Why are you talking of Ragnarok Online in the past? It is not empty at all anymore, and is still being enhanced and developed. They just added another area recently. If you say it was empty, I guess you played the beta only. It sure enough is not empty now.
Nintendo has traditionally stifled the idea mass-communication on their systems Nintendo never stifled the idea of mass-communicating, only YOUR idea of mass-communication, which doesn't work with a larger demographic like the one Nintendo always targeted.
Thus the friend codes on both the DS and the Wii Only people that never used any of Nintendo online services would say such a nonsense. There are several high profile Nintendo games that don't require any friends code at all to play against others. Only when some kind of communication is required, they require friends code.
This probably keeps maintaining game network costs to a minimum as well. So building/maintaining even a simple MMO infrastructure is more than likely out of the question, as Nintendo seems rooted in not having subscriptions to play online That's wrong of course. Nintendo doesn't make a MMO because they don't know how to do those kind of games, plain and simple. These games are western audience oriented, and western developers are the most proficient in it, with the exception of Korea. The better question would be why no western 3rd party did a MMORPG for the DS? The answer is that like on most Nintendo handheld, western devs made lackluster support for it. The support from the western devs for the DS is so poor that it's pathetic. Look at all the big hits past and to come on the DS: most come from eastern devs. I actually can't even cite one big hit from western devs for the DS. I'm not even sure the Sims is one.
Anyway, that's one of the few genre Nintendo doesn't have in its portfolio, but they are working on it, courting some korean company for one or two MMORPG games. They will be eastern oriented though, nothing like you're used to, except if you enjoyed Ragnarok Online or that 2D one from Korea.
Mistwalker is not and never was a MS game studio. Just because their first projects released were exclusive XBox 360 titles does not make them a MS studio. That's why it's no surprise they went the way of the DS, as their projects failed as expected in the japanese market, and they will never make a good name for their studio, if they go on developing exclusively for XBox 360. That's because their core audience is japanese, and they have to cater to them.
Anyway, the end result is mostly the same -- the 360's hardware scaler chip is quite good, and only the OCD pixel counters will ever notice that the game is natively rendered at 640p rather than 720p or 1080p Plain wrong! The end result is NOT the same AT ALL! It seems the initial message has been lost in translation, and lots of apologists say: "it's not a big deal". The end result is that the main XBox 360 game, the one that the console is most know for, HALO 3, IS NOT A HD GAME! Which is kind of a shocker, when it's a 1st party game coming from a company that bashed others for not being HD or not working with every HDTV out there. Their flagship game is not HD, can you believe that? You can see it as 20 % less pixels than the minimum HD resolution, or 80 pixels lost in vertical resolution, but the end result is that the flagship game of the console is not even in HD resolution. Even a few less pixels would be good for overscan, but this is just plain wrong, when you tout "next-gen" is HD here and there.
As for not being able to handle double-buffered 1920x1080 resolutions, there are currently exactly two games on the Xbox 360 that render in 1080p -- Virtua Tennis 3 and some basketball game (NBA Street Homecourt, I think) You're correct, but just want to say that they are 1080 vertical resolution (1080p), but less than 1920 horizontal: they're not 1920x1080 games. I say that because your sentence was confusing, and people could believe these games render internally in 1920x1080, which they are not. IIRC there's only one game doing that, and it's on PS3.
Obviously an upscaled 1080p image will not be quite as good as a natively-rendered 1080p image, but if you're playing the game rather than counting pixels you're never going to notice. You just invalidated one reason to go HD, and invalidated the "HD consoles", XBox 360 and PS3. Good job! Are you seriously saying that you'll never going to notice the difference between a game that isn't even HD (Halo 3) and a native 1080p image? You just implied the "HD consoles'" HD feature is useless. Because you know, all (digital) HDTV have to scale content to their native resolution anyway, so if the console won't do the job, the TV will, with various results of course.
How many enemies and physics-affected items are on-screen at one time in Gears or Bioshock? How large are the areas? Now compare that to Halo 3, where you can have 30+ enemies on-screen at one time, with hundreds of items strewn about being affected by physics, on maps with draw distances measured in kilometers. You actually believe your own BS? "draw distances measured in kilometers"? Yeah right, OK thanks. Now, you would have to know the resolution of Gears or Bioshock to compare the processing power needed.
This was about what is left for japanese fans, as everyone can read in the article. And as for the list of Aladrin of exclusives content (no multiplatform, no remake) that MAY appeal (no FPS, no WRPG) to japanese fans, it reduces to : Lost Odyssey. Adding Infinite Undiscovery, that's pretty much what the original article said.
What makes you figure only a "fanboy" would buy a console without knowing much of its game library Nothing, I don't even believe that at all. What I believe though, is that only fanboys buy a bare console, without any game.
they said "mom, dad, I want a Playstation" or "I want a Nintendo" or whatever BS! There's a reason they want the console, and even if they don't know the game's name, you can be sure they can point their parent to the game they want. The "I want a Playstation" doesn't come from a vacuum you know.
As for adults, the accessibility of a console (wiimote) and the price still means more than the quality of the games, since *most of these people haven't actually played these games and have NO clue what their experience would be like What nonsense! The people buying the Wii that didn't buy any console before have at least seen it experienced by others, or even tried it themselves. They didn't come flocking to the Wii just because. And to have even a glimpse of the accessibility of the wiimote, they have to have at least seen people experiencing it. People just don't lurk videogame related areas to see if a controller is accessible. You talk like all these new users woke up one day believing they want a Wii. The alpha mom theory is much more believable, sorry.
So, yeah you are the ultimate troll and I don't see how someone hasn't modded you down yet.
A console's purpose is playing games? Sure, kinda, except for the PS3 which almost everyone I know uses for movies and maybe Madden or something You're amazing...
changing from 480i to 480p will not improve the quality of the image produced. It will still be less than 1/4 the number of pixels an HDTV is capable of displaying You're full of it. If you're cluelessn don't say anything and look like a fool. If you have 1/4 the number of pixels in 480p, then you have 1/8 in 480i in the same time frame. And going interlaced to progressive WILL IMPROVE the picture quality. There are countless artifacts caused by interlaced signal.
The only thing changing to progressive scan will do is increase the rate of refresh and therefor reduce motion blur BS! It won't increase any rate of refresh, it will just improve the resolution, bypassing the image pairing, avoiding lots of artefacts in the process.
