Yeah, because it was such a *bad* thing that they tried to reign in developers so that we wouldn't have another Atari-esque debacle, with a deluge of terrible uninspired games to bury the few gems in a confusing mess that caused that whole video game crash thing.
And yeah, telling developers that they could only release X number of titles per year was such an awful thing, because then it forced them to at least *try* to make a quality product, rather than assigning a single programmer the task of creating a video game -- and giving him a couple weeks to do it before it shipped. (ET anyone?)
As for censorship, the only 2 titles I know of that Nintendo actively censored were Mortal Kombat and Wolfenstein 3D. In the NES era there were pictures of Hitler's exploding head, implied sex, and plenty of other stuff. By the end of the SNES era, the blood was right back in MK2. And honestly I can't fault Nintendo for trying to avoid controversy with parents/religious groups because we all know how much worse those people are than some idiot gamers whining that they can't see blood or nazi symbols.
Their tactics were definitely heavy-handed, but you failed to mention the *one* thing that they really should be called on, and that was their dealing with retailers. They did everything they could to keep competitors products off the shelves.
And give an example of Nintendo being "bad" now...? Yeah, they shut down some pirate sites. That doesn't seem to bad to me. Yeah, they did go after some flash cart makers, and while that definitely sucks, the flash carts were primarily being sold as a piracy tool (spare me the homebrew argument, I know it all and that's why I think it sucks that they were shut down) so I can't really fault them for that.
Here's what Nintendo hasn't done: they haven't paid off developers for exclusives. They haven't sold consoles at a loss to try to buy their way into a new market. They haven't completely sold out and commercialized every aspect of my favorite hobby. They didn't help EA become the behemoth it is by helping them sell millions of cheap disc-based copies of Madden every year to idiot frat boys. They also haven't ever insulted me by saying that I should be willing to go take a second job to afford their game console, or reneged on a "$1200 per PS3 in the wild" deal made by one of their top execs. They've never released misleading hardware specifications (60 million! polygons per second! (unlit, untextured, single-pixel triangles on a single triangle strip)) or reported consoles/games shipped rather than sold.
So yeah, I'll defend them as one of the good guys. I can overlook some poor decisions in the 90s and a couple anticompetitive practices from the 80s. Besides, Sony is the poor decision maker lately, and Microsoft has a whole history of anticompetitive practices that continue today.
I disagree with this statement 100%. The commercials are stupid -- but then, I like to be informed by commercials, not entertained or given "warm fuzzy" feelings about the advertised product.
I have no idea what good exclusive games are out yet for the PS3 (if there is any)
And this is exactly why the commercials were stupid. I think I saw a couple flashes of Ratchet & Clank in the spots, but honestly I have no clue what games they were even trying to advertise to me. Basically the ad said to me, as a gamer who loosely follows the releases on platforms I don't own, "We don't have any specific games worth showing to you, but the PS3 sure is awesome. You should get one." To which I say, "Screw that."
The trade off between storage can be seen last gen. Look at the Xbox version of the Prince of Persia games compared to the Gamecube.
OT I know, but I'd like to see a source for that. I played through Sands of Time on Gamecube hooked up to my 7.1 system probably a half dozen times system and it sounded incredible. Pumped through my Denon HT amp and B&W speakers, I think I'd have noticed any significant audio compression artifacts.
There's really no reason for any game to *not* use high quality compressed audio for the soundtrack. It's not discernable, and it saves a ton of streaming/loading operations from your disc -- especially useful in a seamless game like PoP.
Concrete example: why can't a new PC that comes with Windows Vista or Windows XP run CD-ROM games from the DOS era? It's an optical disc; per your comment, there should be no excuse.
The rest of your post was also nonsense, but this bit's easy to reply to: try DOSBox. Oh wait, you artificially limited it to "a new PC that come with Windows Vista or Windows XP" -- Maybe because Microsoft doesn't make any money off of helping play old DOS CD-ROM games?
Sorry, but if you're going to pass up Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Galaxy, and Mario Kart (and presumably, Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twilight Princess), you fail at being a hardcore gamer.
They needed the "3D" on the title because a game called Wolfenstein already existed.
Wolf3D was a 3D game. It was a primitive 3D game, but a 3D game nonetheless. And, the only difference between Wolf3D and Doom was that in Doom, you could fall off of or be blocked by a ledge. You were still restricted to only controlling yourself in the X/Z plane. (yes, that's oversimplifying the improvements in the Doom engine)
If you want the first first-person game engine that actually rendered arbitrary polygons, that would probably be either Ultima Underworld 1 or 2 or Quake.
