If you want to stick it to sony there are far better things to buy for homebrew than a PSP. And you hurt them far more by NOT buying one then you do by buying one.
Say Sony loses $20 per PSP sold. If you buy one of their prodigious backstock @ $250 you just mitigated their loss from $270 to $20, and you also handed them a sale they can point to to try to get some momentum going in the handheld space.
Like gizmondo's new handheld. Or their old one, the GP32. Or hell, even a GBA/DS can do homebrew via a flash cart and in the case of those two they not only have working emulators they're made by one of the companies that put the games out in the first place.
Sony's NOT going to suddenly wake up one day and go "hey, let's allow anyone to write apps!" so how about purchasing one of the many competing products. Either from Nintendo, who have been very hands off so far(tons of homebrew GBA stuff and DS stuff is hitting, no sign of them flashing the firmware yet), or from Gizmondo who actually actively SEEKS that niche.
Katamari was made by NAMCO, not some indy developer. Snood was on the PC, where a lot of shareware and indy titles end up. The only real indy game I can think of that hit consoles in recent memory was Alien Hominid.
GTA/Halo are mainstream games. They're not UNIVERSAL APPEAL games. GTA has always played very well to the casual gamer, that hasn't changed. The problem with the two that prevents them from becoming the enormous crazes that things like PacMan, Pokemon, Mario, and Tetris were lies in their content.
Metroid!? Flogged to death? If you want to see flogged to death, look at Capcom and Square-Enix. Hell Metroid is no more flogged to death than Halo or GTA.
I mean hell, in the gaming thesaurus: Flogged to death: see Megaman.
Nintendo is no more guilty of relying on franchises than any other Japanese developer who published in the NES/SNES era. You know, the guys who push out most of the content.
I also know of NO adult who grew up in the NES/SNES era and actually PLAYED the NES/SNES games who doesn't have a soft-spot for those old franchises and old games. The only people making those criticisms are the people who got into it with the Playstation in high-school/college, or the bitter SEGA fans who bought the Saturn over the N64/PS. If you can't "do the mario" w/o looking up what it was, you fall into that category.
Most of us got pissed off at Nintendo over the N64 when they lost all their 3rd party devs. Some of us came back for the Gamecube and view it as a making up for the N64 disappointment(which it does). Quite a few stayed in PC land, and even more just stopped gaming because they started families.
Seriously, if Nintendo pulls off the revolution half as well as their diehard faithful think they will, their old fans will come back in droves. If only to nab it as a 2nd console to relive and share their old gaming days while checking out some things they missed.
Just to put this into perspective: Pokemon sold 80 million units between the 3 original versions worldwide. About 24 million copies per version, the only difference between the versions being cart color and a few pokemon.
To put that into perspective, a copy of pokemon was sold for each person that voted in the 1996 US presidential election.
I'm guessing hotspots and either some kind of router or USB plugin for your computer. Or it could be an on-cart TCP/IP implementation that'll connect via 802.11 to any existing WiFi network.
If you own the server you could kick anyone who doesn't goosestep and spout facist propoganda if you wanted to. Only GOVERNMENT as well as a few services are prohibited from restricting free speech. In the case of services, this is to get a common-carrier exemption for being hands-off in regards to content.
If you don't own the server, you can go somewhere else or you can stop paying for the service. Or ya know, you could grow the fuck up.
I think this nutjob and his little list may interest you two.
Because he's new. Zonk comes from a slashdot-clone fan-site of MMOs. Slashdot needed or wanted a game section, and here be Zonk with his slash site. What a perfect fit... Most MMO gamers are fairly new to the scene, so he fits right in with the magazine crowd. He is, in effect, precisely what/. wanted. A modern game-reviewer type. The problem being that/. is where you can find most of the people who grew up on and/or still carry a fondness for nintendo. He'll figure that out eventually and skew himself more towards an n-sider/nintendojo bent rather than 1up... or he'll end up like all those who came before, Michael... Katz...
Heh, violence. Mob rule. Ignorance of law. Lack of respect for the traditions and rules of my country. Scare quotes around right. Either hyper-pc or hyper-socioconservative message... Congratulations. You deeply offended me. I presume I now have the "right" to silence you by any means necessary under the law right?