At best this will make edges more crisp which will actually make the image look more grainy than it would interlaced as the oversized pixels will be more pronounced So progressive scan DVD players make the DVD image more grainy? What you're saying is BS anyway. If you get oversized pixels that look more grainy, you have a HDTV with a very bad scaler, that's all.
At 19 inches the difference between a 480 and 1080 image is very little, but at even 40 or more images the difference is staggering. Those of us that have viewed a 1080 image regularly have a hard time watching 480 images when we have the choice I have a 55" HDTV, have looked at 1080p movies on it, and can still watch 480i/p images without any problem. I can even look at lesser than that (240 pixels height games) through the Virtual Console games, without any problems. Guess what, I even enjoy the games! Imagine!
The Wii controller was a good idea, not supporting HD-TV was a bad idea You have it backwards. That's your TV that has to support the Wii. And the fact is that most HDTV support the Wii.
The Wii graphics in "The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess" and "Resident Evil 4" look like crap on a 56 inch HD-TV No they don't. The Wii graphics look better now on my 55" HDTV than they did on my 52" SDTV I had when I bought it. Both are RPTV actually, and the HDTV is a 1080p one. Are you believing that the extra 1" makes the graphics worse? I rather believe your HDTV is crap actually. You need to change your crappy HDTV as soon as possible to play the Wii (without lag). Besides, every SD source, and DVD, must look crap on your HDTV too, how sad!
However, it's graphics capabilities are not as advanced, and games for it have trouble comparing to their counterparts on other systems Fortunately, graphics capabilities not being advanced is irrelevant for games, and comparing with other systems is not the goal of a console at all. So basically, what you said here is completely irrelevant, except for graphic whores, which are insignificant for a console sales.
The controls are an excellent idea, but could be much better designed (for instance, NOW is the time to resurrect the Power Glove). Other consoles can and will follow suit (unless Nintendo is able to file suit - difficult considering previous art) Yeah, everything could be much better. Other consoles can't follow suit, but will try. Most people believe that just plugging a wiimote into other consoles would be enough to have the same behaviour. Even the PS3 couldn't have the wiimote pointer. Anyway, the day the other consoles release a wiimote like device, that's the day they start making heavy advertising for the Wii. 3rd party devices never work well, because developers won't sell to the console market, but only to the device market, which is far smaller. So even if they pull it off, there will be a few games for this device, while the Wii will have tons of them. Next move for the consumer, is to go buy a Wii.
The Wii is doing well because Nintendo always does well, even when they're not on top What's this nonsense? Out of argument? BTW, the Wii is not doing well, the Wii is doing amazing.
Not only do they do well, but they do well without being the most technically advanced What are you saying? The Wii is the more technically advanced of the 3? Anyway, the winner of every console generation was never the most technically advanced graphics wise, just a hint.
The Wii was a great concept, and if they don't blow it they could dominate - but it will be difficult to maintain that unless they upgrade their hardware as well In case you don't know, the Wii is still alive and kicking, and they already dominate. And it won't be difficult for them to maintain that situation without upgrading any hardware, as the Wii will soon be leader in 2 markets, then probably the 3 main in 2008. People that want upgraded hardware are an insignificant vocal graphic whores anyway. They don't want fun, they want graphics. When 3rd party are unable to master a supposedly very easy to program low power console, why would you upgrade it? When every game on the Wii is at minimum of the quality of RE4, then they can upgrade. Or when Nintendo deem the generation is finished.
There was no way they could develop a console which could beat Microsoft or Sony on sheer technical brilliance. It never made much sense to even try This wasn't Nintendo's point of view at all. They already did that with the Gamecube, which was even cheaper than the competition. Look where this lead them. It didn't make sense to make that again, because it didn't work already. Sony had the momentum, and most 3rd parties wanted Nintendo dead. They could never recover by providing the exact same experience as Sony, without any differenciation. Besides, your view of the situation is very limited. The main concern of Nintendo was that their core market, the japanese market, was dangerously decreasing. Nintendo stated countless times that they had to revitalize it to survive. The DS and the Wii were made for that specifically, and succeeded. Just look at the software sales since the DS was out. It's pretty obvious that the DS started monopolizing the charts, with a fraction of the PS2 marketshare.
1. Continue to focus on the younger market with a rehashed Gamecube. Nintendo never focused on the younger market, that's a NA originating stigma that stuck to the Gamecube. Nintendo games are for everybody, not just for the younger market. That mantra comes from the "hardcore" that believe that a game rated E means younger, when it means everybody.
2. Broaden the horizons by looking to a target market which didn't actually happen to be that bothered about the latest FPS (exactly the same as the last one but with a slightly bigger gun) Very narrow view again. Must be why one of the launch game on Wii was a FPS, that happens to be one of the best 3rd party seller on this console... Anyway, you could apply what you said to nearly any game genre except sports.
Delusional fanboys rant, that's all what you say is. Games don't sell consoles? Try again. Only a fanboy buys a console without wanting any game on it. A console's purpose is playing games. Even the PS3, which can also play BluRay movies natively.
The fanboy is easily seen in your statements. Guess what, Wii Sports is like a million times better than Oblivion and Bioshock combined for most people. Can you believe that? Zelda Wii being "not really a current-gen title" is another stupid fanboy rant we hear constantly since last year.
Currently (since before launch actually), fanboys are hard at work trying to find negatives to the Wii and its games. Perhaps that in their delusional dream, they hope that if they say the Wii is bad enough, it will go away. I understand acknowledging that the Wii is now market leader makes them past the Kübler-Ross 2nd stage of grief, and is very hard on them.
On the other hand, I find it QUITE surprising that the Wii can so handily outsell the 360 when its game library is, all things considered, horribly outmatched. This is a very strong example of the fact that games do NOT sell the system, as many gamers like to think. Advertisements and price tag do a LOT more than the shelves of dvd-size plastic boxes with the console's logo on them, it seems You're WRONG! And your post is a perfect example of the stealth and cunning of Nintendo. You just forgot that the Wii actually comes with a game already. In that respect, given the sales, the outmatched game library is not the one you think. The cunning of Nintendo is that they know, or at least try to learn, what the market really wants. Notice that "gamers" and the competitors (MS, Sony) dismiss Wii Sports because "it's not HD", "graphics are crap", "poor physics" (!!!), "shallow",... and all kind of negative things they believe are true and make the game irrelevant.