Worse, you get bugs like this when a developer starts thinking, "Oh, nobody will ever copy more than X files, so I can use an integer variable here..."
I know what you're saying, but I think you're saying it wrong. You surely don't mean that a developer should use a float or a double precision float as a counter. Maybe an int64, but there's absolutely no way that anyone would ever copy 2^32 files, let alone 2^64.
What they *don't* want to do is say "Oh, I'm just going to declare an array of char* [MAX_FILE_COUNT]" and then not check to see if there are more than MAX_FILE_COUNT files being copied.
There are very good reasons to use simple integers for counters and to set practical limits on things like this. The key is to check and to *enforce* the limits. Obviously something like a counter in a file transfer operation isn't going to need to be very high performance, but using the wrong data types can have a serious performance impact if you don't know what you're doing. Also, I've written code that won't read textures larger than 2^15x2^15. It's an entirely artificial limit, but I don't see a need for 32,768x32,768 textures any time soon. Maybe in 10 years there will be displays and hardware that can actually *use* textures that big, and in that case my code will just say "oops, I can't handle that," notify the user, and exit.
Yes, completely off topic, but I get tired of hearing the "developers should X" line with no perspective.
Wow, this sounds an awful lot like something a marketing drone would churn out for press-release material. Astroturf much, or are you just that well programmed? And what the fuck does 'fast game play' mean anyway?
I like my wii, wish there was more for it, and if I could sell it for $500 with 3 controllers and all the games, it'd be gone in a heartbeat.
Then do it -- I'll bet you'd have no trouble finding a buyer, depending on how many games you're including with the system.
The open source approach on the other hand tends to be we wont call our product done till the code is perfectly optimized for all systems from a VAX to a Blue Gene.
You must be using different open source projects than I am...
I would say that right now, Nintendo is #1 over all, but only #2 with respect to hard core gamers.... If the Wii is ever going to get a grip on the core segment of the console market, they have to do it within the next year.
I've said this before. I'll say it again. Fuck the 'hardcore' gamers. Let them have their 'superior' games on other platforms. I've been playing video games since Pong, I've finished more games than most of these 'hardcore' gamers have played. I've beaten the original Super Mario Brothers on a single life without warping. I've finished Battletoads. I've finished Einhander. I've finished Perfect Dark on Perfect Agent difficulty. I'm as experienced as they come in terms of video games.
You know what? Increasingly, I think that 'hardcore' gamer just means "a gamer who wants better graphics, more channels of audio, and the same old gameplay." What games are so damn hardcore on the XBox 360? Halo 3? Gears of War? What makes them so damn hardcore? I've played first person shooters, I've played 3rd person shooters. I want something *new*. I'm perfectly happy with my Wii Sports and Wii Play as far as providing something new to try. I've enjoyed Metroid Prime 3, but that's primarily because Super Metroid is my all-time favorite game -- it doesn't bring anything *that* new to the table over MP or Echoes, just some extra polish and enhanced controls.
You know what the nicest thing about the Wii is? I can actually play games like Wii Sports or Raving Rabbids with non-gamer friends when they come over, and they can do well at them. In FPS, RTS, or fighting games, it's not even entertaining to play against my friends, because I just wipe the floor with them. While that might appeal to some people, I'm not in it for bragging rights, I'm in it for a challenge. It's also not entertaining to play against asshat 14-year-olds online.
So fuck the hardcore demographic. They're going to have to accept the fact that they have become a niche audience, and accept what games come their way. Who knows? Maybe hardcore gamers will one day be like movie buffs, known for being familiar with lots of obscure but great games. As it is now, a movie fan analogous to what we think of as a hardcore gamer would watch nothing but Michael Bay films and gush about how awesome they are, and how everyone else sucks for enjoying The Life Aquatic.
I used Firefox for about 4 years, and installed Opera this summer to do some testing on it.
Since then, I've used Opera for browsing and Firefox for web development. There's just no comparison between the two. And now that one of the other responses to this post has pointed me at this, I may not use Firefox for anything other than testing in Firefox.
Of course, I'm one of those sufferers of the Firefox bug that causes it to use ridiculous amounts of memory. I've got a Firefox window open with Gmail (alas, Gmail breaks in Opera for me when composing mail), and it's consuming 180MB. I've got 2 opera windows open with about 15 tabs in one, including a few large Slashdot discussions, and it's consuming 120MB. So for me, there was no question when choosing between the two for everyday use.