Ehh... it's effectively doomed to a niche right out of the gate. Just like the GP32 was.
It's nice to see that they sold enough of them to make a new one though.
Anyway, it's basically a DS(in spec terms) that runs off normal AA batteries with some features knocked out and the ARM7 replaced with another ARM9(different clock rates I'm sure). It supports homebrew out of the gate, no need to reflash the firmware or exploit anything.
I'd worry most about Sony. They've been bleeding red ink out of numerous divisions for a while now. The gaming division has been a large part of how they managed to keep themselves in the black overall, and it's been losing money for 2 straight quarters now. Additionally, IIRC they're currently in the hole for a few bil as a company. Contrast this with MS and Nintendo who both have massive cash reserves.
Supporting an unprofitable division only works if your other divisions maintain profitability, and even then, no company will keep it up forever. Their investors won't allow it. Even MS, whose overall profit and cash reserves make Nintendo and Sony put together look like children with a piggy-bank, won't keep the XBox division around if it's still unprofitable through the next generation.
Then we have Viewtiful Joe(great classic style platformer) and Resident Evil 4 from capcom.
Tales of Symphonia from Namco(exclusive) as well as the best selling version of Soul Calibur 2.
Ikaruga from Treasure(if you missed it on the dreamcast, exclusive).
Animal Crossing, Pikmin(1/2), Star Fox Assault, Metroid Prime(and echoes), Fire Emblem, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Mario Golf, Mario Baseball, Mario Tennis, Paper Mario, Super Smash Bros Melee, and Warioware all from Nintendo.
FF:CC if you have a GBA and friends with GBAs from Square-Enix.
Harvest Moon:AWL and AAWL.
MGS: The Twin Snakes(remake, if you missed it on the PS), and Eternal Darkness from Silicon Knights.
A bunch of old console collections.
There's more, those are just off the top of my head.
WRT to Metroid. Metroid Prime is to Metroid what Mario 64 was to Mario. It retains the essence, but it's really quite new.
Yea, I love the original dawn of the dead. A lot of people would call it schlock horror crap.
Same fucking thing.
It's art. You can't quantify it outside of bugs present. It's either a good game or it isn't. And that's highly subjective.... unless we're talking mario kart. In which case, if you don't like it you don't have a soul.
Don't try. Unless it's the godfather of videogames, people are GOING to disagree with you.
This is why most reviews are total bullshit. This is why Ebert(probably the ONLY living film critic of any note) hates the star rating system(which he only uses out of respect for critics past).
That simply means that to the majority of consumers the PSP doesn't offer enough value to justify the price-tag. Whereas the DS does, to a 2:1 ratio. And the GBA did, to something like a 30:1 ratio.
It really doesn't either. You can get cheaper, better, single-function devices that do everything PSP does.
The only compelling reason to buy a PSP is the games, and the only game I've seen that's worth it is Lumines. Which is a game there is no technical reason I can't play on my freakin' cell phone. Which means it's not worth the $250 price tag. Just freakin' port it to the GBA or make a version for my celly already.
That's why the PSP isn't selling too well, and the nature of the industry is that if you don't get momentum quickly, you never do... unless you drop bucketloads of cash into it.
We don't judge film on originality though. We don't judge anything on originality of premise. Every story is a derivative of some other story or it's a derivative of life.
Hah, you replied to me/Sielwolfs back and forth! And appear to have gotten the joke. You rock.
I love the dreamcast controller as well. My favorite of the current gen is probably the Gamecube, even though it's horribly suited to a few genres(like console FPSes). It just has an incredibly shallow learning curve, and it's layout makes sense mentally. It's comfortable, and it's analog stick is probably the most like an actual joystick out of all of the controllers. Plus the wavebird is excellent. One of its big flaws is the d-pad. Which I would call about as useful as an appendix is to us, a vestigal organ. If you're going to deprecate something that much, don't bother including it. The other problem with the GCN controller is that it's nigh-impossible to hit b+x, which removes one button combo.
Anyway, Dreamcast, then Gamecube, then the XBox S. Which has a sort of dreamcast-esque feel to it to me anyway. Then the dualshock.