It just shows how disconnected from the "non-gamers" the videogame market was, until Nintendo disrupted it.
So you're completely wrong, in that this is actually a strong example of a game selling a system. Wii Sports is what people call a "killer app", believe it or not.
Of course they don't. This study is flawed from the start. It's analyzing the US market for only PS3, Wii and Xbox 360. The XBox 360 is out for 1 year more than the other two, and has the bigger marketshare in the US for now. Besides, the best XBox 360 games and sales are shooters. All of this is very convenient for the study, when the result is skewed by the fact that the XBox 360 is a hardcore console, in the sense that it caters very well to the tastes of US reviewers, which are very limited tastes. I can't help but wonder at what is the agenda of the people that made that study.
And I can't help to wonder at sentences like : "the study found that critics' favorite list and the blockbuster charts have a lot in common, with highly-rated titles selling up to five times better than titles with lower scoring reviews". What does that mean? We don't know. Are there lower scoring reviews that sell up to five times better than highly-rated ones? How many times worse did the highly-rated title that sold the less?
Perhaps that's not the study that has an agenda, but the reviewer's site from which this news comes from.
It's no fact nor fiction. Or rather, it's a fact, but not officially approved yet. Even the most conservative analysts and sites analysing sales have admitted that the Wii is market leader, and reached that status in August, perhaps even in July. Except joke sites like nexgenwars of course, but they always were completely wrong (they had XB360 at 10 millions sold in January !!). Actually, the only region that causes problems is Europe, as the informations are scarce. But we know that among the big 5 of Europe (UK + FIGS, meaning France Germany Italy Spain in that order of market share, representing 85% of Europe sales), Wii has passed the XB360 in all of them except UK, and UK will fall soon.
ALl this means is that for now, Wii is market leader, and leader in one region (Japan). Europe will fall soon (before end of 2007 by most estimates), and USA will fall last, as it's the best (the only good actually) XBox 360 market and they have 2 M+ lead there, which will grow higher with Halo 3 release and Wii shortages that are to be expected in the holidays.
Most 3rd-party developers decided to take a "wait and see" approach with the Wii, because no one was quite sure how it would do You're pretty wrong on this one. What Psychochild said is mostly the truth, and how it's clearly seen in the gaming community: the (western) developers didn't decide to take a "wait and see" approach with the Wii, they had WRITTEN it OF. The Wii was dead on arrival for all of them, even for most eastern devs. Even Ubisoft, which was contracted by Nintendo to make launch games, did really bad launch games. They managed to sell 1 M+ of two of them because there was NOTHING else good from western devs on the Wii. Think that some of the most successful games on the Wii are from Atlus, which wouldn't have even been noticed without being Shin Megami Tensei or Persona or Disgaea games (all RPG).
At this point all we have seen for the Wii is the tail end of the first round of games, especially considering most publishers and developers were late to start projects for the Wii You've got to be kidding. We've barely seen the beginning of the first round of games for the Wii. All we've got for now are very low production value trash games, bad ports and remakes. The core of the first batch of Wii games from 3rd parties will be seen in 2008, more than one year after Wii's release. A shame! Some developers waited until JUNE to realize the Wii wasn't going anywhere, and some still have not realized that!
With over 10 million units sold, I fully expect to see the first major round of 3rd-party Wii titles appear next year Oh, sorry, we actually agree.
If you look at why the PS2 was successful, it got to market earlier than its competitors with a good product at a good price No, the Dreamcast did, and was crushed. Sony got the unconditional follow of every developers exclusive games from the start. Look at what Psychochild answered to your post, that's basically what happened. Devs did exactly the same thing this time with PS3. That's why I actually expect to see lots of publishers go bankrupt this generation. EA nearly died, with their profits shrinking to dangerous levels every year. They should have recouped it all by now if PS3 was a huge success, but that didn't happen. Now they're scared, as it's like NES time again.
I don't think the Wii will have anywhere near the dominance that the PS2 enjoyed, however. This generation marks the first time that I can think of where the capabilities of the various competitors were split so starkly, while at the same time being somewhat equal in terms of their desirability They're not equal, the Wii is clearly more desirable.
The 360 and PS3 are natural extensions of the bigger better faster more mentality, but the Wii is going in a completely different direction, last-gen graphics with a new control scheme The Wii doesn't have last-gen graphics, whatever that means. The Wii is not bigger better faster, but it's even better: smaller better faster.
No one's measured it yet to my knowledge, but I suspect there will be a significant amount of overlap between owners of the Wii and "true" next-gen consoles (i.e. 360/PS3) Wii is as true next-gen (or rather current gen) as 360/PS3. Perhaps you meant HD consoles. And as I suspected from the start, the secondary console will not be the Wii like every one boasted, but one of the other two. It happened already, as the Wii is market leader now. And I doubt the amount of overlap will be significant, as Gamecube marketshare showed, except if most PS2 owners only get a Wii. Which could very well happen, sure.
In what cases vastly weaker? I don't remember ever seeing a console succeed whose full potential could be realized so quickly. Less than a year into the Wii's lifespan, we already hear speculation from developers that they're approaching the limits of what the Wii can do And you took that at face value? How bitter can people and developers be? The fact is that none of these speculating developers even reached the quality of a Gamecube game like Resident Evil 4 or Rogue Squadron, NOT ONE! They don't even master the Gamecube, let alone the Wii. Metroid Prime 3 shatters everyone of these developers' games that speculate on what the Wii can do. It shatters them on graphics and on gameplay with the Wiimote. This is a fact, not speculation. And to add insult to injury, Mark Pacini, director of Metroid Prime 3, says that's all they could do on Wii FOR NOW, as they need more time to master the Wii's power! And their current game destroys all the 3rd parties one already! They even mastered the wiimote controls. They basically did right what Ubisoft wanted to do but couldn't even slightly approach in Red Steel. So spare us your "speculation from developers", or I'll have to think they are all very bad developers.
And how do you explain all the games for the PS3 and 360 which have no planned ports for the Wii, even after the third parties are supposed to have "gotten it"? You mean the games started 2-3 years before that can't be ported to the Wii? The developers are basically stuck on these ones.
The cool thing about this business is that it's not hard at all to rise from the ashes You got to be kidding... There are rare examples of that (Squaresoft mainly), and no, Nintendo was never a company that's gone to ashes.
