Yeah, i'm not surprised that he's falling in with the party line, but he did let one thing slip that i can agree with...
"Actually, it's not even a word"
Too bad they keep insisting that we should go ahead and use it like one anyways though.
and said that he expected people to have a very different perception of the Wii once they've played the device at E3.
It's funny that Nintendo keeps saying that. They don't really seem to understand where i'm coming from. If i were lucky enough to get to go E3 and play it my perception would most likely remain exactly the same. The system is cool, the name sucks.
Their insistence that the two elements are in some way linked is almost counterproductive. If they believe that the public perception of the name is detrimental to the perception of the product than clearly they chose the wrong name, and if the public perception of the name is irrelevant to the perception of the product then no amount of exposure to the product is going to improve our opinion of the name. We can only get used to it over time, if the Nintendo executives are correct, or resigned to it through repeated aural abuse, if those of us who insist it is fundamentaly flawed are correct.
Not at all. The syllable "wii" does not even really exist in Japan. It is just as hard for them to understand the name.
They'll know how to pronounce it when they see the romanization. Vowels always sound the same in Japanese so they won't have the issue of "is it 'why' or 'wee'?"
Their problem will just be that they can't write the name in their own language:)
Re:Back in the day...
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I seem to remember another device that had a name which everyone chastised in the begnning. Give it time people.
"iPod" however has four things going for it that "Wii" doesn't.
It has more than one syllable. I don't know why the name "Wii" being so short bothers me, but it does, it's like you forgot to keep speaking halfway through the name. Two or three syllables makes a word sound more like a name and less like an attempt to create a new root word in the language.
It has a pretty clear pronounciation, at least when you take the capitalization into consideration. The "real" pronounciation of "Wii" is probably pretty easy to remember for Japanese speakers but for English speakers it not only isn't clear, it even seems to promote the wrong interpretation.
It's not a homonym for either urine or something small. Or the french word for "yes." Not to mention the intended pun of "we." I'm going to get really sick of the repeated stupid jokes from the PS3 and 360 fanboys over the next however many years.
Finally, and this is purely my own opinion, "iPod" is not increadibly freakin stupid. When i first heard the name "iPod" i thought "that's kinda weird" not "that's the stupidest name i've ever heard."
people alternately saying that the masses are sheep for buying marketing while simultaneously talking about how they won't buy it because the name is so silly.
I haven't seen a lot of people saying that. My perspective is that i bought a GameCube, i thought it was lots of fun, i didn't mind that it was a small purple cube with a handle. Lots of other people however made fun of it for being a small purple cube with a handle, they made jokes about lunchboxes, they said it was kiddie, they went out and bought an XBox or a PS2 instead. GameCube marketshare falls (or rather, fails to rise as much as it could) so less developers make games for the GameCube and my ability to play fun games on the GameCube is adversely affected. Likewise if Nintendo sticks with "Wii" i'm still going to buy a Wii, i expect it will be fun, but i expect a lot of other people will make fun of it and go buy a PS3 or an XBox 360 instead.
If it's fair to categorize people as sheep and non-sheep (i'm not going to get into that argument) then the non-sheep are not unaffected by the actions and attitudes of the sheep. That's why people who consider themselves to be non-sheep get so pissed off about the actions of people they consider to be sheep. If it didn't make a difference the non-sheep wouldn't care.
I just wish there was a rottentomatoes.com for console and handheld games that would warn people away from the utter crap out there lurking for the unsuspecting buyer.
You mean a site like this? It's currently rating Retro Atari Clasics (which i presume is the one you mean) at 48%
Can you turn off the speaking bits for Brain Age?
on
A DS In Every Pot
·
· Score: 1
If i'm playing the game in public somewhere i don't want to have a voice recognition task pop up in the middle of a sequence. Playing video games on my DS in public is fine, but i don't want to be like those guys on the blue tooth cellphone headsets wandering down the street talking loudly to themselves.
