The great thing about dvd was that you saw immediate benefits both from the medium and the content on your _standard_tv_. You didn't need the latest lcd/dlp/plasma display to appreciate what you were getting... Now we have only an incremental increase in the convenience of the medium (saves having multi-disk sets) which really doesn't mean much for most viewers and the improvements in quality only applies to a much smaller audience.
When it comes to the new consoles, both MS and Sony have bet the bank on the television market being saturated with big HD sets that would justify an "investment" in a game console that would display in HD on them. In a few ways -- cost of game development, size of their potential market as you say here -- both companies appear to have lost track of the market, or to have projected it wrongly. Market penetration of huge HD screens just isn't there yet. Maybe it will be during the lifespan of these consoles, maybe not.
Meanwhile a competitor that tries to jazz up the game experience on "your _standard_tv_" is out there, phrasing its admittedly not-cutting-edge technology in ways that DO mean something to most game players.
The Wii controller talk about 'actually swinging your controller like a sword' or 'use the controller like a fishing rod' reminds me of the race back in the late 80s rpg/adventure games where developers kept adding more and more real world actions to their games. Feeding, equipping items, moving/manipulating objects in the world. In the end it became tedious.
I have not one idea how you think those two things are comparable. If it were somehow the case that games would, by definition, use the Wiimote to make the user constantly open a backpack and equip items in Zelda, that would be one thing -- but I don't see how the one thing leads to the other. If you're just saying that the Wiimote actions will necessarily become too repetitive, I'm lost as to why they're any more or less "tedious" than the blank-eyed button pressing on other controllers and consoles.
(Frankly, too, I've been around a while and I don't remember the supposed phase you're describing in rgps and adventure games.)
Your idea that, because the Wiimote can result in some of the same actions that button presses and joystick controls can cause on-screen, it's somehow not innovative -- that would dismiss such changes as analog controls as also not being innovative. After all, we could move characters on screen before them, right?
Finally, your argument begs the question: Nintendo is treading on thin ice next to what competition? The $600 "buy our HDVD standard product"? Do you have some idea that actually would be "innovative" in your book? Or what?
Funny you should mention the H.264 compression behind that. I just happened to read Macintouch's benchmarks for the new Pentium Mac Pro line, and the numbers for Quicktime exporting are vastly superior on the new chips. The numbers in their benchmark showed the Intel Mac Pros exporting QT movies just under 5 times as fast as a G5 dual-core 2Mhz.) The Macintouch folks commented on Apple's seeming focus on H.264.
The upshot being that, if there was any concern with the new Intel Macs giving up any of this video chatting advantage, probably that's not a worry. The new machines cook in that compression.
I've wondered before why it is that nobody posts albums on iTunes with all the tracks set to "Album Only." If bands really were objecting to the store on those "You need to hear the whole thing" grounds, that would be the workaround, and yet one never sees it. Sounds like a flimsy pretext.
Somebody with an accountant's instincts would probably see through this situation. As it is, my first reaction to the Beatles not letting iTunes list their catalog is that they're fools for spurning the potential revenue. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of sources for that set of music on the p2p networks, and there Apple Music gets nothing, nada, zilch.
In the early 1980s, my high school lunch monitor cracked down on our playing of a board game similar to Carmageddon. Actually it was based more on the old Mad Max series of movies -- I think it might have been called "Car Wars."
The pretext used against us was that rolling dice would be a horrible precedent to set in the high school cafeteria. 'Cause we all know how very, very innocent 17-year-olds are. Wouldn't want anyone starting a game of craps.
We weren't even killing pedestrians -- just having some gladiatorial fun behind the wheel.
"Natural" is hard to pin down. This drug would be an enantiomer (Enantiomer: (stereo)isomers that are mirror images of each other) of the molecule occuring naturally in the plant -- but what supernatural process happens in the lab, again?
Same sort of thing: l-dopa is a psychoactive drug. Its mirror image, d-dopa, isn't. Same
composition and number of atoms, differently-shaped molecule -- they're isomers, and the mirror images are enantiomers of each other. The "l-" version fits a receptor in the brain, the d- version doesn't.
Mendeleev would make a nice point of departure for talking about basic chemistry. I don't know if there's an age-appropriate biography, though.
He's a great example of an integrative mind, and his accomplishments with the periodic table are a very cool example of being able to sift a seemingly confused and overwhelming set of known information in order to understand the world differently, more simply, and better.
