I have to agree that the Z button placement is less than ideal, and I'm an admitted Nintendo fanboy.
The problem is that your hands naturally settle into the convenient grooves for the L and R buttons when gripping the controller. These buttons almost almost grip your fingers themselves, so they are comfortably settled and you do not want to have to move them while playing the games. There's actually a ridge on the R button that "impedes" your finger's progress towards the Z button if you want to press it. Not that it's difficult to reach the button if you're really want to, but it's not comfortable.
A better design might have been if they had done something similar to the N64 controller, putting it on the under side of the controller, perhaps between the C-stick and the B/A/Y/X button cluster, or perhaps to the left of the C-stick, though that have proven difficult to reach for kids with tiny hands.
It's not one of the worst controllers, but it's not one of my favorites either.
Also, in the reference shot of the corridor, the first observation is about the black reflective paneling, saying they don't know whether it has LCARs and if it's an info pane. The answer is that it is, as I recall one episode where crewman demonstrates to a visitor that they can ask the ship for directions, and the corridor panels will light up showing you how to get to your destination.
You know it wouldn't be difficult for them to hire a Trek nerd consultant to relentlessly correct and inform them of all of these little details. But then I guess it's okay for them to show a little Trek ignorance in this article, which seems more geared towards gamer/developer geeks than Trek geeks.
Preceding your provided quote were the words "thousands of Japanese gamers". which you cut out. I'm not sure when Japan was introduced to the Ultima series, but I'm pretty sure that CRPGs weren't as popular or common over there as they were in the US. Once Ultima was ported to the NES, it gained a strong following there, as I understand it (after the release of Zelda, I believe).
It's all about context. Nobody is claiming that Zelda was the first game that featured open-ended exploration, but it was pretty new to the Japanese at the time, and Zelda was one of the first titles to bring such gameplay to the masses (which probably owes as much to the simple pick-up-and-play fun factor of the game as much as it does the fact that it was released on a console instead of a computer).
I remember hearing that a Zelda title might be a launch title for Revolution. I assume this would be different than Twilight Princess? Anyone have any information on this?
This seems very unlikely to me. Two AAA Zelda games being released within 1 year of each other? It could happen, especially if Zelda Revolution is radically different from Twilight Princess and is being worked on by completely seperate development teams, but I would think that the Twilight Princess delay would at least somewhat push back the release of the next Zelda beyond the release of the Revolution, unless the Revolution is delayed into 2007 (I don't even want to think about that happening).
Twilight Princess will likely sate our Zelda craving for a while, so releasing a new Zelda game soon after almost seems like a not-good idea. I may still be striving to unlock everything and do all the miniquests when the Revolution comes out, so I won't be starved for a Zelda game the same way I'm anticipating the next real Mario platforming game (which the GameCube rather lacked -- I thought Sunshine was a let down), a Super Smash Brothers Melee, a Mario Party (the type of game that is just perfect for the Revolution) and a Metroid, which seems like a franchise that is evolving in such a way that it also is an ideal Revolution title. Give me all or most of these games at our near launch, and I'll be perfectly content to wait a year for a new, awesome Zelda game.
I think the official explanation is they realized as the game was nearing completion that it played too much like "The Ocarina of Time 2", so they went back to work on it to include some new gameplay to make the experience feel more fresh and original.
Hm, I'm wondering how this is a problem with the Nintendo controller but not ordinarly controllers. Maybe your can explain what you mean about not having a point of reference and why exactly this is an issue with the Revolution controller specifically. Sure, you can't follow the ball from its origin to its point of impact on your controller (which represens your racket/bat/club) directly, but when you're using an analog stick and buttons to control the timing, location and direction of your swing, is the control really any less abstracted?
You are still performing input based on the location of a ball relative to the character you're controlling and not relative to your own personal body. Both input methods are abstracted, and will require a bit of adjustment and probably require some time devoted to mastering, but it remains to be seen which input method is actually more accurate. It's not immediately obvious how exactly your joystick motions and button pressing will be interpreted in a game with a traditonal controller until after you play around with it a bit. I don't expect this challenge to go away with the Revolution controller, it will just take on a different form.
Not that I'm saying the Revolution controller will automatically be more accurate and intuitive for these types of games, and I agree there are certain significant challenges to overcome. A lot depends on implementation, both on Nintendo's part in making the hardware and the software developer's side of things... but I don't think that tennis/baseball/golf games, etc. for the Revolution are necessarily doomed to be inferior to what we're used to playing today.
(2) Jobs where it doesnt matter one whit if you're wrong. Jobs like theoretical physicist in a field where there isnt the slightest possibility of carrying out an experiment. Such as dabbling in the theory of gravity.
Yeah, it's great, until you successfully manage to measure the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle and end up reducing the planet Earth to the size of a pea.
That's so cool it hurts. It hurts because, for the time being, it's vaporware, and also because when it is released, I won't be able to justify spending what will probably be at least $150 on what amounts to a novelty (and if I did, I'd probably just spill something on it and destroy it).