The closest he came was saying "innate," which actually applies to what he described. I think you must have converted "innate" into "intuitive" and from there into "intuition" to go off on this completely off-topic rebuttal.
And if you believe that your brain is doing any computations when catching or throwing a ball, you're sadly mistaken. It's just muscle memory. It's got nothing to do with computing some sort of projectile motion equation in your head. It's your eyes communicating to your brain "Hmm, that object looks like it's about yea far away" and your brain driving your muscles through a repetetive motion that it has learned will get the ball to fly about yea far. Catching is even simpler -- "it looks like that object is going over there" and getting your hands in front of where it's going.
You know what happens if you can't get your band-new toy the very first minute it becomes available? You realize that your life isn't so empty that your happiness can be dictated by how fast you get to play some super cool new game right away.
Or maybe your life really is that empty -- in that case, my condolences. Enjoy being a consumer whore.
When there are things like Steam, Gametap, X-Box live and other less legal online methods of game delivery, these types of laws are becoming increasingly meaningless anyway.
You think that an unrated game is going to make it onto Steam, XBox Live, or Gametap?
Hell, all of the classic games being released on the Wii virtual console are being submitted for ESRB ratings.
About the only way to distribute a game if it's not rated is to post it on your own website.
If a PC game has a bug, the publisher generally (at best) issues a patch within 6 months.
If a console game has a bug, guess what? Either it doesn't get fixed, or there's a recall. The stakes are just a bit higher when trying to localize a game to a dozen or more different languages and there's no way to fix any bugs you introduced in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
For the love of God, Slashdot, the friends and foes list is great, but where is our ignore list?
--Jeremy
Yeah, because it was such a *bad* thing that they tried to reign in developers so that we wouldn't have another Atari-esque debacle, with a deluge of terrible uninspired games to bury the few gems in a confusing mess that caused that whole video game crash thing.
And yeah, telling developers that they could only release X number of titles per year was such an awful thing, because then it forced them to at least *try* to make a quality product, rather than assigning a single programmer the task of creating a video game -- and giving him a couple weeks to do it before it shipped. (ET anyone?)
As for censorship, the only 2 titles I know of that Nintendo actively censored were Mortal Kombat and Wolfenstein 3D. In the NES era there were pictures of Hitler's exploding head, implied sex, and plenty of other stuff. By the end of the SNES era, the blood was right back in MK2. And honestly I can't fault Nintendo for trying to avoid controversy with parents/religious groups because we all know how much worse those people are than some idiot gamers whining that they can't see blood or nazi symbols.
Their tactics were definitely heavy-handed, but you failed to mention the *one* thing that they really should be called on, and that was their dealing with retailers. They did everything they could to keep competitors products off the shelves.
And give an example of Nintendo being "bad" now...? Yeah, they shut down some pirate sites. That doesn't seem to bad to me. Yeah, they did go after some flash cart makers, and while that definitely sucks, the flash carts were primarily being sold as a piracy tool (spare me the homebrew argument, I know it all and that's why I think it sucks that they were shut down) so I can't really fault them for that.
Here's what Nintendo hasn't done: they haven't paid off developers for exclusives. They haven't sold consoles at a loss to try to buy their way into a new market. They haven't completely sold out and commercialized every aspect of my favorite hobby. They didn't help EA become the behemoth it is by helping them sell millions of cheap disc-based copies of Madden every year to idiot frat boys. They also haven't ever insulted me by saying that I should be willing to go take a second job to afford their game console, or reneged on a "$1200 per PS3 in the wild" deal made by one of their top execs. They've never released misleading hardware specifications (60 million! polygons per second! (unlit, untextured, single-pixel triangles on a single triangle strip)) or reported consoles/games shipped rather than sold.
So yeah, I'll defend them as one of the good guys. I can overlook some poor decisions in the 90s and a couple anticompetitive practices from the 80s. Besides, Sony is the poor decision maker lately, and Microsoft has a whole history of anticompetitive practices that continue today.
--Jeremy
I disagree with this statement 100%. The commercials are stupid -- but then, I like to be informed by commercials, not entertained or given "warm fuzzy" feelings about the advertised product.
I have no idea what good exclusive games are out yet for the PS3 (if there is any)
And this is exactly why the commercials were stupid. I think I saw a couple flashes of Ratchet & Clank in the spots, but honestly I have no clue what games they were even trying to advertise to me. Basically the ad said to me, as a gamer who loosely follows the releases on platforms I don't own, "We don't have any specific games worth showing to you, but the PS3 sure is awesome. You should get one." To which I say, "Screw that."