As a human figure, too, he's interesting enough to maybe catch a kid's eye. Huge beard, stories about dreams and how they gave him insight, and so on.
The Wii seems to be rife with these kinds of games at the moment -- games that only use the motion-sensing capability of the controller to emulate actions that you could do with a regular controller.
I am not understanding this point; maybe it's just been stated clumsily.
A "regular controller" uses buttons that are mapped to [whatever action]. What's the set of actions that cannot be mapped to a button press and analog stick set of controls, again? The motion sensor gives us another way of controlling actions, in the same sense that analog sticks added their element -- but are we supposed to have only games relying on motion sensing, then? Or what?
If what they're saying is that studios -- including Nintendo in this Zelda case -- just took games already under development and made the Wiimote actions "map" to something that was a button before, that makes some sense... But doesn't particularly convince me that the Wiimote couldn't be a dramatic improvement over other controllers. A mouse is much better controller for FPS titles than a keyboard or a "regular" console controller. For similar reasons, people like the idea of the Wiimote in FPS games too. Is that "just emulating" stuff you can do with the other controllers?
To shoot Link's bow, you can either a) use an analog stick to aim and then press a button to fire; or b) draw the Wiimote back and aim it using the motion sensing, with the little speaker in the remote saying "sho-ook" when you release your arrow. Is that just remapping actions from a regular controller?
If Nintendo didn't have confidence in their own controller for one of their flagship titles, that would bode ill for every other game on the system.
For what little it's worth, Nintendo has said it's not using the Wiimote's motion sensing features for the first Wii Super Smash Brothers. Comments to the effect that it didn't add much to the game, etc.
It's having the exact opposite effect of what he expected.
No Child Left Behind is a classic example of real goals at complete cross-purposes with the professed ones. It had loads to do with the far right wing's openly-stated hatred of public schools and longing to return to some imagined halcyon period -- seemingly the pre-integration era as viewed through rose-colored glasses.
On those terms, a system that punishes schools who have students in poverty is exactly what Bush wanted and expected.
(I have two 13-year-olds. The decline in our local school system as various No Child Left Behind ramifications have come down has been palpable. Their grade school I would no longer want them to attend, were they still that age; its curriculum has been lobotomized in order to teach to the testing instruments. I am quite sure based on my experience that many more children are being "left behind.")
The entirety of your post is a sophism that I have never seen confirmed in my very many interactions with scientists and doctors, whose working lives depend on science.
At even the lowest levels of undergraduate science courses, the scientific method is truly something people practice. I have taken the classes, have been there in the labs when things didn't go according to plan, and have worked with the doctors whose approach to the treatment of ulcers or cervical cancer has changed dramatically within my short working life so far.
To compare scientists with fundamentalists as a way of leveling the playing field is just plain a load of crap. You talk about historical examples -- as if the most dramatic ones weren't cases in which authoritarian religions crushed scientific enquiry with deadly force.
Your post is nothing but a talking point, and one I've seen refuted at every level of scientific enquiry I've ever been around. The contrast with fundamentalism -- and yeah, I have relations on both sides of my family who fit there -- could not be more dramatic. The difference is not what they believe, it's how they believe it and live according to it.
The example networked title Nintendo referred to at their E3 press gig was Animal Crossing, which was kind of interesting given that no AC title has been announced for the Wii to my knowledge. Whatever executive it was used AC as an example of how persistent, "even when you're not playing it" connectivity would open new possibilities. The idea was to visit other people's towns in AC at any time and so on.
The DS version of Animal Crossing would be an interesting precedent. The graphics are very close to the ones on the old GameCube title, which really looked more like an N64 game truth be told. Game play is very unconventional -- no real goals except as you choose, just puttering around, and, big finish, very much intended for and marketing to a different set of gamers. Does this sound like the general approach being taken with Wii?
(My kids have the DS version, "Wide World," and have successfully gotten several different adults to try it out. Their grandma enjoyed it.)
I hope Nintendo are right in their apparent assumption that these days consoles have enough power, and the typical consumer doesn't care about running at ultra high resolutions.
Similarly, one might ask the question: have MS and Sony been right in their assumption, made years in advance, that the HDTV market would be mature by now? The market for their products is considerably narrower, limited as it is to those who already own or would own HD sets -- and their products themselves are perceived as much more expensive partly because they went the HD route.
