What's stopping them from using "GameBoy" on their next handheld? They don't have to call it the DS 2, do they? They expanded the audience with the DS; the Game Boy name, aside from any lingering cheesiness, is still something people associate with a kids' console.
I'm one of the people who bought a DS- due to the interesting games- who would never have bought a Game Boy. Personally, having the Game Boy name associated with a console would probably put me off; prejudiced maybe, but unfortunately true.
I think this is Nintendo's way of telling us Game Boy has made the change. (Probably at that party last weekend).
You know your Game Boy's reached adolescence when you don't have to play with it- it plays with itself non-stop.
Ah, that explains what was wrong with the sound. For some reason it had developed a very impressive bass, but a few minutes later it went high-pitched and squeaky. After alternating the two for a while, it settled onto the deeper sound, but now it makes very little noise and won't respond at all.
Eewww, I thought the white ooze coming out was glue or something.
Okay, the first one was good, the other two were crap, and it'll only get worse, so I'll stop there. I'll be here all week, please tip your waitress, etc etc
You know, as successful as the Game Boy was, I can't suspect it would have been taken more seriously by a wider segment of the target audience had it been called something a little less silly-sounding than "Game Boy". Thing is, after a while you don't notice silly names. You don't notice the name at all, in fact. Does anyone stop and think "The Beatles- what a lame pun and cheesy parody of 'The Crickets'"? No. The Beatles are the band.
That having been said, it's possible the name "Game Boy" helped shunt the console towards the child/early-adolescent market before people had got used to its name, and when time had passed, it was already associated with those users.
I don't know if "Game Boy" is strictly speaking Wasei-eigo (Japanese English). But it's certainly cut from the same cloth. Remember what I said about the connotations of the name fading away after a while? No-one thinks of "Walkman" as a silly name now, but that's another pseudo-English Japanese construction which sounds strange when you consider it. (In fact, the Walkman wasn't even originally marketed under that name in the US or in the UK where IIRC it was called "Stowaway").
Sega's "Mega Drive" is another one we got in the UK that (now I consider it) smacks faintly of the same phenomenon. IIRC the reason it was called "Genesis" in the US was for legal reasons, not because the name sounded strange.
Every once in a while, it's nice to develop a totally new idea that doesn't leverage the same brand for eternity. It shows a willingness to innovate IMO. Well, I've heard it stated or implied in more than one place that the DS wasn't a guaranteed success, and that not calling it "Game Boy" also reduced the risk to the brand. Of course, since the DS did succeed and overshadowed the Game Boy-branded devices, it has ultimately left the Game Boy brand stranded.
Personally, I wouldn't want to see the name associated with the DS anyway (as some have suggested and/or hinted that Nintendo would do). The DS really did take things in a new direction, and I've always associated the Game Boy with children and early-teens. The original DS's childish appearance (and possibly the child-associated legacy of Nintendo's name) slightly turned me off the thing. It wasn't until the Lite came out that I saw the ligh... um, sense;-) It looks great, and coupled with the range of more adult/universal (*) games that had been released, it overcame my prejudices. DS is now more than a kids console, and using the Game Boy name again would be a step backwards.
(*) That's "adult" as in games adults of all ages would play- Kawashima, Big Brain, 42 All Time Classics (AKA Clubhouse games). Not as in "lots of soft porn to get 14 year olds' attention".
Around where I live (Canada), I've never even seen a TV that takes component cables. Don't virtually all older TVs in North America take only composite? This isn't very helpful for you, but in Europe, pretty much every TV built in the last 10 years (and a large percentage before that) supports SCART and component video over that connection. (For those not aware of it, SCART basically bundles together a whole load of different audio and video signals- both input and output- onto a single 21-pin connector.)
I'm still pretty surprised that SCART is confined mainly to Europe. It's far from perfect, but for general use, it's a good idea. Partly because it's convenient, but also because (I guess) it keeps the costs of all those separate plugs down. And possibly that's one of the main reasons for leaving out component video on North American TVs(?)
Teletext is another Euro-invention that didn't take off in the US either. Wonder why...
Since when is fear something that needs curing? And if it's so bad why do we make horror movies? Or play hide and seek in the graveyard at night? Well, Red Dwarf showed us why losing your sense of fear is A Bad Thing. (Funnier if you already know the characters; basically, the ship has been invaded by a "Polymorph" which feeds off and removes people's emotions- Lister lost his fear, Rimmer his anger, The Cat his vanity, and Kryten his sense of guilt.)
