deep that, once you figure out exactly how to time attacks and customize your characters appropriately, you can actually complete entire dungeons, late in the game, without taking a single hitpoint of damage! You can even do this with some of the bosses. I never did get into Lunar (their most famous series), but the Grandia games have given me a lot of respect for Game Arts. Here's hoping we get Grandia III one of these days, and that there's nothing "Xtreme" about it. On the "End of the World" area: I'll be coming up on that area before long, shoot me out an email in a few days to remind me and I'll let you know if I encounter any freezes there.
Bleem ran on quite modest hardware by today's standards, Pentium IIs and less than 500mhz, with minimum requirements being 200mhz.
My own system runs Grandia from ePSXe very well. It's 1.5 ghz with 256mb of RAM, which is nowhere near top-of-the-line these days. If you've got something like that, or even a little less, you should be able to get it to work at full speed.
Grandia's the only game I've played with it so far. I'll be giving Final Fantasy Anthology a try before long, as well as Parappa if I can find it. I've been playing with keyboard all this time, which isn't much of a problem with Grandia or most RPGs. I haven't noticed lag, but I haven't been playing with a USB controller.
One of the problems with the emulator is that it has plugins for a wide variety of video cards, and you have to sort through them all to find the one for your system. You'll also have to get a CD plugin and a sound plugin for good sound. All these are free and downloadable, but it's a bit of work to get started. Most of these things have a barrelful of options and selections to make as well, which is good if you like to tinker, and bad if you're trying to figure out which of those dozens of settings is causing your game to freeze up after fifteen minutes of play.
One thing you can do with ePSXe is use a program like ISOproducer to create ISOs of your Playstation disks, then play them off the ISOs. I'm starting to do this with Grandia in order to keep my originals in better shape, it's simply too wonderful a game to risk losing as the years go by.
Ha! How many games can you say that about?
What? (reading parent)
D'oh!!
I can't believe I said that. Should read, "inserted into your system's CD drive," of course.
Looks like I need to spend a good couple of hours with my head in The Bucket for that one.
That's interesting, because Hotmail has had, for a long time, a really crappy filter. They just never had ZE WILL to improve it, I suppose.
In other words, hooray for competition!
From the article:
Which is more mature - GTA San Andreas or Animal Crossing? I bet that nearly every single one of you would say GTA but I disagree with all of you. Yes, even you. Animal Crossing is a far more mature game in many ways.
This is the most insightful thing in the article (which contains some errors -- Nintendo didn't develop the Power Glove, it was just available for their system).
The definition of maturity has become somewhat clouded, what with the MPAA's and the ESRB's ludicrous rating systems. They have caused people to equate violent and sexual content with maturity, which is foolish.
The point of those systems isn't to say that these elements are mature, but that the viewer/player should be of at least this maturity level before being exposed to them. Which itself is awfully condesending to the consumer, but is at least less stupid than the common assumption.
Maturity is not what kinds of objectionable content you put in your work. It is an outlook, a way of being sure of yourself despite what you see, a tendency to look out for others before yourself, the ability to behave rationally, respectfully, thoughtfully. Judge it this way, and I can name thirty-year-olds who might not be considered worthy of playing Grand Theft Auto.
But Animal Crossing rewards all those attributes listed above, while many things in the GTA games, despite all their considerable design strengths, do much to tear them down.
And that is why it's a much more mature game, cartoon animals and all, than GTA.
The concept of loving a corporation is completely beyond me. It goes beyond fanaticism into zealot territory.
But Nintendo fans don't actually love the corporation. They love its games.
It's actually something of a tightrope for the company. Stop making excellent games, desecrate the memory of Mario and Samus and Link, do them a disservice, and fans (such as are left) will abandon the big-N in droves. This comes out of Nintendo's internal developer culture. That, there, is Nintendo's corporate strength.
Take a moment to note that the Mario series, despite the relatively-lackluster response with which Mario Sunshine was met, is still in much better shape than Crash Bandicoot, which some thought, once upon a time, could be actually a legitimate rival for the rubbery plumber.
I personally think it's mostly Ninty fanboys that are the most negative about the PSP, becuase it's a real threat to N's last big market.
There is probably some truth to this, but a lot of people attack the DS as well, and for similar reasons.
Gimmicks *can* make a system successful, if they prove to be more than just gimmicks. The jury's still out on whether developers can make effective use of that microphone and touchscreen. Jam with the Band looks like it could be something truly unique and beautiful....
but sony? other than evercrack what harm have they done to the geek open source community?
Slashdot is a lot more than the open source community. They did release a PS2 version of Linux, but they still made sure to keep their own proprietary layer running beneath it, which was missing the point.
The people who don't like Sony do it because:
A. They are a huge company and it's very easy to hate them (even rightfully) for that, and
B. They have worse games, on the average, than Nintendo.
Do not underestimate the importance of point B! Sony has good games, true. Even some great ones -- GTA, Ico, Katamari Damarcy. They're certainly ahead of Microsoft in this regard now. But they still have catching up to do with Nintendo.
