I doubt they could make such a system for the next generation of handhelds, at least not without making it cost a bloody fortune.
What they _should_ do is make a handheld of PSX/N64 level hardware that plays GCN sized disks. Like the PSP, the disks should have a hard shell like 3.5 floppies. When the next generation handheld after that comes out, it should be GCN level hardware, and they could sell empty cases that GCN disks could be put into and used in the exact same manner as the first generation disk-cartridges.
This would give Nintendo's second generation disk-based handheld double backwards compatibility, both with the first generation games and with GCN games. Nintendo really needs to do something like this, because i feel that they're going to have to make a switchover at some point now that they're competing against Sony. And if they don't switch over in the next generation, they're going to be in trouble when they do make that switchover, because they're going to lose their backwards compatibility advantage when they do the switch, and if they wait one mroe generation they'll be putting a handheld with no backwards compatibility up against the PSP2 which will have a ton of PSP games to play. It will be the PS2 vs. the GameCube all over again.
I guess if they were _really_ ambitious, they could try to make it both cartridge and disk-catridge compatible. They could do two different slots if they could find the room, or since i believe that gameboy cartridges are less wide than GCN disks (could be wrong though) they could have one slot that has a disk reader on the "top" and a cartridge port in the back. They'd just have to make a wide notch in the bottom that allowed you to push the cartridge all the way to the back.
25 cents buys you 57 frames, which is equivalent to about two weeks of a comic in a newspaper, including the sunday edition. Or if you consider that the newspaper i used to get had four or five good comics, it's the equivalent of three or four newspapers worth of comic.
Of course there's still the question of whether or not it's a good comic. Based off of what i can see in the preview, well, i dislike flash in comics. If you're doing movies like HomestarRunner that's fine, but if i'm reading a comic i want the frames to hold still damn it! And i want to be able to jump back in in the middle if i'm not done with a sequence when i leave off.
The art style is okay i guess, but certainly nothing stellar. However the preview tells us jack shit about the story. Maybe we're supposed to be interested because it says "sex" and "for mature readers"?
My grandfather used to deliver mail back in the 60s or something, and my parents told me that at the time, you did NOT fuck with the Post Office. Don't know if that's more or less true nowdays, although the PR about it doesn't seem as good anymore.
Sure, there are pleanty of FAQs detailing the moves, but how many walkthroughs do you see?
Not only do RPGs have FAQs and walkthroughs, people will get obsessive and write in depth FAQs about each of the minigames in an RPG, and on how to find/train/create the best characters, and on how to get the most powerfull items, and anything else that they feel isn't covered well enough in the main FAQs.
I don't know enough fighting games to know which to check, but most have two or three main FAQs, a character FAQ for each character (which all seem to be just a plain subset of what's available in the main FAQs) and a half-dozen or less in depth FAQs. FFX for comparison has 17 main FAQs and about 75 more specialized FAQs.
Given that the US, which scored #1 in the other list, is playing only about an hour and forty five minutes a year per capita, i fail to see what you're complaining about.
If Icelanders had 7 hours a _day_ per capita, they'd probably out rank the US for _total_ number of hours played. It's hard to say, since Iceland didn't make it onto the first chart, but if Sweden played 7 hours a day per capita, they would be #1 in the total hours playes chart at 95.0%, and the US would come in at number two with 2.1%.
Hmm, not totally sure of my math, but i think in the same circumstances Iceland would beat out the US 42.9 billion minutes per year to 32.7 billion minutes per year.
There are a lot of countries i would be happy to welcome to the superpower club with open arms. However China is _not_ one of them. Not given their (relatively) recent record of fascist politics and (lack of) human rights.
"..his departure from his employer of 19 years was seen by analysts as acceptance of responsibility for disappointing sales for the Resident Evil series", which had dipped since Capcom's single-minded decision to opt for GameCube exclusivity in 2001.
Or maybe since they started releasing remake follwed by remake of the exact same formula, in grand Capcom tradiition?
And that matters why? I read pleanty of books that are classified as being for children. Philip Pullman, Heinlein's juvenille novels, early books from Alen E. Nourse and Andre Norton, Roald Dahl from time to time. It's nice to sometimes take a break and sit down with a book that you can finish in a day and not stress your brain out about too much, so why should i treat J.K Rowling any different from those other authors of "children's books"? (Well, okay, other than that it can take two days to finish some of the later Potter books, but that's a trivial difference =)
Those children's stories certainly have far more literary value than a lot of the crap many so-called adults normally read. Take bodice-rippers for example.
