There are a lot more differences between Madden 2005 and 2006, than Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Both keep the same core gameplay with AI tweaks and graphics updates.
Not so. For Ms. Pac-Man cannot be beaten with patterns like Pac-Man can, which at high, and even middle, levels of play makes it a fundamentally different game. Meanwhile Madden 2k5 and 2k6 are still, ultimately, football. It is possible that AI tweaks could make it a different game, although I doubt it in this case. Graphic updates, however, cannot.
The faster and faster enemies of yester-year does not make the games better, especially if you figure the pattern. People have mastered Pac-man.
You grossly oversimplify the case in your dismissal of "faster and faster enemies," but even faster play can, potentially, make a game interesting. For a modern example, check the WarioWare games, which ultimately boil down to an extended reaction test.
Whether a game is masterable or not is beside the point. People have mastered Defender, a game which is orders of magnitude more difficult to rule over than Pac-Man and to which patterns are not useable. Many more people, assuredly, have mastered Madden, but that is not why the endless line of Madden sequels are bad.
If you want to look at this as a problem, then yes, it's clearly the fault of the consumers. People only buy FPS, RTS and MMORPG games, so that's exactly what they're going to get.
It is indeed possible to pin blame on consumers, if you take the view that the true worth of a thing is decided retroactively, years later.
Already pawn shops are littered with outdated sports games, and a used game store I visited just a week ago had two clearance prices: one for old SNES and GENESIS titles, and another, lower one for sports games for those systems.
What kind of "innovation" do people want? Some whacky game where you control a dishwasher and try to rape kittens on Mars?
You make it exceedingly difficult to take you seriously when you make a statement like that.
I know a bit (really not too much, but a bit) about Crawford's Storytron. He's worked a long, long time on it, but if it works, it'll be extremely big -- it's nothing less than a engine that lets a computer tell stories algorithmically.
In otherwords: ever wondered, in a Final Fantasy game, if your character did something that had not been planned by the game creator? Crawford's idea would be able to handle that.
Chris Crawford seems like a person who contributes nothing, but complains a lot.
He does complain a lot. (Lots of other people do too, for that matter.) But his contributing nothing is not so much his fault; to produce games that get sold on the big chain shelves these days, you pretty much have to buy into the system. He does not, which from one perspective dooms him to marginalization, and by another allows him to be principled and insightful.
Sims? World of Warcraft? Second Life? Sports games? Racing games? I should think that they reach out to the "general public" (what does this even mean, exactly?) well enough.
It's easy to cherry pick counter-examples when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of games released every year.
There are essentially two major categories of games you refer to, plus World of Warcraft:
Sims and Second Life are truly unique concepts, and it could be argued that their uniqueness is what makes them popular. Crawford would not disapprove of either of them (though he might of the many Sims expansions). Second Life, in particular, may be something truly new and interesting -- but it also pushes the boundries of what is considered a game. It is also a rarity, and there were several attempts at that kind of thing before Second Life: There, The Palace, and the one which I had the most experience with, WorldsAway.
World of Warcraft doesn't really do anything new, but it is an exceptionally polished example of the genre. That's what Blizzard does best (Warcraft was not the first RTS, and most of what makes Diablo interesting comes from roguelikes), and I can't fault them for that. There isn't room for too many Blizzards, though.
Concerning the other examples, and most notably driving games, I only have two words for you: "Riiiidge Raaacer!"
The problem isn't that there are dozens of knockoffs. The problem is that, now, knock-offs are the industry. Selling games has become more about finding easy to make a buck (Madden Player Update 2006) than creating new kinds of games. (Recognized exception: The Sims, although it should be noted that even though they took a chance on its creation, they quickly ran it into the ground with expansion packs BEFORE releasing the official sequel. I shudder to think of what they'll do if Spore makes it big.)
Even the me-too games of yesteryear tended to add substantial new gameplay nuance. There's enough different from Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man, from Defender to Stargate, that a master of one game is not automatically a master of the other, even if the game types are superficially similar.
