### the gameplay is somehow fundamentally changed in each game,
Um, Zelda:TP played like OOT with prettier graphics, took 20 hours to find the first item I hadn't already used to death in previews Zelda games. Fundamental change? Not even remotely.
### Charismatic dialogs and every notable character you come across has a personality of their own in the games.
Yeah, I just love how Thelma said the same f***ing sentence for a good ten or twenty hours, most other characters weren't any better, Midna probably being the only one exception, but even she had problems (i.e. the character gets turned around 180 degree in the last hour).
### Then there's the magic tough they put into the series that keeps it fresh.
For me Zelda:TP feld like rotten fish, sure you can spend time with it and have some fun, but its the same game I have played for the last 20 years and it doesn't exactly get more interesting with the years.
How you swing the Wiimote has no effect on Links sword movements at all, so if you swing with left or right doesn't matter at all. Most people just shake the remote to trigger a sword move, since swinging it doesn't make a difference.
### Saying the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles is a bit ignorant.
Ignorant? A look at the release list actually makes it looks like a simple fact. Nintendo will for sure do some decent games this year (Mario, Metroid, etc.), but from third parties there is little to none that gets even near Tripple-A quality, no Assassins Creed, no Bioshock, no Dead Rising, no Resident Evil 5, no GTA4, no Alan Wake, no Oblivion, etc. Now there might be hope that some more third parties jump on the Wii train in the future and will release more stuff in 2008, but seriously, I wouldn't count on it.
Currently the Wii is way behind when it comes to serious tripple-A third party support (the Prince of Persia from last year with added motion controls doesn't count) and there simply is no sign of that ever changing. The technical gap between Wii and XBox360/PS3 will only widen in the future, since with XBox360/PS3 there are still a lot of areas to explore, while Wii is pretty much the same as a Gamecube programming wise. Even worse, there aren't even games that proof that the 'motion control' really add much, sure you got Wii Sports, but in terms of classic first person or third person games there really isn't much of anything that shows what the controller is actually good for them, let alone worth completly giving up on graphical/physical/AI improvements.
### You can control each character co-operatively sure, but that doesn't nearly the standard of innovation you demand of Nintendo.
Actually I would love to see a networked cooperative Mario game from Nintendo. But since Nintendo is still avoiding network gaming for most part and I haven't seen Luigi in Galaxy yet I doubt it will happen any time soon.
### Look back and see for yourself what Nintendo has done for video games, both good and bad.
I know what Nintendo has done for video games in the past and I love them for that. The problem is, what are they doing for the games I care about today and in the coming years? So far the answer is simply: Not much at all. Nintendogs, BrainAge, Wii Sports and friends are just not the games that get me interested. Mario always was good or ever great in the past, but after NewSuperMarioBros, YoshisIsland2 and MarioSunshine I feel that Nintendo lost its edge, still ok games, but just a shallow shadow of their predecessors greatness, same with Zelda, StarFox and many other things. MetroidPrime is probably the only exception, while I don't like the Prime games at all, they at least tried to do something new with them and most people seem to be happy with the results. Might just be that I had hoped for something different/better.
Watching Miyamoto's keynote today just confirmed the issues I have with the Wii: Its a console build for non-gamers. I am no longer in the target audience for Nintendo and this is not because I changed, but because Nintendo simply changed focus.
### Unfortunately for the Wii, most developers don't understand the strengths of the Wii Remote yet. Mark my words. Pointing is where it is at.
Where is the strength in pointing? I mean, its sure a nice thing to have and useful in some games, but we had lightguns for years and they haven't really revolutionized the gaming much at all.
### Never played Contra, Ikari Warriors, etc then eh?
I don't call those things "jump'n runs", instead I call them "run and gun" games. While they share a lot of aspect with jump'n runs, they are also very different in there use of weapons. The only real coop jump'n run that I can remember was Chip & Dale on the NES, but even then, that was just two player at once, not five or more over network. So while there have been some coop jump'n runs in the past, its not exactly an overcrowded genre, especially not on the big console, which don't really get much decent 2D games to begin with (well, 2.5D or however one wants to call it here).
### So you are saying that a tennis game where you cannot move the player isn't innovative. Every tennis game I remember playing allowed you to move the player.
Tennis games were the player moves around automatically isn't something new, Jimmy Conners Pro Tennis Tour on the SNES had an option for that and I think some tennis games that I played on the C64 had that as well. The thing is it was on option there, while its the only way to play Wii Sports Tennis. Wii Sport Tennis has some new controls, but is otherwise deliberately dumped down.
### Wii Sports Bowling is the greatest bowling game ever made thanks to Nintendo innovation.
Yes, Wii Sports bowling is one game that is a perfect fit for the Wiimote and wouldn't work much at all with a classic controller. However for how many games do bowling controls work? Not very many.
### I will go on the record right now, and say that Little Big Planet is nothing more than Mario Vs DK 2: March of the Minis with tarted up graphics.