But look at the amount of money they make off of things like WarioWare and Brain Age and compare it to the big budget franchises. It just validates what Spector is talking about, Nintendo needs those big buget franchises to keep themselves in the market.
So, what, does the GBA not count anymore?
Last I checked, that was beating both of them by a fairly sizable amount.
American sales numbers are notoriosuly hard to get ahold of, but in japan at least the NDS and DSL have been smearing _all_ the competition over the last few weeks. The SP and Micro are selling only a fraction of that and the original GBA is being outsold by the XBox, not that winning by 117 to 98 is really something for Microsoft to boast about:)
Plus, I read that Twilight Princess will have an "enhanced mode" for the Rev, which I take to mean enhanced graphics as well.
Yeah, i heard rumors about Twilight Princess being able to take advantage of the Revolution hardware as well, though i heard it from rather obscure site.
This news would be great if the date is not so close to April 1st.
I agree, why would Squenix be anxious to finish FF13 so soon after releasing FF12? _Especially_ given that the next generation of consoles are right around the corner. Oh wait, XBox 360 is out already (i just forget about it for a second =) but i'd be _really_ surprised if they were going to release FF13 for the XBox 360.
It would be kind of sad if they broke the tradition too, three FFs for the NES, three for the SNES, three for the PSX, and so far three that we know of for the PS2. (Though in my own very biased opinion FF11 didn't deserve a number)
Eastern RPGs are just a book written as a video game.... a story is told, with no major twists to what the end is...
Western RPGs is where YOU make the story, and how you want to do it.
Perhaps i just haven't been playing the right Western RPGs, but gameplay aside they seem pretty similar to Eastern RPGs to me. You start at the begining, you have some degree of freedom along the way, and no matter what decisions you make in the process you always end up at the same place.
There are a few Eastern RPGs that allow the choices you make to have a significant impact on the end of the game, but admitedly they're in the minority. However i don't really know of many Western RPGs that have multiple ending possibilities either.
Eastern RPGs _have_ been moving in a somewhat depressing direction lately, especially the FF series. It used to be that there was a path of least resistance that you were encouraged to follow but divergence was possible, but many of the newer games are allowing you less and less leeway. One noteable exception which i played recently was Tales of Symphonia, i decided to go explore the rest of the continent i started on rather than taking the ship across to the next land mass like i was encouraged to, and did some interesting things to the plot as a result:)
Let's see, i thought FF10's sphere grid and Blitzball sounded cool and played it and it was. I was annoyed by FF7's steampunk-over-standard fantasy then played it, thought the game was okay but would have been better without the steampunk. I thought FF9s standard-fantasy-over-steampunk sounded awesome then played it and it was. Furthermore i thought FF8s non-leveling up sounded like crap, then i played it and it _was_ crap.
As far as i know FF4 and FF5 didn't change much and they're two of my favorites. FF6 started the transition to steampunk but was very good despite it, perhaps because they didn't carry it as far as FF7. So it seems to me that sometimes they change a lot of stuff and sometimes they don't, and sometimes the end result is good, and sometimes it's mediocre, and occasionally it's just crap. And so far at least the experience upon playing the game has generally confirmed the impression i got about it beforehand from hearing about changes and plot. At the moment i'm hoping that FF12 will manage to stay in the mediocre category and not turn out to be utter crap. Perhaps this will be the first time that i'll be truely surprised and the game will turn out excelent despite my current misgivings, but i'm not going to let me hopes get up because of that possibility.
I knew it was quite awhile ago and was curious about exactly when. Then i saw the "Related Stories" section which contained a link to an article about the original announcement and figured i could check that out. You know, as long as they're going to start putting links to old articles right at the top they really need to update the dates to include the year, rather than make us decypher it from the URL.
Incidentally, said URL claims it was announced around November 2002, which would be about three and a half years ago, not five, though they were certainly working on it awhile before that.