Look at Nintendo. Barely holding on five years ago. If Nintendo had succeeded witht he Gamecube and N64, there would be no Wii Your premises are flawed and clueless. Nintendo was never "barely holding" on any year. They were making profits all the time. And the Gamecube is not the reason the Wii appeared, Nintendo explained why. The Wii appeared, because while the GC was disappointing sales wise, they had time to look at the market, and saw that the japanese videogame market was dangerously declining. It's their core market, so they had to do sth. That lead to the DS and then the Wii, once they saw their tactics were working. And Nintendo always dominated the handheld market, so they took risk with the DS, despite being the leaders (with the Gameboy brand).
I may sound like an idiot hippie, but I'm right. The losers become the winners in this industry No, you're wrong and sound like a clueless hippie.
Eternal Sonata is NOT awesome. Every time I hear that, I see only 2 possibilities on why someone said that : he's astroturfing, or he never played a good RPG before. Trusty Bell (Eternal Sonata) had the potential to be awesome, but it's not. Perhaps it is to you, but it's far from being awesome for everyone (it highly interests me though). The music has nothing awesome in it, the visuals are very good, and the settings is included in the visuals. The gameplay is not awesome either. Basically, this game plays like Tales of Symphonia with some tweaks, and better and more beautiful cel-shaded graphics. Unfortunately, the story is too short and bad, while it could have been awesome. The pacing is bad too. And that's what counts most in a J-RPG.
Besides, I'm not sure the western XBox 360 audience will like these kind of games. I already heard complaints about the camera not being free, but that's on purpose and part of the gameplay! Seems to me the audience of XB360 treats every genre (apart from racers) like they should be shooters. And that's why I think it will fail, besides its other flaws. If Trusty Bell had an average story, it should have sold at least as much as Blue Dragon in Japan, which is far from being the case, despite the higher installed base at the time it went gold.
As for Europe, we rarely get RPG, it mainly depends on US sales, and even then we usually get a badly translated from english version, with english voice over, even for non english speaking countries. Which is why RPG don't work in Europe: they are complete joke by the time they get there. What I think is worse, is that we don't even get the original japanese voices, but the crappy english ones, with bad subtitles.
As for why we get RPG or not, it never depends on how good they are, rather on how much they sell, be it in Japan or in the US.
To illustrate what I said, we never got Tales of the Abyss, and we got Tales of Symphonia with the crappy english dubbing, which was lacking the dubbing of some scenes. It's so terrible that J-RPG fans (like myself) are forced to mod their console to play most RPG.
So you like to troll? A) The Wii is a "next-gen" (now meaning current gen) console. In case you didn't notice, it was even the last to come out this gen. Of course, to understand that, you first have to understand what a console generation means, and what "next" means. Obviously you don't. B) The PS2 is not in the same gen as the Wii, so no, the PS2 is not winning this generation console war, it won the last one. Stop being stupid!
The Wii is winning the "next-gen" console war, is it so hard to understand? The cross-over time will be this month, despite the XB360 having one full year lead in sales. The Wii will soon be market leader. And the Wii is the only next-gen console to outsell the PS2 constantly everywhere, the PS2 which is last gen. I know you're bitter because your HD consoles are behind, even though you shouldn't, as you like them for their games, right?
There's a very clear definition of what "winning" is in relation to Console War. It's the console that will have the most marketshare compared to its competitors in the same console generation, that is winning. You don't even know that? This is known since at least NES time, you're pretty late on the matter.
Unless my maths are wrong, they're 3% shy of their target. Which doesn't seem to be too shabby Your math is so wrong that makes my head spin. MS said they sold (to retailers) 10.4 M XB360 by end of 2006. They had to ship 1.6 M XB360 in SIX MONTHS to reach 12 M XB360. They only sold 1.2 M! So, they're actually 25 % short of their target, which is extremely shabby. Besides, shipping 1.2 M console in 6 months is a bad target of 200k consoles a month. But your spin was near believable.
Ummm, because the Wii hasn't got the graphics capability of the XBox? The PS3 and the Wii combined don't have the half of the games portfolio that the Xbox has? That the online gaming for the Xbox is way ahead of the other consoles? That the PS3 costs double that of the Xbox? Wrong on some counts. The Wii probably have caught up to the games portfolio XBox 360 has thanks to perfect retro compatibility and most of all, Virtual Console. And yes, Virtual Console sells millions of games. And no, the PS3 is not double the cost of the XBox 360, not at all, especially if you want to mix online gaming in the advantages of XBox 360.
Basically as I see it the only current-gen console that is enough *if it's the only one you have* is the 360. The others just don't have enough games to play yet... What a load of... Who are you to say someone doesn't have enough game to play on a console ? Some people have enough games to play for years on the Wii already. And with the Virtual Console, some have more than they could play in 10 years. So this thing about the 360 only having enough games is nonsense.
Why the PS3 and XB360 only? Is it because the Wii is already outselling the PS2 YTD on a worldwide scale? The Wii is outselling the PS2 worldwide since the start of 2007.
Once I got HDTV in December of 05, the MythTV box really wasn't an option any more This is your problem: you're talking about MythTV from one and a half year ago. So your review was perhaps right then, but it's very wrong now. And you're right, today, there's no comparison between MythTV and commercial DVR: the commercial DVR is beat in every way, except startup time perhaps. And actually, for me, MythTV is even better now that I got a HDTV. The harder part, when setting my MythTV box, was outputting analog video at the right resolution through SVideo. With the HDTV and a DVI to HDMI cable, it just looks amazing now, and is very simple to setup (with a NVidia card at least). Then, the backend NEVER crashed on me, in 1+ year of use. The frontend crashed sometimes, to go back to the mythwelcome screen, so no big deal actually. The scheduler interface is very easy to use now, as my wife uses the MythTV box without any problem at all. She actually uses it more than me, and she doesn't know anything about computers. Besides, in France, we have IPTV since a long time, and the MythBox manages them like a TV card, which no commercial DVR can do. I can even have several depending on my bandwidth, and schedule the channels them like any other card. Plus, with the Video part, I can actually look at every video thrown at it (thanks to mplayer). All the rest is added bonus.