Of course, I've been using a dualshock for over a decade now, so I'm really, really used to it. But it's still tough mentally to remember, without holding one and doing the movements, where the various abxy equiv buttons are. If I factor in experience, then the dualshock wins out over everything but the dreamcast, but not because of any design merits. The whole analog clicking thing... well, ugh.
Of the old controllers, well I loved the original NES one, not because of layout, but because of sheer durability, important in something that's frequently power-chucked at walls. The rest were all fine, except atari's non-self centering joystick.
The PS2 controller sucks. It seriously is horrendously awful. A lot of people have been using it for so long, they no longer realize precisely how much it blows. Your hands will cramp when holding it for long periods of time, the buttons are cryptic with an excessively steep learning curve, the shoulders weak, the analog sticks are positioned poorly... Ugh. Give all 3 controllers to a non-gamer, cover up which system it's for, and no one is EVER going to pick the PS2 one.
I loved Beyond Good and Evil. The Zelda series also qualifies as action/adventure.
I really miss the old Sierra/Lucasarts games though.
I actually still play them. Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Space Quest, The Dig, etc. etc.
Great games with a sense of humor. Each one different. There used to be a whole slew of them every year. Then came the great 3D transition and away they went. They survived the transition from text to graphics, but couldn't cope with the 3D.
Even Grim Fandango was tough to control, and I don't think it benefitted much from 3D gameplay.
Almost no more 2D games outside of portables, next to no new adventure games... sigh. It's really rather sad actually. The playstation and quake mark the death of whole genres that really never should've died.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to stick it to sony there are far better things to buy for homebrew than a PSP. And you hurt them far more by NOT buying one then you do by buying one.
Say Sony loses $20 per PSP sold. If you buy one of their prodigious backstock @ $250 you just mitigated their loss from $270 to $20, and you also handed them a sale they can point to to try to get some momentum going in the handheld space.
Like gizmondo's new handheld. Or their old one, the GP32. Or hell, even a GBA/DS can do homebrew via a flash cart and in the case of those two they not only have working emulators they're made by one of the companies that put the games out in the first place.
Sony's NOT going to suddenly wake up one day and go "hey, let's allow anyone to write apps!" so how about purchasing one of the many competing products. Either from Nintendo, who have been very hands off so far(tons of homebrew GBA stuff and DS stuff is hitting, no sign of them flashing the firmware yet), or from Gizmondo who actually actively SEEKS that niche.
Katamari was made by NAMCO, not some indy developer. Snood was on the PC, where a lot of shareware and indy titles end up. The only real indy game I can think of that hit consoles in recent memory was Alien Hominid.
GTA/Halo are mainstream games. They're not UNIVERSAL APPEAL games. GTA has always played very well to the casual gamer, that hasn't changed. The problem with the two that prevents them from becoming the enormous crazes that things like PacMan, Pokemon, Mario, and Tetris were lies in their content.
Metroid!? Flogged to death? If you want to see flogged to death, look at Capcom and Square-Enix. Hell Metroid is no more flogged to death than Halo or GTA.
I mean hell, in the gaming thesaurus:
Flogged to death: see Megaman.
Nintendo is no more guilty of relying on franchises than any other Japanese developer who published in the NES/SNES era. You know, the guys who push out most of the content.
I also know of NO adult who grew up in the NES/SNES era and actually PLAYED the NES/SNES games who doesn't have a soft-spot for those old franchises and old games. The only people making those criticisms are the people who got into it with the Playstation in high-school/college, or the bitter SEGA fans who bought the Saturn over the N64/PS. If you can't "do the mario" w/o looking up what it was, you fall into that category.
Most of us got pissed off at Nintendo over the N64 when they lost all their 3rd party devs. Some of us came back for the Gamecube and view it as a making up for the N64 disappointment(which it does). Quite a few stayed in PC land, and even more just stopped gaming because they started families.
Seriously, if Nintendo pulls off the revolution half as well as their diehard faithful think they will, their old fans will come back in droves. If only to nab it as a 2nd console to relive and share their old gaming days while checking out some things they missed.