As Cambell keps claiming, there are certain underlying myths and expectations for stories that tends to make most stories converge to a common format. But the comparison is still amusing
If you're still waiting then you've obviously never heard of fanfic. A lot of my female friends are fond of the Harry/Draco porn variety for some reason.
the REAL worst controller ever except for simple games that require only one button,
Say what? The GameCube controllers has a few problems, mainly the lack of a fourth shoulder button, but it's certainly far from worst, and i certainly don't have a problem with the rest of the buttons.
The X-Box on the other hand... i tried it out at Electronics Boutique, and it really sucked. My hand started hurting after about four or five minutes of playing. The little black and white buttons were placed _way_ too close together and i kept hitting the wrong ones, or rather, hitting the right one and accidently pressing one or two others as well.
As for the games, Metroid is completly different on the GameCube, and the only other Zelda game similar to the GameCube one is the N64 one. What you feel about one generation doesn't have much to do with the next. Metroid Prime is good, though i prefered the previous metroids better, however despite really liking the Zeldas on the NES and SNES, The Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker totally sucked in my opinion. However a large majority of people seem to disagree with me on that last one despite agreeing that it's very different from previous incarnations. There are also a lot of other games that aren't just reiterations of Zelda and Metroid. I've got as many GameCube games as i do PS2 games.
Stuff written in english is popular there in the same way that stuff written in japanese and chinese is popular here. There are far more people who think it just looks cool and buy it than there are people who can actually read it. This is why you can frequently find people in japan wandering around with really obscene things written on their clothing. Likewise, i've heard stories about native language t-shirts sold to american tourists in numerous countries.
Although the level of understanding the Japanese have for English is probably closer to the American level of understanding of Spanish rather than Japanese (discounting mexican-americans for obvious reasons) it's still a pretty bad idea if the game depends on writtern text to any degree to carry the plot.
Is it possible for people to refuse the upgrade? Doesn't look like they're offering much to entice people to go along with the game removal, so if it's not an automatic update, i expect a lot of people might "forget" to download it.
Yes, but you'd only have to donate $20 to the EFF for every 20 CDs you bought to keep the EFF even or ahead. $20 to the EFF for every $400 in CDs you buy? Doesn't sound too bad, does it? (Or going with your 10 cents figure, $20 to the EFF for every $4000 in CDs you buy)
Unfortunatly most people just don't give a fuck, and _that_ is the problem.
The one benefit political groups have going for them is the ratio. If you buy a $20 CD, less than $1 is probably going towards the RIAA's legal efforts, probably a _lot_ less than $1. On the other hand, if you give $20 to the EFF a much larger portion of that money is going towards legal/political effots.
Only a 30% of the people said online play affected their choice? Only a third care abotu that issue?
Excuse me, but that seems to be a rather large segment of the demographic to blow off. And the 10% who say they would actively not get a console that had online compatibility, what are they going to do if Nintendo comes out with an online strategy? Just not buy a console at all?
Given that Nintendo has sold significantly less than 30% of Sony's numbers, i don't see how doing something that would influence more people than the total number of consoles they've sold so far would be wasting cash.
They need to have a broadband expansion, they need to have a bundle pack that includes that expansion, and if they're smart, they'll make sure that the expansion is forwards compatible with the GCN2.
The idea that games that depend on accessories won't sell well seems to be outmoded, at least as long as the accessory in question is multi-purpose. The PS2 has quite a few games with network support, and a fair number of people who use that capability.
No, Nintendo isn't hurting right now, but this is no time to rest on their laurels. The N-Gage is a joke, but the PSP could become a threat eventually so Nintendo needs to get back in the habit of dealing with serious competition now while it still has some room to maneuver.
They keep talking about how much they've changed, and how they've recognized the mistakes they've made in the past. However although i've seen some changes to how they do things, a lot of the trends are still the same, they're still having trouble getting 3rd party developers to make games for them and they're still having trouble pushing consoles.
Maybe they'll manage to turn things around with the GCN2, but if not they may end up in a world of hurt if their next console does just as mediocrely and suddenly the PSP2 is coming out with a huge set of PSP games that it's backwards compatible with to challenge whichever version the GB is on at that point.