From what I understand Little Big Planet is a multiplayer cooperative jump'n run, while MarioVsDK2 is more a Lemmings inspired puzzle game. Now jump'n runs alone are not new, but I never ever played a cooperative multiplayer one, let alone on the big consoles.
### I have yet to see this Sony innovation you speak of.
Well, that MMO-network thing that Sony will do look pretty interesting, you might call it a SecondLife ripoff, but they are at least trying something new. While Nintendos online offering isn't exactly doing much of anything at the moment. I am not claiming that Sony is a large innovator, but when I see on Nintendos release list with yet another Mario, yet another Metroid and yet another Zelda I just can't get excited, its the same stuff I already played for the last 20 years, LittleBigPlanet on the other side is exactly what Nintendo games these days should look like, innovative, fun and *not* dumped down.
### So when he says "the WII is crap" what he's really saying is that "we're pissed that they optimized this for something other than controlling our game,
No, thats really not what he is complaining about. Unless I overlooked something he never even mentioned input devices at all. Beside the Wiimote would probably superior or at least equal to something like a mouse, since it allows object manipulation in 3D, not just 2D. The controller is really the least of the Wiis problems.
The real problem is the lack of Wiis GPU and CPU power. The Wii simply can't keep up with some of the improvements that todays games try to achieve. Better AI won't work without some spare CPU cycles, larger worlds won't work with a bit more RAM and lack of shader support certainly won't improve the graphics either. The Wii basically locks down the developers five years behind the rest, that of course isn't something to celebrate about, since it makes a lot of games impossible to create on the Wii.
Unlike Nintendo wants you to believe gaming innovation hasn't stopped, its still happening, not in such big leaps as when we went from 2D to 3D, but its still there and often something that takes some power to use. A Katamari or a Shadow of the Colossus wouldn't have worked on a Playstation1 or on an N64 and this generation will have similarly innovative games as well which just couldn't work on a last gen console, which the Wii however basically is.
As a recent example have a look at LittleBigPlanet on PS3, that game looks fantastic, but not in the first person shooter kind of way, its a cooperative multiplayer jump'n run after all, it however shows very well how one can make some creative use of additional computing power, something that will either be a impossible or a lot harder on the Wii, since there simply is no additional power.
To throw in some random quotes from Steve Nix from id Software: "But our new stuff, the next-generation stuff we're doing, there's no way that it could run effectively on the Wii.". Now this is just id Software, but I bet it doesn't look much different for Epic, Crytek and a whole lot of other developers, the Wii simply can't do what those guys are doing and that is certainly not a good thing.
Yes they have, but they also failed to do so for the complete last generation of consoles, i.e. their last big innovations where years ago and true innovation is happening elsewhere these days. Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari and Resident Evil 4 where the games that had an impact in the last years, none of them Nintendo property. The only area where Nintendo did innovate where the non-games or casual gamer games, they where nicely done, had some successful marketing, but where void of almost any depth. Those puppies in Nintendogs are cute, but the gameplay is totally lacking in that game. Same with Brainage, while interesting, it really isn't much more then what you can get in the dozens as Flashgame on the internet, it surely is nicely packaged, but its not the game which I will care about in a year, let alone in five or ten.
Nintendo certainly found yet again a niche to make some money, but they are no longer those that show others how to write good games. Instead they fail to even keep up with what has been standard in the industry for years (lack of speech in Zelda:TP, lack of orchestral music, seamless terrain, etc.).
### I guess it depends what makes a good game. Tetris was great, and didn't require complicated AI.
And Tetris provides the next-gen gaming experience he has been waiting for exactly how? Just because there are games that are fun without AI, doesn't mean that games with AI are any less fun, even for casual gamers, just look at The Sims.
### The problem is that this complaint comes from a guy who just a year ago complained about "next gen" being too much about pretty graphics.
Just because he might have complaining about to much focus on graphics doesn't mean that he thinks its a good to just completly give up on graphics, which the Wii however pretty much did. The problem with the Wii is that Nintendo completly gave up on advancing the hardware, they upped the Mhz a bit, added a bit more RAM, but not even close to the amount that would have been needed to keep up with the advancements in hardware that have been made since the Gamecube. In some aspects (lack of shaders) the Wii is even worse then the XBox1 and that just can't be a good thing.
Beside, more power also means more AI, more physics and other stuff that actually matters a lot for the gameplay and the fun. Have a look at LittleBigPlanet on PS3 for a nice example for how to but all that new power to some good use. When I see games as good looking (not just gfx, but also gameplay) as LittleBigPlanet I just can't get excited about un-Anti-Aliased Miis running around on a tennis court without a way to actually control there movement.
### Yes. And so does everyone else. The sales of Mario rehashes, Virtual Console style stuff on Wii and XBox is through the roof - much higher than any expectation.