Part of this has been the move from algorithmic-generated, dynamic situations to static "content" to be consumed (which gives us the relatively recent notion that a game can be "completed," and is itself a tremendous shame), but Crawford is right on the money, in general, about the sterility of the game production industry.
First off, I'd like to say that I think the managing of games has come a long way from the beginning. In the beginning, it seemed like you needed one key inventor/genius player on a team to make a great game. It had to be someone's child.
In fact, I think this is one of the reasons so many sucky games are made these days. Being someone's child can be a great advantage to a game in development -- it is a lot easier for a novel gameplay vision to be held by one person alone than by a team of co-designers.
Examples of this are legion. MULE: designed by one (at the time) guy. Atari Games' classic output: mostly designed by one person, even in the later years. Rogue: developed by a team of three, went on to inspire an entire genre of games and, ultimately, Diablo.
These days, however, even the games that are designed by small teams seem to be tremendously deriviative. Take "casual" games, or as I think of them, dressed up Flash games using some mechanic invented by someone else a decade earlier into the ground games. This seems, to me, to indicate the problem lies with a focus on making a quick buck rather than on taking the time to create games with new kinds of play.
I've played a good bit of these games, or at least the ones that came out in the US....
My favorite, even more than the modern Metroidvanias, is still the first game. It's just such an elegant combination of control and reflexes. The thing about the game to realize is that your character is purposely limited (you can't control how high you jump, you can't change direction in mid-air, can't jump very high, can't walk fast and climb stairs even slower) but has a powerful main weapon. None of this two-pixel-long sword crap, your whip extends like four blocks ahead of you! And once powered up, which wasn't hard at all usually, it could take out most non-boss foes in one hit.
On the other hand, your enemies were a lot more manueverable than you, and of course it turns out that it was not Dracula who was the bane of Simon's existence but gaping pits. When a friend told me that "Dracula X" for the SNES's version of Dracula was fought over a giant hole and was made much harder as a result, I realized it: gravity is classic Castlevania's secret ultimate boss! "So, we meet again, player! I see you've met my lackey Dracula... a charming fellow, and his fangs are quite deadly, but he is as nothing next to my awesome power! Now you must fight us both at once!" (Bottomless Pit runs out and just looms underneath the fight.) "Take that!"
Hm. Bottomless Pit. Something makes me think a lot of people are going to use that as a character nickname for the new Smash Bros....
At this moment, this story bears the tags dupe and oldnews.
An Old Stories search for France Apple DRM turns up dozens of hits, but only this story seems to have to do with France, so I doubt it's a dupe. The oldnews tag doesn't make sense either, considering that the article linked to the story was published on May 26. This is not the first time I've seen tags like this, either.
Maybe this is too meta, but I must wonder whether people are trying to game the tag system. Has anyone else noticed this kind of thing?
Howard Phillips was the "president of the Nintendo Fun Club," and the first editor of Nintendo Power. The man was a kind of all-around spokesman/friendly corporate face/human mascot for Nintendo at the time, to the degree that he was one-half of the "Howard and Nester" comic printed in the magazine. Eventually he left the company, and bounced around the industry for a while, but once in a while the magazine will still mention him. (Entertainingly, he now works for Microsoft Game Studios, who could really use such a humanizing face.)
Now, Reggie Fils-Amie is the one person working at Nintendo of America that a non-initiate would be likely to name. Putting aside how one feels about his over-proclaimed kicking of ass and taking of name, he doesn't seem quite as jolly as their former spokesman. I'm thinking specifically of his speeches back at Nintendo's E3 press conference. Phillips was (if memory serves, it's been a while) humorous and self-effacing, while Fils-Amie talks trash. With buzz over Wii fairly high after the show, he has the potential to preside (as much as a non-American can ever preside at NOA) over a resurging of the company's fortunes unequaled since the NES days.
How long before we get a Reggie and Nester comic? Can it really be so long, and will he be wiping the floor with that punk round-headed kid's ass? Could that happen soon enough?
Where did you get your information? Awfully little other than that trailer and a couple of other things on the Smash Bros Dojo site has been released on the game, and to my recollection none of it features a turtle shell powerup. I am forced to call shenanigans.