Interesting diagram, thanks. Yep, looks like Europe and most of "Asia" are one mass; the interesting bit is that Saudi Arabia and surrounding parts of the Middle East *do* have their own plate, and the same applies to the Indian Subcontinent (The latter collision of two plates forming- of course- the Himalayas). So, if we use plates as the basis, most of Eurasia can't be considered separate, but those two can.
Actually is divided in North America, Central America and South America. As far as I am aware "Central America" is a political description. Yes, it's useful (and valid) when discussing countries and so on, but I've never heard it referred to as a continent... the only geographical basis for that I see is that it is on a separate tectonic plate.
That's for one unit of energy WE use to produce it; all that solar power that goes into it is what we're getting out. Well, of course. Short of breaking the laws of thermodynamics, the energy is always going to come from *somewhere*. However, as things stand at present, we can consider this as a free and almost unlimited source of energy that is just not as convenient to get at as we'd like.
America is one huge continent. The USA is the only country that splits it. Wrong; they are called "North America" and "South America" in the UK, and probably many other countries too.
Why do you think there are 5 rings in the olympic symbol? The 5 continents: America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Let me tell you something; at its thinnest point, the connection between North and South America is significantly narrower than that between Africa and Asia.
More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents- it seems to be a cultural distinction, which has nothing to do with physical geography. At any rate, North and South America are *far* more separate then Europe and Asia are.
Ironically, you can see this in the picture that you linked to.
It's possible that some corn sugar is used in ready-made foods, but seems a bit unlikely as we don't grow a vast amount of sweetcorn. Although it's true that corn-originated sugar seems to be rare in the UK, your reasoning is flawed. Cane sugar isn't grown in the UK either (it requires a tropical or subtropical climate), yet we use a lot of that.
In fact, I was always under the impression that cane sugar made up a much higher percentage of the UK market than sugar from beets (which can be grown in the UK). Might be wrong on that, though.
Additional: Ah... I also notice from this post that sugar imports imports into the US are penalised- probably in part to placate U.S. corn farming interests. That would explain why HFCS is the cheaper option within the U.S., but not outside.
In many places in the world you cannot now legally smoke in confined spaces. We acknowledge the harm that tobacco smoke can cause and we are taking (too little, too late perhaps) measures to help people maintain their health. To play devil's advocate here, there's no such thing as "passive fructose/sugar consumption". In other words, if you smoke in an enclosed space, it directly affects me. If you eat crap, it doesn't.
Of course, it's debatable whether the smoking bans in (for example) the UK were ever intended simply to protect others from passive smoke, or- as is implied- to discourage people from smoking altogether for the sake of their *own* health.
Don't the British use corn sugar as table sugar? As far as I'm aware, it's sucrose, mainly from sugar cane. The infamous "high fructose corn syrup" doesn't usually appear as an ingredients here, probably because we don't have corn farmers and hence no artificially cheap (i.e. subsidised) corn syrup.
I don't know how widespread U.S.-produced HFCS is outside that country anyway, or what the issues would be with the levels of subsidy. But I do know that we don't see much- if any- of it within the UK.
If you don't like it, you can leave. We don't need no whinny Euro-cans telling us not In all seriousness, what makes you think the guy was European anyway?
Yeah but the error-handling in First Life just plain blows. I'm waiting for the service pack where you can save your game before doing something stupid. Some people believe that you can come back into First Life after dying, but this is just a rumour and hasn't been proved. Apparently a guy called Buddhist or something similar said something about this...
First Life has absolutely amazing photorealistic graphics, but the game is as boring as hell- you have to spend roughly 5 out of 7 days doing gold-farming-style activities just to get enough money to buy the more interesting stuff; sometimes even just to get by.
And that's after spending years doing training in the random (usually boring) place you started the game in and being stuck with a load of boorish cretins. Supposedly this is to teach you how the game works, but after you complete it, you realise it's not that useful at all.
The one bit of good news is that you don't have to buy your own genitalia- the bad news is that it's hard, if not impossible, to upgrade...
Yes, it makes a lot more sense to do such a survey now, rather than before you wasted a bunch of money putting your company presence on this POS "game."