On the other hand, a search within quotes narrows it down just to your name. This seems to bring up 891 results, lower than what even my name would bring up.;-)
You wish! Even with quotes there's some level of garbage that google will accept between the two search terms, or at least one particularly annoying case, that being "'s". For those of us whose last name also happens to be a commonly used noun this can result in a lot of either interesting or annoying results, depending on how you view it.
Luckily there's at least a simple solution. Compare searches for the fictitious name "john stomach" (about 555 results) with +"john stomach" -"john's stomach" (about 281 results)
For me this is second only to google's general ignorance about punctuation in annoyance factor. (Altavista could handle punctuation just fine! Right up until they decided to "be like google" and eliminated the only reason i still ever used their search engine.)
The version of Mario Party i've played (6 i think?) allows you to either set up teams or assign certain players handicaps in free-for-all. Both ways work well for introducing inexperienced players, though the team play might be more fun for the new player.
Did i and several thousand other people call it or what?:)
And i doubt this was decided or announced "on a whim," i'm sure they've been planning to make Twilight Princess the pseudo-launch game for the Revolution for quite awhile now. And when was this interview? Sony just made a big announcement about the PS3, and now Miyamoto makes a bigish anouncement about Zelda/Revolution, coincidence?
Please RTFA. There are two main points to it, A: Stardock, the company behind GalCiv, uses virtually no DRM and particularly doesn't use third-party customer-unfriendly DRM such as that provided by Starforce, and that the heavy sales of the game may seem threatening to companies whose primary buisness is selling DRM software (again, such as Starforce.)
B: A Starforce employee posted on the Starforce forums a link to a site where pirate torrents of GalCiv2 could be downloaded. Ostensibly this was to provide "proof" that GalCiv/Stardock were suffering from piracy. (Presumably with the intent to encourage other companies to purchase Starforce software.) As noted in other comments however some people are viewing it as a mafia-esque tactic to harm Stardock by increasing piracy of their game. (Presumably with the intent to intimidate Stardock and other companies into purchasing Starforce software.)
Don't make the same mistake I did and run out to purchase the game based on good reviews and the fact that the developers have a good attitude. At this point I'm pretty much thinking of GC2 in the same way I thought about Black & White: It was awesome for the first few days but over the course of a week or so I started liking it less and less. Even after a few patches I'd say the game is still suffering from a poor UI and a lack of information about how the game mechanics actually work. Wait for a demo, and then decide if you're going to buy, as always.
Well what you say makes a certain amount of sense, but here's an alternate view:
First, both good reviews and good developers sound like good reasons to consider buying a game. Good reviews for the obvious reason, good developers because i like to support such behavior. One can make a good theoretical argument that one should judge the merit of a piece of art solely on the basis of the work itself, completly isolated from the context of the artist(s) who made it. Although i understand the reasoning behind the argument i do believe that the actions of the artist should influence your judgement to some degree. If the artist is actively working to bring about changes to society that you disagree with then any interest you have in their work should be mitigated by the knowledge that supporting them will support a cause you disagree with. Likewise if the artist is working to support views you agree with then choosing to support their work in preference to other artists whose work may be technically superior but who are not "fighting the good fight" is a completely valid position.
Furthermore, those who played the first GalCiv already know that Stardock has a history of not only listening to feedback from the players but incorporating those changes into completely free patches and add-ons. Everything they've said so far indicates that they plan to do the same for GalCiv2 as well, which greatly mitigates any fears i have about purchasing an unplayable or even just unenjoyable game. And if you did play the first GalCiv, consider how much you paid for it (about $50 in my case i believe) and how much enjoyment you got out of it compared to other games of the same price. In my case the amount of time i spent playing it and the enjoyment i got out of those hours far exceeded what i gained from many other games that i paid just as much for. Personally i feel i "owe" Stardock more than the original $50 i paid for the first game, and as such paying another $50 for the second game is well worth the risk. If the second game turns out to be mediocre or worse then i can consider my karmic dept for the first game to be repaid and be more wary when and if they release a third game in the series.
the game offers a fully destructible world where every bullet's trajectory is a story of its own.