Perceptions of "horsepower" aside, for me the HD feature is actually a potential drawback of those other systems. If I can't see games in all their splendor, why would I pay $500 or whatever for a console whose main claim to glory is the HD images? A whopping $2000 ($600 + an HD set) just to get in the door is a LOT to ask. Too much for me, personally.
So I see what you're saying, but it cuts both ways.
Note also that while MS and Sony are pitching to the dedicated gamer willing to shell out a big lump of bills, Nintendo's rhetoric has been all about broadening the market. With the DS, at least, it seems to work -- if my kids' 82-year-old grandma avidly playing "Brain Age" this last week was any indication...
I agree with you that Apple isn't into entering previously saturated markets so much. However:
There is no room for that in the cell phone market, which is oversaturated with low-margin Asian manufacturers/vendors whose phones are often given away for free
Saying phones are currently "given away for free" is hardly right. They're wedded to contracts with the phone companies. My Motorola got soaked this February out whale watching, and I can tell you it wasn't "free" to replace the thing with a much worse phone.
And all that said -- if the current business model for phone sales seems completely irrational, and it does, one can at least imagine some clever Apple niche-redefinition around a new device. Yeah, it seems implausible. So did Apple's getting major record labels to sign onto the iTMS, in the day.
Plus, we do have the RAZR market-testing as a toe Apple put in the water, very carefully. You'd think they'd have learned to stay out based on that, but...
The N64 had a GC Color hook-up, and the GC hooks up to the GBA for some titles. They've all been titles developed by Nintendo as far as I know. Never anything essential for a game, either -- always funny little add-ons. (You could play as Tingle in Zelda-Windwaker, and it was more fun than I'd ever have thought.)
If Nintendo could get third-party developers to buy into the idea, that would reflect a critical mass they're reaching on the Wii. Can't imagine that would happen right off, though.
(until they do the development cost math)
on
Everybody Loves the Wii
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Developers whose idea of a better game is bigger pixel counts will surely want to develop for the PS3 or the 360 -- at least until they realize how much more it costs to develop for those systems, that is. That's another aspect to the "GameCube II" angle your link derided.
"[The Wii] wasn't a whole new programming environment," Farrell said. "So we had a lot of tools and tech that work in that environment. So those costs--and again, I hate these broad generalizations--but they could be as little as a third of the high-end next-gen titles... Maybe the range is a quarter to a half."
Rep. Jeff Johnson is about par for the social conservative course here now. He's not evil, he's really something of a moderate in the context of today's MN Republican party.
We used to produce better, more decent sorts of Republicans, whom I have voted for in the past. Our formerly proud Minnesota tradition of "Independent Republicans" has died hard. The state party stripped the word "Independent" from its title, even, in an effort to close ranks with the national party. They had a very popular sitting governor in Arne Carlson -- fiscally convservative, socially liberal -- whom they failed to endorse on his way to a resounding reelection a while back. Carlson wasn't asinine enough on social issues.
This guy comes from the Twin Cities area -- notably liberal, nothing like outstate -- and says his priorities are "tax relief, education reform, and limiting government spending and regulation." Recent news items about him include eminent domain legislation meant to protect private land and a bunch of stuff about Meth laws. "Education reform" will mean vouchers for private school, almost certainly.
Probably this bill was a sop to "the base" given his relatively more moderate stances in general. We have much worse here now. (Meet Michele Bachman.)
Personally, I'm not worrying, and neither is anybody that I know in meatspace.
The people wearing masks around major Chinese cities a few years back were almost a direct throwback to the 1918 flu panic -- in which entire populations put on porous, ineffectual masks in order to protect against a pathogen much too small to be hindered by the fabric. There are pictures of streets in Philadelphia on which everyone, everyone, is wearing a mask. Whole towns closed their gates; "Keep on driving, we don't want visitors here" signs showed up on the outskirts of little rural villages.
Major pandemics figured in lots of major, major upheavals in human history. We aren't panicked right now, and yeah the media furor makes everything into a crisis -- but panic over a pandemic wouldn't be new to modern levels of media saturation. Not at all. If H15N crosses the species barrier we're not going to be perfectly calm about it. Human nature hasn't changed, and you're probably not above it.
