Good point, but as is, fincance is not a target worth anything regarding cuba, Cuba is interesting for tourists, and some food production
but definitely not finance, as you said it is not worth the hazzle.
I think the IGN critic is way too harsh, the game is really good, Sonic has gotten a lot of beating in the recent past, but every Critic so far said that Secret rings so far is one of the best Sonic games there is.
The downgrades usually come from, a) yet another sonic game, b) the mini games are trash (which is indeed true)
c) the story is nothing to write about d) it is too hard (which is a non argument because it is not harder than the 2d sonic games).
Dont get me wrong all this is true, but that is not a reason why I think this game is bad, in fact I would consider it one of the must have titles. It is pretty much the only 3d Sonic which did it right, in the core gameplay.
Actually in my opinion gamepads are an ergomic nightmare, they cause small injuries (nintendo thumb) they cannot scale to different hand sizes properly, and worse if you are right handed, the mist important controller usually is on the left side, which gets you out of focus, and there is no option to switch side.
Ergonomics in my opinion have made a nosedive when nintendo introduced the gamepad replacing various way more ergonomic stick solutions.
Problem is it does not work out that way....;-)
The reality simply is lots of companies worldwide make good deals with Cuba, mainly the european tourist industry...
There are ways to bypass the problem, either you do not do any business with the USA, the market is worldwide anyway and the USA is not that important anymore.
Or you might end up making your sidecompany for those deals...
The only stupdities you still encounter is that if you want to enter cuba, you have to fly in from Europe or Carribean European territory, or from a third party island!
The funny thing is, that the Castro Regime probably already would have gone the way of the Dodo if the USA would have acted decently on their parts! But Cuban exile voters in Florida are reason enough to keep this stupidity up and running ad finitum. The funny thing is that exactly those voters prevent what they want most by acting the way they do!
Sorry there is no worldwide embargo, Europe does a lot of business with Cuba,
the US embargo is self inflicted to keep the Cuban exilants in Florida calm and in line for the next votes.
Everyone over here in Europe knows this is the only reason.
Btw. another funny thing is, that Cuba probably never would have gone communistic
if the USA didnt act so stupidly in the early 60s.
There was a famous quote of one of the former sovjet leaders (Chrustchov I think) which is pretty well known over here in Europe, which said, our best ally to drive Cuba into our arms is the USA themselves.
Cuba might have ended communistic, but it also could have ended differently, only one constant is
there Castro would have been leader, nevertheless.
Castro probably would have ended like every other person being a dictator over his country, he just ran into the arms of the nation which gave him enough money to sustain his government.
Nowadays he is just a hyppocrite, trying to sustain power, and the USA still does a very good
job to give him the fuel which is needed for his propaganda, instead of getting off their collective asses and start talking to the guy and his government!
A nation just have to be big enough to say screw your, and the US runs into a major crisis. (China, Russia, EU... all of them could, China and Russia probably would in case of a major crisis, EU usually sides with the USA on things even if it is its own doom)
If the USA manages to push this patent system via the WIPO into the international law standards, which it tries, then the USA is screwed within the next 20 years, because development and research currently is shifting away from it. All it then has, is a lot of people paying for foreign goods, and no directy income, by research and self fabricated goods.
One sentence, either revert the course guys, or you are definitely screwed, not that I would mind seeing the exactly same people who are responsible for this begging on the streets in the end, but there are millions of people who do not have anything to do with this, who also will suffer!
(Btw. you also cannot rely on the Dollar as being the only trade currency anymore)
You obviously are very young, there are excellent examples of good olympic sports games.
Decathlon and Summer games probably are the most important ones, with Decathlon being one of the first and still one of the best summer sports games ever!
Actually the Simarillion is a great book, but you have to read it in conjunction with the various fragment books released, otherwise it becomes to dense.
Actually I liked my DS Phat, and still have it, this thing basically is a bombshell, you cannot break it.
Perfect match if you go for harder conditions and want some gaming with you.
The DS light is way better, I agree, although for long gaming sessions the hands also cramp (every
portable console has this problem)
I simply have both, for normal use the light, and for heavy conditions the phat, add to that that multiplaying is only possible with 2+ dses... this combo is perfect for guests.