By "fully destructible" do they/you mean in the same manner as Red Faction? Can i blast my way through any wall i choose rather than using the door? Can i did giant holes in the ground with rockets for other players/NPCs to fall in? Can i find secret rooms with cool stuff by tunneling through rock in a similar manner?
I thought Red Faction was great, if Black is similar to that in the gameplay elements i'd probably be interested, otherwise i'll most likely pass.
It's a pretty large leap from the traditional interface (and possible scenario setup), which might irk some people. But, it is that sort of thing that is refreshing to others. Personally, I enjoyed it quite immensely, but then again I also very much enjoyed the archeypes for the system (presumably a variation of the FFT/A scenario system and a battle system akin to FFXI's).
Change can be a good thing, but for the first 10 iterations of the game they managed to change a _lot_ of stuff while still keping it basically as a turn based RPG. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting a more action based game, but if i wanted that i could always go play a fighter. Or for that matter i could play the Tales series, which has already combined the action and RPG genres, and done a much better job of it than Square-Enix did from what i saw in the FF12 demo.
Furthermore they already have a system like this, namely FF11, which i did not buy because i wasn't interested in either such a system in particular or a MMORPG in general. However i consoled myself that at least once they got back to FF12 it would be back to the kind of genre i enjoyed. However then they decided to take the MMORPG controls and shove them into a single player game, which to me just seems stupid. Isn't everyone who really likes such controls still busy playing FF11?
Of the three FF fans i know who tried the FF12 demo, myself included, all of us just felt very... underwhelmed. We didn't have as much control as we liked, we didn't seem to have to do very much to do even with what we could control, and we just weren't having any fun.
Well, there's the fact that Nintendo is actualy making money. Sony and MS are dumping money out of their bottomless coffers in order to push their consoles on the public.
That's true of the XBox and XBox360, and may be true of the PS3 as well. However as far as i know the PS2 succeeded on its own merits (if one includes Sony's predatory marketing division as one of those merits) and not because of any subsidizing of the console itself.
I like Nintendo, i like their consoles and their games and i think anyone who doesn't want to play them because they're too "kiddie" has rocks for brains. However i don't think my sympathy for Nintendo should blind me to the truth. Yes they're making money, but their relative marketshare _has_ shrunk. If they had maintained the market share they had back in the 80s imagine how much _more_ money they would be making. You could just say that as long as they're making money that what the majority of gamers think doesn't matter, but i don't have faith that a continuously shrinking group of people who "get it" will be able to support them indefinitely.
Yes the average person seems to be a stupid sheep (IMHO =) but that doesn't mean that a company which should be trying to sell as many consoles and games as possible can just write them off. Nintendo needs to learn how to market to the segments of the market they don't currently appeal to. Reaching out to new segments is a good move, but i hope they don't sacrifice what remaining appeal they have to the hardcore self-appointed "real" gamers in the process.
I'm surprised that FF actually ranked higher than DQ. I'd always heard that DQ was more popular in Japan (take the law passed about DQ releases for example) which is why Enix ended up buying out Square and not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
"Actually, it's not even a word"
Too bad they keep insisting that we should go ahead and use it like one anyways though.
and said that he expected people to have a very different perception of the Wii once they've played the device at E3.
It's funny that Nintendo keeps saying that. They don't really seem to understand where i'm coming from. If i were lucky enough to get to go E3 and play it my perception would most likely remain exactly the same. The system is cool, the name sucks.
Their insistence that the two elements are in some way linked is almost counterproductive. If they believe that the public perception of the name is detrimental to the perception of the product than clearly they chose the wrong name, and if the public perception of the name is irrelevant to the perception of the product then no amount of exposure to the product is going to improve our opinion of the name. We can only get used to it over time, if the Nintendo executives are correct, or resigned to it through repeated aural abuse, if those of us who insist it is fundamentaly flawed are correct.
