Why do they even need to have seperate server software? The new MarioKart can run on eight GameCubes over a local LAN, how hard would it be to slap on an TCP/IP protocal and run it through the users' ISPs?
Obviosuly it would require some extra coding by the developers, but there's no need to have a dedicated PC server that i can see.
I don't care about your numbers and your demographics or whatever, lack of online capability is a PR killer.
It doesn't matter that most people _don't_ use it, it matters that with the GameCube they _can't_ use it.
Even if people aren't particularly planning on getting online, there are good odds that they'll be influenced by the general atmosphere of "XBox is cool because it has online play and GameCube sucks cause it doesn't." Stop expecting people to be rational.
Microsoft's XBox Live is a selling point, even if people don't ever get around to using it. There have been a lot of games for the PC that advertised their multiplayer capability that influenced my opinion at least a little that i never actually got around to playing online or just played one or two games that way. But i bought the game, which is what's important to the company.
And if they don't think people will pay $15 a month for online service then just let them connect directly to each other through their ISP and host the games themselves. I'm far more interested in playing games online with my old college friends and people i know on the east coast than i am with random strangers i've never met on some online service.
Saying SWG is EQ with star wars races is a gross overgeneralization. As reading the review hints at, gameplay in EQ and SWG are very different, largely due to SWG's lack of hard set classes and also its lack of specific content. In addition, the lack of anything resembling an NPC economy means that there is a different aspect involved there. EQ was run out, kill things, collect loot, sell to vendors. There's no such pattern in SWG. Half the careers don't even need or want to kill things to progress.
You dispute that it's EQ with a Star Wars theme because it's lacking a lot of the things EQ had? This just gets better and better!
Since the optical disks are read only, Nintendo would have to include some way to save games. Internal memory is probably a bad idea, so memory cards would be used. Just make sure that GBA cartridges can fit into the memory card slot. Or just use GBA cartridges as memory cards (if possible, I don't really know).
That's a really good idea! That would probably make the memory cards a little bigger than necessary, but it would probably save space overall.
I don't think you could actually use cartridge games as memory, at least not for other games. Even the cartridges that have memory in them probably all use different formating methods, and it wouldn't be practical to figure out how to coopt all the different systems. Besides, they only have enough space to save info for their own game, and i would imagine that most GBA2 games would require more space than that.
The article said that he skipped several opportunities for points in the mid-game because he lost two lives so early. I don't know how many points exactly, but he seems to think he can hit a million if he does a little better.
Seeing as how the PSp uses UMDs and not CDs, there is a near zero chance that it will play PSone games (not to mention the increased cost in supplying that backwards compatibility).
First of all, i was speaking in generalized way about the type and quality of games for the system.
Despite that however, i see no reason to assume 100% that it can't play PSX games. Given the large amount of research they've put into emulation for the PS2 (note that Sony has said that one of the reasons for the projected low price is "the unit used a lot of the technology that has already been researched and manufactured for the Plasytation2") there is no reason why the PSP wouldn't be able to run PSX games reburned onto UMD disks. However given that that might make piracy too easy in Sony's opinion they'll most likely make it necessary to make at least a few changes to the code. (i have little idea how much UMDs differ from DVDs and how likely it is that people could burn their own, if it turns out to be fairly difficult Sony may not bother with making direct transfes difficult.) However i would be suprised if Sony didn't make it as easy as possible to port PSX games to the PSP (piracy issues aside) since it would be their best weapon again the GBA's huge back-library.
(And memory cards for a portable? Ugh!)
What's your rational for this? You think it will be too annoying to have to carry around pieces of plastic that you have to insert into your handheld system?:)
That's one thing i'd be quite happy with, regardless of whether the system in question was using cartridges or optical media. The memory in cartridges eventually dies. I can't save games on my original FF for the NES anymore. Eventually almost all my GBA cartridges will be useless for the same reason, and there's no easy way to get the data off them and onto a new cartridge even if i was willing to pay for a new one.