So MythTV sure needs tweaking at first, but once it's done properly, you don't have to attend it anymore, it just works, and is very intuitive to use for basic functionality. For more advanced things, it can do them, but you'll need to read the doc. Automatic recording of shows, playing every video formats and memory of the already recorded shows, are some of its best features, which commercial offerings still can't do.
People's expectations increase, games are advertised on TV and some of them are looking extremely good Sorry to tell you that games are not sold by how good they look alone. Seems to be a common misconception nowadays. To this date, the console that won each generation was the less powerful in graphics, so your point is shattered already.
PS3 and Xbox360 have the potential to offer photorealistic looking games OK, now the Wii sells faster and doesn't offer photorealistic looking games. The PS2 doesn't either and sells faster too BTW.
If you think it won't matter why is there a Gameboy Advanced or Gameboy Advanced SP? Why is there DS? Huh? You actually believe the only improvements in GBA and DS was graphics? Do you even understand games?
What I think will happen over the next three or four years the PS3/Xbox360 price will drop, as the gap between the Wii, PS3 and Xbox360 decreases the reason for a Wii decrease and the differences will as well While the library of Wii games will grow in response to its market share...
To believe that MS and PS3 won't heavily invest in more casual games (considering the trouncing their getting) is pointless. Once those consoles have better casual gamer expearence you start taking away its advantages, the biggest disadvantage will be its graphics BS! Once the Wii has a huge library of games using the wiimote, which is one of the main difference with the other consoles, there's just no way people will jump on a console that have a handful of these games, with a wiimote-like accessory, instead of on the Wii were the wiimote is the main thing, with a huge library of games.
An ancedote, The PSP has always been far more expensive when compared to the DS, in the recent bank holiday the place I work we had a PSP (+game) for £129.99 and a DS (+game) for £99.99 we sold five or six PSP's but no DS's. I think the Wii will feel the same effect is Sony and Microsoft can start competing with it on price So you think in your place, 6 people will buy Sony or MS once they compete in price with the Wii, losing even more billions in the process, while Nintendo earns millions. OK. Now, as when your 6 people bought the PSP, the DS was still outselling it 2 to 1 worldwide, if not 3 to 1, and the Wii is the same, then I just hope your 6 people enjoy their little device, as it will have no effect at all on Wii sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you talking of Ragnarok Online in the past?
It is not empty at all anymore, and is still being enhanced and developed.
They just added another area recently. If you say it was empty, I guess you played the beta only.
It sure enough is not empty now.
The support from the western devs for the DS is so poor that it's pathetic. Look at all the big hits past and to come on the DS: most come from eastern devs.
I actually can't even cite one big hit from western devs for the DS. I'm not even sure the Sims is one.
Anyway, that's one of the few genre Nintendo doesn't have in its portfolio, but they are working on it, courting some korean company for one or two MMORPG games. They will be eastern oriented though, nothing like you're used to, except if you enjoyed Ragnarok Online or that 2D one from Korea.
Mistwalker is not and never was a MS game studio.
Just because their first projects released were exclusive XBox 360 titles does not make them a MS studio.
That's why it's no surprise they went the way of the DS, as their projects failed as expected in the japanese market, and they will never make a good name for their studio, if they go on developing exclusively for XBox 360.
That's because their core audience is japanese, and they have to cater to them.
It seems the initial message has been lost in translation, and lots of apologists say: "it's not a big deal".
The end result is that the main XBox 360 game, the one that the console is most know for, HALO 3, IS NOT A HD GAME!
Which is kind of a shocker, when it's a 1st party game coming from a company that bashed others for not being HD or not working with every HDTV out there.
Their flagship game is not HD, can you believe that? You can see it as 20 % less pixels than the minimum HD resolution, or 80 pixels lost in vertical resolution, but the end result is that the flagship game of the console is not even in HD resolution. Even a few less pixels would be good for overscan, but this is just plain wrong, when you tout "next-gen" is HD here and there. As for not being able to handle double-buffered 1920x1080 resolutions, there are currently exactly two games on the Xbox 360 that render in 1080p -- Virtua Tennis 3 and some basketball game (NBA Street Homecourt, I think) You're correct, but just want to say that they are 1080 vertical resolution (1080p), but less than 1920 horizontal: they're not 1920x1080 games.
I say that because your sentence was confusing, and people could believe these games render internally in 1920x1080, which they are not.
IIRC there's only one game doing that, and it's on PS3. Obviously an upscaled 1080p image will not be quite as good as a natively-rendered 1080p image, but if you're playing the game rather than counting pixels you're never going to notice. You just invalidated one reason to go HD, and invalidated the "HD consoles", XBox 360 and PS3. Good job!
Are you seriously saying that you'll never going to notice the difference between a game that isn't even HD (Halo 3) and a native 1080p image?
You just implied the "HD consoles'" HD feature is useless.
Because you know, all (digital) HDTV have to scale content to their native resolution anyway, so if the console won't do the job, the TV will, with various results of course. How many enemies and physics-affected items are on-screen at one time in Gears or Bioshock? How large are the areas? Now compare that to Halo 3, where you can have 30+ enemies on-screen at one time, with hundreds of items strewn about being affected by physics, on maps with draw distances measured in kilometers. You actually believe your own BS? "draw distances measured in kilometers"? Yeah right, OK thanks.
Now, you would have to know the resolution of Gears or Bioshock to compare the processing power needed.
This was about what is left for japanese fans, as everyone can read in the article.
And as for the list of Aladrin of exclusives content (no multiplatform, no remake) that MAY appeal (no FPS, no WRPG) to japanese fans, it reduces to : Lost Odyssey.
Adding Infinite Undiscovery, that's pretty much what the original article said.
What I believe though, is that only fanboys buy a bare console, without any game. they said "mom, dad, I want a Playstation" or "I want a Nintendo" or whatever BS! There's a reason they want the console, and even if they don't know the game's name, you can be sure they can point their parent to the game they want. The "I want a Playstation" doesn't come from a vacuum you know. As for adults, the accessibility of a console (wiimote) and the price still means more than the quality of the games, since *most of these people haven't actually played these games and have NO clue what their experience would be like What nonsense!
The people buying the Wii that didn't buy any console before have at least seen it experienced by others, or even tried it themselves. They didn't come flocking to the Wii just because. And to have even a glimpse of the accessibility of the wiimote, they have to have at least seen people experiencing it. People just don't lurk videogame related areas to see if a controller is accessible.