They'll know how to pronounce it when they see the romanization. Vowels always sound the same in Japanese so they won't have the issue of "is it 'why' or 'wee'?"
Their problem will just be that they can't write the name in their own language :)
"iPod" however has four things going for it that "Wii" doesn't.
It has more than one syllable. I don't know why the name "Wii" being so short bothers me, but it does, it's like you forgot to keep speaking halfway through the name. Two or three syllables makes a word sound more like a name and less like an attempt to create a new root word in the language.
It has a pretty clear pronounciation, at least when you take the capitalization into consideration. The "real" pronounciation of "Wii" is probably pretty easy to remember for Japanese speakers but for English speakers it not only isn't clear, it even seems to promote the wrong interpretation.
It's not a homonym for either urine or something small. Or the french word for "yes." Not to mention the intended pun of "we." I'm going to get really sick of the repeated stupid jokes from the PS3 and 360 fanboys over the next however many years.
Finally, and this is purely my own opinion, "iPod" is not increadibly freakin stupid. When i first heard the name "iPod" i thought "that's kinda weird" not "that's the stupidest name i've ever heard."
I haven't seen a lot of people saying that. My perspective is that i bought a GameCube, i thought it was lots of fun, i didn't mind that it was a small purple cube with a handle. Lots of other people however made fun of it for being a small purple cube with a handle, they made jokes about lunchboxes, they said it was kiddie, they went out and bought an XBox or a PS2 instead. GameCube marketshare falls (or rather, fails to rise as much as it could) so less developers make games for the GameCube and my ability to play fun games on the GameCube is adversely affected. Likewise if Nintendo sticks with "Wii" i'm still going to buy a Wii, i expect it will be fun, but i expect a lot of other people will make fun of it and go buy a PS3 or an XBox 360 instead.
If it's fair to categorize people as sheep and non-sheep (i'm not going to get into that argument) then the non-sheep are not unaffected by the actions and attitudes of the sheep. That's why people who consider themselves to be non-sheep get so pissed off about the actions of people they consider to be sheep. If it didn't make a difference the non-sheep wouldn't care.
You mean a site like this? It's currently rating Retro Atari Clasics (which i presume is the one you mean) at 48%
If i'm playing the game in public somewhere i don't want to have a voice recognition task pop up in the middle of a sequence. Playing video games on my DS in public is fine, but i don't want to be like those guys on the blue tooth cellphone headsets wandering down the street talking loudly to themselves.
Uh, _very_ bad example. Have you seen the sales for Brain Training For Adults in Japan? It's been in the top ten sales chart for almost a year now.
Last I checked, that was beating both of them by a fairly sizable amount.
American sales numbers are notoriosuly hard to get ahold of, but in japan at least the NDS and DSL have been smearing _all_ the competition over the last few weeks. The SP and Micro are selling only a fraction of that and the original GBA is being outsold by the XBox, not that winning by 117 to 98 is really something for Microsoft to boast about :)
Didn't Nokia try that with the N-Gage?
Yeah, i heard rumors about Twilight Princess being able to take advantage of the Revolution hardware as well, though i heard it from rather obscure site.
I agree, why would Squenix be anxious to finish FF13 so soon after releasing FF12? _Especially_ given that the next generation of consoles are right around the corner. Oh wait, XBox 360 is out already (i just forget about it for a second =) but i'd be _really_ surprised if they were going to release FF13 for the XBox 360.
It would be kind of sad if they broke the tradition too, three FFs for the NES, three for the SNES, three for the PSX, and so far three that we know of for the PS2. (Though in my own very biased opinion FF11 didn't deserve a number)
Western RPGs is where YOU make the story, and how you want to do it.
Perhaps i just haven't been playing the right Western RPGs, but gameplay aside they seem pretty similar to Eastern RPGs to me. You start at the begining, you have some degree of freedom along the way, and no matter what decisions you make in the process you always end up at the same place.