I used to take my dog -- a Newfoundland -- in to the airport to pick people up. The baggage claim at our local airport basically lets people get dogs off their leashes after a flight, and according to the local cops it was okay. Never had a cross word from anyone; I wasn't inflicting too many more allergens on anyone, I hoped, and mostly we got a lot of good socialization when she was a puppy. At least some people seemed to get a wake-up in the middle of their exhausting travel day.
One day a TSA employee caught sight of us. A squad of four of them surrounded me, quietly preventing me from moving away as one lectured me on all the potential dreadful consequences should they decide to enforce their vaguely-defined regulations. I tried to ask after the specific laws or airport restrictions involved. There probably were some -- I'd always assumed the cops were just being smart about what to enforce and what not to -- but it was clear that the TSA guys were entirely motivated by that obnoxious self-righteousness I recognize from birding near power plants. You know, the one that comes with private security agencies taking themselves too seriously and not having clear "boundaries," so that they end up thinking their job is to harass people. Said people are to be presumed guilty, of course.
End result was me feeling intimidated, which seemed to be the goal. Those guys were a hybrid between hallway monitors and the bullies from your middle school.
Somehow the local cops had always managed to keep me in line, and to prevent potential terrorist attacks by Newfoundland drool and shedding, without any ill will. If one of them had brought this up with me I'd have taken it a lot differently...
The simple categories don't work, you're right. With movies, the MPAA's ratings are sometimes nuts. "Whale Rider" got a PG-13 despite being a fantastic family movie because of some sort of bong in the background in one scene. A few F-enheimers earn an R rating, still, bizarrely. (The MPAA is seemingly forever going to be living out the legacy of the old Hays/Breen code. The tinge of Catholic influence is a curious thing, and one we have to think around every time.)
But a "scorecard" with too much detail loses me just as much. For movies http://www.screenit.com/ is pretty much what you describe -- it gives you access to a highly detailed "scorecard" for each movie. As a parent, I love the idea but think the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. There's just too much information, the detailed descriptions get sort of silly with repetition, and in the effort to categorize elements of a movie things get pretty hazy pretty fast. "Imitative behavior" is a category, for example, into which almost anything might fit.
I would generally prefer a personalized reaction from someone I'm familiar with. For video games, that's what I use. The kids had decided "Gun" was off-limits based on its M rating, but I was curious and went to read reviews on Gamespot. (Yep, too violent -- by a lot.)
Aside from last holiday season's hype, the X-Box has been a back burner item for the press. Sony's PR has been almost uniformly poorly received.
Meanwhile outlets like slashdot have been talking up the Wii for months and months. It's not like we didn't have items posted on/. just for the name switch from Revolution to Wii, you know? Hotly debated at the time, too. People are paying tons of attention.
Where'd the idea that Nintendo's been all but ignored come from? Lordy. How'd this "Did you know Nintendo has a new console too?" story get accepted?
Claiming to speak for "most people" as an AC? Needling the straw man of PS3 fanboys? Insight isn't what it used to be.
(For that matter, the original post here is in a deep muddle. The headline about "when consoles lose" implies that consoles as a whole should go down, not that failures in the business often seed future development.)
Or why France doesn't have a major California wine festival.
California wines rank quite highly in contests held in France, and have for decades now. I know of at least three "sister city" relationships that celebrate the connection.
Culture is nowhere near as simple as your ideas about contempt, and your stereotypes are inaccurate as far as my own experiences go. My experience of French people (Parisians mostly) is that they're by and large extremely soft-spoken, humorous, and unfailingly polite. (They certainly are gracious next to the American flight crews on the way home; I practically get the bends coming back from those trips. It's usually a crew from Jersey.) My experiences with Japan and the Japanese convince me that they've got some weird twists of racism and sexism going on, but that they are certainly open to cool technical gadgetry from any source. Another poster mentioned the iPod. Uh-huh.
You attribute to spite reactions that aren't nearly that emotional. They don't care. The 360 was greeted by profound indifference in Japan, by all accounts.
Even if MS had a killer line up of Japanese games coming, they now have to fight against a negative perception.
Whereas if they'd waited until they had a great lineup of (they thought) Japan-friendly titles, they'd have somehow been stiffing the Japanese market, and they'd have that negative perception to overcome.