Do you have any numbers on this? Sure, the VC and XBoxLive do sell stuff, but I think a large part of that is because it is cheap, not because the games are old rehashes. A bit nostalgia is always a nice thing, but Zelda:TP already had for to much of it and felt like a rehash, not like a good game and my interest in rebuying all the old NES and SNES is also rather limited.
### Gran Turismo (same game, same cars, SHINIER SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS, same lawnmower engines, MORE LEAVES ON THE TREES).
GT is a simulation which tries to be realistic, so its natural that with each release it gets a little closer to its goal, they can't just be innovative and add turtle shells, since that would totally break what the game is about. That said, its really time for a damage model in GT, kind of miss that since GT3.
### Modern games are only an artform
Have a look at LittleBigPlanet for the PS3, that game looks amazing on a lot of levels and its exactly the game that I would hope Nintendo would do, but they simply don't do innovative stuff any more, instead we get a tennis game in which you can't even control the player, good for capturing the casual gamers, boring for everybody else. A motion controller is a nice thing, but if all Nintendo does with it is a bunch of casual gamer games and yet another Mario, Zelda, Metroid, than I seriously couldn't care less.
While I agree that the "Yes, No" questions, where only one is a real answer and the other a dead-end are pretty stupid, I don't think that a branch need to have meaningful content, I think a lot of interactivity and immersion actually comes from not having meaningful choices. By that I don't mean the "Yes, No" type answers, but answers that both fit the situation equally without really having much impact on the overall story.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prohpecy was great in that aspect, while the overall story was almost completly linear, the gameplay and the dialog still gave the player a lot of freedom on what exactly he wants to do or say, it all were rather simple things, you might at one point take a taxi or a subway, you might hide a knife in the trashcan or just throw it away, you might answer the phone or just leave it ringing. None of those things were game-breakers, taking the taxi instead of the subway wouldn't kill you, it simply was a different thing to do and both accomplished the same thing, just as they would do in the real world.
In contrast for example Jade Empire had very meaningful choices, choices that mattered, but I found them extremely annoying, since they simply didn't fit. You always had a good, bad and neutral dialog choice and whenever choosing one I thought much more about what the right one would be then what my character would say. The dialog simply felt extremely forced since it was clear that some story-writer had to sad down and write good, bad and neutral questions/answers for each and every thing.
Now I don't mind having meaningful choices, but they have to be implemented in such a way that there is no right and wrong choice, since as soon as it gets obvious that there is a right and a wrong answer the player ends up trying to out-guess the storywriters intention instead of just interaction with the game world. Answers should also not just be black or white, since that similarly destroys the immersion by automatically leading to dialog that feels out of character. All that said, good dialog is of course easier to write in an linear adventure game then in a non-linear RPG, but for a better story I wouldn't mind to much giving up a bit of gaming freedom.
### The most useless part of a review is the grade, it says absolutely nothing,
I disagree, ratings give you a simple value to compare different games of similar genres. Sure, it doesn't make sense to compare a The Sims rating with a GTA one, since the games are just vastly different, but comparing GTA vs Crackdown is perfectly doable. Ratings also give you a very direct way to see what the reviewer thought of a game, when the review text just mentioned that the graphics are "good", how good is that "good", is that a RE4 "good" or just an average "good"? A 10/10 in graphics on the other side easily tells me that its among the best to expect on a console.
Beside pages from this, ratings are important for sites like Metacritic which would be rather hard to use without a final rating. When I want to get an impression from a game I search for the reviews that gave it the highest score and those reviews that gave it the lowest, thus I get a good overview of how somebody who likes the game views it vs somebody who doesn't like it. If there would just be text things would get rather hard to find the right reviews.
All that said, rating numbers are of course heavily flawed, many reviewers rate almost every game in a 70-90/100 area and don't make much use of the rest of the scale, another issues is that ratings are often tinted by non-game related issues, like price, if it is a port of an old game and such, which however might not matter at all for having fun with the game, especially since price can lower over time and as long as I don't already know the game it is still 'new' for me. Ratings are also a one dimensional scale, while you really might one a multidimensional, i.e. there are many games out there that are great by concept, but also heavily flawed in implementation, those however just end up in the 70-80% region, which tells little about there flaws or great concept, but just tosses them together with all those games that have an uninteresting concept but flawlessly implemented.
With all the flaws I however still consider ratings far more useful then harmful.
### Why would I buy this when I can get a Supercard?
This is a thing you buy when you *can't* get a Supercard. You know, not everybody has a credit card, feels good about buying things in some shop in HongKong or has a specialized video game store that actually sells Supercard near his home. Actually getting a Supercard or a similar device is by far the hardest part when one wants to get started with homebrew stuff. This card from Datel on the other side actually has a change to end up in a shop near your, so you can just walk in and buy one, that way it might end up in the hands of people that didn't even know about homebrew before buying it, which a Supercard never would.
