Only insofar as it would be impossible for an electronics entertainment company to justify not having MP3 playing devices. They make MP3 players because all portable electronic entertainment companies make MP3 players.
As for the PDA's, if you make a PDA with halfway decent specs, someone is going to start writing software for it. If it is technically possible for the device to play MP3s, someone will write software to do so. Sony just bowed to the inevitable.
The biggest battle is coming from SCEI, who fears that the PSX has a bigger vulnerability to piracy than the PS2.
This device is out of Sony Electronics, not Sony Computer Entertainment Incorporated, nor Sony Pictures. Same brands, different heads of the hydra.
What winds up happening is that different sections have entirely contradicting business goals: Sony Electronics wants to provide the consumer with devices which will allow him to burn DVDs at high speeds from a large capacity hard drive, and record live TV onto said hard drive, not to mention viewing a variety of other burned media, including the burned DVD-rs.
SCEI fears this will allow people to play copied PS2 and PSOne games. They need to squash some features.
Sony Pictures fears this will allow people to play copied movies. They need to squash some features.
Sony Music fears this will allow people to play downloaded songs. They need to squash some features.
And so on. It's no surprise that the PSX is going to be all black-and-blue (and missing functionality) after all these corporate divisions have beaten it up. By the time this thing sees a stateside release, I'll be surprised if it even has a dvd-r drive in it.
Okay, RPGs are pretty much my favorite genre of gaming. However, this seems a bit odd. The only connection to the Virtua Fighter series is the moves? I'm no fighting series snob, but the Virtua Fighter moves weren't especially distinguishable from general martial arts moves, were they?
If I made an RPG which featured all-new characters, I couldn't (assuming I had legal rights) very well call it a Mortal Kombat game just because one character has a grappling-spear, could I? Or call a puzzle game "Sonic Chaos Mix" just because some of the crystals were blue?
There comes a point where brand recognition doesn't really work.
Sure, it looks like a Gameboy. Unless you rotate it 90 and use it in portrait mode with the stylus. Provided you're not using the standard "gamer grip" (holding unit with both hands, operating controls with thumbs) and have the sound turned down or off, no one will care what you're doing. The PDA functions are easily usable with the included stylus.
This would be true of any PDA with thumb-oriented controls. However, I don't think the idea was to create a stealth gaming device. For that, you might want to try a Texas Instruments graphing calculator and the wealth of software available for it.
Feh. The real danger is that those who like Anime just for the sake of liking something that other people don't will have to move further into the fringe, which means the naughty tentacle stuff. That stuff makes me want to claw my eyes out.
For those of us who genuinely like quality Anime (rather than just saying "Oooh, it's Japanese! Pretty!"), we'll simply be overjoyed to be able to buy our favorite series in Wal-Mart instead of having to hunt for months and pay silly prices for 20 minutes of a bad pirate copy, and happy that we are now able to share our enthusiasm with our friends.
Here's my bet for the torough silliness going on here:
Some CN exec got it in his head that a Cartoon Network amusment park might be a good idea, and flogged some lackey into checking out actual costs involved in creating real-life versions of lavish cartoon sets and props.
Lackey comes back with conservative figures, hoping to keep his job and push the project forward. Exec's superior sees figures and says to himself, "Hey, that's not that expensive. Let's sell them to the public! After all, there's 270 million people in America, surely a few dozen are rich and gullible enough to buy these extravagances!"
Hang about: How are dating sims any different from sims who date, like in The Sims: Hot Date?
And besides, many Japanese games which made it in the States contained dating sim elements, such as in Thousand Arms, Final Fantasy VII & VIII, and even the always successful Harvest Moon series.
Why don't they focus on the truly unusual games, like Boon-Ga Boon-Ga! (violate the buttocks of your least favorite people, like politicians), or the Densha de Go series (you can drive a train. You know, trains? The only vehicle with no steering?). They should at least have given a nod to the truly Japanese and truly odd games which did make it over here, like Stretch Panic.
"Shoddy Journalism" barely scratches the surface on this article.
That's only if you have all the MAME drivers loaded into memory at once, which is something you'll never do.