There are a few Eastern RPGs that allow the choices you make to have a significant impact on the end of the game, but admitedly they're in the minority. However i don't really know of many Western RPGs that have multiple ending possibilities either.
Eastern RPGs _have_ been moving in a somewhat depressing direction lately, especially the FF series. It used to be that there was a path of least resistance that you were encouraged to follow but divergence was possible, but many of the newer games are allowing you less and less leeway. One noteable exception which i played recently was Tales of Symphonia, i decided to go explore the rest of the continent i started on rather than taking the ship across to the next land mass like i was encouraged to, and did some interesting things to the plot as a result :)
As far as i know FF4 and FF5 didn't change much and they're two of my favorites. FF6 started the transition to steampunk but was very good despite it, perhaps because they didn't carry it as far as FF7. So it seems to me that sometimes they change a lot of stuff and sometimes they don't, and sometimes the end result is good, and sometimes it's mediocre, and occasionally it's just crap. And so far at least the experience upon playing the game has generally confirmed the impression i got about it beforehand from hearing about changes and plot. At the moment i'm hoping that FF12 will manage to stay in the mediocre category and not turn out to be utter crap. Perhaps this will be the first time that i'll be truely surprised and the game will turn out excelent despite my current misgivings, but i'm not going to let me hopes get up because of that possibility.
I knew it was quite awhile ago and was curious about exactly when. Then i saw the "Related Stories" section which contained a link to an article about the original announcement and figured i could check that out. You know, as long as they're going to start putting links to old articles right at the top they really need to update the dates to include the year, rather than make us decypher it from the URL.
Incidentally, said URL claims it was announced around November 2002, which would be about three and a half years ago, not five, though they were certainly working on it awhile before that.
You wish! Even with quotes there's some level of garbage that google will accept between the two search terms, or at least one particularly annoying case, that being "'s". For those of us whose last name also happens to be a commonly used noun this can result in a lot of either interesting or annoying results, depending on how you view it.
Luckily there's at least a simple solution. Compare searches for the fictitious name "john stomach" (about 555 results) with +"john stomach" -"john's stomach" (about 281 results)
For me this is second only to google's general ignorance about punctuation in annoyance factor. (Altavista could handle punctuation just fine! Right up until they decided to "be like google" and eliminated the only reason i still ever used their search engine.)
The version of Mario Party i've played (6 i think?) allows you to either set up teams or assign certain players handicaps in free-for-all. Both ways work well for introducing inexperienced players, though the team play might be more fun for the new player.
And i doubt this was decided or announced "on a whim," i'm sure they've been planning to make Twilight Princess the pseudo-launch game for the Revolution for quite awhile now. And when was this interview? Sony just made a big announcement about the PS3, and now Miyamoto makes a bigish anouncement about Zelda/Revolution, coincidence?
Well they needed something to follow up on the "Second Coming" article just prior =P
Yes, thank you for managing to restate that first paragraph in such a succint way :)
Please RTFA. There are two main points to it, A: Stardock, the company behind GalCiv, uses virtually no DRM and particularly doesn't use third-party customer-unfriendly DRM such as that provided by Starforce, and that the heavy sales of the game may seem threatening to companies whose primary buisness is selling DRM software (again, such as Starforce.)
B: A Starforce employee posted on the Starforce forums a link to a site where pirate torrents of GalCiv2 could be downloaded. Ostensibly this was to provide "proof" that GalCiv/Stardock were suffering from piracy. (Presumably with the intent to encourage other companies to purchase Starforce software.) As noted in other comments however some people are viewing it as a mafia-esque tactic to harm Stardock by increasing piracy of their game. (Presumably with the intent to intimidate Stardock and other companies into purchasing Starforce software.)