I'd say that it is underserved right now, when Nintendo has released games for the GameCube like Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, and, for better or worse (or rather, worse or really hideously worse) the uncensored BMX XXX.
This isn't a matter of them saying they will change from what they have been up til now, they actually have changed already, as far back as Conker's Bad Fur Day for the N64 at least.
If you were to go with what everyone remembers, no one would buy anything but Nintendo playing cards and Sony transistor radios, and no one would buy any Microsoft products at all because they're always bloated and buggy and they try to monopolize any market they enter. Well okay, maybe one of those three i agree with, but still, judging by a past that is clearly no longer relevant is not very productive.
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What they _should_ do is make a handheld of PSX/N64 level hardware that plays GCN sized disks. Like the PSP, the disks should have a hard shell like 3.5 floppies. When the next generation handheld after that comes out, it should be GCN level hardware, and they could sell empty cases that GCN disks could be put into and used in the exact same manner as the first generation disk-cartridges.
This would give Nintendo's second generation disk-based handheld double backwards compatibility, both with the first generation games and with GCN games. Nintendo really needs to do something like this, because i feel that they're going to have to make a switchover at some point now that they're competing against Sony. And if they don't switch over in the next generation, they're going to be in trouble when they do make that switchover, because they're going to lose their backwards compatibility advantage when they do the switch, and if they wait one mroe generation they'll be putting a handheld with no backwards compatibility up against the PSP2 which will have a ton of PSP games to play. It will be the PS2 vs. the GameCube all over again.
I guess if they were _really_ ambitious, they could try to make it both cartridge and disk-catridge compatible. They could do two different slots if they could find the room, or since i believe that gameboy cartridges are less wide than GCN disks (could be wrong though) they could have one slot that has a disk reader on the "top" and a cartridge port in the back. They'd just have to make a wide notch in the bottom that allowed you to push the cartridge all the way to the back.
Of course there's still the question of whether or not it's a good comic. Based off of what i can see in the preview, well, i dislike flash in comics. If you're doing movies like HomestarRunner that's fine, but if i'm reading a comic i want the frames to hold still damn it! And i want to be able to jump back in in the middle if i'm not done with a sequence when i leave off.
The art style is okay i guess, but certainly nothing stellar. However the preview tells us jack shit about the story. Maybe we're supposed to be interested because it says "sex" and "for mature readers"?
My grandfather used to deliver mail back in the 60s or something, and my parents told me that at the time, you did NOT fuck with the Post Office. Don't know if that's more or less true nowdays, although the PR about it doesn't seem as good anymore.
This is why FF7 and 8 (and possily 10, i don't know about that one since i'm still partway through 9) have been less than stellar in my opinion.
Not only do RPGs have FAQs and walkthroughs, people will get obsessive and write in depth FAQs about each of the minigames in an RPG, and on how to find/train/create the best characters, and on how to get the most powerfull items, and anything else that they feel isn't covered well enough in the main FAQs.
I don't know enough fighting games to know which to check, but most have two or three main FAQs, a character FAQ for each character (which all seem to be just a plain subset of what's available in the main FAQs) and a half-dozen or less in depth FAQs. FFX for comparison has 17 main FAQs and about 75 more specialized FAQs.
Darwin, Destiny and Deuterium?
Pretty sad when a disaster for humanity is considered a better alternative to a disaster for a nation.
I'm a nanotechnologist because i use tiny machines to create the energy i need to survive. (Mitochondria)
If Icelanders had 7 hours a _day_ per capita, they'd probably out rank the US for _total_ number of hours played. It's hard to say, since Iceland didn't make it onto the first chart, but if Sweden played 7 hours a day per capita, they would be #1 in the total hours playes chart at 95.0%, and the US would come in at number two with 2.1%.
Hmm, not totally sure of my math, but i think in the same circumstances Iceland would beat out the US 42.9 billion minutes per year to 32.7 billion minutes per year.
There are a lot of countries i would be happy to welcome to the superpower club with open arms. However China is _not_ one of them. Not given their (relatively) recent record of fascist politics and (lack of) human rights.
Or maybe since they started releasing remake follwed by remake of the exact same formula, in grand Capcom tradiition?