The main executable can be as small as a few hundred kilobytes, and then load the proper game driver from a datfile full of drivers (as is the case with some current distributions of MAME, like MAMEplus). There's no reason for Pac Man to require 6 MB, unless you were using some incredibly inefficent form of dynamic recompilation.
Of course, with 4 MB of ram, you can never run anything more complex than Capcom CPS1 games.
I hear a lot about people going to universities with video game degrees. I don't hear much about how the video game industry in general views these degrees. Do they respect them? Does Nintendo or EA say, "Oh, I see you have a degree in game design, and another in game theory. You're just the person we're looking for!"
I realize that these game-centric courses are relatively new, but shouldn't we be hearing some success stories from them? Someone must have gotten a degree from Full Sail by now.
I'm going to assume that the flying sections you're referring to are in Ratchet and Clank, not Jak and Daxter. Jak and Daxter had no flying sections. Annoying hoverbike sections, but no flying.
Sure, the control scheme is different for controlling a vehicle. That's the way it is in GTA III (although it wasn't in GTA and GTA II), and that's the way it pretty universally is in all games that have vehicles. Ask yourself this, though: Did the flying sections' controls make sense for a flying game?
Personally, I like a bit of shooter-on-rails, or even free-roaming-shooter. They weren't long sections, and they weren't particularly difficult, or even really frustrating.
Point is, you can't really carry a control metaphor for a running, jumping character over into an omnidirectional vehicle such as a space ship. Usually, when a control scheme is changed, it is done because to not do so would provide a counter-intuitive control scheme.
How would you have done the flight combat sequences in R&C (other than to completely omit them)?
There's nothing wrong with short mandatory mini-games. Prolonged mini-gameness should always be optional (except in the case of things like the constantly inexplicable Bishi Bashi Special, which is nothing but mini games). And variety is not inherently bad. Only when it's not done well.
I believe that mini-games are, on the whole, a good thing, in the same sense that chocolate chunks in brownies are a good thing. They may not contribute much in the flavor, but they do introduce novel textures. On the same note, however, mini-games could be well designed, but completely clash with the basic thrust of the main game, in which case it's like chocolate chunks in a sirloin steak. Both good things, but not a great combination.
Of course, it's not impossible or even improbable that the mini-games could be bad. In which case it's like a nice chocolate cake filled with broccoli chunks.
I like chocolate...
Basic point I'm getting at is this: Very few games are purely whatever category they go for. Even Super Mario 64 had it's races, puzzles, and fetch quests. The ability to adapt variety well is the difficult part, as is the ability to incorporate the variety without completely shattering the story.
However, even my '87 Honda Accord is a better automobile than both the Nokia nGage and the GBA. Then again, none of those things have the flavor, texture, or nutritional value of Pringles potato crisps.
Cross comparisons just plain don't make sense. Why not talk about how the nGage stacks up against other gaming-enabled cell phones, especially considering the asking price for the unit and games?
No, the Sony execs aren't on crack. Well, okay, maybe they are, but not for this reason.
The paranoiac in me sees this as an interesting ploy by some piracy advocate within Sony to get the world a better modchip. Most of them hover around $20-$30, and usually have more than 15 wires to solder to tiny little contacts, any one of which could turn your $179 console into a large black paperweight if done incorrectly.
So, release the system in China, and inside of a week, a $5 modchip which requires 8 wires at most will hit the market.
I'm not even sure how much of that little rant was serious...
I didn't say otherwise. However, with the system classified as "obsolete", it would be perfectly legal for you to make backups of Gamecube games you own, and by extension, it would be legal to purchase devices which allowed such circumvention.
Nintendo was the one who basically purchased laws prohibiting game-cartridge copying hardware, and really don't want people backing up Gamecube games in the first place.
What with the recent ruling by the Library of Congress regarding copying obsolete video games, the Gamecube was, technically an obsolete system. The actual wording of the law was that a system shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured OR is no longer reasonably available on the commercial market. Since only one of those conditions needs to be true, Nintendo may have resumed production just to keep copying of GameCube games illegal. Makes me wonder if they'll start making NES, SNES, and Virtual Boy systems again, but they'd also have to make them "reasonably available on the commercial market" (pre-owned doesn't count as "commercial").
Provided Kingdom Hearts II, Chain of Memories, Front Mission III, Front Mission First and Final Fantasy X-2 are all still on schedule. Square only has so many employees, after all.