I swear, if the average corporate marketing division was a person, he'd have an IQ roughly between that of a flying penis and that of the jizz on a furry's suit. As the article states
[Ludlow] said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself. "It was a way to brand themselves as being leading-edge," he said. In other words, they want cyber-credibility by association, the type that Wired deals in. Though I'm guessing that Second Life is probably considered passé at Wired itself by now. After all, it's basically a coffee-table mag for tech-hipsters, can't be seen being behind the curve now, can they?
Well, Europe doesn't really matter if we're talking about video games... the overall market is small, returns are low, per capita purchasing power is low, you have to localize for at least half a dozen languages for a region which has several hundred living languages, and up until the playstation you could determine what was going to fail in every other region by what was popular in Europe. Which might or might not be true, and might or might not be flamebait, but isn't actually relevant to what I said anyway.
I don't know about you, but I am hung. Well hung that is! Another good reason why you should say the death thingy as "hanged", not "hung". Reduces the chances of someone making a lame joke;-)
Who said that was my pen name? It could easily be [various things] and of course I have more fun not telling you whether it is or isn't. In other words, regardless of whether "eht" is derived from any real-world meaning, it's de facto an anonymous pen name.
Someone going the the pen name eht asks As opposed to 'twitter'? You entirely missed his point; that the person accusing Twitter wasn't using their real name either.
Meanwhile over in Europe we had Atari STs, Amigas, Sega Megadrives and later PCs- how we wished we could play a pink princess like you. Yes yes the Atari's, Amiga, Speccy, Commodore, Colecovision, etc, were out during that time. But in the mid 80s to late if you asked a child what a videogame was 99% would simply state "Nintendo" or name a Nintendo franchise. That is what Winckle was alluding to. I believe the point the OP was trying to make was that during the original 8-bit NES's era of greatest success in the U.S., it was *nowhere* near as dominant in Western Europe. (Certainly not in the UK at any rate).
In fact, do you remember the Sega Master System, the NES's "flop" competitor as far as U.S. and Japanese markets were concerned? Well, believe it or not, the NES was outsold by the Master System in the UK, (partly due to better marketing).
However, this obscures the bigger point- that unlike the US, the UK/European games market during the second half of the 1980s was not mainly console-driven, but still based around home computers. Sure, some people had the SMS and NES, but far more people were still using computers (8-bit ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 still going at the low end, 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST coming in at the high end). Now that I think of it, I this probably applies to the 2600 era as well. Although I remember some people having Atari VCSs, the ZX Spectrum computer is the poster boy for early-80s nostalgia in Britain.
Anyway, this situation changed in the early 1990s, with the dawning of the 16-bit Mega Drive (AKA Genesis) and SNES era. They did very well, and from there on, the low-end/mass gaming market was dominated by consoles. (The PC took over the high end, and the once-cool but now aging Amiga 500 suffered from being stuck in the middle).
But basically, ask a nostalgic European games player what they had during the 1980s, and it's far less likely to be Nintendo and more likely some flavour of computer. Different markets, different games...
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I'm one of the people who bought a DS- due to the interesting games- who would never have bought a Game Boy. Personally, having the Game Boy name associated with a console would probably put me off; prejudiced maybe, but unfortunately true.
- You know your Game Boy's reached adolescence when you don't have to play with it- it plays with itself non-stop.
- Ah, that explains what was wrong with the sound. For some reason it had developed a very impressive bass, but a few minutes later it went high-pitched and squeaky. After alternating the two for a while, it settled onto the deeper sound, but now it makes very little noise and won't respond at all.
- Eewww, I thought the white ooze coming out was glue or something.
Okay, the first one was good, the other two were crap, and it'll only get worse, so I'll stop there. I'll be here all week, please tip your waitress, etc etcThat having been said, it's possible the name "Game Boy" helped shunt the console towards the child/early-adolescent market before people had got used to its name, and when time had passed, it was already associated with those users.
I don't know if "Game Boy" is strictly speaking Wasei-eigo (Japanese English). But it's certainly cut from the same cloth. Remember what I said about the connotations of the name fading away after a while? No-one thinks of "Walkman" as a silly name now, but that's another pseudo-English Japanese construction which sounds strange when you consider it. (In fact, the Walkman wasn't even originally marketed under that name in the US or in the UK where IIRC it was called "Stowaway").
Sega's "Mega Drive" is another one we got in the UK that (now I consider it) smacks faintly of the same phenomenon. IIRC the reason it was called "Genesis" in the US was for legal reasons, not because the name sounded strange.