DS Organize has organizer functions, overall
homebrew adds some amazing stuff,
dsorganize in its latest incarnation adds
a text html browser,
the scummvm adds a load of adventuregames which feel like a match made in heaven.
moonshell adds a decent mp3 playing and overall media playing functionality.
Actually the DS has another plus, it is slowly becoming the first console delivering decent point and click adventure games, the european adventure game publishers currently jumping onto the ship, with Ankh and a bunch of other games being ported.
RTS probably is the next genre which will jump onto the DS, homebrewers already got the clue and there is at least one excellent RTS, the publishers still need to get the clue.
Basically every genre except shooters where the pc is strong is suitable for the DS as well.
Actually this is a good point, at least in the case of the sports games it still pays off,
the control scheme of tiger woods alone is a good enough reason to go for the wii version,
but sports games is pretty much the only genre here except adventure and rts games which can profit immensely
from the new controllers.
At least the wii has higher hopes of getting more exclusives due to the relatively low production costs for
the games.
Anyway back to the DS Nintendogs basically brought the DS back from the dead, and
you know the games audience?
5-10 year old girls, not quite the gamers demographic. But yet again like the Sims
(which has a similar demographic but a tad older) one of the most sold games
ever and pushing the sales of the underlying console into the skies.
What we see with the wii is Nintendogs all over again.
Relatively low powered hardware gathering a demographic 10 times as big as the core gamers.
(Which formerly was either uninterested in consoles, or just heard of consoles
and games being the root of all evil)
We probably can expect the same like on the DS all over again, excellent first party games, excellent casual and non gamers games, excellent third party games if exclusive, relatively lousy third party multiplatform games, with the wii controls shoehorned in and a lot of cheaply because it is possible to do it, produced fast cash in games, trying
to get the money out of brand name addicted kiddies.
(Pokemon 5000, Cars 4000, etc...)
Since the price of the Wii is relatively low this is not a serious issue, Nintendo is targetting the toy land and does not even want to be exclusive console anymore, they often said they want to be second console.
That this strategy might end up being the total winner of the next console round is another issue.
Well, You should give Sonic, Excite Truck and SSX Blur also a second look, all of them excellent in their own.
Also for rental I really can recommend kororinpha not a buy title but also excellent in its own, although too easy for a buy title and too short, but ideal for rental.
I also have high hopes in Tiger Woods Golf.
Actually I personally think currently the Wii gets a good mix of all, it is about 5 mini game titles,
5-7 children games and the rest is either age agnostic or really mature.
The main problem currently neither is the amount of mini games nor the number of adult titles available, it is more the lack of rpgs and the lack of epic games besides zelda.
Ah I forgot, about the cheap cash in games, the console which sells the most gets the biggest push, from what I personally expect is that if the wii stays on top until 2009 (it will be surpassed I am sure, but it has very good years ahead until HDTV really becomes an issue, and even then the numbers should keep it alive)
I wont get quick cash in ports, it will be more along the lines that the efforts will be reduced for the XBOX and PS3 in that time and those will get quick ports with higher resolution textures but no work on anything else whatsoever!
Pretty much what happend on the PC the last years, the PC was able to handle real high res content and has been for a long time, but there was a serious drop in quality from 2002 onward, the reason was it mostly was fed with quickly ported console games, which resultet in problematic controls, and a serious drop in graphics quality.
Actually the PS1 and PS2 became successes at a time when when they reached commodity pricepoints.
Bascially every console there is which was successful was rather cheapish, the ones failed always were the expensive ones, sorry, but consoles are commodities and have to be cheaper than a PC.
As for the long term plan. HDTV will have a significant market saturation by 2010, 2011. For sony it made sense to integrate HDTV they wanted to use it as a vehicle to push blue ray into the market, for Microsoft it made sense, because Sony was doing it, for Nintendo it did not make sense.
Not their market currently. I still think their aim was dead on find your own nieche, drop out of the race for a while. The problem is, that the nieche nintendo has found is about 10 times bigger than the one Sony and Microsoft are targetting.
Actually Nintendo is looking long term, their strategy is dead on, consoles are commodities, and hence they have to be cheap (have you read the interview where they wanted to get the price below 100$)
you do not need an uber machine doing everything, the pc already does that way better than any console can do it, and a pc can be found in every house.