Sure, call me a fanboy, but I've never seen a Squaresoft game crash, lockup, or otherwise glitch-out. Poor camera angles, sure. Superflous gameplay elements, absolutely (although I'm one of the very few people who actually enjoyed making Gummi ships in Kingdom Hearts. Flying them, not so much, but making them was actually enjoyable), but never a full-fledged bugs. Very few other companies put quite as much craftsmanship into their games.
Of course, I can't speak for Final Fantasy XI, owing to my longstanding disapproval of MMORPGs.
Take longer. No problem. Use the time to make it a better game. There's plenty of other good games coming out to counterbalance it. It's not like it's the only game that matters.
An unusual article to say the least. Seems more like a passing entry in someone's 'blog. And since it's awfully light on which old games the "1337ists" are veering towards, it's tough to draw any meaningful conclusions.
At any rate, comparing the games of today to the games of yesteryear is, rather counterintuitively, not comparing the same things. It's like comparing Fritz Lang's Metropolis to The Matrix.
Oldschool twitch-Shmup fans are, fairly predictably, not going to like RPGs. Pac-Man enthusiasts aren't going to find much to enjoy in FPSs. If all I care about is Robotron, I'm not going to sing any praises of RTS. Everyone's on stage in their designated places, reading their expected lines.
Anyway, yes, mainstream is going to include poor games, even from a purely statistical point of view (since mainstream is average, and average taste is not "highly-discerning".) It will, by its nature include sub-standard games and obvious greats. However, just because the mainstream crowd says the sky is blue doesn't mean they're wrong.
Maybe they're not. Maybe the target market of There is the previously un-catered to Superhero/space alien/time traveller/billionaire tycoon. There's a first time for everything.
Should this thing ever truly see the light of day (and I hope it does: Infinium deserves to go belly-up in a big way), they really should consider teaming up with Nokia. They could get some Phantom/nGage connectivity action going on. Why? Because "you [us] people" will buy anything.
Actually, the comment of "Well then you aren't really part of the Phantom's core user base," is what really chokes me up: The implication is that the Phantom's core user base is that group of people who already want a Phantom.
Saves a fortune in advertising. So logically, they should be planning an initial run of, what, 12 units worldwide?
I could go on and on, but really, they've given us so much rich material for mockery that it's difficult to concieve of anyone taking them seriously, which takes some of the fun out of ridiculing their inane babblings.
This is somewhat reminiscant of Sony's E3 2001 press conference. They spent 2 hours talking about how there weren't shortages in initial shipments, how demand was easily being met, and how the dev kit was a piece of cake to use.
Immediately followed by every developer saying "Yeah, this was a real pain in the butt to do with their dev kit."
Ignore your senses and reasoning skills. Trust the corp-speak. The corp-speak would not lie.
I don't recall taking any actions to stop or slow anyone from persuing whatever enjoyment they get from MMOGs, nor did I belittle or insult anyone who does. All I said was that I didn't.
Consider that, without LANs and online gaming, computers are pretty much inherantly one-player animals, whereas consoles have almost universally had 2-4 player possibilities since the 1970s.
Console gamers are used to being able to play multiplayer games without all that messy setting up a network or getting your console online. I'm not saying these things are complex, just that Joe Average is going to percieve them as being so.
I personally hate online multiplayer gaming in just about every form, for pretty much the same reason I hated group assignments in school. That, and I object to the idea of continuing to pay for a game I've already bought.
Yes, yes. I've heard the comparison of buying fuel for your car, or paying for electricity, but those don't hold up as comparisons: All cars require fuel, and all electronics require electricity, but not all video games require continuous subscriptions.
Umm... What makes you think they didn't? We have only one test-subject's account of a still-ongoing study, the methods of which aren't clear at this point.
Keep in mind that your immediate reaction to violent video games is different from looking for long-term results of playing violent video games. A good study on the matter would look for how playing violent games might affect you in non-violent or non-gaming situations.
Then again, you still have the possibility of violent behavior being the cause, and not the effect.
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Only insofar as it would be impossible for an electronics entertainment company to justify not having MP3 playing devices. They make MP3 players because all portable electronic entertainment companies make MP3 players.