### So I suppose these same users who real operating systems have failed have bought and tried every newer, better operating system they could in an effort to find something suitable?
The problem is there are only three OSs that are usable, Windows, MacOSX and all that Unix stuff (Linux, BSD, etc.). All the academic OS indeed provide a lot of cool features, they however also lack a ton of stuff that people expect for there daily work. And also trying a new OS is hard, almost impossible for a casual user, while using a web application is extremely trivial, even easier then installing a application on a current day OS.
Maybe things will change a bit, since virtualization makes it easier to run multiple OS at the same time, but a browser based application is simply hard to beat in terms of ease of use, since its literally just a single click away, while everything else is a lot more complicated.
Its not a whole OS, but the browser is more an more replacing the whole higher level of an OS, i.e. GUI stuff, file handling, text search, etc.
### What archaic piece of junk are you running anyway? Hard to clone? Setting aside the fact that the "dd" utility has been around for eons,
dd, yeah, great, and that solves the problem of different hardware exactly how, different partition sizes, etc? How can I use it to just copy a single application? Answer: I can't. dd is nothing more then a simple low level tool that copies data around bit by bit, it doesn't allow you to replicate an installation of one machine on another in a working state.
With a browser based application/OS I have a sandbox environment with which I can instantly on multiple platforms the exact same work environment with almost zero effort, all it takes is a simple URL.
### And of course let's not forget the many Virtual Machines in existence that allow you to clone or snapshot OSs within a virtual environment.
Virtual Machines are nice, only two problems: Slow and crippled, try running a game in them. Expensive: I don't know any OS that comes out of the box with an easy to use setup for virtual machines, on the other side, almost every OS comes with a browser. And yes, a browser is crippled too, thats however the point, even though its extremely crippled, it still performs a lot of tasks much better then what the real OS provides.
### Sounds like you're confusing an OS with a word processor.
No, the point is word processor running on X11/Gtk/QT vs world processor running in browser, currently it looks like the browser is winning and X11/Gtk/QT and friends are dieing a slow death. Not yet for word processors or graphic tools, but webmail is already in heavy use and I wouldn't be supprised if more people use GMail then POP3/IMap and a separate client.
### The find and locate utilities in *nix,
Have you actually ever used them? Trying to search through my mailbox takes an awful lot of time with them, no surprise, if I find/grep through may mail without having an index file that is pretty much expected. GMail on the other side gives me almost instant results, a Maildir simply can't compete in that area, its not even close.
The sad part about all those web based "OSs" is that they show that the real OSs pretty much completly failed to keep up with the demand of the users. Maintenance of a real OS has become such a huge issue that at least some people prefer to stick with a Javascript/DHTML hack of a thing that runs in a browser who never was build to be an operating system or run applications in the first place and the irony is that those apps indeed often run better, build in version tracking, easy group collaboration, fast search and other things often work out-of-the-box in those web OSs while they can be a huge pain to get up and running with a real OS and a real application.
Now of course a web OS can't replace the low-level stuff of real OS, the browser after all has to run on something but in terms of higher level functions, like GUI and such, web based OSs really do quite a good job, which really is sad, since a real OS should be able to do all those jobs a heck of a lot better, but they simply don't in practice. Real OS development has pretty much staled in the last ten years from a users point of view and everything that was broken back then still is (version tracking is non-existant, no proper undelete, manual save, no quick search, hard to clone a OS onto another machine, etc.).
### An Xbox with XBMC is great but an Xbox360 with XBMC360 would be able to play HD resolution media,
Question: Isn't a large part of the video decoding infrastructure on Linux based up on Windows dlls? And wouldn't those fail to work on an XBox360 due to lack of an x86 prozessor? That alone should make a XBox360 not all that attractive as media center, since it can't play half as much as an x86 system.
### If it's not that big of a deal, then why is Nintendo having a great success with their virtual console offerings?
Thats not backward compability, at least not in the PS3-sense. I can't stick a NES or SNES module in the Wii and work, instead I have to rebuy the games I already own.
Maybe its just me, but I found the first 10-20mins of HalfLife2 to be *by far* the best part of the entire game. It was good especially because you didn't have a gun and because you really hadn't all that much to do. You where after all in a city ruled by Combine, so you had to follow their orders and couldn't just wildly run around as you please. The beginning of HalfLife2 was great because it felt realistic, because it made sense, something I can't really say about the rest of the game. At the point where you get the gun the game fell pretty much apart for me and turned into yet another random run-and-gun game, maybe prettier then other, but not really any more interesting. There where a few other good cutscenes later on, but the core gameplay lacked any of the realism and feeling that was established in those first minutes. I would absolutely love a 'first person shooter' where you just run around like in those 10-20mins for all of the game, add a bit more interaction into the mix and you could end up with an awesome first-person-adventure kind of game, DeusEx already kind of did that and I would love to see a few more games in that direction, maybe with even less guns.