HDTV does not make sense yet because the market saturation is not good enough, so what can you do, build a machine which is cheap and a no brainer to pick up, and get the controls right so that also beginners can jump on it, while also serving the old fan base.
It is not too hard, to get a HDTV enabled wii out of the door, if the demand is there, currently it is not, and Nintendo is dead right on this. In about a three years time it is time to rethink the strategy, but do not expect nintendo to move fast into this area, they seem to feel quite cozy in their little toy corner and watch Microsoft and Sony kill each other in the console business.
The current situation must be very comforting to them, they again are out of the visual target range of Microsoft which still tries to sink Sony, Sony is shooting itself into the food with its own arrogance, and Nintendo slowly but surely reaches numbers which third parties cannot avoid to develop for anymore, in between they seem to have reached the new gamer and non gamer audience via excellent coverage in non gamer media.
And currently not being able to run on pure hdtv does not mean you cannot do it, look at PC gaming, HDTV resolutions have been a commodity there for almost a decade, games simply scale down or up, and often simply replace textures.
So I do not see the current non hdtv as a real issue here. They dropped out of the race because there is nothing to gain or to win there.
If you need a PS3 they can be obtained in huge numbers in most european countries...
The picture seems all over the same, almost no units sold, boxes stacking up left and right
I have heard preorders were better, sales really were not that good,
in german forums there were reports of people, who reported 3 ps3 sold on launch day by big chains the entire day,
not one of those reports a lot of them, and they are pretty well in line with local sightings of friends of mine over here,
and what the reports told about paris etc...
Funny thing is, over here in Austria the Wii drought has come to an end, you finally can see them in stores in small numbers but they are available without waiting!
You guys in the IK should contact people in other european countries, the Wiis for instance in Austria currently
can be found in not too big but good numbers, almost every bigger store over here
has at least 3-5 boxes stacked.
Of course this is nothing compared to 70 PS3 boxes, from which 3-5 were sold at the entire launch day, but this is an entirely different issue:-)
>They want idiots to equate rule of law, and worse still, non-US rule of law, with them goddam commie preverts in yoorp intent on destroying the >american way.
Those same idiotic arguments were used in Nazi germany and sowjet russia...
once you dont have arguments which can be justified anymore, simply say it is anti
works every time it is applied,
Original quote by Hermann Goering, propaganda minister of nazi germany, just a little bit food for thought!
That happened only in London, and even there the reception was rather cold
(they had 100 tvs for the midnight lines in London and given the fact this was a secret even there were almost no lines).
The biggest documented thing was in Paris, where
60 people basically bought a PS3 in a big launch event, where they had 1000 PS3s lingering around, to the worse, a Microsoft boat drove by before.
Actually locally here (central europe) there were some boxes sold, but they had them stacked up so most of them basically were left alone. (Totally opposite to the Wii launch where the boxes were basically ripped from the floors within minutes
and basically all of them sold out within the first 20 minutes and lots of people being left empty handed)
I dont know the preorder numbers, but as it seems, and every report indicates
it that the entire launch was rather cold.
The main problem really is the price, Sony as a brand is strong, but HDTV is not and the season is not a shopping season, add to that the fact that the price here in Europe is 800 dollars,
add to that the fact that the europen version is the first getting the software Emu and people over here have the feeling to get a worse version (compatbility still is worse although the potential for the thing is there, but you still can switch the us version to software only as well)
and people rightfully feel like being screwed and ripped off by Sony left and right and hate them for it. Or in other words, many loyal PS2 fans simply were not interested at all anymore!
I hope this is the right smack on the head for Sony, that they finally get the clue to cut down the influence of their media division into the rest of the company.
This whole fiasco could have been avoided if they would not have misused the entire thing as trojan horse to push Blue Ray into the market!
I personally think, that we might see a DVD version of the PS3 sometime, but it might be to late to save the PS3 then.
Ahem this is called antitrust laws, and is basically market economics 0-1, every economist will tell you that a capitalist market targets monopoly, in the end you will have no capitalist market anymore, the downside of this is, while governments have stay away from markets as much as possible, they have to interfer from time to time to break the monpolies.
Nothing communistic there, if you want to see something communistic than look at the behavior of certain economic monopolists in the USA...