Any basic business student will tell you that the price you sell something is proportional to the price the market will bear, not the cost of production.
That's the case if competition is somehow excluded from the pot. Each console manufacturer competes with its own proprietary system, instead of generalized hardware, so each has, in effect, a little monopoly, with only some of the games available on all the platforms. The greater the effect competition has, the lower the prices the manufacturer must set to make his product look attractive compared to the alternatives. He cannot lower it below the cost of production and still make a profit, but the closer he goes the more of the market (all other things being equal) he'll take.
This idea can also be used to explain your example of the prices of CDs: people buy what they like, not that which is cheapest. The increase in utility derived from obtaining music by their favorite band outweighs the difference in price, much more than the increased quality of the medium itself (which is shamefully overpriced by any measure), so ultimately each album is like its own tiny market.
But even accepting the monopolistic aspects of the game business, your assertion is not completely true either, regardless of what your hypothetical business student says. For competition is not just a case of different similar products competing for money. It's also a case of consumers having to decide which, of all the things available for his limited amount of money, he's going to buy. To some extent, all things which cost money compete with each other. This is the danger of Sony's new console and game pricing strategy: they're the only people who make PS3s, it is true, and you'll have to get a PS3 to play PS3 games, but price it too high and people will decide it's better to go with a different system, and a different set of exclusive games. If all the console manufacturers priced their wares too high, then consumers would be driven to other sources of recreation.
Ah, my definition of console generations follows more of a chronological determining. Thus, the Neo-Geo is a SNES-generation console, despite the fact that it was much more technologically capable of other systems of the time, and was priced to match.
Actually it's interesting, checking the Wikipedia entry on the NeoGeo, it seems obvious that the system was not *that* much more capable that other systems of its age. It had a 12MHz processor, but the Genesis' was 7MHz. The NeoGeo was neither capable of doing 3D graphics nor did it use CD-based media upon its release.
Also, I think the Dreamcast does need to be included along with the PS2/GC/X-box era.
I realized shortly after posting that I had neglected to mention the non-programmable consoles. Ah well.
It'd be nice if EA actually backed some new ideas besides those by Will Wright (apparently the only employee of the company to retain his soul). But because the company, back in their 8-bit computer days, were the publishers of so many wonderful creations, I have to rate the company as having a net deficit in the wonder-and-goodness department until they at least get back to that level.
Electronic Arts was hot stuff once. I doubt we'll ever see it at that level again.
Hmmm... that is not a consumer product, so the idea of devoting a whole generation to it doesn't make sense. Include things like that, and we'd have to consider Space War and arcade games as well, and that's not useful for this context.
However, I *did* forget the early non-programmable, Pong-playing systems like the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, which I'd rate an Intellivision-era system).
While I agree with the parent's sentiment and those in other posts about this story being irrelevant, is there any evidence that Sony was behind this? If not, then the Sony bashing has officially gotten out of hand, and the parent has no business being modded 'Insightful'.
The bashing, of all types, has been out of hand 'round these parts for some time. (Just ask the Overrated Gremlins that follow me around Slashdot....)
Too many conversations about video games on Slashdot too often (and Digg, and many gaming blogs too), once you reduce to lowest common denominator, take the form You're a FANBOY!/No YOU'RE a fanboy!
There was no general-purpose, publically-available Gameboy reader for the N64.
However, there were two games, at least, that allowed an N64 to interface with Gameboy cartridges. They were the devices that shipped along with the Pokemon Stadium games, and allowed them to store Gameboy-captured Pokemon, and also fight with them on a TV screen.
While I don't believe the device was capable of reading an entire Gameboy cartridge, it was at least able to read the SRAM (obviously), and enough of the rest to confirm which first-gen version of Pokemon was inserted. It could then start an emulated copy of that game stored on the cartridge, using the SRAM data on the cart.
the DS only just got its first good FPS, with no others in the pipeline that I'm aware of, and it has excellent control options for FPSes. Yet the Xbox with its unfriendly controller is overflowing with them.