Well what you say makes a certain amount of sense, but here's an alternate view:
First, both good reviews and good developers sound like good reasons to consider buying a game. Good reviews for the obvious reason, good developers because i like to support such behavior. One can make a good theoretical argument that one should judge the merit of a piece of art solely on the basis of the work itself, completly isolated from the context of the artist(s) who made it. Although i understand the reasoning behind the argument i do believe that the actions of the artist should influence your judgement to some degree. If the artist is actively working to bring about changes to society that you disagree with then any interest you have in their work should be mitigated by the knowledge that supporting them will support a cause you disagree with. Likewise if the artist is working to support views you agree with then choosing to support their work in preference to other artists whose work may be technically superior but who are not "fighting the good fight" is a completely valid position.
Furthermore, those who played the first GalCiv already know that Stardock has a history of not only listening to feedback from the players but incorporating those changes into completely free patches and add-ons. Everything they've said so far indicates that they plan to do the same for GalCiv2 as well, which greatly mitigates any fears i have about purchasing an unplayable or even just unenjoyable game. And if you did play the first GalCiv, consider how much you paid for it (about $50 in my case i believe) and how much enjoyment you got out of it compared to other games of the same price. In my case the amount of time i spent playing it and the enjoyment i got out of those hours far exceeded what i gained from many other games that i paid just as much for. Personally i feel i "owe" Stardock more than the original $50 i paid for the first game, and as such paying another $50 for the second game is well worth the risk. If the second game turns out to be mediocre or worse then i can consider my karmic dept for the first game to be repaid and be more wary when and if they release a third game in the series.
By "fully destructible" do they/you mean in the same manner as Red Faction? Can i blast my way through any wall i choose rather than using the door? Can i did giant holes in the ground with rockets for other players/NPCs to fall in? Can i find secret rooms with cool stuff by tunneling through rock in a similar manner?
I thought Red Faction was great, if Black is similar to that in the gameplay elements i'd probably be interested, otherwise i'll most likely pass.
Change can be a good thing, but for the first 10 iterations of the game they managed to change a _lot_ of stuff while still keping it basically as a turn based RPG. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting a more action based game, but if i wanted that i could always go play a fighter. Or for that matter i could play the Tales series, which has already combined the action and RPG genres, and done a much better job of it than Square-Enix did from what i saw in the FF12 demo.
Furthermore they already have a system like this, namely FF11, which i did not buy because i wasn't interested in either such a system in particular or a MMORPG in general. However i consoled myself that at least once they got back to FF12 it would be back to the kind of genre i enjoyed. However then they decided to take the MMORPG controls and shove them into a single player game, which to me just seems stupid. Isn't everyone who really likes such controls still busy playing FF11?
Of the three FF fans i know who tried the FF12 demo, myself included, all of us just felt very... underwhelmed. We didn't have as much control as we liked, we didn't seem to have to do very much to do even with what we could control, and we just weren't having any fun.
That's true of the XBox and XBox360, and may be true of the PS3 as well. However as far as i know the PS2 succeeded on its own merits (if one includes Sony's predatory marketing division as one of those merits) and not because of any subsidizing of the console itself.
I like Nintendo, i like their consoles and their games and i think anyone who doesn't want to play them because they're too "kiddie" has rocks for brains. However i don't think my sympathy for Nintendo should blind me to the truth. Yes they're making money, but their relative marketshare _has_ shrunk. If they had maintained the market share they had back in the 80s imagine how much _more_ money they would be making. You could just say that as long as they're making money that what the majority of gamers think doesn't matter, but i don't have faith that a continuously shrinking group of people who "get it" will be able to support them indefinitely.
Yes the average person seems to be a stupid sheep (IMHO =) but that doesn't mean that a company which should be trying to sell as many consoles and games as possible can just write them off. Nintendo needs to learn how to market to the segments of the market they don't currently appeal to. Reaching out to new segments is a good move, but i hope they don't sacrifice what remaining appeal they have to the hardcore self-appointed "real" gamers in the process.
I'm surprised that FF actually ranked higher than DQ. I'd always heard that DQ was more popular in Japan (take the law passed about DQ releases for example) which is why Enix ended up buying out Square and not the other way around.