Saying something or someone is of the "next generation" doesn't imply they are in any way revolutionary or even superior. It simply implies that they are descended from some older source.
In this sense it's completely appropriate to categorize consoles in terms of "generations". Of course in the video game business you are at least (usually) assured of improvements, if only incremental and of a non-revolutionary nature with each new generation, while the term when used in other contexts may not have such a generally positive connnotation.
It's an advantage because you can get rid of clutter in your house by getting rid of one console if another offers complete or near-complete emulation of the old. This may not be a huge deal for most of us the States, but Japan is a pretty big video gaming market too, and space is at a premium there. Even living in rural Florida, though, it's a convenience to not have to find a place/power outlet for my old consoles (or to have to deal with the tangle of cables that exists in and around my TV space).
Also, the price on older games tends to go down after a while. You can eventually get the best games for under $20 each, or sometimes for as little as $10ish. While they may not sport the most cutting edge graphics, they still are fun to play and may be a better value than the majority of $50 (or now, $60) titles available for the new system. If you didn't own the previous generation console, this can be an important selling point, especially early in the life of the next-gen console, when your selection of quality titles is very small.
You can sell your own system, which, granted, you may not get a ton of money for if a shiny, new backwards compatible system has just been released by the same company, but you'll still probably get enough for at least one shiny new cutting edge game (except perhaps in the case of the GameCube, which is so inexpensive already that I have a hard time imagining someone getting more than $50 for it on eBay, particularly after the Revolution comes.
So backwards compatability may not be something that makes someone decide that they definitely aren't going to buy the system, it is a great bonus feature that will make the decision to buy easier.
Nintendo's 'problem', if you can call it that, is that they don't target people who don't already play games.
Sure they do, they just don't do it with immense success (yet anyway). Games like Mario Party, Animal Crossing and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat are all designed to have some appeal to non-gamers (and often do), and you've already mentioned Monkey Ball which has similar appeal.
Possibly the problem is one of marketing. It's a tough nut to crack. Nintendo produces some very simple, accessible, family friendly games, but to market themselves as such opens them up to ridicule and the perception that their games are all too simplistic and that they are too "kiddie", while the other consoles cultivate an image of being "hardcore" and "mature", which isn't exactly something your more mainstream, non-gamer/casual gamer cares about generally. Nobody except Nintendo seems willing to risk alienating the "bread and butter" proven video game buyers by making appeal to a broader audience a cornerstone philosophy... and when you see Nintendo's market share and console sales shrinking, it's not tough to blame Microsoft and Sony for taking their tact (despite the fact that Nintendo is still successful in terms of generating profit.)
Huh, or maybe they do have refresh rates, but they have response times too, of course. I must have misread something a while back about the fundamental technology of LCDs, because now I do notice refresh rate is a listed spec on some models.
Personally I can't really notice a different in refresh rate above 85 Hz or so. Lower than 70 Hz hurts (ha, pun) my eyes though.
But LCDs don't have a refresh rate. They don't redraw the image so many times a second, instead they display an image and change which pixels need changing as necessary. The length of time it takes for a pixel to change color appropriately is called "response time" and over the past few years, LCD response times has improved considerably, to the point where many gaming/hardware web sites now recommend LCDs as a primary choice, because CRT technology has been pretty stagnant for a while now (some actually believe the quality has been on the decline) while the advantages of the LCD have been steadily piling up (or more accurately, their disadvantages have been getting toned down).
a) if you actually followed the Blizzard rules, pretty much every conceivable name is out,
Not even remotely true. The fact that they have a built in name generator (which, granted, is not the most personal way to choose a name for your character) that generates names perfectly allowable by Blizzard's rules (most of the time, the generator may still produce some unacceptable names, but not commonly) of the time pretty much blows this assertation out of the water.
I've never had trouble coming up with names appropriate for games like World of Warcraft, even in games with even stricter naming policies. Finding a name that isn't taken that I really, really like can take a while sometimes, but it's completely doable.
That's not to say a particularly anal GM couldn't stretch Blizzard's existing naming policy rules (one of which is a catch-all "any name deemed not appropriate for the game world" or some such thing) to absurd lengths to include some borderline names that the vast majority of people would have no problem with... but in this particular case, Cmdrtaco is a clear violation, and Taco frankly got what was coming to him for either not reading the rules, or taking them and the included warnings seriously enough.
b) the policy is imposed very hapharzardly
I agree, more uniform and complete enforcement would be better... though personally I'd rather have selective enforcement than no enforcement. But then, I got my start in online roleplaying in games which took roleplaying much more seriously, and I get more bugged than probably most people do by silly, stupid, totally unoriginal or completely out of genre/inappropriate names.
What I find somewhat interesting, a little annoying, and probably fairly offensive if I were in Taco's shoes, however, is that Blizzard itself could be interpreted as being a violator of this very same policy. There are tons of thinly-veiled "easter egg"-like modern day/real world/pop culture references all over the game (Star Trek, Sling Blade, Zelda, others that I can't remember off the top of my head, as I haven't played in several months). Of course, Blizzard is within their rights to do this as it is their game, but it does seem a bit inconsistent that they get cute with these sorts of references with their own NPCs and quests, and behave like such hardasses (sometimes) when their players do the same thing.