They were already in a hole. In order to get out of it they'd have had to try something different that would bring them back to the attention of potential buyers. They tried more of the same, or at most an incremental "we learned our lessons" improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
The great thing about dvd was that you saw immediate benefits both from the medium and the content on your _standard_tv_. You didn't need the latest lcd/dlp/plasma display to appreciate what you were getting... Now we have only an incremental increase in the convenience of the medium (saves having multi-disk sets) which really doesn't mean much for most viewers and the improvements in quality only applies to a much smaller audience.
When it comes to the new consoles, both MS and Sony have bet the bank on the television market being saturated with big HD sets that would justify an "investment" in a game console that would display in HD on them. In a few ways -- cost of game development, size of their potential market as you say here -- both companies appear to have lost track of the market, or to have projected it wrongly. Market penetration of huge HD screens just isn't there yet. Maybe it will be during the lifespan of these consoles, maybe not.
Meanwhile a competitor that tries to jazz up the game experience on "your _standard_tv_" is out there, phrasing its admittedly not-cutting-edge technology in ways that DO mean something to most game players.
The Wii controller talk about 'actually swinging your controller like a sword' or 'use the controller like a fishing rod' reminds me of the race back in the late 80s rpg/adventure games where developers kept adding more and more real world actions to their games. Feeding, equipping items, moving/manipulating objects in the world. In the end it became tedious.
I have not one idea how you think those two things are comparable. If it were somehow the case that games would, by definition, use the Wiimote to make the user constantly open a backpack and equip items in Zelda, that would be one thing -- but I don't see how the one thing leads to the other. If you're just saying that the Wiimote actions will necessarily become too repetitive, I'm lost as to why they're any more or less "tedious" than the blank-eyed button pressing on other controllers and consoles.
(Frankly, too, I've been around a while and I don't remember the supposed phase you're describing in rgps and adventure games.)
Your idea that, because the Wiimote can result in some of the same actions that button presses and joystick controls can cause on-screen, it's somehow not innovative -- that would dismiss such changes as analog controls as also not being innovative. After all, we could move characters on screen before them, right?
Finally, your argument begs the question: Nintendo is treading on thin ice next to what competition? The $600 "buy our HDVD standard product"? Do you have some idea that actually would be "innovative" in your book? Or what?
Funny you should mention the H.264 compression behind that. I just happened to read Macintouch's benchmarks for the new Pentium Mac Pro line, and the numbers for Quicktime exporting are vastly superior on the new chips. The numbers in their benchmark showed the Intel Mac Pros exporting QT movies just under 5 times as fast as a G5 dual-core 2Mhz.) The Macintouch folks commented on Apple's seeming focus on H.264.
The upshot being that, if there was any concern with the new Intel Macs giving up any of this video chatting advantage, probably that's not a worry. The new machines cook in that compression.
I have no problem with the ESRB in fact I think its a good idea, but until parents are responsible to buy into it, its not going to work.
I'm not clear about what you think parents aren't doing now? What do you propose to make them "responsible to buy into" the ESRB?
Being a parent who does pay attention, I'd just like to know.
I've wondered before why it is that nobody posts albums on iTunes with all the tracks set to "Album Only." If bands really were objecting to the store on those "You need to hear the whole thing" grounds, that would be the workaround, and yet one never sees it. Sounds like a flimsy pretext.
Somebody with an accountant's instincts would probably see through this situation. As it is, my first reaction to the Beatles not letting iTunes list their catalog is that they're fools for spurning the potential revenue. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of sources for that set of music on the p2p networks, and there Apple Music gets nothing, nada, zilch.
In the early 1980s, my high school lunch monitor cracked down on our playing of a board game similar to Carmageddon. Actually it was based more on the old Mad Max series of movies -- I think it might have been called "Car Wars."
The pretext used against us was that rolling dice would be a horrible precedent to set in the high school cafeteria. 'Cause we all know how very, very innocent 17-year-olds are. Wouldn't want anyone starting a game of craps.
We weren't even killing pedestrians -- just having some gladiatorial fun behind the wheel.
"Natural" is hard to pin down. This drug would be an enantiomer (Enantiomer: (stereo)isomers that are mirror images of each other) of the molecule occuring naturally in the plant -- but what supernatural process happens in the lab, again?
Same sort of thing: l-dopa is a psychoactive drug. Its mirror image, d-dopa, isn't. Same composition and number of atoms, differently-shaped molecule -- they're isomers, and the mirror images are enantiomers of each other. The "l-" version fits a receptor in the brain, the d- version doesn't.