And that matters why? I read pleanty of books that are classified as being for children. Philip Pullman, Heinlein's juvenille novels, early books from Alen E. Nourse and Andre Norton, Roald Dahl from time to time. It's nice to sometimes take a break and sit down with a book that you can finish in a day and not stress your brain out about too much, so why should i treat J.K Rowling any different from those other authors of "children's books"? (Well, okay, other than that it can take two days to finish some of the later Potter books, but that's a trivial difference =)
Those children's stories certainly have far more literary value than a lot of the crap many so-called adults normally read. Take bodice-rippers for example.
As Cambell keps claiming, there are certain underlying myths and expectations for stories that tends to make most stories converge to a common format. But the comparison is still amusing
If you're still waiting then you've obviously never heard of fanfic. A lot of my female friends are fond of the Harry/Draco porn variety for some reason.
you guys only modded it redundant because you wanted to tell those jokes yourself and he beat you to it!
Say what? The GameCube controllers has a few problems, mainly the lack of a fourth shoulder button, but it's certainly far from worst, and i certainly don't have a problem with the rest of the buttons.
The X-Box on the other hand... i tried it out at Electronics Boutique, and it really sucked. My hand started hurting after about four or five minutes of playing. The little black and white buttons were placed _way_ too close together and i kept hitting the wrong ones, or rather, hitting the right one and accidently pressing one or two others as well.
As for the games, Metroid is completly different on the GameCube, and the only other Zelda game similar to the GameCube one is the N64 one. What you feel about one generation doesn't have much to do with the next. Metroid Prime is good, though i prefered the previous metroids better, however despite really liking the Zeldas on the NES and SNES, The Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker totally sucked in my opinion. However a large majority of people seem to disagree with me on that last one despite agreeing that it's very different from previous incarnations. There are also a lot of other games that aren't just reiterations of Zelda and Metroid. I've got as many GameCube games as i do PS2 games.
We need some kind of contaminant warning sign to hang around our (current) politics and our megacorps.
Although the level of understanding the Japanese have for English is probably closer to the American level of understanding of Spanish rather than Japanese (discounting mexican-americans for obvious reasons) it's still a pretty bad idea if the game depends on writtern text to any degree to carry the plot.
Is it possible for people to refuse the upgrade? Doesn't look like they're offering much to entice people to go along with the game removal, so if it's not an automatic update, i expect a lot of people might "forget" to download it.
Unfortunatly most people just don't give a fuck, and _that_ is the problem.
The one benefit political groups have going for them is the ratio. If you buy a $20 CD, less than $1 is probably going towards the RIAA's legal efforts, probably a _lot_ less than $1. On the other hand, if you give $20 to the EFF a much larger portion of that money is going towards legal/political effots.
Excuse me, but that seems to be a rather large segment of the demographic to blow off. And the 10% who say they would actively not get a console that had online compatibility, what are they going to do if Nintendo comes out with an online strategy? Just not buy a console at all?
Given that Nintendo has sold significantly less than 30% of Sony's numbers, i don't see how doing something that would influence more people than the total number of consoles they've sold so far would be wasting cash.
They need to have a broadband expansion, they need to have a bundle pack that includes that expansion, and if they're smart, they'll make sure that the expansion is forwards compatible with the GCN2.
The idea that games that depend on accessories won't sell well seems to be outmoded, at least as long as the accessory in question is multi-purpose. The PS2 has quite a few games with network support, and a fair number of people who use that capability.
They keep talking about how much they've changed, and how they've recognized the mistakes they've made in the past. However although i've seen some changes to how they do things, a lot of the trends are still the same, they're still having trouble getting 3rd party developers to make games for them and they're still having trouble pushing consoles.
Maybe they'll manage to turn things around with the GCN2, but if not they may end up in a world of hurt if their next console does just as mediocrely and suddenly the PSP2 is coming out with a huge set of PSP games that it's backwards compatible with to challenge whichever version the GB is on at that point.
*sigh* Things don't look too hot for the GameCube either. Nintendo really needs to drop the price again or something.
This isn't a matter of them saying they will change from what they have been up til now, they actually have changed already, as far back as Conker's Bad Fur Day for the N64 at least.
If you were to go with what everyone remembers, no one would buy anything but Nintendo playing cards and Sony transistor radios, and no one would buy any Microsoft products at all because they're always bloated and buggy and they try to monopolize any market they enter. Well okay, maybe one of those three i agree with, but still, judging by a past that is clearly no longer relevant is not very productive.