As for the PDA's, if you make a PDA with halfway decent specs, someone is going to start writing software for it. If it is technically possible for the device to play MP3s, someone will write software to do so. Sony just bowed to the inevitable.
The biggest battle is coming from SCEI, who fears that the PSX has a bigger vulnerability to piracy than the PS2.
This device is out of Sony Electronics, not Sony Computer Entertainment Incorporated, nor Sony Pictures. Same brands, different heads of the hydra.
What winds up happening is that different sections have entirely contradicting business goals: Sony Electronics wants to provide the consumer with devices which will allow him to burn DVDs at high speeds from a large capacity hard drive, and record live TV onto said hard drive, not to mention viewing a variety of other burned media, including the burned DVD-rs.
SCEI fears this will allow people to play copied PS2 and PSOne games. They need to squash some features.
Sony Pictures fears this will allow people to play copied movies. They need to squash some features.
Sony Music fears this will allow people to play downloaded songs. They need to squash some features.
And so on. It's no surprise that the PSX is going to be all black-and-blue (and missing functionality) after all these corporate divisions have beaten it up. By the time this thing sees a stateside release, I'll be surprised if it even has a dvd-r drive in it.
Okay, RPGs are pretty much my favorite genre of gaming. However, this seems a bit odd. The only connection to the Virtua Fighter series is the moves? I'm no fighting series snob, but the Virtua Fighter moves weren't especially distinguishable from general martial arts moves, were they?
If I made an RPG which featured all-new characters, I couldn't (assuming I had legal rights) very well call it a Mortal Kombat game just because one character has a grappling-spear, could I? Or call a puzzle game "Sonic Chaos Mix" just because some of the crystals were blue?
There comes a point where brand recognition doesn't really work.
Sure, it looks like a Gameboy. Unless you rotate it 90 and use it in portrait mode with the stylus. Provided you're not using the standard "gamer grip" (holding unit with both hands, operating controls with thumbs) and have the sound turned down or off, no one will care what you're doing. The PDA functions are easily usable with the included stylus.
This would be true of any PDA with thumb-oriented controls. However, I don't think the idea was to create a stealth gaming device. For that, you might want to try a Texas Instruments graphing calculator and the wealth of software available for it.
Feh. The real danger is that those who like Anime just for the sake of liking something that other people don't will have to move further into the fringe, which means the naughty tentacle stuff. That stuff makes me want to claw my eyes out.
For those of us who genuinely like quality Anime (rather than just saying "Oooh, it's Japanese! Pretty!"), we'll simply be overjoyed to be able to buy our favorite series in Wal-Mart instead of having to hunt for months and pay silly prices for 20 minutes of a bad pirate copy, and happy that we are now able to share our enthusiasm with our friends.
Not invisible. I just shrink to the size of an action figure. Then I hang out with telekinetic Courteney Cox and solve mysteries.
Here's my bet for the torough silliness going on here:
Some CN exec got it in his head that a Cartoon Network amusment park might be a good idea, and flogged some lackey into checking out actual costs involved in creating real-life versions of lavish cartoon sets and props.
Lackey comes back with conservative figures, hoping to keep his job and push the project forward. Exec's superior sees figures and says to himself, "Hey, that's not that expensive. Let's sell them to the public! After all, there's 270 million people in America, surely a few dozen are rich and gullible enough to buy these extravagances!"
Bet on stupid, and you win every time.
Hang about: How are dating sims any different from sims who date, like in The Sims: Hot Date?
And besides, many Japanese games which made it in the States contained dating sim elements, such as in Thousand Arms, Final Fantasy VII & VIII, and even the always successful Harvest Moon series.
Why don't they focus on the truly unusual games, like Boon-Ga Boon-Ga! (violate the buttocks of your least favorite people, like politicians), or the Densha de Go series (you can drive a train. You know, trains? The only vehicle with no steering?). They should at least have given a nod to the truly Japanese and truly odd games which did make it over here, like Stretch Panic.
"Shoddy Journalism" barely scratches the surface on this article.
That's only if you have all the MAME drivers loaded into memory at once, which is something you'll never do.