You talk like all these new users woke up one day believing they want a Wii.
The alpha mom theory is much more believable, sorry. So, yeah you are the ultimate troll and I don't see how someone hasn't modded you down yet.
A console's purpose is playing games? Sure, kinda, except for the PS3 which almost everyone I know uses for movies and maybe Madden or something You're amazing...
If you have 1/4 the number of pixels in 480p, then you have 1/8 in 480i in the same time frame.
And going interlaced to progressive WILL IMPROVE the picture quality. There are countless artifacts caused by interlaced signal. The only thing changing to progressive scan will do is increase the rate of refresh and therefor reduce motion blur BS! It won't increase any rate of refresh, it will just improve the resolution, bypassing the image pairing, avoiding lots of artefacts in the process. At best this will make edges more crisp which will actually make the image look more grainy than it would interlaced as the oversized pixels will be more pronounced So progressive scan DVD players make the DVD image more grainy?
What you're saying is BS anyway. If you get oversized pixels that look more grainy, you have a HDTV with a very bad scaler, that's all. At 19 inches the difference between a 480 and 1080 image is very little, but at even 40 or more images the difference is staggering. Those of us that have viewed a 1080 image regularly have a hard time watching 480 images when we have the choice I have a 55" HDTV, have looked at 1080p movies on it, and can still watch 480i/p images without any problem. I can even look at lesser than that (240 pixels height games) through the Virtual Console games, without any problems. Guess what, I even enjoy the games! Imagine!
Both are RPTV actually, and the HDTV is a 1080p one.
Are you believing that the extra 1" makes the graphics worse? I rather believe your HDTV is crap actually.
You need to change your crappy HDTV as soon as possible to play the Wii (without lag).
Besides, every SD source, and DVD, must look crap on your HDTV too, how sad!
So basically, what you said here is completely irrelevant, except for graphic whores, which are insignificant for a console sales. The controls are an excellent idea, but could be much better designed (for instance, NOW is the time to resurrect the Power Glove). Other consoles can and will follow suit (unless Nintendo is able to file suit - difficult considering previous art) Yeah, everything could be much better. Other consoles can't follow suit, but will try.
Most people believe that just plugging a wiimote into other consoles would be enough to have the same behaviour. Even the PS3 couldn't have the wiimote pointer.
Anyway, the day the other consoles release a wiimote like device, that's the day they start making heavy advertising for the Wii.
3rd party devices never work well, because developers won't sell to the console market, but only to the device market, which is far smaller.
So even if they pull it off, there will be a few games for this device, while the Wii will have tons of them. Next move for the consumer, is to go buy a Wii. The Wii is doing well because Nintendo always does well, even when they're not on top What's this nonsense? Out of argument?
BTW, the Wii is not doing well, the Wii is doing amazing. Not only do they do well, but they do well without being the most technically advanced What are you saying? The Wii is the more technically advanced of the 3?
Anyway, the winner of every console generation was never the most technically advanced graphics wise, just a hint. The Wii was a great concept, and if they don't blow it they could dominate - but it will be difficult to maintain that unless they upgrade their hardware as well In case you don't know, the Wii is still alive and kicking, and they already dominate.
And it won't be difficult for them to maintain that situation without upgrading any hardware, as the Wii will soon be leader in 2 markets, then probably the 3 main in 2008.
People that want upgraded hardware are an insignificant vocal graphic whores anyway. They don't want fun, they want graphics.
When 3rd party are unable to master a supposedly very easy to program low power console, why would you upgrade it?
When every game on the Wii is at minimum of the quality of RE4, then they can upgrade. Or when Nintendo deem the generation is finished.
Besides, your view of the situation is very limited. The main concern of Nintendo was that their core market, the japanese market, was dangerously decreasing. Nintendo stated countless times that they had to revitalize it to survive.
The DS and the Wii were made for that specifically, and succeeded. Just look at the software sales since the DS was out. It's pretty obvious that the DS started monopolizing the charts, with a fraction of the PS2 marketshare. 1. Continue to focus on the younger market with a rehashed Gamecube. Nintendo never focused on the younger market, that's a NA originating stigma that stuck to the Gamecube.
Nintendo games are for everybody, not just for the younger market. That mantra comes from the "hardcore" that believe that a game rated E means younger, when it means everybody. 2. Broaden the horizons by looking to a target market which didn't actually happen to be that bothered about the latest FPS (exactly the same as the last one but with a slightly bigger gun) Very narrow view again. Must be why one of the launch game on Wii was a FPS, that happens to be one of the best 3rd party seller on this console
Anyway, you could apply what you said to nearly any game genre except sports.
Delusional fanboys rant, that's all what you say is.
Games don't sell consoles? Try again. Only a fanboy buys a console without wanting any game on it.
A console's purpose is playing games. Even the PS3, which can also play BluRay movies natively.
The fanboy is easily seen in your statements. Guess what, Wii Sports is like a million times better than Oblivion and Bioshock combined for most people. Can you believe that?
Zelda Wii being "not really a current-gen title" is another stupid fanboy rant we hear constantly since last year.
Currently (since before launch actually), fanboys are hard at work trying to find negatives to the Wii and its games. Perhaps that in their delusional dream, they hope that if they say the Wii is bad enough, it will go away.
I understand acknowledging that the Wii is now market leader makes them past the Kübler-Ross 2nd stage of grief, and is very hard on them.
And your post is a perfect example of the stealth and cunning of Nintendo.
You just forgot that the Wii actually comes with a game already. In that respect, given the sales, the outmatched game library is not the one you think.
The cunning of Nintendo is that they know, or at least try to learn, what the market really wants.
Notice that "gamers" and the competitors (MS, Sony) dismiss Wii Sports because "it's not HD", "graphics are crap", "poor physics" (!!!), "shallow",
It just shows how disconnected from the "non-gamers" the videogame market was, until Nintendo disrupted it.
So you're completely wrong, in that this is actually a strong example of a game selling a system.
Wii Sports is what people call a "killer app", believe it or not.
Of course they don't.
This study is flawed from the start.
It's analyzing the US market for only PS3, Wii and Xbox 360.
The XBox 360 is out for 1 year more than the other two, and has the bigger marketshare in the US for now.
Besides, the best XBox 360 games and sales are shooters.