All valid points, all possibly pointless in the face of faceless consumerdom. Nobody said "let's make/buy games on the N64 for the features the N64 does well, and same for the PSX," the developers said "Hey! The other guys have cheaper media so we make more money!" and the consumers said "Hey! You guys don't have [LATEST_COOL_FAD_FEATURE]"
The PSX games had bad loading times, occasionaly skipped, didn't use 3D very well, and wasn't cheap when it first came out, but that didn't stop it from selling like hotcakes.
I'd like to have faith that the average consumer wouldn't buy into the 3D hype without something to show for it a second time, but i'm too much of a cynic to convince myself of that. Why do you think things will go any differently if, effectively speaking, Sony puts a PSX handheld up against a N64 handheld? Nintendo will have a big backlog of old games going for them, but if Sony is smart they'll make it as simple as possible to port old PSX games to the PSP format, and they'll quickly build up a huge library.
I don't feel that Sony can make this work. I'm having a seriously difficult time imagining that this device will be as small as an original Game Boy. If I found out that information's wrong, then I'll reevaluate my opinion.
They claim it will cost about as much as the GBA. Obviously if it's as large as a GameCube it won't sell. However if it were say, 25% bigger than the original GBA, would you turn down a device that could play movies, music, and PSX games for the price of a Gameboy Advance just because of that?
Regardless, i'm sure they know size is an issue and are doing their best to squeeze it down, we'll have to wait for more specific information to be sure.
I hope not. The optical disc will not automatically yield better games.
Sadly i agree with you on this one. In my opinion FF7 and FF8 didn't measure up to FF4-6 at all, and there are a lot of other games for which i can make that comparison. I've been getting a lot of use out of my GBA as the last bastion of 2D gaming.
However time stands still for no man. As the PSX and other newer consoles have shown, my opinion of 2D vs. 3D games is not reflected by the majority of the marketplace. They didn't stop making 3D games because i liked 2D games better. And if Nintendo sticks with a Cartridge based format that's best suited for 2D games, my support alone will not keep it going if Sony convinces everyone that 3D handheld games are the wave of the future.
I'd rather have a living 3D system for which i can hope for the occasional 2D game being made, rather than a 2D system that dies after a year or two and i never see another game for it again.
(And yes, i'm simplifying the issue, but there is a strong correlation between 2D games vs. 3D games and cartridge format vs. optical format)
That's the big question i have about the GBA2 or whatever they choose to call it. The size and nature of the screen is really of secondary importance.
Nintendo currently has a huge dominance in the handheld arena, in large part because of the huge number of games available due to backwards compatibility. However i'm worried that what we're looking at seems really similar to the end of the SNES era.
For better or worse, i think Nintendo is eventually going to have to switch over to optical media, unless the PSP completly bombs, but even then i think it will just delay the inevitable.
If the PSP maanges to get a foot in the door however due to a large amount of third party support, and Nintendo sticks with cartridge format, Nintendo is going to have set themselves up for a fall.
They could continue to stubbornly stick to cartridge format, just like the N64, and they'll slowly see their share start to slip. (Not as quick as with teh N64, because backwards compatibility will still do them some good.) On the other hand, they could decide to follow Sony's lead and switch to an optical disk format, at which point they're going to get slammed because the second generation PSP will presumably be backwards compatible and have a huge library of PSP games to draw on, while the new Nintedo optical handheld will have just lost it's backwards compatibility with the previous cartridge games. Sit back and watch the PS2 vs Gamecube situation happen all over again.
The second best solution to this problem that i can see is for Nintendo to switch over to optical disk format for the GBA2, but make sure that the disks are the same size as the Gamecube's disks. They'll be going head to head against the PSP, each with no backlog of playable games, but it will be better than waiting to make the switch. When the next generation comes out they'll hopefully have improved the design enough such that Gamecube games can be played on it directly. At that point the new GameBoy would have two large sets of games that it was backwards compatible with and hopefully crush the PSP.