The main executable can be as small as a few hundred kilobytes, and then load the proper game driver from a datfile full of drivers (as is the case with some current distributions of MAME, like MAMEplus). There's no reason for Pac Man to require 6 MB, unless you were using some incredibly inefficent form of dynamic recompilation.
Of course, with 4 MB of ram, you can never run anything more complex than Capcom CPS1 games.
I hear a lot about people going to universities with video game degrees. I don't hear much about how the video game industry in general views these degrees. Do they respect them? Does Nintendo or EA say, "Oh, I see you have a degree in game design, and another in game theory. You're just the person we're looking for!"
I realize that these game-centric courses are relatively new, but shouldn't we be hearing some success stories from them? Someone must have gotten a degree from Full Sail by now.
I'm going to assume that the flying sections you're referring to are in Ratchet and Clank, not Jak and Daxter. Jak and Daxter had no flying sections. Annoying hoverbike sections, but no flying.
Sure, the control scheme is different for controlling a vehicle. That's the way it is in GTA III (although it wasn't in GTA and GTA II), and that's the way it pretty universally is in all games that have vehicles. Ask yourself this, though: Did the flying sections' controls make sense for a flying game?
Personally, I like a bit of shooter-on-rails, or even free-roaming-shooter. They weren't long sections, and they weren't particularly difficult, or even really frustrating.
Point is, you can't really carry a control metaphor for a running, jumping character over into an omnidirectional vehicle such as a space ship. Usually, when a control scheme is changed, it is done because to not do so would provide a counter-intuitive control scheme.
How would you have done the flight combat sequences in R&C (other than to completely omit them)?
There's nothing wrong with short mandatory mini-games. Prolonged mini-gameness should always be optional (except in the case of things like the constantly inexplicable Bishi Bashi Special, which is nothing but mini games). And variety is not inherently bad. Only when it's not done well.
I believe that mini-games are, on the whole, a good thing, in the same sense that chocolate chunks in brownies are a good thing. They may not contribute much in the flavor, but they do introduce novel textures. On the same note, however, mini-games could be well designed, but completely clash with the basic thrust of the main game, in which case it's like chocolate chunks in a sirloin steak. Both good things, but not a great combination.
Of course, it's not impossible or even improbable that the mini-games could be bad. In which case it's like a nice chocolate cake filled with broccoli chunks.
I like chocolate...
Basic point I'm getting at is this: Very few games are purely whatever category they go for. Even Super Mario 64 had it's races, puzzles, and fetch quests. The ability to adapt variety well is the difficult part, as is the ability to incorporate the variety without completely shattering the story.
Sure, it's a better cell phone than the GBA.
However, even my '87 Honda Accord is a better automobile than both the Nokia nGage and the GBA. Then again, none of those things have the flavor, texture, or nutritional value of Pringles potato crisps.
Cross comparisons just plain don't make sense. Why not talk about how the nGage stacks up against other gaming-enabled cell phones, especially considering the asking price for the unit and games?
No, the Sony execs aren't on crack. Well, okay, maybe they are, but not for this reason.
The paranoiac in me sees this as an interesting ploy by some piracy advocate within Sony to get the world a better modchip. Most of them hover around $20-$30, and usually have more than 15 wires to solder to tiny little contacts, any one of which could turn your $179 console into a large black paperweight if done incorrectly.
So, release the system in China, and inside of a week, a $5 modchip which requires 8 wires at most will hit the market.
I'm not even sure how much of that little rant was serious...
Emm...
I didn't say otherwise. However, with the system classified as "obsolete", it would be perfectly legal for you to make backups of Gamecube games you own, and by extension, it would be legal to purchase devices which allowed such circumvention.
Nintendo was the one who basically purchased laws prohibiting game-cartridge copying hardware, and really don't want people backing up Gamecube games in the first place.
What with the recent ruling by the Library of Congress regarding copying obsolete video games, the Gamecube was, technically an obsolete system. The actual wording of the law was that a system shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured OR is no longer reasonably available on the commercial market. Since only one of those conditions needs to be true, Nintendo may have resumed production just to keep copying of GameCube games illegal. Makes me wonder if they'll start making NES, SNES, and Virtual Boy systems again, but they'd also have to make them "reasonably available on the commercial market" (pre-owned doesn't count as "commercial").