Mendeleev would make a nice point of departure for talking about basic chemistry. I don't know if there's an age-appropriate biography, though.
He's a great example of an integrative mind, and his accomplishments with the periodic table are a very cool example of being able to sift a seemingly confused and overwhelming set of known information in order to understand the world differently, more simply, and better.
As a human figure, too, he's interesting enough to maybe catch a kid's eye. Huge beard, stories about dreams and how they gave him insight, and so on.
The Wii seems to be rife with these kinds of games at the moment -- games that only use the motion-sensing capability of the controller to emulate actions that you could do with a regular controller.
I am not understanding this point; maybe it's just been stated clumsily.
A "regular controller" uses buttons that are mapped to [whatever action]. What's the set of actions that cannot be mapped to a button press and analog stick set of controls, again? The motion sensor gives us another way of controlling actions, in the same sense that analog sticks added their element -- but are we supposed to have only games relying on motion sensing, then? Or what?
If what they're saying is that studios -- including Nintendo in this Zelda case -- just took games already under development and made the Wiimote actions "map" to something that was a button before, that makes some sense... But doesn't particularly convince me that the Wiimote couldn't be a dramatic improvement over other controllers. A mouse is much better controller for FPS titles than a keyboard or a "regular" console controller. For similar reasons, people like the idea of the Wiimote in FPS games too. Is that "just emulating" stuff you can do with the other controllers?
To shoot Link's bow, you can either a) use an analog stick to aim and then press a button to fire; or b) draw the Wiimote back and aim it using the motion sensing, with the little speaker in the remote saying "sho-ook" when you release your arrow. Is that just remapping actions from a regular controller?
If Nintendo didn't have confidence in their own controller for one of their flagship titles, that would bode ill for every other game on the system.
For what little it's worth, Nintendo has said it's not using the Wiimote's motion sensing features for the first Wii Super Smash Brothers. Comments to the effect that it didn't add much to the game, etc.
Flagship title? Check.
It's having the exact opposite effect of what he expected.
No Child Left Behind is a classic example of real goals at complete cross-purposes with the professed ones. It had loads to do with the far right wing's openly-stated hatred of public schools and longing to return to some imagined halcyon period -- seemingly the pre-integration era as viewed through rose-colored glasses.
On those terms, a system that punishes schools who have students in poverty is exactly what Bush wanted and expected.
(I have two 13-year-olds. The decline in our local school system as various No Child Left Behind ramifications have come down has been palpable. Their grade school I would no longer want them to attend, were they still that age; its curriculum has been lobotomized in order to teach to the testing instruments. I am quite sure based on my experience that many more children are being "left behind.")
The entirety of your post is a sophism that I have never seen confirmed in my very many interactions with scientists and doctors, whose working lives depend on science.
At even the lowest levels of undergraduate science courses, the scientific method is truly something people practice. I have taken the classes, have been there in the labs when things didn't go according to plan, and have worked with the doctors whose approach to the treatment of ulcers or cervical cancer has changed dramatically within my short working life so far.
To compare scientists with fundamentalists as a way of leveling the playing field is just plain a load of crap. You talk about historical examples -- as if the most dramatic ones weren't cases in which authoritarian religions crushed scientific enquiry with deadly force.
Your post is nothing but a talking point, and one I've seen refuted at every level of scientific enquiry I've ever been around. The contrast with fundamentalism -- and yeah, I have relations on both sides of my family who fit there -- could not be more dramatic. The difference is not what they believe, it's how they believe it and live according to it.
The example networked title Nintendo referred to at their E3 press gig was Animal Crossing, which was kind of interesting given that no AC title has been announced for the Wii to my knowledge. Whatever executive it was used AC as an example of how persistent, "even when you're not playing it" connectivity would open new possibilities. The idea was to visit other people's towns in AC at any time and so on.
The DS version of Animal Crossing would be an interesting precedent. The graphics are very close to the ones on the old GameCube title, which really looked more like an N64 game truth be told. Game play is very unconventional -- no real goals except as you choose, just puttering around, and, big finish, very much intended for and marketing to a different set of gamers. Does this sound like the general approach being taken with Wii?
(My kids have the DS version, "Wide World," and have successfully gotten several different adults to try it out. Their grandma enjoyed it.)