I think that's telling in a way, and that's why I made my Nintendo-w/-good-FPS controls comment. Nintendo's control schemes are interesting because they're perfect for FPSes, even though they are not a company priority.
As for DS games, well I don't know about you, but the possibility of a new Yoshi's Island, that leaves behind the Yoshi's Story "innovations," could be absolutely awesome, and it seems there is a DS Chibi Robo game in the works....
Heya Satan, long time no see. Me an' Baelzebub's gettin' together after work if you're up for a game.
I noticed the slow facing change time on Red Steel too, good eyes. By the way, is it just me, or is it damn strange that Nintendo's consoles are the ones that seem to have the best FPS interfaces this time around?
Even if they do live to regret that sentiment when/if HD becomes the norm.
It's a "cripple" because, if it does become the norm, it's not just Sony that will be regretting it, it'll be everyone who bought system that only costs half a grand.
Well, if I was Nintendo, I would be alternating between two activities right now. Gibbering in panic and frantic consultation with lawyers.
With the HUGE price difference between the systems, the PS3's lack of anything like X-box Live Arcade or Virtual Console, and the half-hearted motion sensing technology in the PS3's controller (apparently incapable of detecting tilt unless the controller is moved) with its inability to detect how it's being held in relation to the screen, which has always been Wii's true innovation?
Do not be so quick to proclaim Nintendo is teh d00md.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot more differences between Madden 2005 and 2006, than Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Both keep the same core gameplay with AI tweaks and graphics updates.
Not so. For Ms. Pac-Man cannot be beaten with patterns like Pac-Man can, which at high, and even middle, levels of play makes it a fundamentally different game. Meanwhile Madden 2k5 and 2k6 are still, ultimately, football. It is possible that AI tweaks could make it a different game, although I doubt it in this case. Graphic updates, however, cannot.
The faster and faster enemies of yester-year does not make the games better, especially if you figure the pattern. People have mastered Pac-man.
You grossly oversimplify the case in your dismissal of "faster and faster enemies," but even faster play can, potentially, make a game interesting. For a modern example, check the WarioWare games, which ultimately boil down to an extended reaction test.
Whether a game is masterable or not is beside the point. People have mastered Defender, a game which is orders of magnitude more difficult to rule over than Pac-Man and to which patterns are not useable. Many more people, assuredly, have mastered Madden, but that is not why the endless line of Madden sequels are bad.
If you want to look at this as a problem, then yes, it's clearly the fault of the consumers. People only buy FPS, RTS and MMORPG games, so that's exactly what they're going to get.
It is indeed possible to pin blame on consumers, if you take the view that the true worth of a thing is decided retroactively, years later.
Already pawn shops are littered with outdated sports games, and a used game store I visited just a week ago had two clearance prices: one for old SNES and GENESIS titles, and another, lower one for sports games for those systems.
What kind of "innovation" do people want? Some whacky game where you control a dishwasher and try to rape kittens on Mars?
You make it exceedingly difficult to take you seriously when you make a statement like that.
I know a bit (really not too much, but a bit) about Crawford's Storytron. He's worked a long, long time on it, but if it works, it'll be extremely big -- it's nothing less than a engine that lets a computer tell stories algorithmically.
In otherwords: ever wondered, in a Final Fantasy game, if your character did something that had not been planned by the game creator? Crawford's idea would be able to handle that.
Chris Crawford seems like a person who contributes nothing, but complains a lot.
He does complain a lot. (Lots of other people do too, for that matter.) But his contributing nothing is not so much his fault; to produce games that get sold on the big chain shelves these days, you pretty much have to buy into the system. He does not, which from one perspective dooms him to marginalization, and by another allows him to be principled and insightful.
Sims? World of Warcraft? Second Life? Sports games? Racing games? I should think that they reach out to the "general public" (what does this even mean, exactly?) well enough.
It's easy to cherry pick counter-examples when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of games released every year.