People choose stupid names and MMOs have poor CS. Stop the presses!
Seriously, read the naming policy before you choose your silly, titled, out of genre, Internet-famous name if you don't want to have to deal with the consequences of violating their rules.
Though you can deride Blizzard for providing poor customer service with their World of Warcraft product (and I'd agree that this is often the case), all you have to do is read the naming policy to see that titles are against their rules, so why it would be necessary to send even one e-mail or make one phone call to Blizzard asking why your name was changed is unclear to me, especially for a web/techno-savvy, presumably at least semi-intelligent person like Taco, who should have no problem deducing that the name change was the result of a naming policy violation and should have no problem finding the previously linked URL with less than a minute or two of searching. A quick scan of that policy would make it very clear that in at least one way it was a clear violation. I wouldn't expect Taco or anybody else forced to have their name changed to be happy about it, as it certainly is a considerable pain in the ass, but they really have nobody to blame but themselves.
Simply put, it is your responsibility to know their terms of service and rules, and it doesn't take a dozen inquiries through Blizzard reps to figure out what their rules are. It only takes one inquiry through information posted publicly on their web site.
Although I generally agree that when action such as this is taken (banning, suspension, forced name change, or any other disciplinary action) the GM should spell out explicitly exactly what aspect of what policy (or policies) was violated... so people who may have been unjustly penalized have an idea of what they need to attempt to disprove to establish their innocence, and so what scant CS resources Blizzard seems to have available aren't wasted answering the e-mails of confused or belligerant individuals who are seem unable or unwilling to read the rules (not that I really think this would stop most people).
Anyway, s far as I'm concerned, Taco, you were part of the whole CS nightmare that is the reality of most MMOs. You didn't read the rules, didn't follow the rules and instead of accepting the consequences for your poor behavior, you went on to waste more of limited time and resources that the Blizzard staff has at its disposal. You contributed to a clogging of the (I agree, sometimes unnecessarily convoluted) lines of communications for those who have legitimate issues that can't be addressed simply by reading the FAQ, TOS or knowledge base articles.
Put simply: RTFM next time.
Blizzard certainly is to blame as well, and the seeming unaccountability of GMs can possibly be troublesome, too... but customers are often a big part of the problem with customer service, I think.
Smashing Pumpkins also released their last album, Machina II: Friends and Enemies of Modern Music for free in mp3 format, though more in frustration with their label than anything else, as I understand it and not as a social stand against the assault on filesharing.
They were and still are one of my favorite bands, if not my favorite, but unfortunately the album itself didn't make much of an impression on me. There are only a couple songs on it I really like. I don't think they made nearly as much of an effort of polishing this release as they did their previous albums.
Like many others, I think that if this is properly executed, it will indeed be fully worthy of the name "Revolution" and video games will be a whole new kind of fun.
I'm not usually an early adopter -- I don't make a lot of money and I like to let other people test the waters before I plunk down what to me is serious cash on a piece of new technology. However, I am seriously considering preordering the Revolution.
As long as I read some reviews confirming that the final device is not prone to glitches or lag, and there are at least two heavily enticing launch titles (Super Smash Brothers 3 makes one already) and the price is reasonable (normally I wouldn't pay more than $250 or so for consoles and accessories, but in the case of the Revolution I may push that budget up a bit if I have to).
However, when I showed the teaser video to my mom, my sister, and my girlfriend (none of whom are "veteren gamers") the reaction was a bit mixed.
My mom, who doesn't play games at all (yet), still thought the control was a bit intimidating. All of the moving around, perhaps. Plus the fact that it seemed like futuristic technology also spooked her a bit, I believe.
My sister, who has played maybe 150 hours worth video games in her entire life and spent a bit more time than that watching me play, thought it looked really cool and awesome. I get the impression that she looks forward to trying it out.
My girlfriend is what I'd describe as a "casual gamer". She and her sister own a SNES, PS2 and N64, along with a modest collection of games. She was put off by the Revolution controller, expressing a concern about playing a game being overly exerting and said that she feels like she needs to have the controller gripped in both hands to be comfortable. She said she'd have to try it but didn't sound like she's anticipating liking it.
So obviously Nintendo has some work ahead of them. They need to market this thing smart to win over the non-gamers that they are counting on (in large part) to make the whole experiment worthwhile, and to prevent themselves from alienating the unconvinced, skeptical majority of veteren gamers who have grown accustomed to more traditional controllers.
The controllers we have now are so widely used because they work.
And the reason we have the controllers we have today are because Nintendo basically invented them. The D-pad, the analog stick, the shoulder button, force feedback/rumble vibration, the analog button, these are all timely Nintendo innovations that were copied by the rest of the industry.
Whenever new funcitons are necessary for gaming, they can be easily adapted to the controler and be utilized.