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason to buy a sony handheld is to play old Nintendo games...
Good point, but as is, fincance is not a target worth anything regarding cuba, Cuba is interesting for tourists, and some food production but definitely not finance, as you said it is not worth the hazzle.
I think the IGN critic is way too harsh, the game is really good, Sonic has gotten a lot of beating in the recent past, but every Critic so far said that Secret rings so far is one of the best Sonic games there is. The downgrades usually come from, a) yet another sonic game, b) the mini games are trash (which is indeed true) c) the story is nothing to write about d) it is too hard (which is a non argument because it is not harder than the 2d sonic games). Dont get me wrong all this is true, but that is not a reason why I think this game is bad, in fact I would consider it one of the must have titles. It is pretty much the only 3d Sonic which did it right, in the core gameplay.
Actually in my opinion gamepads are an ergomic nightmare, they cause small injuries (nintendo thumb) they cannot scale to different hand sizes properly, and worse if you are right handed, the mist important controller usually is on the left side, which gets you out of focus, and there is no option to switch side. Ergonomics in my opinion have made a nosedive when nintendo introduced the gamepad replacing various way more ergonomic stick solutions.
Problem is it does not work out that way.... ;-)
The reality simply is lots of companies worldwide make good deals with Cuba, mainly the european tourist industry...
There are ways to bypass the problem, either you do not do any business with the USA, the market is worldwide anyway and the USA is not that important anymore.
Or you might end up making your sidecompany for those deals...
The only stupdities you still encounter is that if you want to enter cuba, you have to fly in from Europe or Carribean European territory, or from a third party island!
The funny thing is, that the Castro Regime probably already would have gone the way of the Dodo if the USA would have acted decently on their parts! But Cuban exile voters in Florida are reason enough to keep this stupidity up and running ad finitum. The funny thing is that exactly those voters prevent what they want most by acting the way they do!
Sorry there is no worldwide embargo, Europe does a lot of business with Cuba, the US embargo is self inflicted to keep the Cuban exilants in Florida calm and in line for the next votes. Everyone over here in Europe knows this is the only reason.
Btw. another funny thing is, that Cuba probably never would have gone communistic if the USA didnt act so stupidly in the early 60s. There was a famous quote of one of the former sovjet leaders (Chrustchov I think) which is pretty well known over here in Europe, which said, our best ally to drive Cuba into our arms is the USA themselves. Cuba might have ended communistic, but it also could have ended differently, only one constant is there Castro would have been leader, nevertheless.
Castro probably would have ended like every other person being a dictator over his country, he just ran into the arms of the nation which gave him enough money to sustain his government. Nowadays he is just a hyppocrite, trying to sustain power, and the USA still does a very good job to give him the fuel which is needed for his propaganda, instead of getting off their collective asses and start talking to the guy and his government!
You obviously have not played Sonic and the Secret Rings yet
There are several problems with this approach.
A nation just have to be big enough to say screw your, and the US runs into a major crisis. (China, Russia, EU... all of them could, China and Russia probably would in case of a major crisis, EU usually sides with the USA on things even if it is its own doom)
If the USA manages to push this patent system via the WIPO into the international law standards, which it tries, then the USA is screwed within the next 20 years, because development and research currently is shifting away from it. All it then has, is a lot of people paying for foreign goods, and no directy income, by research and self fabricated goods.
One sentence, either revert the course guys, or you are definitely screwed, not that I would mind seeing the exactly same people who are responsible for this begging on the streets in the end, but there are millions of people who do not have anything to do with this, who also will suffer! (Btw. you also cannot rely on the Dollar as being the only trade currency anymore)
You obviously are very young, there are excellent examples of good olympic sports games. Decathlon and Summer games probably are the most important ones, with Decathlon being one of the first and still one of the best summer sports games ever!
is probably the middle finger...
Actually the Simarillion is a great book, but you have to read it in conjunction with the various fragment books released, otherwise it becomes to dense.
Actually I liked my DS Phat, and still have it, this thing basically is a bombshell, you cannot break it. Perfect match if you go for harder conditions and want some gaming with you. The DS light is way better, I agree, although for long gaming sessions the hands also cramp (every portable console has this problem) I simply have both, for normal use the light, and for heavy conditions the phat, add to that that multiplaying is only possible with 2+ dses... this combo is perfect for guests.