Just to put this into perspective: Pokemon sold 80 million units between the 3 original versions worldwide. About 24 million copies per version, the only difference between the versions being cart color and a few pokemon.
To put that into perspective, a copy of pokemon was sold for each person that voted in the 1996 US presidential election.
I'm guessing hotspots and either some kind of router or USB plugin for your computer. Or it could be an on-cart TCP/IP implementation that'll connect via 802.11 to any existing WiFi network.
Arrogance AND hubris eh?
Just show up later. You know you have a 15 minute+ buffer of ads before showtime now a days.
If you own the server you could kick anyone who doesn't goosestep and spout facist propoganda if you wanted to. Only GOVERNMENT as well as a few services are prohibited from restricting free speech. In the case of services, this is to get a common-carrier exemption for being hands-off in regards to content.
If you don't own the server, you can go somewhere else or you can stop paying for the service. Or ya know, you could grow the fuck up.
I think this nutjob and his little list may interest you two.
Because he's new. Zonk comes from a slashdot-clone fan-site of MMOs. Slashdot needed or wanted a game section, and here be Zonk with his slash site. What a perfect fit... Most MMO gamers are fairly new to the scene, so he fits right in with the magazine crowd. He is, in effect, precisely what /. wanted. A modern game-reviewer type. The problem being that /. is where you can find most of the people who grew up on and/or still carry a fondness for nintendo. He'll figure that out eventually and skew himself more towards an n-sider/nintendojo bent rather than 1up... or he'll end up like all those who came before, Michael... Katz...
Heh, violence. Mob rule. Ignorance of law. Lack of respect for the traditions and rules of my country. Scare quotes around right. Either hyper-pc or hyper-socioconservative message... Congratulations. You deeply offended me. I presume I now have the "right" to silence you by any means necessary under the law right?
Ehh... it's effectively doomed to a niche right out of the gate. Just like the GP32 was.
It's nice to see that they sold enough of them to make a new one though.
Anyway, it's basically a DS(in spec terms) that runs off normal AA batteries with some features knocked out and the ARM7 replaced with another ARM9(different clock rates I'm sure). It supports homebrew out of the gate, no need to reflash the firmware or exploit anything.
Communities have always been the answer.
It's just a night and day difference, and there is no real way to tame the wilds of the internet.
My right to free speech does not end because you happen to find the things I say offensive.
I'd worry most about Sony. They've been bleeding red ink out of numerous divisions for a while now. The gaming division has been a large part of how they managed to keep themselves in the black overall, and it's been losing money for 2 straight quarters now. Additionally, IIRC they're currently in the hole for a few bil as a company. Contrast this with MS and Nintendo who both have massive cash reserves.
Supporting an unprofitable division only works if your other divisions maintain profitability, and even then, no company will keep it up forever. Their investors won't allow it. Even MS, whose overall profit and cash reserves make Nintendo and Sony put together look like children with a piggy-bank, won't keep the XBox division around if it's still unprofitable through the next generation.
No PS2?
Then we have Viewtiful Joe(great classic style platformer) and Resident Evil 4 from capcom.
Tales of Symphonia from Namco(exclusive) as well as the best selling version of Soul Calibur 2.
Ikaruga from Treasure(if you missed it on the dreamcast, exclusive).
Animal Crossing, Pikmin(1/2), Star Fox Assault, Metroid Prime(and echoes), Fire Emblem, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Mario Golf, Mario Baseball, Mario Tennis, Paper Mario, Super Smash Bros Melee, and Warioware all from Nintendo.
FF:CC if you have a GBA and friends with GBAs from Square-Enix.
Harvest Moon:AWL and AAWL.
MGS: The Twin Snakes(remake, if you missed it on the PS), and Eternal Darkness from Silicon Knights.
A bunch of old console collections.
There's more, those are just off the top of my head.
WRT to Metroid. Metroid Prime is to Metroid what Mario 64 was to Mario. It retains the essence, but it's really quite new.
Yea, I love the original dawn of the dead. A lot of people would call it schlock horror crap.
Same fucking thing.