Of course in a day down the road, the functions and actions in game will require for a complete and revolutionary controller.
On the contrary, I think that there comes a point where you have to make some fundamental changes to the controller setup before certain types of gameplay can be realized in a fun and worthwhile fashion. How many people would be playing Dance Dance Revolution if it had never been paired with a "dance mat" controller?
It seems to me we've reached a functional plateau with regards to the "output" we receive from video games, the video and the audio. Sure, the graphics continue to improve, but better graphics aren't really going to change the gameplay experience that much. Also, the addition of sheer processing power isn't going to add much to the equation either, aside from perhaps slightly better bot AI and more complex simulations.
No, right now it seems that technologically, the only thing you can feasibly change to produce a revolutionary leap forward in the gaming experience is to alter the way the player interfaces with the game.
Is it too soon for this kind of "paradigm shift"? Maybe, but I don't think so. Now's the time to start experimenting, when the current crop of controllers has grown stale and even the weakest of the CPU/GPU entrants are going to be capable of producing stunning visuals, and online play is reaching maturity as a standard feature.
I think this was the right time for Nintendo to make this move. Nintendo isn't shooting themselves in the foot "again". They're a profitable company that knows pretty well by now what they're doing. They've had a few missteps (all of the players have) but they are breaking new ground, and while they may not be dominating the market again (yet), they are doing something Sony and Microsoft really haven't been doing with as much success as far as I can tell, and that is that Nintendo is essentially creating new gamers by appealing people other than 19 year old males.
I sincerely doubt this will prove a "fatal" move for Nintendo even the console doesn't catch on like it has the potential to. Nintendo may regress further into providing a niche role in the market, where they can still be a "success" in terms of greatly satisfying their customers while turning a profit... or they may prove a success on a "revolutionary" scale and be "The" company once again... whereas Microsoft and Sony find them in a perhaps somewhat less enviable position, one where they vie for supremacy by means of a pissing contest that has both of them producing expensive juggernauts of consoles that will likely serve as "loss leaders" for the both of them for a good long while, in a battle that may leave many customers upset at their ultimate choice of a console ("damn, I'm not really enjoying this $400 toy as much as I thought I was going to!") and one company or the other ultimately losing money from the venture instead of earning it... or not... I'm not an expert on this stuff, but this is how it seems to based on various articles and such that I've read.
Yep, I personally stopped playing the game almost as soon as I hit level 60, though this probably had about as much with my friends not being around to play much anymore as it did with a lack of endgame content. But by browsing the forums, reading web sites, and sampling the level 60+ content for myself, I was already starting to get the feeling that there wouldn't be much for me to do that would be entertaining/tolerable for me for long at level 60.
What really bugs me is this obsession that MMO designers have with creating content that can only be appropriately experienced by legions of obsessed players. This makes particularly little sense for me in the case of World of Warcraft where there's a rather abrupt transition from being able to make decent advancement with very casual play, to a game where in order to continue perceptible advancement you have to become rather hardcore, just to enjoy a relatively small amount of game content that allows you to continue to progress.
And what I really don't know, and often wonder is, does an MMO really need to be designed in such a way that once you reach a certain point, "raid" participation becomes virtually mandatory for any kind of appreciable character progression?
People often play "fantasy" games so they can be one of a handful of heroes (or villains) along with their other friends. Not to be just another cog in an (admittedly impressive) machine with 39 other people (or 71+ other people in the case of some games/raid encounters).
I mean, that might appeal to a small percentage of people who actually enjoy the challenge of dealing with the logistics of getting that many high level players (often paired with high level egos and low levels of maturity) together and getting them to do their jobs properly and sorting out who gets to attend what raid and will be rewarded what loot according to various "DKPoint" schemes and whatnot, but for the rest of us who would prefer to just muster up a group of around 4 to 14 friends, big time raid encounters, while perhaps being a somewhat enticing challenge, seems more like work that we should be getting paid for, not something fun that we should be paying to do.
I've played a few MMOs, and I know that as soon as I reach that point where it seems like my only option to improve my character involves retreading the same content over and over and over in hopes of one of a handful of rare items, or raiding, then my excitement about the game cools down, I stop playing very much for a couple months, then I just end up quitting, like I did in World of Warcraft months ago.
I've just recently thought about playing again, to have something entertaining to do with my girlfriend when we're not together (we live about 40 minutes from one another so it's not always worth it to go see each other, depending on the amount of free time we have and what we need to get accomplished at home) but I'm pretty sure that if her and I did start playing, we'd just play to level 60, maybe a bit beyond, and then move on to something else... because at that point, while perhaps we haven't yet "won" World of Warcraft, we'd have done all the stuff that seems fun and worthwhile.
Oh, and also, Blizzard, like every other other company that tries this MMO thing, doesn't seem to have a clue about customer relationships. They've done the "stealth nerf" thing several times, they are slow to respond to what are often very legitimate/important player concerns, and it takes a pretty long time for inexplicable changes to be reversed (if they ever are). The dupe story, I suppose, is a good example of this. At least they're not as bad as Square-Enix though. I still can't fathom the mentality of an MMO company that thinks it's a good idea to design a game to crash if you try to alt+tab, and deletes characters if a customer decides to suspend their account for three months or more.