I hope Nintendo are right in their apparent assumption that these days consoles have enough power, and the typical consumer doesn't care about running at ultra high resolutions.
Similarly, one might ask the question: have MS and Sony been right in their assumption, made years in advance, that the HDTV market would be mature by now? The market for their products is considerably narrower, limited as it is to those who already own or would own HD sets -- and their products themselves are perceived as much more expensive partly because they went the HD route.
Perceptions of "horsepower" aside, for me the HD feature is actually a potential drawback of those other systems. If I can't see games in all their splendor, why would I pay $500 or whatever for a console whose main claim to glory is the HD images? A whopping $2000 ($600 + an HD set) just to get in the door is a LOT to ask. Too much for me, personally.
So I see what you're saying, but it cuts both ways.
Note also that while MS and Sony are pitching to the dedicated gamer willing to shell out a big lump of bills, Nintendo's rhetoric has been all about broadening the market. With the DS, at least, it seems to work -- if my kids' 82-year-old grandma avidly playing "Brain Age" this last week was any indication...
I agree with you that Apple isn't into entering previously saturated markets so much. However:
There is no room for that in the cell phone market, which is oversaturated with low-margin Asian manufacturers/vendors whose phones are often given away for free
Saying phones are currently "given away for free" is hardly right. They're wedded to contracts with the phone companies. My Motorola got soaked this February out whale watching, and I can tell you it wasn't "free" to replace the thing with a much worse phone.
And all that said -- if the current business model for phone sales seems completely irrational, and it does, one can at least imagine some clever Apple niche-redefinition around a new device. Yeah, it seems implausible. So did Apple's getting major record labels to sign onto the iTMS, in the day.
Plus, we do have the RAZR market-testing as a toe Apple put in the water, very carefully. You'd think they'd have learned to stay out based on that, but...
The N64 had a GC Color hook-up, and the GC hooks up to the GBA for some titles. They've all been titles developed by Nintendo as far as I know. Never anything essential for a game, either -- always funny little add-ons. (You could play as Tingle in Zelda-Windwaker, and it was more fun than I'd ever have thought.)
If Nintendo could get third-party developers to buy into the idea, that would reflect a critical mass they're reaching on the Wii. Can't imagine that would happen right off, though.
Developers whose idea of a better game is bigger pixel counts will surely want to develop for the PS3 or the 360 -- at least until they realize how much more it costs to develop for those systems, that is. That's another aspect to the "GameCube II" angle your link derided.
Rep. Jeff Johnson is about par for the social conservative course here now. He's not evil, he's really something of a moderate in the context of today's MN Republican party.
We used to produce better, more decent sorts of Republicans, whom I have voted for in the past. Our formerly proud Minnesota tradition of "Independent Republicans" has died hard. The state party stripped the word "Independent" from its title, even, in an effort to close ranks with the national party. They had a very popular sitting governor in Arne Carlson -- fiscally convservative, socially liberal -- whom they failed to endorse on his way to a resounding reelection a while back. Carlson wasn't asinine enough on social issues.
This guy comes from the Twin Cities area -- notably liberal, nothing like outstate -- and says his priorities are "tax relief, education reform, and limiting government spending and regulation." Recent news items about him include eminent domain legislation meant to protect private land and a bunch of stuff about Meth laws. "Education reform" will mean vouchers for private school, almost certainly.
Probably this bill was a sop to "the base" given his relatively more moderate stances in general. We have much worse here now. (Meet Michele Bachman.)
Personally, I'm not worrying, and neither is anybody that I know in meatspace.
The people wearing masks around major Chinese cities a few years back were almost a direct throwback to the 1918 flu panic -- in which entire populations put on porous, ineffectual masks in order to protect against a pathogen much too small to be hindered by the fabric. There are pictures of streets in Philadelphia on which everyone, everyone, is wearing a mask. Whole towns closed their gates; "Keep on driving, we don't want visitors here" signs showed up on the outskirts of little rural villages.
Major pandemics figured in lots of major, major upheavals in human history. We aren't panicked right now, and yeah the media furor makes everything into a crisis -- but panic over a pandemic wouldn't be new to modern levels of media saturation. Not at all. If H15N crosses the species barrier we're not going to be perfectly calm about it. Human nature hasn't changed, and you're probably not above it.