It is not that uncommon that you end up with stuff flashing on the screen for a fraction of a second in game programming. It can for example easily happen when try to place a sprite on the screen, but only initialize its positions position value after having gone through the draw loop once, i.e. something like this:
1. call update() to handle game events, one of them triggers the creation of a new object A 2. call draw() to draw the current game state 3. call update() and only now finalize the initialization of object A now 4. call draw() to redraw the screen again
With that code you would get some object flashing up at some random position. Other easy causes for random flashing could be texture loading that happens in a separate thread, since the game doesn't wait for the texture to be fully loaded, it will use a placeholder texture for the first few frames of a new scene till the real texture is loaded (see for example Halo2 on XBox). If that placeholder texture happens to not be specified the renderer might just use whatever texture is just in memory and so you would get the desired effect of textures appearing in the wrong places. Double buffering can also lead to all kinds of subliminal errors.
So in short, there are plenty of ways to get subliminal errors in game programming, if Konami did this by error or intentionally is of course a different question, but those kind of errors are not that uncommon.
### Seriously though, I like the basic idea, but the system does add an extra point of failure.
Does it? Its not totally fool proof since the original server hosting the link file could still go down, but thats not an extra point of failure, since its no different then the server going down when trying to download the real file from it in the first place. Once you have the Metalink file everything should be fine.
### Bittorrent already does this just about as effectively as this idea will.
If the tracker goes down or there happens to be a lack of seeds the link is dead. With Metalink on the other side a client could automatically use *all* ways to get a file, not just a single tracker or server, but multiple http servers, P2P networks and torrent all at the same time, if one goes down there might still be plenty of others left.
### Once again, bittorrent is just as easy. And its OS agnostic.
But not protocol or server agnostic.
### To me, this looks like a solution in search of a problem.
Ever tried to download a file from Sourceforge or any other server with a dozens of mirrors which you have to manually select? That is exactly the problem that Metalink solves, its a standard way to show where the mirrors are, completly independent of the protocol in use. Thus it allows the client to automatically select them or use them all at the same time for faster download, no more stupid manual mirror selection just to find out that the host is down or slow as hell.
Metalink doesn't try to replace bittorrent, quite the opposite, it tries to provide a way to simply bundle all links that lead to the same file, torrent included.
Isn't the official definition of space something like 100km above earth? This missile reached 150km, a good bit above that. Still along way to make it into a stable orbit, but it is still 'space'.
Slashdot Mirror
### the gameplay is somehow fundamentally changed in each game,
Um, Zelda:TP played like OOT with prettier graphics, took 20 hours to find the first item I hadn't already used to death in previews Zelda games. Fundamental change? Not even remotely.
### Charismatic dialogs and every notable character you come across has a personality of their own in the games.
Yeah, I just love how Thelma said the same f***ing sentence for a good ten or twenty hours, most other characters weren't any better, Midna probably being the only one exception, but even she had problems (i.e. the character gets turned around 180 degree in the last hour).
### Then there's the magic tough they put into the series that keeps it fresh.
For me Zelda:TP feld like rotten fish, sure you can spend time with it and have some fun, but its the same game I have played for the last 20 years and it doesn't exactly get more interesting with the years.
How you swing the Wiimote has no effect on Links sword movements at all, so if you swing with left or right doesn't matter at all. Most people just shake the remote to trigger a sword move, since swinging it doesn't make a difference.
### Saying the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles is a bit ignorant.
Ignorant? A look at the release list actually makes it looks like a simple fact. Nintendo will for sure do some decent games this year (Mario, Metroid, etc.), but from third parties there is little to none that gets even near Tripple-A quality, no Assassins Creed, no Bioshock, no Dead Rising, no Resident Evil 5, no GTA4, no Alan Wake, no Oblivion, etc. Now there might be hope that some more third parties jump on the Wii train in the future and will release more stuff in 2008, but seriously, I wouldn't count on it.
Currently the Wii is way behind when it comes to serious tripple-A third party support (the Prince of Persia from last year with added motion controls doesn't count) and there simply is no sign of that ever changing. The technical gap between Wii and XBox360/PS3 will only widen in the future, since with XBox360/PS3 there are still a lot of areas to explore, while Wii is pretty much the same as a Gamecube programming wise. Even worse, there aren't even games that proof that the 'motion control' really add much, sure you got Wii Sports, but in terms of classic first person or third person games there really isn't much of anything that shows what the controller is actually good for them, let alone worth completly giving up on graphical/physical/AI improvements.
### You can control each character co-operatively sure, but that doesn't nearly the standard of innovation you demand of Nintendo.
Actually I would love to see a networked cooperative Mario game from Nintendo. But since Nintendo is still avoiding network gaming for most part and I haven't seen Luigi in Galaxy yet I doubt it will happen any time soon.