--Jeremy
The PS3 is flopping horribly in this department for reasons I cannot fathom.
I think this statement alone sheds light on your entire misguided post.
--Jeremy
Polls are pretty bogus and you can make a poll get the result you want, regardless of what people really believe.
So, first you ask him to cite a source, then you tell him that whatever source he cites is probably bogus. Which is it? Want some cake with your cake?
--Jeremy
'Media' and 'disc' are the same thing in the context in which you're using. You mean software everywhere you're using the word media.
--Jeremy
The trade off between storage can be seen last gen. Look at the Xbox version of the Prince of Persia games compared to the Gamecube.
OT I know, but I'd like to see a source for that. I played through Sands of Time on Gamecube hooked up to my 7.1 system probably a half dozen times system and it sounded incredible. Pumped through my Denon HT amp and B&W speakers, I think I'd have noticed any significant audio compression artifacts.
There's really no reason for any game to *not* use high quality compressed audio for the soundtrack. It's not discernable, and it saves a ton of streaming/loading operations from your disc -- especially useful in a seamless game like PoP.
--Jeremy
GP poster specificially referenced the Sega 'upgrade' fiasco.
--Jeremy
Concrete example: why can't a new PC that comes with Windows Vista or Windows XP run CD-ROM games from the DOS era? It's an optical disc; per your comment, there should be no excuse.
The rest of your post was also nonsense, but this bit's easy to reply to: try DOSBox. Oh wait, you artificially limited it to "a new PC that come with Windows Vista or Windows XP" -- Maybe because Microsoft doesn't make any money off of helping play old DOS CD-ROM games?
--Jeremy
Sorry, but if you're going to pass up Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Galaxy, and Mario Kart (and presumably, Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twilight Princess), you fail at being a hardcore gamer.
--Jeremy
Dear EA,
Make your own, and publish games exclusively for it. Let us know how well that works out for you.
Thanks.
--Jeremy
+1 Burn.
--Jeremy
They needed the "3D" on the title because a game called Wolfenstein already existed.
Wolf3D was a 3D game. It was a primitive 3D game, but a 3D game nonetheless. And, the only difference between Wolf3D and Doom was that in Doom, you could fall off of or be blocked by a ledge. You were still restricted to only controlling yourself in the X/Z plane. (yes, that's oversimplifying the improvements in the Doom engine)
If you want the first first-person game engine that actually rendered arbitrary polygons, that would probably be either Ultima Underworld 1 or 2 or Quake.
--Jeremy
Worse, you get bugs like this when a developer starts thinking, "Oh, nobody will ever copy more than X files, so I can use an integer variable here..."
I know what you're saying, but I think you're saying it wrong. You surely don't mean that a developer should use a float or a double precision float as a counter. Maybe an int64, but there's absolutely no way that anyone would ever copy 2^32 files, let alone 2^64.
What they *don't* want to do is say "Oh, I'm just going to declare an array of char* [MAX_FILE_COUNT]" and then not check to see if there are more than MAX_FILE_COUNT files being copied.
There are very good reasons to use simple integers for counters and to set practical limits on things like this. The key is to check and to *enforce* the limits. Obviously something like a counter in a file transfer operation isn't going to need to be very high performance, but using the wrong data types can have a serious performance impact if you don't know what you're doing. Also, I've written code that won't read textures larger than 2^15x2^15. It's an entirely artificial limit, but I don't see a need for 32,768x32,768 textures any time soon. Maybe in 10 years there will be displays and hardware that can actually *use* textures that big, and in that case my code will just say "oops, I can't handle that," notify the user, and exit.
Yes, completely off topic, but I get tired of hearing the "developers should X" line with no perspective.
--Jeremy
Wow, this sounds an awful lot like something a marketing drone would churn out for press-release material. Astroturf much, or are you just that well programmed? And what the fuck does 'fast game play' mean anyway?
I like my wii, wish there was more for it, and if I could sell it for $500 with 3 controllers and all the games, it'd be gone in a heartbeat.
Then do it -- I'll bet you'd have no trouble finding a buyer, depending on how many games you're including with the system.
--Jeremy
The open source approach on the other hand tends to be we wont call our product done till the code is perfectly optimized for all systems from a VAX to a Blue Gene.
You must be using different open source projects than I am...
--Jeremy
Giving up a mod point to post, but...
... If the Wii is ever going to get a grip on the core segment of the console market, they have to do it within the next year.