The _best_ solution would be to bite the bullet, and spend a lot of money and research figuring out a way to make a system that could play both cartridges and optical disks without costing a fortune. The physics would be simple, at least if they did the intelligent thing like Sony and packaged the optical media in pseudo-cartridges like 3.5 floppy disks. Make the slot wide enough to hold a cartridge the size of a GameCube disk, with a notch cut out of the "bottom" edge to fit a GBA or GB cartridge. The optical media reader would be in the "top", and the cartridge interface would be at the back.
The complicated bit would be reducing the size and cost of having both types of hardware in the same machine.
I know it plugs directly into the tv, but i wonder if they could get it to interface with a console so they could release additional games later. It would be an interesting way to get around the chicken and egg problem normally faced by new peripherals.
Dance Dance: Revolution, anyone? It's up to the 6th remix so far and still selling like coke in California.
Exactly. If they want to get it to really sell in the US all they need to do is to modify it into a fighting type game for the arcades and start selling the home version once that becomes popular.
Re:Not sequels - genuine heptology - and great
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Even his good guys (Ned Stark) are so well rendered that I believed them, and knew them, even though they epitomized Good and Honor.
"Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
It's not everyone in the world though. We're mostly dealing with noble families. If you don't expect a higher than normal percentage of ruthless bastards in the upper tiers of politics/nobility, well, you've got some naivete issues to work out.
Even so, not everyone is portrayed as more evil than good. The Starks may be the only group that's all fairly nice, but i seem to recall that the southern group and the island group had several good characters mixed in with the bad.
As others have pointed out though, none of the characters is really 100% good or evil.
My suggestions: -- glen cook's Black Company series -- mervyn peake's Gormenghast -- robin hobb's Assassin Trilogy and Liveship Traders (a bit soap-operaish though) -- stephen donaldson's Thomas Covenant Series -- anything by gene wolfe (althoug a bit too erudite) -- guy gavriel kay's Tigana
Robin Hobb is excelent, as is Guy Gavrial Kay. Haven't read Glen Cook or Mervyn Peake.
Stephen Donaldson... "Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through" were pretty good, but Thomas Covenant was a load of crap.
Or is this someone else entirely, and it's now in fashion to just use our initials *cough* Rowling *cough*?
Yeah, shame on J.K. Rowling for popularizing something that used to only be done by no-name hacks like J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Friedman, S.M. Stirling, C.J. Cherryh, L.E. Modesitt Jr., etc.
Re:JR Rowling and initials and fashion...
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Of course there's also counter-examples like Andre Norton. It's hard to say whether the bias in SF/Fantasy to male authors is real or perceived, and whether authors like Usula K. LeGuin and Anne McCaffrey are the exception or the rule.
We certainly don't have enough evidence to judge the issue just based on which authors were successful. We'd also need to examine every single author that _wasn't_ successful, and then factor in the genre they were writing in, and who their perceived and actual audiences were, etc.
I think you meant http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/vulnwatch/2 003-q3/0008.html (ie without the extraneous space) but yeah, given that they're 100% identical to each other, including the name of the author, i'm guessing that they just _might_ be the same exploit.
The impression i had was that the autopilot controls would be fully or closely integrated with the fly by wire controls. Which means that shooting it out would be a very difficult procedure, since you would be far more likely to disable all the controls before you managed to disable just the autopilot.
A very well designed system would have the computer making the decisions located elsewhere than the cockpit, and the most you could do by smashing up the controls is ruin your ability to control the plane at all while not disabling the soft walls. The blane would crash and burn after that, but not in any of the designated safe areas.
Do you think printer ink grows on trees? I'm just guessing, but since they are dyes, I'd guess they are made from petrolium.
I find this question ironic given that the very first dyes were ground up plants. I don't know if they grow printer ink on trees (probably doubtfull) but they certainly _could_. However it would most likely cost a lot more that way. Nowdays anything you can grow costs a lot more than most things you can dig out of the ground.
"Apparently you can't read either. I said Nintendo titles."
Me: "I like Nintendo as much as the next guy (well, better most likely) but i'm not so blinded that i can convince myself that they're doing _well_ at the moment, at least in the console area."