### Look back and see for yourself what Nintendo has done for video games, both good and bad.
I know what Nintendo has done for video games in the past and I love them for that. The problem is, what are they doing for the games I care about today and in the coming years? So far the answer is simply: Not much at all. Nintendogs, BrainAge, Wii Sports and friends are just not the games that get me interested. Mario always was good or ever great in the past, but after NewSuperMarioBros, YoshisIsland2 and MarioSunshine I feel that Nintendo lost its edge, still ok games, but just a shallow shadow of their predecessors greatness, same with Zelda, StarFox and many other things. MetroidPrime is probably the only exception, while I don't like the Prime games at all, they at least tried to do something new with them and most people seem to be happy with the results. Might just be that I had hoped for something different/better.
Watching Miyamoto's keynote today just confirmed the issues I have with the Wii: Its a console build for non-gamers. I am no longer in the target audience for Nintendo and this is not because I changed, but because Nintendo simply changed focus.
### Unfortunately for the Wii, most developers don't understand the strengths of the Wii Remote yet. Mark my words. Pointing is where it is at.
Where is the strength in pointing? I mean, its sure a nice thing to have and useful in some games, but we had lightguns for years and they haven't really revolutionized the gaming much at all.
### Never played Contra, Ikari Warriors, etc then eh?
I don't call those things "jump'n runs", instead I call them "run and gun" games. While they share a lot of aspect with jump'n runs, they are also very different in there use of weapons. The only real coop jump'n run that I can remember was Chip & Dale on the NES, but even then, that was just two player at once, not five or more over network. So while there have been some coop jump'n runs in the past, its not exactly an overcrowded genre, especially not on the big console, which don't really get much decent 2D games to begin with (well, 2.5D or however one wants to call it here).
### So you are saying that a tennis game where you cannot move the player isn't innovative. Every tennis game I remember playing allowed you to move the player.
Tennis games were the player moves around automatically isn't something new, Jimmy Conners Pro Tennis Tour on the SNES had an option for that and I think some tennis games that I played on the C64 had that as well. The thing is it was on option there, while its the only way to play Wii Sports Tennis. Wii Sport Tennis has some new controls, but is otherwise deliberately dumped down.
### Wii Sports Bowling is the greatest bowling game ever made thanks to Nintendo innovation.
Yes, Wii Sports bowling is one game that is a perfect fit for the Wiimote and wouldn't work much at all with a classic controller. However for how many games do bowling controls work? Not very many.
### I will go on the record right now, and say that Little Big Planet is nothing more than Mario Vs DK 2: March of the Minis with tarted up graphics.
From what I understand Little Big Planet is a multiplayer cooperative jump'n run, while MarioVsDK2 is more a Lemmings inspired puzzle game. Now jump'n runs alone are not new, but I never ever played a cooperative multiplayer one, let alone on the big consoles.
### I have yet to see this Sony innovation you speak of.
Well, that MMO-network thing that Sony will do look pretty interesting, you might call it a SecondLife ripoff, but they are at least trying something new. While Nintendos online offering isn't exactly doing much of anything at the moment. I am not claiming that Sony is a large innovator, but when I see on Nintendos release list with yet another Mario, yet another Metroid and yet another Zelda I just can't get excited, its the same stuff I already played for the last 20 years, LittleBigPlanet on the other side is exactly what Nintendo games these days should look like, innovative, fun and *not* dumped down.
### So when he says "the WII is crap" what he's really saying is that "we're pissed that they optimized this for something other than controlling our game,
No, thats really not what he is complaining about. Unless I overlooked something he never even mentioned input devices at all. Beside the Wiimote would probably superior or at least equal to something like a mouse, since it allows object manipulation in 3D, not just 2D. The controller is really the least of the Wiis problems.
The real problem is the lack of Wiis GPU and CPU power. The Wii simply can't keep up with some of the improvements that todays games try to achieve. Better AI won't work without some spare CPU cycles, larger worlds won't work with a bit more RAM and lack of shader support certainly won't improve the graphics either. The Wii basically locks down the developers five years behind the rest, that of course isn't something to celebrate about, since it makes a lot of games impossible to create on the Wii.
Unlike Nintendo wants you to believe gaming innovation hasn't stopped, its still happening, not in such big leaps as when we went from 2D to 3D, but its still there and often something that takes some power to use. A Katamari or a Shadow of the Colossus wouldn't have worked on a Playstation1 or on an N64 and this generation will have similarly innovative games as well which just couldn't work on a last gen console, which the Wii however basically is.
As a recent example have a look at LittleBigPlanet on PS3, that game looks fantastic, but not in the first person shooter kind of way, its a cooperative multiplayer jump'n run after all, it however shows very well how one can make some creative use of additional computing power, something that will either be a impossible or a lot harder on the Wii, since there simply is no additional power.