So I'm still waiting for someone to get it right. While World of Warcraft is a fun
Well, apparently someone's already making an effort to lobby for whispering and related issues. The fact that they're trying to educate people indicates that to me that the idea has already met some degree of resistence.
Games created for two next-generation consoles - the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony - will display video in wide-screen high-definition format if the console is connected to a high-definition TV. Only Nintendo's entry, code-named Revolution, will not cater to HDTV's. ...
Regarding the increasing development costs of games: To compensate, publishers can be expected to raise retail prices - even Nintendo, though it is forgoing high definition. "We'll see if we can push prices up to $59, using 'Collectors' Edition' content," George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. This Christmas, the company will offer a special edition of its Legend of Zelda franchise at that price.
So it sounds like the cost of the consoles isn't the only thing that's going to be increasing... the games will be getting more expensive too, though the point of the article being referenced here on slashdot is that this technology of Microsoft's is supposed to reduce the burden on developers somewhat, so we'll have to see how well that pans out.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that your hands naturally settle into the convenient grooves for the L and R buttons when gripping the controller. These buttons almost almost grip your fingers themselves, so they are comfortably settled and you do not want to have to move them while playing the games. There's actually a ridge on the R button that "impedes" your finger's progress towards the Z button if you want to press it. Not that it's difficult to reach the button if you're really want to, but it's not comfortable.
A better design might have been if they had done something similar to the N64 controller, putting it on the under side of the controller, perhaps between the C-stick and the B/A/Y/X button cluster, or perhaps to the left of the C-stick, though that have proven difficult to reach for kids with tiny hands.
It's not one of the worst controllers, but it's not one of my favorites either.
You know it wouldn't be difficult for them to hire a Trek nerd consultant to relentlessly correct and inform them of all of these little details. But then I guess it's okay for them to show a little Trek ignorance in this article, which seems more geared towards gamer/developer geeks than Trek geeks.
Sate is spelled correctly. I did however misspell the word separate. Or are "your" just trying to be ironic?
It's all about context. Nobody is claiming that Zelda was the first game that featured open-ended exploration, but it was pretty new to the Japanese at the time, and Zelda was one of the first titles to bring such gameplay to the masses (which probably owes as much to the simple pick-up-and-play fun factor of the game as much as it does the fact that it was released on a console instead of a computer).
This seems very unlikely to me. Two AAA Zelda games being released within 1 year of each other? It could happen, especially if Zelda Revolution is radically different from Twilight Princess and is being worked on by completely seperate development teams, but I would think that the Twilight Princess delay would at least somewhat push back the release of the next Zelda beyond the release of the Revolution, unless the Revolution is delayed into 2007 (I don't even want to think about that happening).
Twilight Princess will likely sate our Zelda craving for a while, so releasing a new Zelda game soon after almost seems like a not-good idea. I may still be striving to unlock everything and do all the miniquests when the Revolution comes out, so I won't be starved for a Zelda game the same way I'm anticipating the next real Mario platforming game (which the GameCube rather lacked -- I thought Sunshine was a let down), a Super Smash Brothers Melee, a Mario Party (the type of game that is just perfect for the Revolution) and a Metroid, which seems like a franchise that is evolving in such a way that it also is an ideal Revolution title. Give me all or most of these games at our near launch, and I'll be perfectly content to wait a year for a new, awesome Zelda game.
I think the official explanation is they realized as the game was nearing completion that it played too much like "The Ocarina of Time 2", so they went back to work on it to include some new gameplay to make the experience feel more fresh and original.
Hm, I'm wondering how this is a problem with the Nintendo controller but not ordinarly controllers. Maybe your can explain what you mean about not having a point of reference and why exactly this is an issue with the Revolution controller specifically. Sure, you can't follow the ball from its origin to its point of impact on your controller (which represens your racket/bat/club) directly, but when you're using an analog stick and buttons to control the timing, location and direction of your swing, is the control really any less abstracted?
... but I don't think that tennis/baseball/golf games, etc. for the Revolution are necessarily doomed to be inferior to what we're used to playing today.
You are still performing input based on the location of a ball relative to the character you're controlling and not relative to your own personal body. Both input methods are abstracted, and will require a bit of adjustment and probably require some time devoted to mastering, but it remains to be seen which input method is actually more accurate. It's not immediately obvious how exactly your joystick motions and button pressing will be interpreted in a game with a traditonal controller until after you play around with it a bit. I don't expect this challenge to go away with the Revolution controller, it will just take on a different form.
Not that I'm saying the Revolution controller will automatically be more accurate and intuitive for these types of games, and I agree there are certain significant challenges to overcome. A lot depends on implementation, both on Nintendo's part in making the hardware and the software developer's side of things
Even if they're mutant turtles?