DS Organize has organizer functions, overall homebrew adds some amazing stuff, dsorganize in its latest incarnation adds a text html browser, the scummvm adds a load of adventuregames which feel like a match made in heaven. moonshell adds a decent mp3 playing and overall media playing functionality.
Actually the DS has another plus, it is slowly becoming the first console delivering decent point and click adventure games, the european adventure game publishers currently jumping onto the ship, with Ankh and a bunch of other games being ported. RTS probably is the next genre which will jump onto the DS, homebrewers already got the clue and there is at least one excellent RTS, the publishers still need to get the clue. Basically every genre except shooters where the pc is strong is suitable for the DS as well.
Actually this is a good point, at least in the case of the sports games it still pays off, the control scheme of tiger woods alone is a good enough reason to go for the wii version, but sports games is pretty much the only genre here except adventure and rts games which can profit immensely from the new controllers.
At least the wii has higher hopes of getting more exclusives due to the relatively low production costs for the games.
Anyway back to the DS Nintendogs basically brought the DS back from the dead, and you know the games audience? 5-10 year old girls, not quite the gamers demographic. But yet again like the Sims (which has a similar demographic but a tad older) one of the most sold games ever and pushing the sales of the underlying console into the skies. What we see with the wii is Nintendogs all over again. Relatively low powered hardware gathering a demographic 10 times as big as the core gamers. (Which formerly was either uninterested in consoles, or just heard of consoles and games being the root of all evil) We probably can expect the same like on the DS all over again, excellent first party games, excellent casual and non gamers games, excellent third party games if exclusive, relatively lousy third party multiplatform games, with the wii controls shoehorned in and a lot of cheaply because it is possible to do it, produced fast cash in games, trying to get the money out of brand name addicted kiddies. (Pokemon 5000, Cars 4000, etc...)
Since the price of the Wii is relatively low this is not a serious issue, Nintendo is targetting the toy land and does not even want to be exclusive console anymore, they often said they want to be second console. That this strategy might end up being the total winner of the next console round is another issue.
Well, You should give Sonic, Excite Truck and SSX Blur also a second look, all of them excellent in their own. Also for rental I really can recommend kororinpha not a buy title but also excellent in its own, although too easy for a buy title and too short, but ideal for rental. I also have high hopes in Tiger Woods Golf.
Actually I personally think currently the Wii gets a good mix of all, it is about 5 mini game titles, 5-7 children games and the rest is either age agnostic or really mature. The main problem currently neither is the amount of mini games nor the number of adult titles available, it is more the lack of rpgs and the lack of epic games besides zelda.
Ah I forgot, about the cheap cash in games, the console which sells the most gets the biggest push, from what I personally expect is that if the wii stays on top until 2009 (it will be surpassed I am sure, but it has very good years ahead until HDTV really becomes an issue, and even then the numbers should keep it alive) I wont get quick cash in ports, it will be more along the lines that the efforts will be reduced for the XBOX and PS3 in that time and those will get quick ports with higher resolution textures but no work on anything else whatsoever! Pretty much what happend on the PC the last years, the PC was able to handle real high res content and has been for a long time, but there was a serious drop in quality from 2002 onward, the reason was it mostly was fed with quickly ported console games, which resultet in problematic controls, and a serious drop in graphics quality.
Actually the PS1 and PS2 became successes at a time when when they reached commodity pricepoints. Bascially every console there is which was successful was rather cheapish, the ones failed always were the expensive ones, sorry, but consoles are commodities and have to be cheaper than a PC.
As for the long term plan. HDTV will have a significant market saturation by 2010, 2011. For sony it made sense to integrate HDTV they wanted to use it as a vehicle to push blue ray into the market, for Microsoft it made sense, because Sony was doing it, for Nintendo it did not make sense. Not their market currently. I still think their aim was dead on find your own nieche, drop out of the race for a while. The problem is, that the nieche nintendo has found is about 10 times bigger than the one Sony and Microsoft are targetting.