To throw in some random quotes from Steve Nix from id Software: "But our new stuff, the next-generation stuff we're doing, there's no way that it could run effectively on the Wii.". Now this is just id Software, but I bet it doesn't look much different for Epic, Crytek and a whole lot of other developers, the Wii simply can't do what those guys are doing and that is certainly not a good thing.
### And has done for decades
Yes they have, but they also failed to do so for the complete last generation of consoles, i.e. their last big innovations where years ago and true innovation is happening elsewhere these days. Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari and Resident Evil 4 where the games that had an impact in the last years, none of them Nintendo property. The only area where Nintendo did innovate where the non-games or casual gamer games, they where nicely done, had some successful marketing, but where void of almost any depth. Those puppies in Nintendogs are cute, but the gameplay is totally lacking in that game. Same with Brainage, while interesting, it really isn't much more then what you can get in the dozens as Flashgame on the internet, it surely is nicely packaged, but its not the game which I will care about in a year, let alone in five or ten.
Nintendo certainly found yet again a niche to make some money, but they are no longer those that show others how to write good games. Instead they fail to even keep up with what has been standard in the industry for years (lack of speech in Zelda:TP, lack of orchestral music, seamless terrain, etc.).
### I guess it depends what makes a good game. Tetris was great, and didn't require complicated AI.
And Tetris provides the next-gen gaming experience he has been waiting for exactly how? Just because there are games that are fun without AI, doesn't mean that games with AI are any less fun, even for casual gamers, just look at The Sims.
### The problem is that this complaint comes from a guy who just a year ago complained about "next gen" being too much about pretty graphics.
Just because he might have complaining about to much focus on graphics doesn't mean that he thinks its a good to just completly give up on graphics, which the Wii however pretty much did. The problem with the Wii is that Nintendo completly gave up on advancing the hardware, they upped the Mhz a bit, added a bit more RAM, but not even close to the amount that would have been needed to keep up with the advancements in hardware that have been made since the Gamecube. In some aspects (lack of shaders) the Wii is even worse then the XBox1 and that just can't be a good thing.
Beside, more power also means more AI, more physics and other stuff that actually matters a lot for the gameplay and the fun. Have a look at LittleBigPlanet on PS3 for a nice example for how to but all that new power to some good use. When I see games as good looking (not just gfx, but also gameplay) as LittleBigPlanet I just can't get excited about un-Anti-Aliased Miis running around on a tennis court without a way to actually control there movement.
### Yes. And so does everyone else. The sales of Mario rehashes, Virtual Console style stuff on Wii and XBox is through the roof - much higher than any expectation.
Do you have any numbers on this? Sure, the VC and XBoxLive do sell stuff, but I think a large part of that is because it is cheap, not because the games are old rehashes. A bit nostalgia is always a nice thing, but Zelda:TP already had for to much of it and felt like a rehash, not like a good game and my interest in rebuying all the old NES and SNES is also rather limited.
### Gran Turismo (same game, same cars, SHINIER SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS, same lawnmower engines, MORE LEAVES ON THE TREES).
GT is a simulation which tries to be realistic, so its natural that with each release it gets a little closer to its goal, they can't just be innovative and add turtle shells, since that would totally break what the game is about. That said, its really time for a damage model in GT, kind of miss that since GT3.
### Modern games are only an artform
Have a look at LittleBigPlanet for the PS3, that game looks amazing on a lot of levels and its exactly the game that I would hope Nintendo would do, but they simply don't do innovative stuff any more, instead we get a tennis game in which you can't even control the player, good for capturing the casual gamers, boring for everybody else.
A motion controller is a nice thing, but if all Nintendo does with it is a bunch of casual gamer games and yet another Mario, Zelda, Metroid, than I seriously couldn't care less.
While I agree that the "Yes, No" questions, where only one is a real answer and the other a dead-end are pretty stupid, I don't think that a branch need to have meaningful content, I think a lot of interactivity and immersion actually comes from not having meaningful choices. By that I don't mean the "Yes, No" type answers, but answers that both fit the situation equally without really having much impact on the overall story.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prohpecy was great in that aspect, while the overall story was almost completly linear, the gameplay and the dialog still gave the player a lot of freedom on what exactly he wants to do or say, it all were rather simple things, you might at one point take a taxi or a subway, you might hide a knife in the trashcan or just throw it away, you might answer the phone or just leave it ringing. None of those things were game-breakers, taking the taxi instead of the subway wouldn't kill you, it simply was a different thing to do and both accomplished the same thing, just as they would do in the real world.
In contrast for example Jade Empire had very meaningful choices, choices that mattered, but I found them extremely annoying, since they simply didn't fit. You always had a good, bad and neutral dialog choice and whenever choosing one I thought much more about what the right one would be then what my character would say. The dialog simply felt extremely forced since it was clear that some story-writer had to sad down and write good, bad and neutral questions/answers for each and every thing.