All of this is very convenient for the study, when the result is skewed by the fact that the XBox 360 is a hardcore console, in the sense that it caters very well to the tastes of US reviewers, which are very limited tastes.
I can't help but wonder at what is the agenda of the people that made that study.
And I can't help to wonder at sentences like : "the study found that critics' favorite list and the blockbuster charts have a lot in common, with highly-rated titles selling up to five times better than titles with lower scoring reviews".
What does that mean? We don't know. Are there lower scoring reviews that sell up to five times better than highly-rated ones?
How many times worse did the highly-rated title that sold the less?
Perhaps that's not the study that has an agenda, but the reviewer's site from which this news comes from.
It's no fact nor fiction. Or rather, it's a fact, but not officially approved yet.
Even the most conservative analysts and sites analysing sales have admitted that the Wii is market leader, and reached that status in August, perhaps even in July. Except joke sites like nexgenwars of course, but they always were completely wrong (they had XB360 at 10 millions sold in January !!).
Actually, the only region that causes problems is Europe, as the informations are scarce.
But we know that among the big 5 of Europe (UK + FIGS, meaning France Germany Italy Spain in that order of market share, representing 85% of Europe sales), Wii has passed the XB360 in all of them except UK, and UK will fall soon.
ALl this means is that for now, Wii is market leader, and leader in one region (Japan). Europe will fall soon (before end of 2007 by most estimates), and USA will fall last, as it's the best (the only good actually) XBox 360 market and they have 2 M+ lead there, which will grow higher with Halo 3 release and Wii shortages that are to be expected in the holidays.
Even Ubisoft, which was contracted by Nintendo to make launch games, did really bad launch games. They managed to sell 1 M+ of two of them because there was NOTHING else good from western devs on the Wii. Think that some of the most successful games on the Wii are from Atlus, which wouldn't have even been noticed without being Shin Megami Tensei or Persona or Disgaea games (all RPG). At this point all we have seen for the Wii is the tail end of the first round of games, especially considering most publishers and developers were late to start projects for the Wii You've got to be kidding. We've barely seen the beginning of the first round of games for the Wii. All we've got for now are very low production value trash games, bad ports and remakes. The core of the first batch of Wii games from 3rd parties will be seen in 2008, more than one year after Wii's release. A shame!
Some developers waited until JUNE to realize the Wii wasn't going anywhere, and some still have not realized that! With over 10 million units sold, I fully expect to see the first major round of 3rd-party Wii titles appear next year Oh, sorry, we actually agree. If you look at why the PS2 was successful, it got to market earlier than its competitors with a good product at a good price No, the Dreamcast did, and was crushed. Sony got the unconditional follow of every developers exclusive games from the start. Look at what Psychochild answered to your post, that's basically what happened.
Devs did exactly the same thing this time with PS3. That's why I actually expect to see lots of publishers go bankrupt this generation.
EA nearly died, with their profits shrinking to dangerous levels every year. They should have recouped it all by now if PS3 was a huge success, but that didn't happen. Now they're scared, as it's like NES time again. I don't think the Wii will have anywhere near the dominance that the PS2 enjoyed, however. This generation marks the first time that I can think of where the capabilities of the various competitors were split so starkly, while at the same time being somewhat equal in terms of their desirability They're not equal, the Wii is clearly more desirable. The 360 and PS3 are natural extensions of the bigger better faster more mentality, but the Wii is going in a completely different direction, last-gen graphics with a new control scheme The Wii doesn't have last-gen graphics, whatever that means. The Wii is not bigger better faster, but it's even better: smaller better faster. No one's measured it yet to my knowledge, but I suspect there will be a significant amount of overlap between owners of the Wii and "true" next-gen consoles (i.e. 360/PS3) Wii is as true next-gen (or rather current gen) as 360/PS3. Perhaps you meant HD consoles.
And as I suspected from the start, the secondary console will not be the Wii like every one boasted, but one of the other two. It happened already, as the Wii is market leader now.
And I doubt the amount of overlap will be significant, as Gamecube marketshare showed, except if most PS2 owners only get a Wii. Which could very well happen, sure.
How bitter can people and developers be?
The fact is that none of these speculating developers even reached the quality of a Gamecube game like Resident Evil 4 or Rogue Squadron, NOT ONE!
They don't even master the Gamecube, let alone the Wii.
Metroid Prime 3 shatters everyone of these developers' games that speculate on what the Wii can do. It shatters them on graphics and on gameplay with the Wiimote. This is a fact, not speculation. And to add insult to injury, Mark Pacini, director of Metroid Prime 3, says that's all they could do on Wii FOR NOW, as they need more time to master the Wii's power! And their current game destroys all the 3rd parties one already!
They even mastered the wiimote controls. They basically did right what Ubisoft wanted to do but couldn't even slightly approach in Red Steel.
So spare us your "speculation from developers", or I'll have to think they are all very bad developers. And how do you explain all the games for the PS3 and 360 which have no planned ports for the Wii, even after the third parties are supposed to have "gotten it"? You mean the games started 2-3 years before that can't be ported to the Wii?
The developers are basically stuck on these ones.
And the Gamecube is not the reason the Wii appeared, Nintendo explained why. The Wii appeared, because while the GC was disappointing sales wise, they had time to look at the market, and saw that the japanese videogame market was dangerously declining. It's their core market, so they had to do sth.
That lead to the DS and then the Wii, once they saw their tactics were working.
And Nintendo always dominated the handheld market, so they took risk with the DS, despite being the leaders (with the Gameboy brand). I may sound like an idiot hippie, but I'm right. The losers become the winners in this industry No, you're wrong and sound like a clueless hippie.
Eternal Sonata is NOT awesome. Every time I hear that, I see only 2 possibilities on why someone said that : he's astroturfing, or he never played a good RPG before.
Trusty Bell (Eternal Sonata) had the potential to be awesome, but it's not. Perhaps it is to you, but it's far from being awesome for everyone (it highly interests me though).
The music has nothing awesome in it, the visuals are very good, and the settings is included in the visuals.
The gameplay is not awesome either. Basically, this game plays like Tales of Symphonia with some tweaks, and better and more beautiful cel-shaded graphics.
Unfortunately, the story is too short and bad, while it could have been awesome. The pacing is bad too.
And that's what counts most in a J-RPG.
Besides, I'm not sure the western XBox 360 audience will like these kind of games. I already heard complaints about the camera not being free, but that's on purpose and part of the gameplay! Seems to me the audience of XB360 treats every genre (apart from racers) like they should be shooters.