There are essentially two major categories of games you refer to, plus World of Warcraft:
Sims and Second Life are truly unique concepts, and it could be argued that their uniqueness is what makes them popular. Crawford would not disapprove of either of them (though he might of the many Sims expansions). Second Life, in particular, may be something truly new and interesting -- but it also pushes the boundries of what is considered a game. It is also a rarity, and there were several attempts at that kind of thing before Second Life: There, The Palace, and the one which I had the most experience with, WorldsAway.
World of Warcraft doesn't really do anything new, but it is an exceptionally polished example of the genre. That's what Blizzard does best (Warcraft was not the first RTS, and most of what makes Diablo interesting comes from roguelikes), and I can't fault them for that. There isn't room for too many Blizzards, though.
Concerning the other examples, and most notably driving games, I only have two words for you: "Riiiidge Raaacer!"
The problem isn't that there are dozens of knockoffs. The problem is that, now, knock-offs are the industry. Selling games has become more about finding easy to make a buck (Madden Player Update 2006) than creating new kinds of games. (Recognized exception: The Sims, although it should be noted that even though they took a chance on its creation, they quickly ran it into the ground with expansion packs BEFORE releasing the official sequel. I shudder to think of what they'll do if Spore makes it big.)
Even the me-too games of yesteryear tended to add substantial new gameplay nuance. There's enough different from Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man, from Defender to Stargate, that a master of one game is not automatically a master of the other, even if the game types are superficially similar.
Part of this has been the move from algorithmic-generated, dynamic situations to static "content" to be consumed (which gives us the relatively recent notion that a game can be "completed," and is itself a tremendous shame), but Crawford is right on the money, in general, about the sterility of the game production industry.
First off, I'd like to say that I think the managing of games has come a long way from the beginning. In the beginning, it seemed like you needed one key inventor/genius player on a team to make a great game. It had to be someone's child.
In fact, I think this is one of the reasons so many sucky games are made these days. Being someone's child can be a great advantage to a game in development -- it is a lot easier for a novel gameplay vision to be held by one person alone than by a team of co-designers.
Examples of this are legion. MULE: designed by one (at the time) guy. Atari Games' classic output: mostly designed by one person, even in the later years. Rogue: developed by a team of three, went on to inspire an entire genre of games and, ultimately, Diablo.
These days, however, even the games that are designed by small teams seem to be tremendously deriviative. Take "casual" games, or as I think of them, dressed up Flash games using some mechanic invented by someone else a decade earlier into the ground games. This seems, to me, to indicate the problem lies with a focus on making a quick buck rather than on taking the time to create games with new kinds of play.
Am I the only Slashdot reader that remembers that toy? "I am the atomic-powered RO-bot! PLEASE give my best wishes to EVERYBODY!"
(As immortalized in a Mystery Science Theater episode.)
I've played a good bit of these games, or at least the ones that came out in the US....
My favorite, even more than the modern Metroidvanias, is still the first game. It's just such an elegant combination of control and reflexes. The thing about the game to realize is that your character is purposely limited (you can't control how high you jump, you can't change direction in mid-air, can't jump very high, can't walk fast and climb stairs even slower) but has a powerful main weapon. None of this two-pixel-long sword crap, your whip extends like four blocks ahead of you! And once powered up, which wasn't hard at all usually, it could take out most non-boss foes in one hit.
On the other hand, your enemies were a lot more manueverable than you, and of course it turns out that it was not Dracula who was the bane of Simon's existence but gaping pits. When a friend told me that "Dracula X" for the SNES's version of Dracula was fought over a giant hole and was made much harder as a result, I realized it: gravity is classic Castlevania's secret ultimate boss! "So, we meet again, player! I see you've met my lackey Dracula... a charming fellow, and his fangs are quite deadly, but he is as nothing next to my awesome power! Now you must fight us both at once!" (Bottomless Pit runs out and just looms underneath the fight.) "Take that!"
Hm. Bottomless Pit. Something makes me think a lot of people are going to use that as a character nickname for the new Smash Bros....
So you're saying the People's Mario (Flash animation) lied to me?
At this moment, this story bears the tags dupe and oldnews.