Yeah, it's great, until you successfully manage to measure the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle and end up reducing the planet Earth to the size of a pea.
That's so cool it hurts. It hurts because, for the time being, it's vaporware, and also because when it is released, I won't be able to justify spending what will probably be at least $150 on what amounts to a novelty (and if I did, I'd probably just spill something on it and destroy it).
Now I'm going to have to redo all of my WoW keybindings again.
In this sense it's completely appropriate to categorize consoles in terms of "generations". Of course in the video game business you are at least (usually) assured of improvements, if only incremental and of a non-revolutionary nature with each new generation, while the term when used in other contexts may not have such a generally positive connnotation.
Also, the price on older games tends to go down after a while. You can eventually get the best games for under $20 each, or sometimes for as little as $10ish. While they may not sport the most cutting edge graphics, they still are fun to play and may be a better value than the majority of $50 (or now, $60) titles available for the new system. If you didn't own the previous generation console, this can be an important selling point, especially early in the life of the next-gen console, when your selection of quality titles is very small.
You can sell your own system, which, granted, you may not get a ton of money for if a shiny, new backwards compatible system has just been released by the same company, but you'll still probably get enough for at least one shiny new cutting edge game (except perhaps in the case of the GameCube, which is so inexpensive already that I have a hard time imagining someone getting more than $50 for it on eBay, particularly after the Revolution comes.
So backwards compatability may not be something that makes someone decide that they definitely aren't going to buy the system, it is a great bonus feature that will make the decision to buy easier.
Sure they do, they just don't do it with immense success (yet anyway). Games like Mario Party, Animal Crossing and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat are all designed to have some appeal to non-gamers (and often do), and you've already mentioned Monkey Ball which has similar appeal.
Possibly the problem is one of marketing. It's a tough nut to crack. Nintendo produces some very simple, accessible, family friendly games, but to market themselves as such opens them up to ridicule and the perception that their games are all too simplistic and that they are too "kiddie", while the other consoles cultivate an image of being "hardcore" and "mature", which isn't exactly something your more mainstream, non-gamer/casual gamer cares about generally. Nobody except Nintendo seems willing to risk alienating the "bread and butter" proven video game buyers by making appeal to a broader audience a cornerstone philosophy ... and when you see Nintendo's market share and console sales shrinking, it's not tough to blame Microsoft and Sony for taking their tact (despite the fact that Nintendo is still successful in terms of generating profit.)
Here ya go.
My mistake.
But LCDs don't have a refresh rate. They don't redraw the image so many times a second, instead they display an image and change which pixels need changing as necessary. The length of time it takes for a pixel to change color appropriately is called "response time" and over the past few years, LCD response times has improved considerably, to the point where many gaming/hardware web sites now recommend LCDs as a primary choice, because CRT technology has been pretty stagnant for a while now (some actually believe the quality has been on the decline) while the advantages of the LCD have been steadily piling up (or more accurately, their disadvantages have been getting toned down).
My next display will probably be an LCD.
Not even remotely true. The fact that they have a built in name generator (which, granted, is not the most personal way to choose a name for your character) that generates names perfectly allowable by Blizzard's rules (most of the time, the generator may still produce some unacceptable names, but not commonly) of the time pretty much blows this assertation out of the water.
I've never had trouble coming up with names appropriate for games like World of Warcraft, even in games with even stricter naming policies. Finding a name that isn't taken that I really, really like can take a while sometimes, but it's completely doable.
That's not to say a particularly anal GM couldn't stretch Blizzard's existing naming policy rules (one of which is a catch-all "any name deemed not appropriate for the game world" or some such thing) to absurd lengths to include some borderline names that the vast majority of people would have no problem with ... but in this particular case, Cmdrtaco is a clear violation, and Taco frankly got what was coming to him for either not reading the rules, or taking them and the included warnings seriously enough.
b) the policy is imposed very hapharzardly
I agree, more uniform and complete enforcement would be better ... though personally I'd rather have selective enforcement than no enforcement. But then, I got my start in online roleplaying in games which took roleplaying much more seriously, and I get more bugged than probably most people do by silly, stupid, totally unoriginal or completely out of genre/inappropriate names.
What I find somewhat interesting, a little annoying, and probably fairly offensive if I were in Taco's shoes, however, is that Blizzard itself could be interpreted as being a violator of this very same policy. There are tons of thinly-veiled "easter egg"-like modern day/real world/pop culture references all over the game (Star Trek, Sling Blade, Zelda, others that I can't remember off the top of my head, as I haven't played in several months). Of course, Blizzard is within their rights to do this as it is their game, but it does seem a bit inconsistent that they get cute with these sorts of references with their own NPCs and quests, and behave like such hardasses (sometimes) when their players do the same thing.
Seriously, read the naming policy before you choose your silly, titled, out of genre, Internet-famous name if you don't want to have to deal with the consequences of violating their rules.