And that's why I think it will fail, besides its other flaws. If Trusty Bell had an average story, it should have sold at least as much as Blue Dragon in Japan, which is far from being the case, despite the higher installed base at the time it went gold.
As for Europe, we rarely get RPG, it mainly depends on US sales, and even then we usually get a badly translated from english version, with english voice over, even for non english speaking countries. Which is why RPG don't work in Europe: they are complete joke by the time they get there.
What I think is worse, is that we don't even get the original japanese voices, but the crappy english ones, with bad subtitles.
As for why we get RPG or not, it never depends on how good they are, rather on how much they sell, be it in Japan or in the US.
To illustrate what I said, we never got Tales of the Abyss, and we got Tales of Symphonia with the crappy english dubbing, which was lacking the dubbing of some scenes. It's so terrible that J-RPG fans (like myself) are forced to mod their console to play most RPG.
So you like to troll?
A) The Wii is a "next-gen" (now meaning current gen) console. In case you didn't notice, it was even the last to come out this gen. Of course, to understand that, you first have to understand what a console generation means, and what "next" means. Obviously you don't.
B) The PS2 is not in the same gen as the Wii, so no, the PS2 is not winning this generation console war, it won the last one. Stop being stupid!
The Wii is winning the "next-gen" console war, is it so hard to understand? The cross-over time will be this month, despite the XB360 having one full year lead in sales. The Wii will soon be market leader. And the Wii is the only next-gen console to outsell the PS2 constantly everywhere, the PS2 which is last gen.
I know you're bitter because your HD consoles are behind, even though you shouldn't, as you like them for their games, right?
There's a very clear definition of what "winning" is in relation to Console War.
It's the console that will have the most marketshare compared to its competitors in the same console generation, that is winning.
You don't even know that?
This is known since at least NES time, you're pretty late on the matter.
They had to ship 1.6 M XB360 in SIX MONTHS to reach 12 M XB360. They only sold 1.2 M!
So, they're actually 25 % short of their target, which is extremely shabby. Besides, shipping 1.2 M console in 6 months is a bad target of 200k consoles a month. But your spin was near believable. Ummm, because the Wii hasn't got the graphics capability of the XBox? The PS3 and the Wii combined don't have the half of the games portfolio that the Xbox has? That the online gaming for the Xbox is way ahead of the other consoles? That the PS3 costs double that of the Xbox? Wrong on some counts. The Wii probably have caught up to the games portfolio XBox 360 has thanks to perfect retro compatibility and most of all, Virtual Console. And yes, Virtual Console sells millions of games.
And no, the PS3 is not double the cost of the XBox 360, not at all, especially if you want to mix online gaming in the advantages of XBox 360.
Who are you to say someone doesn't have enough game to play on a console ?
Some people have enough games to play for years on the Wii already. And with the Virtual Console, some have more than they could play in 10 years. So this thing about the 360 only having enough games is nonsense.
Why the PS3 and XB360 only?
Is it because the Wii is already outselling the PS2 YTD on a worldwide scale?
The Wii is outselling the PS2 worldwide since the start of 2007.
So they're all current gen, and PS2 last gen.
So your review was perhaps right then, but it's very wrong now.
And you're right, today, there's no comparison between MythTV and commercial DVR: the commercial DVR is beat in every way, except startup time perhaps.
And actually, for me, MythTV is even better now that I got a HDTV. The harder part, when setting my MythTV box, was outputting analog video at the right resolution through SVideo.
With the HDTV and a DVI to HDMI cable, it just looks amazing now, and is very simple to setup (with a NVidia card at least).
Then, the backend NEVER crashed on me, in 1+ year of use. The frontend crashed sometimes, to go back to the mythwelcome screen, so no big deal actually.
The scheduler interface is very easy to use now, as my wife uses the MythTV box without any problem at all. She actually uses it more than me, and she doesn't know anything about computers.
Besides, in France, we have IPTV since a long time, and the MythBox manages them like a TV card, which no commercial DVR can do. I can even have several depending on my bandwidth, and schedule the channels them like any other card.
Plus, with the Video part, I can actually look at every video thrown at it (thanks to mplayer). All the rest is added bonus.
So MythTV sure needs tweaking at first, but once it's done properly, you don't have to attend it anymore, it just works, and is very intuitive to use for basic functionality.
For more advanced things, it can do them, but you'll need to read the doc.
Automatic recording of shows, playing every video formats and memory of the already recorded shows, are some of its best features, which commercial offerings still can't do.
To this date, the console that won each generation was the less powerful in graphics, so your point is shattered already. PS3 and Xbox360 have the potential to offer photorealistic looking games OK, now the Wii sells faster and doesn't offer photorealistic looking games. The PS2 doesn't either and sells faster too BTW. If you think it won't matter why is there a Gameboy Advanced or Gameboy Advanced SP? Why is there DS? Huh? You actually believe the only improvements in GBA and DS was graphics?
Do you even understand games? What I think will happen over the next three or four years the PS3/Xbox360 price will drop, as the gap between the Wii, PS3 and Xbox360 decreases the reason for a Wii decrease and the differences will as well While the library of Wii games will grow in response to its market share... To believe that MS and PS3 won't heavily invest in more casual games (considering the trouncing their getting) is pointless. Once those consoles have better casual gamer expearence you start taking away its advantages, the biggest disadvantage will be its graphics BS! Once the Wii has a huge library of games using the wiimote, which is one of the main difference with the other consoles, there's just no way people will jump on a console that have a handful of these games, with a wiimote-like accessory, instead of on the Wii were the wiimote is the main thing, with a huge library of games. An ancedote, The PSP has always been far more expensive when compared to the DS, in the recent bank holiday the place I work we had a PSP (+game) for £129.99 and a DS (+game) for £99.99 we sold five or six PSP's but no DS's. I think the Wii will feel the same effect is Sony and Microsoft can start competing with it on price So you think in your place, 6 people will buy Sony or MS once they compete in price with the Wii, losing even more billions in the process, while Nintendo earns millions. OK. Now, as when your 6 people bought the PSP, the DS was still outselling it 2 to 1 worldwide, if not 3 to 1, and the Wii is the same, then I just hope your 6 people enjoy their little device, as it will have no effect at all on Wii sales.