An Old Stories search for France Apple DRM turns up dozens of hits, but only this story seems to have to do with France, so I doubt it's a dupe. The oldnews tag doesn't make sense either, considering that the article linked to the story was published on May 26. This is not the first time I've seen tags like this, either.
Maybe this is too meta, but I must wonder whether people are trying to game the tag system. Has anyone else noticed this kind of thing?
Howard Phillips was the "president of the Nintendo Fun Club," and the first editor of Nintendo Power. The man was a kind of all-around spokesman/friendly corporate face/human mascot for Nintendo at the time, to the degree that he was one-half of the "Howard and Nester" comic printed in the magazine. Eventually he left the company, and bounced around the industry for a while, but once in a while the magazine will still mention him. (Entertainingly, he now works for Microsoft Game Studios, who could really use such a humanizing face.)
Now, Reggie Fils-Amie is the one person working at Nintendo of America that a non-initiate would be likely to name. Putting aside how one feels about his over-proclaimed kicking of ass and taking of name, he doesn't seem quite as jolly as their former spokesman. I'm thinking specifically of his speeches back at Nintendo's E3 press conference. Phillips was (if memory serves, it's been a while) humorous and self-effacing, while Fils-Amie talks trash. With buzz over Wii fairly high after the show, he has the potential to preside (as much as a non-American can ever preside at NOA) over a resurging of the company's fortunes unequaled since the NES days.
How long before we get a Reggie and Nester comic? Can it really be so long, and will he be wiping the floor with that punk round-headed kid's ass? Could that happen soon enough?
Where did you get your information? Awfully little other than that trailer and a couple of other things on the Smash Bros Dojo site has been released on the game, and to my recollection none of it features a turtle shell powerup. I am forced to call shenanigans.
Any basic business student will tell you that the price you sell something is proportional to the price the market will bear, not the cost of production.
That's the case if competition is somehow excluded from the pot. Each console manufacturer competes with its own proprietary system, instead of generalized hardware, so each has, in effect, a little monopoly, with only some of the games available on all the platforms. The greater the effect competition has, the lower the prices the manufacturer must set to make his product look attractive compared to the alternatives. He cannot lower it below the cost of production and still make a profit, but the closer he goes the more of the market (all other things being equal) he'll take.
This idea can also be used to explain your example of the prices of CDs: people buy what they like, not that which is cheapest. The increase in utility derived from obtaining music by their favorite band outweighs the difference in price, much more than the increased quality of the medium itself (which is shamefully overpriced by any measure), so ultimately each album is like its own tiny market.
But even accepting the monopolistic aspects of the game business, your assertion is not completely true either, regardless of what your hypothetical business student says. For competition is not just a case of different similar products competing for money. It's also a case of consumers having to decide which, of all the things available for his limited amount of money, he's going to buy. To some extent, all things which cost money compete with each other. This is the danger of Sony's new console and game pricing strategy: they're the only people who make PS3s, it is true, and you'll have to get a PS3 to play PS3 games, but price it too high and people will decide it's better to go with a different system, and a different set of exclusive games. If all the console manufacturers priced their wares too high, then consumers would be driven to other sources of recreation.
Ah, my definition of console generations follows more of a chronological determining. Thus, the Neo-Geo is a SNES-generation console, despite the fact that it was much more technologically capable of other systems of the time, and was priced to match.
Actually it's interesting, checking the Wikipedia entry on the NeoGeo, it seems obvious that the system was not *that* much more capable that other systems of its age. It had a 12MHz processor, but the Genesis' was 7MHz. The NeoGeo was neither capable of doing 3D graphics nor did it use CD-based media upon its release.
Also, I think the Dreamcast does need to be included along with the PS2/GC/X-box era.
I realized shortly after posting that I had neglected to mention the non-programmable consoles. Ah well.
New properties != Innovation!
It'd be nice if EA actually backed some new ideas besides those by Will Wright (apparently the only employee of the company to retain his soul). But because the company, back in their 8-bit computer days, were the publishers of so many wonderful creations, I have to rate the company as having a net deficit in the wonder-and-goodness department until they at least get back to that level.