Though you can deride Blizzard for providing poor customer service with their World of Warcraft product (and I'd agree that this is often the case), all you have to do is read the naming policy to see that titles are against their rules, so why it would be necessary to send even one e-mail or make one phone call to Blizzard asking why your name was changed is unclear to me, especially for a web/techno-savvy, presumably at least semi-intelligent person like Taco, who should have no problem deducing that the name change was the result of a naming policy violation and should have no problem finding the previously linked URL with less than a minute or two of searching. A quick scan of that policy would make it very clear that in at least one way it was a clear violation. I wouldn't expect Taco or anybody else forced to have their name changed to be happy about it, as it certainly is a considerable pain in the ass, but they really have nobody to blame but themselves.
Simply put, it is your responsibility to know their terms of service and rules, and it doesn't take a dozen inquiries through Blizzard reps to figure out what their rules are. It only takes one inquiry through information posted publicly on their web site.
Although I generally agree that when action such as this is taken (banning, suspension, forced name change, or any other disciplinary action) the GM should spell out explicitly exactly what aspect of what policy (or policies) was violated ... so people who may have been unjustly penalized have an idea of what they need to attempt to disprove to establish their innocence, and so what scant CS resources Blizzard seems to have available aren't wasted answering the e-mails of confused or belligerant individuals who are seem unable or unwilling to read the rules (not that I really think this would stop most people).
Anyway, s far as I'm concerned, Taco, you were part of the whole CS nightmare that is the reality of most MMOs. You didn't read the rules, didn't follow the rules and instead of accepting the consequences for your poor behavior, you went on to waste more of limited time and resources that the Blizzard staff has at its disposal. You contributed to a clogging of the (I agree, sometimes unnecessarily convoluted) lines of communications for those who have legitimate issues that can't be addressed simply by reading the FAQ, TOS or knowledge base articles.
Put simply: RTFM next time.
Blizzard certainly is to blame as well, and the seeming unaccountability of GMs can possibly be troublesome, too ... but customers are often a big part of the problem with customer service, I think.
They were and still are one of my favorite bands, if not my favorite, but unfortunately the album itself didn't make much of an impression on me. There are only a couple songs on it I really like. I don't think they made nearly as much of an effort of polishing this release as they did their previous albums.
I'm not usually an early adopter -- I don't make a lot of money and I like to let other people test the waters before I plunk down what to me is serious cash on a piece of new technology. However, I am seriously considering preordering the Revolution.
As long as I read some reviews confirming that the final device is not prone to glitches or lag, and there are at least two heavily enticing launch titles (Super Smash Brothers 3 makes one already) and the price is reasonable (normally I wouldn't pay more than $250 or so for consoles and accessories, but in the case of the Revolution I may push that budget up a bit if I have to).
However, when I showed the teaser video to my mom, my sister, and my girlfriend (none of whom are "veteren gamers") the reaction was a bit mixed.
My mom, who doesn't play games at all (yet), still thought the control was a bit intimidating. All of the moving around, perhaps. Plus the fact that it seemed like futuristic technology also spooked her a bit, I believe.
My sister, who has played maybe 150 hours worth video games in her entire life and spent a bit more time than that watching me play, thought it looked really cool and awesome. I get the impression that she looks forward to trying it out.
My girlfriend is what I'd describe as a "casual gamer". She and her sister own a SNES, PS2 and N64, along with a modest collection of games. She was put off by the Revolution controller, expressing a concern about playing a game being overly exerting and said that she feels like she needs to have the controller gripped in both hands to be comfortable. She said she'd have to try it but didn't sound like she's anticipating liking it.
So obviously Nintendo has some work ahead of them. They need to market this thing smart to win over the non-gamers that they are counting on (in large part) to make the whole experiment worthwhile, and to prevent themselves from alienating the unconvinced, skeptical majority of veteren gamers who have grown accustomed to more traditional controllers.
I hope they can pull it off.
And the reason we have the controllers we have today are because Nintendo basically invented them. The D-pad, the analog stick, the shoulder button, force feedback/rumble vibration, the analog button, these are all timely Nintendo innovations that were copied by the rest of the industry.
Whenever new funcitons are necessary for gaming, they can be easily adapted to the controler and be utilized.
Of course in a day down the road, the functions and actions in game will require for a complete and revolutionary controller.
On the contrary, I think that there comes a point where you have to make some fundamental changes to the controller setup before certain types of gameplay can be realized in a fun and worthwhile fashion. How many people would be playing Dance Dance Revolution if it had never been paired with a "dance mat" controller?
It seems to me we've reached a functional plateau with regards to the "output" we receive from video games, the video and the audio. Sure, the graphics continue to improve, but better graphics aren't really going to change the gameplay experience that much. Also, the addition of sheer processing power isn't going to add much to the equation either, aside from perhaps slightly better bot AI and more complex simulations.
No, right now it seems that technologically, the only thing you can feasibly change to produce a revolutionary leap forward in the gaming experience is to alter the way the player interfaces with the game.