Personally, I wouldn't want to see the name associated with the DS anyway (as some have suggested and/or hinted that Nintendo would do). The DS really did take things in a new direction, and I've always associated the Game Boy with children and early-teens. The original DS's childish appearance (and possibly the child-associated legacy of Nintendo's name) slightly turned me off the thing. It wasn't until the Lite came out that I saw the ligh... um, sense
Nintendo have stated that they don't intend using it again anyway.
(*) That's "adult" as in games adults of all ages would play- Kawashima, Big Brain, 42 All Time Classics (AKA Clubhouse games). Not as in "lots of soft porn to get 14 year olds' attention".
I'm still pretty surprised that SCART is confined mainly to Europe. It's far from perfect, but for general use, it's a good idea. Partly because it's convenient, but also because (I guess) it keeps the costs of all those separate plugs down. And possibly that's one of the main reasons for leaving out component video on North American TVs(?)
Teletext is another Euro-invention that didn't take off in the US either. Wonder why...
Interesting diagram, thanks. Yep, looks like Europe and most of "Asia" are one mass; the interesting bit is that Saudi Arabia and surrounding parts of the Middle East *do* have their own plate, and the same applies to the Indian Subcontinent (The latter collision of two plates forming- of course- the Himalayas). So, if we use plates as the basis, most of Eurasia can't be considered separate, but those two can.
More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents- it seems to be a cultural distinction, which has nothing to do with physical geography. At any rate, North and South America are *far* more separate then Europe and Asia are.
Ironically, you can see this in the picture that you linked to.
In fact, I was always under the impression that cane sugar made up a much higher percentage of the UK market than sugar from beets (which can be grown in the UK). Might be wrong on that, though.
Additional: Ah... I also notice from this post that sugar imports imports into the US are penalised- probably in part to placate U.S. corn farming interests. That would explain why HFCS is the cheaper option within the U.S., but not outside.
Of course, it's debatable whether the smoking bans in (for example) the UK were ever intended simply to protect others from passive smoke, or- as is implied- to discourage people from smoking altogether for the sake of their *own* health.
I don't know how widespread U.S.-produced HFCS is outside that country anyway, or what the issues would be with the levels of subsidy. But I do know that we don't see much- if any- of it within the UK.
First Life has absolutely amazing photorealistic graphics, but the game is as boring as hell- you have to spend roughly 5 out of 7 days doing gold-farming-style activities just to get enough money to buy the more interesting stuff; sometimes even just to get by.
And that's after spending years doing training in the random (usually boring) place you started the game in and being stuck with a load of boorish cretins. Supposedly this is to teach you how the game works, but after you complete it, you realise it's not that useful at all.
The one bit of good news is that you don't have to buy your own genitalia- the bad news is that it's hard, if not impossible, to upgrade...
I swear, if the average corporate marketing division was a person, he'd have an IQ roughly between that of a flying penis and that of the jizz on a furry's suit. As the article states [Ludlow] said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself. "It was a way to brand themselves as being leading-edge," he said. In other words, they want cyber-credibility by association, the type that Wired deals in. Though I'm guessing that Second Life is probably considered passé at Wired itself by now. After all, it's basically a coffee-table mag for tech-hipsters, can't be seen being behind the curve now, can they?
Reminds me of this discussion.
In fact, do you remember the Sega Master System, the NES's "flop" competitor as far as U.S. and Japanese markets were concerned? Well, believe it or not, the NES was outsold by the Master System in the UK, (partly due to better marketing).
However, this obscures the bigger point- that unlike the US, the UK/European games market during the second half of the 1980s was not mainly console-driven, but still based around home computers. Sure, some people had the SMS and NES, but far more people were still using computers (8-bit ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 still going at the low end, 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST coming in at the high end). Now that I think of it, I this probably applies to the 2600 era as well. Although I remember some people having Atari VCSs, the ZX Spectrum computer is the poster boy for early-80s nostalgia in Britain.
Anyway, this situation changed in the early 1990s, with the dawning of the 16-bit Mega Drive (AKA Genesis) and SNES era. They did very well, and from there on, the low-end/mass gaming market was dominated by consoles. (The PC took over the high end, and the once-cool but now aging Amiga 500 suffered from being stuck in the middle).
But basically, ask a nostalgic European games player what they had during the 1980s, and it's far less likely to be Nintendo and more likely some flavour of computer. Different markets, different games...