Also... well, this is probably just me, but I kind of get a slimy feeling when I see a commercial for a game called "Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal." Say what you want about Nintendo, but you never get the feeling that they're pandering to their audience. (Well, except maybe in the case of the Mario Party games.)
Fanboyism is lame.
Indeed. But one should also take care to avoid anti-fanboyism, tearing something down specifically because it looks like it needs tearing.
Nintendo's iron-fisted behavior back with NES licensing is ancient history these days. Their Tetris actions are defendable, since Atari didn't technically have the legal right to make a console version of the game. Delaying the SNES may have been a mistake from their view, but not from ours, since we got to see a good number of very nice Genesis games including the original ToeJam & Earl.
Your list is merely a number of examples of things Nintendo did "wrong" without any overall connecting thread, which is of course highly subjective and which you can do just as easily for Sony or Microsoft so it proves nothing.
For example, you could make a point about Nintendo's pandering to the purtanical aspects of American culture by noting their old strict and nonsensical censorship policies, which neutered the NES release of Maniac Mansion among other things, and that they did not survive for long into the SNES era anyway due to competition from Sega. That would also tie in the Mortal Kombat point from later.
As for the article... there are still certain game design qualities that Nintendo is known for. They do make great games. They have a more consistant track record for quality than any other publisher at this time. Even their misses (Mario Party n, anyone?) are games that the other console manufacturers would kill for. They're the only remaining console manufacturer that, themselves, develops and publishes the best games for their system.
This, in fact, could be one of the biggest things working against them. Since they make their own sellers, that tends to mean they don't need to worry about giving third-parties a good deal, which means fewer overall games, which leads to a perception that there are not a lot of titles for the system.
My all-time favorite RPG series has got to be Grandia. It's MUCH better-written than Final Fantasy (and just about any other RPG I could name except maybe Earthbound), I like the music more, the characters are works of art, and the battle system is actually fun instead of a mere punishment factor against leveling up.
Yet, my Playstation hasn't worked for years, and I went with Gamecube in the current generation, so no PS2 backwards compatibility for me. So I haven't actually been able to play the original Grandia in all that time.
This is why I was so pleased to find out about ePSXe, a Playstation emulator that can play actual PSX disks inserted in a computer's hard drive. As time passes and the motors inside of optical drives break down, ultimately this will be the only way to play these old games.
(Preemptive caveat: I know what the Sony guys have said, that the original PS format will live forever. My response is that no, it won't, there's no way in hell Sony will continue to allow themselves to be beholden to the original PS format forever, as the profit available for supporting then declines further and further they can and will abandon the old PS1 format someday, it's just a question of when.)
Sony, of course, sued Bleem!, the commercial Playstation emulator, to smithereens. Yet ultimately I think this worked against them, because the net (and debatable) sales loss from piracy was probably less than the potential sales gain from letting people play Playstation games on their computer for $50 bucks, the price of the emulator, instead of $150 bucks, the then-price of the PSX.
Interesting to note that now, five years later, I'm playing through Grandia on a free emulator instead.
Also, neither does Gmail, which disables image display by default.
Gmail, by the way, has a really sharp spam filter, I I've gotten less than one spam message a week on my normal account for months now. It (probably) works because it can use Baynesian filtering where the imputs are the spam reports of tens of thousands of users.
"Hi, umm, Microsoft Support? Yeah, I'm trying to run this program called Gimp, and it seems to keep erroring out because of XYZ." Could you imagine flooding their phone lines with calls for OSS apps. It'd drive them bonkers.
Well, the tech support drones are just ordinary people, likely. It'd only supply sufficent driverage, bonkerwise, if the trend became widespread enough that they heard about it further up the latter, and that'd just give the higher-ups at MS greater incentive to disallow all signed code in future versions of Windows, which would shut out a lot of open source and freeware developers.
Further, if OSS programs *did* become a sizable percentage of Microsoft tech support calls... well, let's just say that it's not difficult at all to see how the MS propaganda mill would spin that to their advantage.
They were too durable, because anything short of a sledgehammer blow to the system and it'd keep working.
(Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was the second worst game ever, aside from ET)
You sound like a man who's never played Chubby Cherub.
That's essentially the model that h2g2 uses, it has a vast "unedited" Guide that's quirky and idiosyncratic and funny and sometimes untrustworthy, and an "edited" guide that contains articles that have been looked over by staff and been approved. Articles are plainly marked by whether they're in the Edited or Unedited sections.
For this to work in Wikipedia, they'd probably have to introduce a flag that will identify a page as Edited. Searches would probably have to turn up Edited first, or prominently in some way, maybe with a little icon by their titles. Anyone would be able to modify an Edited page, but the result would be an unedited version of that page. Each pages' last approval would be the "official" one for that page.