You: "If you were actually paying attention to those sales charts, you'll also see that most Nintendo titles sell > 500,000 copies in Japan (exceptions are the American games like Metroid, Eternal Darkness). Of course you're so blind you can't see that."
You might want to move out of that glass house before you decide to start throwing stones. You never even manged to read what i wrote in the first place.
I originaly said that Nintendo is not doing well in the console market. That was based off of reading the charts for information about the three main consoles. As i just showed the charts which you apparently paid no attenion to completly support that view. I never said that Nintendo as a whole was or was not doing well, or that the GBA was or was not doing well.
We're not talking about all of Nintendo, we're talking about the GCN. Seeing as how i made that clear in the first post, and you started talking about Metroid and Eternal Darkness, both of which are GCN games among other things, i had no reason to suspect that you had failed to read my first post and completly missed the point. Now either address the actual point being discussed or shut up.
Hmmm, i said "I like Nintendo as much as the next guy (well, better most likely) but i'm not so blinded that i can convince myself that they're doing _well_ at the moment, at least in the console area."
And you said " If you were actually paying attention to those sales charts, you'll also see that most Nintendo titles sell > 500,000 copies in Japan (exceptions are the American games like Metroid, Eternal Darkness). Of course you're so blind you can't see that."
Let's see, highest selling GCN game, for the last chart, Naruto, with 116,000 copies sold total. Total number of GCN games on the top 30 chart, two. Top selling PS2 game? FFX-2 with 1.9 _million_ copies. Total PS2 games on the chart, fourteen. One XBox game makes it on the chart with 4,385 copies, both for total and that week.
Now sure, the GBA is kicking ass all up and down the chart, but i did specify consoles didn't i? And yes, the occasional GCN game will sell pretty well. However if on any random week, the GCN has exactly _two_ games that are selling more than 3,700 copies (what the #30 game sold for that week) then that seems to indicate that something isn't going so well, don't you think?
The GCN doesn't show up until #8 on the chart, with Mario Party 4 at 760,000. There are five PS2 games ranked above it, ranging from 780,000 to 1.8 million copies. The GCN has 6 games on the list, totaling 2.8 million and averaging, 481 thousand copies each. The PS2 has 32 games (more than everything else combined) totaling 15.6 million, and averaging 488 thousand.
So the PS2 is selling, on average, slightly more copies per game, and is doing so on a _lot_ more games and overall selling over five times as many units as the GCN over the entire year.
Now since i'm apparently blind, please tell me what it is i'm missing that shows that the GCN is doing well compared to the PS2?
"Sales of GameCube software fell short in North America and Europe last year, and I believe that's due to the popularity of violent games on other consoles. The culture of Japan is much different and less accepting of such titles. Our target market is the entire world, so it's very difficult to develop software that appeals to everyone."
Last time i checked MagicBox, the GameCube sales in Japan were pretty abysmal too. How do you explain away that?
I like Nintendo as much as the next guy (well, better most likely) but i'm not so blinded that i can convince myself that they're doing _well_ at the moment, at least in the console area. They've managed to not get blown away by the XBox yet, but that's really damning with faint praise.
Unfortunatly unlike the N64 it's really hard to pick a few good reasons why they're not doing so well this round. Being tied at second or third to market (depending on if you want to count the Dreamcast) certainly didn't help. Neither does the kiddy perception. I've heard that their relations with 3rd party developers isn't great, though it's still far better than N64 days. I'm really not sure if disk size plays into it at all.
Whatever it is it all adds up to a cultural impression that the PS2 is for your average gamer, the XBox is for "cool" people, and the GameCube is for, well, i don't know who really, other than people who like good games and aren't phased by all the hype.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviosuly it would require some extra coding by the developers, but there's no need to have a dedicated PC server that i can see.
It doesn't matter that most people _don't_ use it, it matters that with the GameCube they _can't_ use it.
Even if people aren't particularly planning on getting online, there are good odds that they'll be influenced by the general atmosphere of "XBox is cool because it has online play and GameCube sucks cause it doesn't." Stop expecting people to be rational.