It's art. You can't quantify it outside of bugs present. It's either a good game or it isn't. And that's highly subjective.... unless we're talking mario kart. In which case, if you don't like it you don't have a soul.
Don't try. Unless it's the godfather of videogames, people are GOING to disagree with you.
This is why most reviews are total bullshit. This is why Ebert(probably the ONLY living film critic of any note) hates the star rating system(which he only uses out of respect for critics past).
That simply means that to the majority of consumers the PSP doesn't offer enough value to justify the price-tag. Whereas the DS does, to a 2:1 ratio. And the GBA did, to something like a 30:1 ratio.
It really doesn't either. You can get cheaper, better, single-function devices that do everything PSP does.
The only compelling reason to buy a PSP is the games, and the only game I've seen that's worth it is Lumines. Which is a game there is no technical reason I can't play on my freakin' cell phone. Which means it's not worth the $250 price tag. Just freakin' port it to the GBA or make a version for my celly already.
That's why the PSP isn't selling too well, and the nature of the industry is that if you don't get momentum quickly, you never do... unless you drop bucketloads of cash into it.
We don't judge film on originality though. We don't judge anything on originality of premise. Every story is a derivative of some other story or it's a derivative of life.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
To sum it up, it's by far the best portable browser I've ever used.
Really? I quite like safari myself.
Hah, you replied to me/Sielwolfs back and forth! And appear to have gotten the joke. You rock.
I love the dreamcast controller as well. My favorite of the current gen is probably the Gamecube, even though it's horribly suited to a few genres(like console FPSes). It just has an incredibly shallow learning curve, and it's layout makes sense mentally. It's comfortable, and it's analog stick is probably the most like an actual joystick out of all of the controllers. Plus the wavebird is excellent. One of its big flaws is the d-pad. Which I would call about as useful as an appendix is to us, a vestigal organ. If you're going to deprecate something that much, don't bother including it. The other problem with the GCN controller is that it's nigh-impossible to hit b+x, which removes one button combo.
Anyway, Dreamcast, then Gamecube, then the XBox S. Which has a sort of dreamcast-esque feel to it to me anyway. Then the dualshock.
Of course, I've been using a dualshock for over a decade now, so I'm really, really used to it. But it's still tough mentally to remember, without holding one and doing the movements, where the various abxy equiv buttons are. If I factor in experience, then the dualshock wins out over everything but the dreamcast, but not because of any design merits. The whole analog clicking thing... well, ugh.
Of the old controllers, well I loved the original NES one, not because of layout, but because of sheer durability, important in something that's frequently power-chucked at walls. The rest were all fine, except atari's non-self centering joystick.
The PS2 controller sucks. It seriously is horrendously awful. A lot of people have been using it for so long, they no longer realize precisely how much it blows. Your hands will cramp when holding it for long periods of time, the buttons are cryptic with an excessively steep learning curve, the shoulders weak, the analog sticks are positioned poorly... Ugh. Give all 3 controllers to a non-gamer, cover up which system it's for, and no one is EVER going to pick the PS2 one.
The PS2 controller sucks. It's just sucked for so long, we're all used to it.
Mattel also encourages our children to engage in extreme body modification! Ken is a nullo! A nulllooooo!!!!!
No, but the longhorn switch + that + everything else will get a lot of people stopping to think.
Oh, and when something hits culture as pop as the Chappelle Show, even if it's only in one sketch, it means it's pretty freakin' well known.
I had heard Shafer was doing that game with a bunch of old Lucasarts employees, I just must've missed that there's a PC version.
I'll have to nab it next time I find a store with a PC games section.
I loved Beyond Good and Evil. The Zelda series also qualifies as action/adventure.
I really miss the old Sierra/Lucasarts games though.
I actually still play them. Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Space Quest, The Dig, etc. etc.
Great games with a sense of humor. Each one different. There used to be a whole slew of them every year. Then came the great 3D transition and away they went. They survived the transition from text to graphics, but couldn't cope with the 3D.
Even Grim Fandango was tough to control, and I don't think it benefitted much from 3D gameplay.
Almost no more 2D games outside of portables, next to no new adventure games... sigh. It's really rather sad actually. The playstation and quake mark the death of whole genres that really never should've died.