Provided Kingdom Hearts II, Chain of Memories, Front Mission III, Front Mission First and Final Fantasy X-2 are all still on schedule. Square only has so many employees, after all.
Sure, call me a fanboy, but I've never seen a Squaresoft game crash, lockup, or otherwise glitch-out. Poor camera angles, sure. Superflous gameplay elements, absolutely (although I'm one of the very few people who actually enjoyed making Gummi ships in Kingdom Hearts. Flying them, not so much, but making them was actually enjoyable), but never a full-fledged bugs. Very few other companies put quite as much craftsmanship into their games.
Of course, I can't speak for Final Fantasy XI, owing to my longstanding disapproval of MMORPGs.
Take longer. No problem. Use the time to make it a better game. There's plenty of other good games coming out to counterbalance it. It's not like it's the only game that matters.
An unusual article to say the least. Seems more like a passing entry in someone's 'blog. And since it's awfully light on which old games the "1337ists" are veering towards, it's tough to draw any meaningful conclusions.
At any rate, comparing the games of today to the games of yesteryear is, rather counterintuitively, not comparing the same things. It's like comparing Fritz Lang's Metropolis to The Matrix.
Oldschool twitch-Shmup fans are, fairly predictably, not going to like RPGs. Pac-Man enthusiasts aren't going to find much to enjoy in FPSs. If all I care about is Robotron, I'm not going to sing any praises of RTS. Everyone's on stage in their designated places, reading their expected lines.
Anyway, yes, mainstream is going to include poor games, even from a purely statistical point of view (since mainstream is average, and average taste is not "highly-discerning".) It will, by its nature include sub-standard games and obvious greats. However, just because the mainstream crowd says the sky is blue doesn't mean they're wrong.
They're just right without merit.
Maybe they're not. Maybe the target market of There is the previously un-catered to Superhero/space alien/time traveller/billionaire tycoon. There's a first time for everything.
How many of those lines are variations of "You suck" and "I own(zer/xor/@#$)ed you"?
Should this thing ever truly see the light of day (and I hope it does: Infinium deserves to go belly-up in a big way), they really should consider teaming up with Nokia. They could get some Phantom/nGage connectivity action going on. Why? Because "you [us] people" will buy anything.
Actually, the comment of "Well then you aren't really part of the Phantom's core user base," is what really chokes me up: The implication is that the Phantom's core user base is that group of people who already want a Phantom.
Saves a fortune in advertising. So logically, they should be planning an initial run of, what, 12 units worldwide?
I could go on and on, but really, they've given us so much rich material for mockery that it's difficult to concieve of anyone taking them seriously, which takes some of the fun out of ridiculing their inane babblings.
This is somewhat reminiscant of Sony's E3 2001 press conference. They spent 2 hours talking about how there weren't shortages in initial shipments, how demand was easily being met, and how the dev kit was a piece of cake to use.
Immediately followed by every developer saying "Yeah, this was a real pain in the butt to do with their dev kit."
Ignore your senses and reasoning skills. Trust the corp-speak. The corp-speak would not lie.
I don't recall taking any actions to stop or slow anyone from persuing whatever enjoyment they get from MMOGs, nor did I belittle or insult anyone who does. All I said was that I didn't.
Consider that, without LANs and online gaming, computers are pretty much inherantly one-player animals, whereas consoles have almost universally had 2-4 player possibilities since the 1970s.
Console gamers are used to being able to play multiplayer games without all that messy setting up a network or getting your console online. I'm not saying these things are complex, just that Joe Average is going to percieve them as being so.
I personally hate online multiplayer gaming in just about every form, for pretty much the same reason I hated group assignments in school. That, and I object to the idea of continuing to pay for a game I've already bought.
Yes, yes. I've heard the comparison of buying fuel for your car, or paying for electricity, but those don't hold up as comparisons: All cars require fuel, and all electronics require electricity, but not all video games require continuous subscriptions.
Umm... What makes you think they didn't? We have only one test-subject's account of a still-ongoing study, the methods of which aren't clear at this point.
Keep in mind that your immediate reaction to violent video games is different from looking for long-term results of playing violent video games. A good study on the matter would look for how playing violent games might affect you in non-violent or non-gaming situations.
Then again, you still have the possibility of violent behavior being the cause, and not the effect.