Microsoft's XBox Live is a selling point, even if people don't ever get around to using it. There have been a lot of games for the PC that advertised their multiplayer capability that influenced my opinion at least a little that i never actually got around to playing online or just played one or two games that way. But i bought the game, which is what's important to the company.
And if they don't think people will pay $15 a month for online service then just let them connect directly to each other through their ISP and host the games themselves. I'm far more interested in playing games online with my old college friends and people i know on the east coast than i am with random strangers i've never met on some online service.
You dispute that it's EQ with a Star Wars theme because it's lacking a lot of the things EQ had? This just gets better and better!
That's a really good idea! That would probably make the memory cards a little bigger than necessary, but it would probably save space overall.
I don't think you could actually use cartridge games as memory, at least not for other games. Even the cartridges that have memory in them probably all use different formating methods, and it wouldn't be practical to figure out how to coopt all the different systems. Besides, they only have enough space to save info for their own game, and i would imagine that most GBA2 games would require more space than that.
The article said that he skipped several opportunities for points in the mid-game because he lost two lives so early. I don't know how many points exactly, but he seems to think he can hit a million if he does a little better.
First of all, i was speaking in generalized way about the type and quality of games for the system.
Despite that however, i see no reason to assume 100% that it can't play PSX games. Given the large amount of research they've put into emulation for the PS2 (note that Sony has said that one of the reasons for the projected low price is "the unit used a lot of the technology that has already been researched and manufactured for the Plasytation2") there is no reason why the PSP wouldn't be able to run PSX games reburned onto UMD disks. However given that that might make piracy too easy in Sony's opinion they'll most likely make it necessary to make at least a few changes to the code. (i have little idea how much UMDs differ from DVDs and how likely it is that people could burn their own, if it turns out to be fairly difficult Sony may not bother with making direct transfes difficult.) However i would be suprised if Sony didn't make it as easy as possible to port PSX games to the PSP (piracy issues aside) since it would be their best weapon again the GBA's huge back-library.
(And memory cards for a portable? Ugh!)
What's your rational for this? You think it will be too annoying to have to carry around pieces of plastic that you have to insert into your handheld system? :)
That's one thing i'd be quite happy with, regardless of whether the system in question was using cartridges or optical media. The memory in cartridges eventually dies. I can't save games on my original FF for the NES anymore. Eventually almost all my GBA cartridges will be useless for the same reason, and there's no easy way to get the data off them and onto a new cartridge even if i was willing to pay for a new one.
The PSX games had bad loading times, occasionaly skipped, didn't use 3D very well, and wasn't cheap when it first came out, but that didn't stop it from selling like hotcakes.
I'd like to have faith that the average consumer wouldn't buy into the 3D hype without something to show for it a second time, but i'm too much of a cynic to convince myself of that. Why do you think things will go any differently if, effectively speaking, Sony puts a PSX handheld up against a N64 handheld? Nintendo will have a big backlog of old games going for them, but if Sony is smart they'll make it as simple as possible to port old PSX games to the PSP format, and they'll quickly build up a huge library.
They claim it will cost about as much as the GBA. Obviously if it's as large as a GameCube it won't sell. However if it were say, 25% bigger than the original GBA, would you turn down a device that could play movies, music, and PSX games for the price of a Gameboy Advance just because of that?
Regardless, i'm sure they know size is an issue and are doing their best to squeeze it down, we'll have to wait for more specific information to be sure.
I hope not. The optical disc will not automatically yield better games.
Sadly i agree with you on this one. In my opinion FF7 and FF8 didn't measure up to FF4-6 at all, and there are a lot of other games for which i can make that comparison. I've been getting a lot of use out of my GBA as the last bastion of 2D gaming.
However time stands still for no man. As the PSX and other newer consoles have shown, my opinion of 2D vs. 3D games is not reflected by the majority of the marketplace. They didn't stop making 3D games because i liked 2D games better. And if Nintendo sticks with a Cartridge based format that's best suited for 2D games, my support alone will not keep it going if Sony convinces everyone that 3D handheld games are the wave of the future.