Nintendo's long been known for the durability of their handhelds. The original Gameboy was extremely durable under ordinary, and some extraordinary, conditions. They probably make the most durable portable consumer electronics of anyone. On the other hand, I've had opportunity to use a Sony Network Walkman. I was constantly worried about dropping it on a hard tile floor. I don't think the little hatch that holds the battery in can withstand even moderate shock. I have a HPC that fell out of my backpack once onto concrete, and while it'll still able to power up, it's just not useable now; a hinge snapped out of place, and it's seems nigh-impossible to snap it back. I've also seen a Palm device with a power button that broke off, requiring that one press the bubble switch inside with a stylus to turn it on and off. More portable manufacturers should take lessons from Nintendo's construction.
Unlike consoles, portables have to be able to take this kind of abuse. It's not always possible to make sure they won't get subject to these kinds of stresses, you can only take so many precautions before you're effectively treating your portable like a console. While it's probably only a matter of time before an enterprising 3rd party manufacturer comes up with some kind of protective frame for the PSP, that just adds even more to the price, while making the unit bulkier in the process.
Word is, from BoingBoing a few months ago, that a recent round of Apple laptops suffered from screen issues that sound similar to these that are being experienced in PSPs, and denied there was a problem for a while. Not sure how Sony will handle the situation, but I suspect they'll be better at it than Apple was in replacing C. Doctorow's iBook.
Oh dear lord let's hear more about the big movie-only sequel to Final Freaking Fantasy VII.
I lost interest in Final Fantasy games some time ago, it is true, but I could see all this ruckus a bit more sympathetically if this were a game. It's like a gigantic cut-scene! Full motion video was the LEAST interesting part of the original game. (Most interesting part? Materia system.)
But if they resurrect Aeris in this, my opinion of the series will drop an additional point. Considering that the big Final Fantasy guy over at Square is supposed to have quit recently, I wouldn't place any bets against that happening.
Well actually...
The N64 had some great software, arguably more than the Gamecube does, taking everything into account. Only problem was, most of it was *by* Nintendo.
N64: Mario 64, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie, Paper Mario, Starfox 64, and the first Mario Party. I'm sure I'm missing some.
GC: Zelda: Wind Waker (which a lot of people have a stupid bias against), Pikmin & Pikmin 2, Metroid Prime & Prime 2, Super Monkey Ball & 2, Eternal Darkness, and now three RPGs. Many of these have limited overall appeal. It had a very light-weight launch, with Luigi's Mansion as the supposed "big" game. Super Monkey Ball was the best thing out of the initial collection, which is great mind you, and I've seen a lot of people have a whole lot of fun with it, but... it's hard.
Mario Sunshine didn't have the revolutionary impact that Mario 64 did, and I think that hurt the system more than anything. The next Gamecube Mario could have anything in it at all and it's difficult to see it making much difference to the system's fortunes.
I think the reason the PSX sold better than the N64 can be best summed up with: Final Fantasy, fighting games, and sports games, and the advantages optical media made possible to those genres. Sure there are other games that did well for it, but in retrospect it's difficult to point to a series that was popular now that was as popular then. PS platformers can't hold a candle to the N64s (there's a reason the fortunes of Crash Bandicoot have declined as of late), and no other adventure game has yet come close to Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But the N64 only ever got one real RPG, towards the end of its life, and last generation was the time RPGs finally started getting real street cred in the U.S. (Unfortunately for me, that was right about the time I started getting sick of them.)
The PS2 widened the lead with the 3D GTA games, most of all, which are the main reasons I'd even consider getting a PS2 these days, but also the more recent FFs and, of course, sports.
Now Sony has built Playstation into a brand name, and it's going to be more difficult to dethrone them next time. Nintendo's next console is codenamed Revolution, so I hear, so maybe they're planning some kind of DS-style gimmick with it. That just *might* do it, if it's a great one. They're certainly being tight-lipped enough about it.
Ridge Racer's control scheme, from what I heard, is actually taken from the N64 version of the game. But I played neither, so I admit I could be mistaken here.
N64 was the big console of the era. Lots of people held off from the Saturn and the Playstation to wait for it (as the N64 was perpetually delayed, and always just around the corner). In the first year of the N64's life, it outsold the PSX by far.
But the later sentences of this assertion don't necessarily imply the first one is correct. The PSX still sold a lot more systems and games than the N64 did. I'm not happy about it either, but it's a fact. I don't see how the N64 can be the "big" console of the previous generation if this is true.
Hmm... I imagine that other, creative solutions might be possible as well. Such as rendering on both screens at half-time.
Display a scene on one screen, save a framebuffer of that and keep showing it there, then display on the other screen on the next frame. It'd be choppy, but could work on both screens.
Metroid Hunters: First Hunt also shows cinemas that split between the screens, so apparently video is possible on both.
But it seems obvious that the designed intention was 3D on one screen and 2D on the other, or 2D on both -- both screens get their own 2D hardware, at least according to these guys.
I think this next system they are developing will be their Dreamcast; that is, their last chance at a home console; make or break time.
I hate to say it but you're on the ball with that remark.
The working title I've heard for their next console is Nintendo Revolution. At this rate, it damn well better be. It would be cool if they had some super-deluxe new DS-style gimmicks included with it. Remains to be seen what they actually do with it.