Is it too soon for this kind of "paradigm shift"? Maybe, but I don't think so. Now's the time to start experimenting, when the current crop of controllers has grown stale and even the weakest of the CPU/GPU entrants are going to be capable of producing stunning visuals, and online play is reaching maturity as a standard feature.
I think this was the right time for Nintendo to make this move. Nintendo isn't shooting themselves in the foot "again". They're a profitable company that knows pretty well by now what they're doing. They've had a few missteps (all of the players have) but they are breaking new ground, and while they may not be dominating the market again (yet), they are doing something Sony and Microsoft really haven't been doing with as much success as far as I can tell, and that is that Nintendo is essentially creating new gamers by appealing people other than 19 year old males.
I sincerely doubt this will prove a "fatal" move for Nintendo even the console doesn't catch on like it has the potential to. Nintendo may regress further into providing a niche role in the market, where they can still be a "success" in terms of greatly satisfying their customers while turning a profit ... or they may prove a success on a "revolutionary" scale and be "The" company once again ... whereas Microsoft and Sony find them in a perhaps somewhat less enviable position, one where they vie for supremacy by means of a pissing contest that has both of them producing expensive juggernauts of consoles that will likely serve as "loss leaders" for the both of them for a good long while, in a battle that may leave many customers upset at their ultimate choice of a console ("damn, I'm not really enjoying this $400 toy as much as I thought I was going to!") and one company or the other ultimately losing money from the venture instead of earning it ... or not ... I'm not an expert on this stuff, but this is how it seems to based on various articles and such that I've read.
What really bugs me is this obsession that MMO designers have with creating content that can only be appropriately experienced by legions of obsessed players. This makes particularly little sense for me in the case of World of Warcraft where there's a rather abrupt transition from being able to make decent advancement with very casual play, to a game where in order to continue perceptible advancement you have to become rather hardcore, just to enjoy a relatively small amount of game content that allows you to continue to progress.
And what I really don't know, and often wonder is, does an MMO really need to be designed in such a way that once you reach a certain point, "raid" participation becomes virtually mandatory for any kind of appreciable character progression?
People often play "fantasy" games so they can be one of a handful of heroes (or villains) along with their other friends. Not to be just another cog in an (admittedly impressive) machine with 39 other people (or 71+ other people in the case of some games/raid encounters).
I mean, that might appeal to a small percentage of people who actually enjoy the challenge of dealing with the logistics of getting that many high level players (often paired with high level egos and low levels of maturity) together and getting them to do their jobs properly and sorting out who gets to attend what raid and will be rewarded what loot according to various "DKPoint" schemes and whatnot, but for the rest of us who would prefer to just muster up a group of around 4 to 14 friends, big time raid encounters, while perhaps being a somewhat enticing challenge, seems more like work that we should be getting paid for, not something fun that we should be paying to do.
I've played a few MMOs, and I know that as soon as I reach that point where it seems like my only option to improve my character involves retreading the same content over and over and over in hopes of one of a handful of rare items, or raiding, then my excitement about the game cools down, I stop playing very much for a couple months, then I just end up quitting, like I did in World of Warcraft months ago.
I've just recently thought about playing again, to have something entertaining to do with my girlfriend when we're not together (we live about 40 minutes from one another so it's not always worth it to go see each other, depending on the amount of free time we have and what we need to get accomplished at home) but I'm pretty sure that if her and I did start playing, we'd just play to level 60, maybe a bit beyond, and then move on to something else ... because at that point, while perhaps we haven't yet "won" World of Warcraft, we'd have done all the stuff that seems fun and worthwhile.
Oh, and also, Blizzard, like every other other company that tries this MMO thing, doesn't seem to have a clue about customer relationships. They've done the "stealth nerf" thing several times, they are slow to respond to what are often very legitimate/important player concerns, and it takes a pretty long time for inexplicable changes to be reversed (if they ever are). The dupe story, I suppose, is a good example of this. At least they're not as bad as Square-Enix though. I still can't fathom the mentality of an MMO company that thinks it's a good idea to design a game to crash if you try to alt+tab, and deletes characters if a customer decides to suspend their account for three months or more.
So I'm still waiting for someone to get it right. While World of Warcraft is a fun
Well, apparently someone's already making an effort to lobby for whispering and related issues. The fact that they're trying to educate people indicates that to me that the idea has already met some degree of resistence.
Games created for two next-generation consoles - the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony - will display video in wide-screen high-definition format if the console is connected to a high-definition TV. Only Nintendo's entry, code-named Revolution, will not cater to HDTV's.
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Regarding the increasing development costs of games: To compensate, publishers can be expected to raise retail prices - even Nintendo, though it is forgoing high definition. "We'll see if we can push prices up to $59, using 'Collectors' Edition' content," George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. This Christmas, the company will offer a special edition of its Legend of Zelda franchise at that price.
So it sounds like the cost of the consoles isn't the only thing that's going to be increasing ... the games will be getting more expensive too, though the point of the article being referenced here on slashdot is that this technology of Microsoft's is supposed to reduce the burden on developers somewhat, so we'll have to see how well that pans out.