I would say that right now, Nintendo is #1 over all, but only #2 with respect to hard core gamers.
I've said this before. I'll say it again. Fuck the 'hardcore' gamers. Let them have their 'superior' games on other platforms. I've been playing video games since Pong, I've finished more games than most of these 'hardcore' gamers have played. I've beaten the original Super Mario Brothers on a single life without warping. I've finished Battletoads. I've finished Einhander. I've finished Perfect Dark on Perfect Agent difficulty. I'm as experienced as they come in terms of video games.
You know what? Increasingly, I think that 'hardcore' gamer just means "a gamer who wants better graphics, more channels of audio, and the same old gameplay." What games are so damn hardcore on the XBox 360? Halo 3? Gears of War? What makes them so damn hardcore? I've played first person shooters, I've played 3rd person shooters. I want something *new*. I'm perfectly happy with my Wii Sports and Wii Play as far as providing something new to try. I've enjoyed Metroid Prime 3, but that's primarily because Super Metroid is my all-time favorite game -- it doesn't bring anything *that* new to the table over MP or Echoes, just some extra polish and enhanced controls.
You know what the nicest thing about the Wii is? I can actually play games like Wii Sports or Raving Rabbids with non-gamer friends when they come over, and they can do well at them. In FPS, RTS, or fighting games, it's not even entertaining to play against my friends, because I just wipe the floor with them. While that might appeal to some people, I'm not in it for bragging rights, I'm in it for a challenge. It's also not entertaining to play against asshat 14-year-olds online.
So fuck the hardcore demographic. They're going to have to accept the fact that they have become a niche audience, and accept what games come their way. Who knows? Maybe hardcore gamers will one day be like movie buffs, known for being familiar with lots of obscure but great games. As it is now, a movie fan analogous to what we think of as a hardcore gamer would watch nothing but Michael Bay films and gush about how awesome they are, and how everyone else sucks for enjoying The Life Aquatic.
--Jeremy
No reason for them to -- all Pokemon are treated ethically, and none are harmed during combat.
--Jeremy
I used Firefox for about 4 years, and installed Opera this summer to do some testing on it.
Since then, I've used Opera for browsing and Firefox for web development. There's just no comparison between the two. And now that one of the other responses to this post has pointed me at this, I may not use Firefox for anything other than testing in Firefox.
Of course, I'm one of those sufferers of the Firefox bug that causes it to use ridiculous amounts of memory. I've got a Firefox window open with Gmail (alas, Gmail breaks in Opera for me when composing mail), and it's consuming 180MB. I've got 2 opera windows open with about 15 tabs in one, including a few large Slashdot discussions, and it's consuming 120MB. So for me, there was no question when choosing between the two for everyday use.
--Jeremy
Not once did the GP ever mention "intuition."
The closest he came was saying "innate," which actually applies to what he described. I think you must have converted "innate" into "intuitive" and from there into "intuition" to go off on this completely off-topic rebuttal.
And if you believe that your brain is doing any computations when catching or throwing a ball, you're sadly mistaken. It's just muscle memory. It's got nothing to do with computing some sort of projectile motion equation in your head. It's your eyes communicating to your brain "Hmm, that object looks like it's about yea far away" and your brain driving your muscles through a repetetive motion that it has learned will get the ball to fly about yea far. Catching is even simpler -- "it looks like that object is going over there" and getting your hands in front of where it's going.
--Jeremy
You know what happens if you can't get your band-new toy the very first minute it becomes available? You realize that your life isn't so empty that your happiness can be dictated by how fast you get to play some super cool new game right away.
Or maybe your life really is that empty -- in that case, my condolences. Enjoy being a consumer whore.
--Jeremy
You think that an unrated game is going to make it onto Steam, XBox Live, or Gametap?
Hell, all of the classic games being released on the Wii virtual console are being submitted for ESRB ratings.
About the only way to distribute a game if it's not rated is to post it on your own website.
--Jeremy
And anti-MS zealot Twitter sees things differently. Who woulda thunk it?!
--Jeremy
Awww, is someone upset because his platform/game of choice got stomped in sales by the weaker, kiddy hardware and games that Nintendo makes?
--Jeremy
If a PC game has a bug, the publisher generally (at best) issues a patch within 6 months.
If a console game has a bug, guess what? Either it doesn't get fixed, or there's a recall. The stakes are just a bit higher when trying to localize a game to a dozen or more different languages and there's no way to fix any bugs you introduced in the process.
--Jeremy