I'd rather have a living 3D system for which i can hope for the occasional 2D game being made, rather than a 2D system that dies after a year or two and i never see another game for it again.
(And yes, i'm simplifying the issue, but there is a strong correlation between 2D games vs. 3D games and cartridge format vs. optical format)
Nintendo currently has a huge dominance in the handheld arena, in large part because of the huge number of games available due to backwards compatibility. However i'm worried that what we're looking at seems really similar to the end of the SNES era.
For better or worse, i think Nintendo is eventually going to have to switch over to optical media, unless the PSP completly bombs, but even then i think it will just delay the inevitable.
If the PSP maanges to get a foot in the door however due to a large amount of third party support, and Nintendo sticks with cartridge format, Nintendo is going to have set themselves up for a fall.
They could continue to stubbornly stick to cartridge format, just like the N64, and they'll slowly see their share start to slip. (Not as quick as with teh N64, because backwards compatibility will still do them some good.) On the other hand, they could decide to follow Sony's lead and switch to an optical disk format, at which point they're going to get slammed because the second generation PSP will presumably be backwards compatible and have a huge library of PSP games to draw on, while the new Nintedo optical handheld will have just lost it's backwards compatibility with the previous cartridge games. Sit back and watch the PS2 vs Gamecube situation happen all over again.
The second best solution to this problem that i can see is for Nintendo to switch over to optical disk format for the GBA2, but make sure that the disks are the same size as the Gamecube's disks. They'll be going head to head against the PSP, each with no backlog of playable games, but it will be better than waiting to make the switch. When the next generation comes out they'll hopefully have improved the design enough such that Gamecube games can be played on it directly. At that point the new GameBoy would have two large sets of games that it was backwards compatible with and hopefully crush the PSP.
The _best_ solution would be to bite the bullet, and spend a lot of money and research figuring out a way to make a system that could play both cartridges and optical disks without costing a fortune. The physics would be simple, at least if they did the intelligent thing like Sony and packaged the optical media in pseudo-cartridges like 3.5 floppy disks. Make the slot wide enough to hold a cartridge the size of a GameCube disk, with a notch cut out of the "bottom" edge to fit a GBA or GB cartridge. The optical media reader would be in the "top", and the cartridge interface would be at the back.
The complicated bit would be reducing the size and cost of having both types of hardware in the same machine.
I know it plugs directly into the tv, but i wonder if they could get it to interface with a console so they could release additional games later. It would be an interesting way to get around the chicken and egg problem normally faced by new peripherals.
Exactly. If they want to get it to really sell in the US all they need to do is to modify it into a fighting type game for the arcades and start selling the home version once that becomes popular.
"Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
Even so, not everyone is portrayed as more evil than good. The Starks may be the only group that's all fairly nice, but i seem to recall that the southern group and the island group had several good characters mixed in with the bad.
As others have pointed out though, none of the characters is really 100% good or evil.
Robin Hobb is excelent, as is Guy Gavrial Kay. Haven't read Glen Cook or Mervyn Peake.
Stephen Donaldson... "Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through" were pretty good, but Thomas Covenant was a load of crap.
Yeah, shame on J.K. Rowling for popularizing something that used to only be done by no-name hacks like J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Friedman, S.M. Stirling, C.J. Cherryh, L.E. Modesitt Jr., etc.
We certainly don't have enough evidence to judge the issue just based on which authors were successful. We'd also need to examine every single author that _wasn't_ successful, and then factor in the genre they were writing in, and who their perceived and actual audiences were, etc.
I think you meant http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/vulnwatch/2 003-q3/0008.html (ie without the extraneous space) but yeah, given that they're 100% identical to each other, including the name of the author, i'm guessing that they just _might_ be the same exploit.
Wouldn't Microsoft have to challenge them in an Australian court, where they've already been beat at least once before on this issue?
A very well designed system would have the computer making the decisions located elsewhere than the cockpit, and the most you could do by smashing up the controls is ruin your ability to control the plane at all while not disabling the soft walls. The blane would crash and burn after that, but not in any of the designated safe areas.