Electronic Arts was hot stuff once. I doubt we'll ever see it at that level again.
Because I am a *pedant*. I thought that much was obvious?
Okay seriously, it doesn't really matter. Just a poster seemed to have forgotten about the history of gaming pre-NES, as many often do.
Hmmm... that is not a consumer product, so the idea of devoting a whole generation to it doesn't make sense. Include things like that, and we'd have to consider Space War and arcade games as well, and that's not useful for this context.
However, I *did* forget the early non-programmable, Pong-playing systems like the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, which I'd rate an Intellivision-era system).
I seem to remember making this kind of comment before, but....
The Gamecube is sixth-generation. The prior generations are:
1. Up to and including Atari 2600.
2. Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 5200.
3. NES, Sega Master System, Atari 7800.
4. Genesis, SNES, Turbografx 16.
5. Saturn, Playstation, N64
6. Dreamcast, PS2, X-box, Gamecube.
-- and next --
7. X-Box 360, Playstation 3, Wii.
While I agree with the parent's sentiment and those in other posts about this story being irrelevant, is there any evidence that Sony was behind this? If not, then the Sony bashing has officially gotten out of hand, and the parent has no business being modded 'Insightful'.
The bashing, of all types, has been out of hand 'round these parts for some time. (Just ask the Overrated Gremlins that follow me around Slashdot....)
Too many conversations about video games on Slashdot too often (and Digg, and many gaming blogs too), once you reduce to lowest common denominator, take the form You're a FANBOY!/No YOU'RE a fanboy!
It's almost as bad as talking politics....
There was no general-purpose, publically-available Gameboy reader for the N64.
However, there were two games, at least, that allowed an N64 to interface with Gameboy cartridges. They were the devices that shipped along with the Pokemon Stadium games, and allowed them to store Gameboy-captured Pokemon, and also fight with them on a TV screen.
While I don't believe the device was capable of reading an entire Gameboy cartridge, it was at least able to read the SRAM (obviously), and enough of the rest to confirm which first-gen version of Pokemon was inserted. It could then start an emulated copy of that game stored on the cartridge, using the SRAM data on the cart.
Blogger For Word.
The King of All Cosmos needs to be in the game, although I'm sure his giant Katamari Attack would be somewhat overpowered....
Can't be as bad as Roy in Melee, though.
the DS only just got its first good FPS, with no others in the pipeline that I'm aware of, and it has excellent control options for FPSes. Yet the Xbox with its unfriendly controller is overflowing with them.
I think that's telling in a way, and that's why I made my Nintendo-w/-good-FPS controls comment. Nintendo's control schemes are interesting because they're perfect for FPSes, even though they are not a company priority.
As for DS games, well I don't know about you, but the possibility of a new Yoshi's Island, that leaves behind the Yoshi's Story "innovations," could be absolutely awesome, and it seems there is a DS Chibi Robo game in the works....
Heya Satan, long time no see. Me an' Baelzebub's gettin' together after work if you're up for a game.
I noticed the slow facing change time on Red Steel too, good eyes. By the way, is it just me, or is it damn strange that Nintendo's consoles are the ones that seem to have the best FPS interfaces this time around?
Even if they do live to regret that sentiment when/if HD becomes the norm.
It's a "cripple" because, if it does become the norm, it's not just Sony that will be regretting it, it'll be everyone who bought system that only costs half a grand.
Well, if I was Nintendo, I would be alternating between two activities right now. Gibbering in panic and frantic consultation with lawyers.
With the HUGE price difference between the systems, the PS3's lack of anything like X-box Live Arcade or Virtual Console, and the half-hearted motion sensing technology in the PS3's controller (apparently incapable of detecting tilt unless the controller is moved) with its inability to detect how it's being held in relation to the screen, which has always been Wii's true innovation?
Do not be so quick to proclaim Nintendo is teh d00md.
I can vouch for your experience, I *still* am not used to WASD, and can't even play Nethack without OPTIONS=NUMPAD.