Actually Nintendo is looking long term, their strategy is dead on, consoles are commodities, and hence they have to be cheap (have you read the interview where they wanted to get the price below 100$) you do not need an uber machine doing everything, the pc already does that way better than any console can do it, and a pc can be found in every house. HDTV does not make sense yet because the market saturation is not good enough, so what can you do, build a machine which is cheap and a no brainer to pick up, and get the controls right so that also beginners can jump on it, while also serving the old fan base.
It is not too hard, to get a HDTV enabled wii out of the door, if the demand is there, currently it is not, and Nintendo is dead right on this. In about a three years time it is time to rethink the strategy, but do not expect nintendo to move fast into this area, they seem to feel quite cozy in their little toy corner and watch Microsoft and Sony kill each other in the console business.
The current situation must be very comforting to them, they again are out of the visual target range of Microsoft which still tries to sink Sony, Sony is shooting itself into the food with its own arrogance, and Nintendo slowly but surely reaches numbers which third parties cannot avoid to develop for anymore, in between they seem to have reached the new gamer and non gamer audience via excellent coverage in non gamer media.
And currently not being able to run on pure hdtv does not mean you cannot do it, look at PC gaming, HDTV resolutions have been a commodity there for almost a decade, games simply scale down or up, and often simply replace textures. So I do not see the current non hdtv as a real issue here. They dropped out of the race because there is nothing to gain or to win there.
If you need a PS3 they can be obtained in huge numbers in most european countries... The picture seems all over the same, almost no units sold, boxes stacking up left and right
I have heard preorders were better, sales really were not that good, in german forums there were reports of people, who reported 3 ps3 sold on launch day by big chains the entire day, not one of those reports a lot of them, and they are pretty well in line with local sightings of friends of mine over here, and what the reports told about paris etc...
Funny thing is, over here in Austria the Wii drought has come to an end, you finally can see them in stores in small numbers but they are available without waiting!
You guys in the IK should contact people in other european countries, the Wiis for instance in Austria currently can be found in not too big but good numbers, almost every bigger store over here has at least 3-5 boxes stacked. Of course this is nothing compared to 70 PS3 boxes, from which 3-5 were sold at the entire launch day, but this is an entirely different issue :-)
>They want idiots to equate rule of law, and worse still, non-US rule of law, with them goddam commie preverts in yoorp intent on destroying the >american way. Those same idiotic arguments were used in Nazi germany and sowjet russia... once you dont have arguments which can be justified anymore, simply say it is anti works every time it is applied, Original quote by Hermann Goering, propaganda minister of nazi germany, just a little bit food for thought!
That happened only in London, and even there the reception was rather cold (they had 100 tvs for the midnight lines in London and given the fact this was a secret even there were almost no lines). The biggest documented thing was in Paris, where 60 people basically bought a PS3 in a big launch event, where they had 1000 PS3s lingering around, to the worse, a Microsoft boat drove by before. Actually locally here (central europe) there were some boxes sold, but they had them stacked up so most of them basically were left alone. (Totally opposite to the Wii launch where the boxes were basically ripped from the floors within minutes and basically all of them sold out within the first 20 minutes and lots of people being left empty handed) I dont know the preorder numbers, but as it seems, and every report indicates it that the entire launch was rather cold. The main problem really is the price, Sony as a brand is strong, but HDTV is not and the season is not a shopping season, add to that the fact that the price here in Europe is 800 dollars, add to that the fact that the europen version is the first getting the software Emu and people over here have the feeling to get a worse version (compatbility still is worse although the potential for the thing is there, but you still can switch the us version to software only as well) and people rightfully feel like being screwed and ripped off by Sony left and right and hate them for it. Or in other words, many loyal PS2 fans simply were not interested at all anymore! I hope this is the right smack on the head for Sony, that they finally get the clue to cut down the influence of their media division into the rest of the company. This whole fiasco could have been avoided if they would not have misused the entire thing as trojan horse to push Blue Ray into the market! I personally think, that we might see a DVD version of the PS3 sometime, but it might be to late to save the PS3 then.
Ahem this is called antitrust laws, and is basically market economics 0-1, every economist will tell you that a capitalist market targets monopoly, in the end you will have no capitalist market anymore, the downside of this is, while governments have stay away from markets as much as possible, they have to interfer from time to time to break the monpolies. Nothing communistic there, if you want to see something communistic than look at the behavior of certain economic monopolists in the USA...