They're going to install Windows on all the jumbo jets? Wouldn't that scare away the passengers too? And the flight crew?
Yet another bad movie idea, Speed 3, if the plane descends below 10,000 feet the bomb goes off.
I find this question ironic given that the very first dyes were ground up plants. I don't know if they grow printer ink on trees (probably doubtfull) but they certainly _could_. However it would most likely cost a lot more that way. Nowdays anything you can grow costs a lot more than most things you can dig out of the ground.
Me: "I like Nintendo as much as the next guy (well, better most likely) but i'm not so blinded that i can convince myself that they're doing _well_ at the moment, at least in the console area."
You: "If you were actually paying attention to those sales charts, you'll also see that most Nintendo titles sell > 500,000 copies in Japan (exceptions are the American games like Metroid, Eternal Darkness). Of course you're so blind you can't see that."
You might want to move out of that glass house before you decide to start throwing stones. You never even manged to read what i wrote in the first place.
I originaly said that Nintendo is not doing well in the console market. That was based off of reading the charts for information about the three main consoles. As i just showed the charts which you apparently paid no attenion to completly support that view. I never said that Nintendo as a whole was or was not doing well, or that the GBA was or was not doing well.
We're not talking about all of Nintendo, we're talking about the GCN. Seeing as how i made that clear in the first post, and you started talking about Metroid and Eternal Darkness, both of which are GCN games among other things, i had no reason to suspect that you had failed to read my first post and completly missed the point. Now either address the actual point being discussed or shut up.
And you said " If you were actually paying attention to those sales charts, you'll also see that most Nintendo titles sell > 500,000 copies in Japan (exceptions are the American games like Metroid, Eternal Darkness). Of course you're so blind you can't see that."
Well let's go and take a look at those charts why don't we?
Let's see, highest selling GCN game, for the last chart, Naruto, with 116,000 copies sold total. Total number of GCN games on the top 30 chart, two. Top selling PS2 game? FFX-2 with 1.9 _million_ copies. Total PS2 games on the chart, fourteen. One XBox game makes it on the chart with 4,385 copies, both for total and that week.
Now sure, the GBA is kicking ass all up and down the chart, but i did specify consoles didn't i? And yes, the occasional GCN game will sell pretty well. However if on any random week, the GCN has exactly _two_ games that are selling more than 3,700 copies (what the #30 game sold for that week) then that seems to indicate that something isn't going so well, don't you think?
Now if you look at the chart for the best selling games of the 2002 fiscal year the numbers are almost as bad.
The GCN doesn't show up until #8 on the chart, with Mario Party 4 at 760,000. There are five PS2 games ranked above it, ranging from 780,000 to 1.8 million copies. The GCN has 6 games on the list, totaling 2.8 million and averaging, 481 thousand copies each. The PS2 has 32 games (more than everything else combined) totaling 15.6 million, and averaging 488 thousand.
So the PS2 is selling, on average, slightly more copies per game, and is doing so on a _lot_ more games and overall selling over five times as many units as the GCN over the entire year.
Now since i'm apparently blind, please tell me what it is i'm missing that shows that the GCN is doing well compared to the PS2?
Last time i checked MagicBox, the GameCube sales in Japan were pretty abysmal too. How do you explain away that?
I like Nintendo as much as the next guy (well, better most likely) but i'm not so blinded that i can convince myself that they're doing _well_ at the moment, at least in the console area. They've managed to not get blown away by the XBox yet, but that's really damning with faint praise.
Unfortunatly unlike the N64 it's really hard to pick a few good reasons why they're not doing so well this round. Being tied at second or third to market (depending on if you want to count the Dreamcast) certainly didn't help. Neither does the kiddy perception. I've heard that their relations with 3rd party developers isn't great, though it's still far better than N64 days. I'm really not sure if disk size plays into it at all.
Whatever it is it all adds up to a cultural impression that the PS2 is for your average gamer, the XBox is for "cool" people, and the GameCube is for, well, i don't know who really, other than people who like good games and aren't phased by all the hype.