I used to take my dog -- a Newfoundland -- in to the airport to pick people up. The baggage claim at our local airport basically lets people get dogs off their leashes after a flight, and according to the local cops it was okay. Never had a cross word from anyone; I wasn't inflicting too many more allergens on anyone, I hoped, and mostly we got a lot of good socialization when she was a puppy. At least some people seemed to get a wake-up in the middle of their exhausting travel day.
One day a TSA employee caught sight of us. A squad of four of them surrounded me, quietly preventing me from moving away as one lectured me on all the potential dreadful consequences should they decide to enforce their vaguely-defined regulations. I tried to ask after the specific laws or airport restrictions involved. There probably were some -- I'd always assumed the cops were just being smart about what to enforce and what not to -- but it was clear that the TSA guys were entirely motivated by that obnoxious self-righteousness I recognize from birding near power plants. You know, the one that comes with private security agencies taking themselves too seriously and not having clear "boundaries," so that they end up thinking their job is to harass people. Said people are to be presumed guilty, of course.
End result was me feeling intimidated, which seemed to be the goal. Those guys were a hybrid between hallway monitors and the bullies from your middle school.
Somehow the local cops had always managed to keep me in line, and to prevent potential terrorist attacks by Newfoundland drool and shedding, without any ill will. If one of them had brought this up with me I'd have taken it a lot differently...
The simple categories don't work, you're right. With movies, the MPAA's ratings are sometimes nuts. "Whale Rider" got a PG-13 despite being a fantastic family movie because of some sort of bong in the background in one scene. A few F-enheimers earn an R rating, still, bizarrely. (The MPAA is seemingly forever going to be living out the legacy of the old Hays/Breen code. The tinge of Catholic influence is a curious thing, and one we have to think around every time.)
But a "scorecard" with too much detail loses me just as much. For movies http://www.screenit.com/ is pretty much what you describe -- it gives you access to a highly detailed "scorecard" for each movie. As a parent, I love the idea but think the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. There's just too much information, the detailed descriptions get sort of silly with repetition, and in the effort to categorize elements of a movie things get pretty hazy pretty fast. "Imitative behavior" is a category, for example, into which almost anything might fit.
I would generally prefer a personalized reaction from someone I'm familiar with. For video games, that's what I use. The kids had decided "Gun" was off-limits based on its M rating, but I was curious and went to read reviews on Gamespot. (Yep, too violent -- by a lot.)
Aside from last holiday season's hype, the X-Box has been a back burner item for the press. Sony's PR has been almost uniformly poorly received.
Meanwhile outlets like slashdot have been talking up the Wii for months and months. It's not like we didn't have items posted on /. just for the name switch from Revolution to Wii, you know? Hotly debated at the time, too. People are paying tons of attention.
Where'd the idea that Nintendo's been all but ignored come from? Lordy. How'd this "Did you know Nintendo has a new console too?" story get accepted?
Claiming to speak for "most people" as an AC? Needling the straw man of PS3 fanboys? Insight isn't what it used to be.
(For that matter, the original post here is in a deep muddle. The headline about "when consoles lose" implies that consoles as a whole should go down, not that failures in the business often seed future development.)
Or why France doesn't have a major California wine festival.
California wines rank quite highly in contests held in France, and have for decades now. I know of at least three "sister city" relationships that celebrate the connection.
Culture is nowhere near as simple as your ideas about contempt, and your stereotypes are inaccurate as far as my own experiences go. My experience of French people (Parisians mostly) is that they're by and large extremely soft-spoken, humorous, and unfailingly polite. (They certainly are gracious next to the American flight crews on the way home; I practically get the bends coming back from those trips. It's usually a crew from Jersey.) My experiences with Japan and the Japanese convince me that they've got some weird twists of racism and sexism going on, but that they are certainly open to cool technical gadgetry from any source. Another poster mentioned the iPod. Uh-huh.
You attribute to spite reactions that aren't nearly that emotional. They don't care. The 360 was greeted by profound indifference in Japan, by all accounts.
Even if MS had a killer line up of Japanese games coming, they now have to fight against a negative perception.
Whereas if they'd waited until they had a great lineup of (they thought) Japan-friendly titles, they'd have somehow been stiffing the Japanese market, and they'd have that negative perception to overcome.
They were already in a hole. In order to get out of it they'd have had to try something different that would bring them back to the attention of potential buyers. They tried more of the same, or at most an incremental "we learned our lessons" improvement.