Now I don't mind having meaningful choices, but they have to be implemented in such a way that there is no right and wrong choice, since as soon as it gets obvious that there is a right and a wrong answer the player ends up trying to out-guess the storywriters intention instead of just interaction with the game world. Answers should also not just be black or white, since that similarly destroys the immersion by automatically leading to dialog that feels out of character. All that said, good dialog is of course easier to write in an linear adventure game then in a non-linear RPG, but for a better story I wouldn't mind to much giving up a bit of gaming freedom.
### The most useless part of a review is the grade, it says absolutely nothing,
I disagree, ratings give you a simple value to compare different games of similar genres. Sure, it doesn't make sense to compare a The Sims rating with a GTA one, since the games are just vastly different, but comparing GTA vs Crackdown is perfectly doable. Ratings also give you a very direct way to see what the reviewer thought of a game, when the review text just mentioned that the graphics are "good", how good is that "good", is that a RE4 "good" or just an average "good"? A 10/10 in graphics on the other side easily tells me that its among the best to expect on a console.
Beside pages from this, ratings are important for sites like Metacritic which would be rather hard to use without a final rating. When I want to get an impression from a game I search for the reviews that gave it the highest score and those reviews that gave it the lowest, thus I get a good overview of how somebody who likes the game views it vs somebody who doesn't like it. If there would just be text things would get rather hard to find the right reviews.
All that said, rating numbers are of course heavily flawed, many reviewers rate almost every game in a 70-90/100 area and don't make much use of the rest of the scale, another issues is that ratings are often tinted by non-game related issues, like price, if it is a port of an old game and such, which however might not matter at all for having fun with the game, especially since price can lower over time and as long as I don't already know the game it is still 'new' for me. Ratings are also a one dimensional scale, while you really might one a multidimensional, i.e. there are many games out there that are great by concept, but also heavily flawed in implementation, those however just end up in the 70-80% region, which tells little about there flaws or great concept, but just tosses them together with all those games that have an uninteresting concept but flawlessly implemented.
With all the flaws I however still consider ratings far more useful then harmful.
### Why would I buy this when I can get a Supercard?
This is a thing you buy when you *can't* get a Supercard. You know, not everybody has a credit card, feels good about buying things in some shop in HongKong or has a specialized video game store that actually sells Supercard near his home. Actually getting a Supercard or a similar device is by far the hardest part when one wants to get started with homebrew stuff. This card from Datel on the other side actually has a change to end up in a shop near your, so you can just walk in and buy one, that way it might end up in the hands of people that didn't even know about homebrew before buying it, which a Supercard never would.
### So I suppose these same users who real operating systems have failed have bought and tried every newer, better operating system they could in an effort to find something suitable?
The problem is there are only three OSs that are usable, Windows, MacOSX and all that Unix stuff (Linux, BSD, etc.). All the academic OS indeed provide a lot of cool features, they however also lack a ton of stuff that people expect for there daily work. And also trying a new OS is hard, almost impossible for a casual user, while using a web application is extremely trivial, even easier then installing a application on a current day OS.
Maybe things will change a bit, since virtualization makes it easier to run multiple OS at the same time, but a browser based application is simply hard to beat in terms of ease of use, since its literally just a single click away, while everything else is a lot more complicated.
### Er, then it's not an OS.
Its not a whole OS, but the browser is more an more replacing the whole higher level of an OS, i.e. GUI stuff, file handling, text search, etc.
### What archaic piece of junk are you running anyway? Hard to clone? Setting aside the fact that the "dd" utility has been around for eons,
dd, yeah, great, and that solves the problem of different hardware exactly how, different partition sizes, etc? How can I use it to just copy a single application? Answer: I can't. dd is nothing more then a simple low level tool that copies data around bit by bit, it doesn't allow you to replicate an installation of one machine on another in a working state.
With a browser based application/OS I have a sandbox environment with which I can instantly on multiple platforms the exact same work environment with almost zero effort, all it takes is a simple URL.
### And of course let's not forget the many Virtual Machines in existence that allow you to clone or snapshot OSs within a virtual environment.
Virtual Machines are nice, only two problems: Slow and crippled, try running a game in them. Expensive: I don't know any OS that comes out of the box with an easy to use setup for virtual machines, on the other side, almost every OS comes with a browser. And yes, a browser is crippled too, thats however the point, even though its extremely crippled, it still performs a lot of tasks much better then what the real OS provides.
### Sounds like you're confusing an OS with a word processor.
No, the point is word processor running on X11/Gtk/QT vs world processor running in browser, currently it looks like the browser is winning and X11/Gtk/QT and friends are dieing a slow death. Not yet for word processors or graphic tools, but webmail is already in heavy use and I wouldn't be supprised if more people use GMail then POP3/IMap and a separate client.
### The find and locate utilities in *nix,
Have you actually ever used them? Trying to search through my mailbox takes an awful lot of time with them, no surprise, if I find/grep through may mail without having an index file that is pretty much expected. GMail on the other side gives me almost instant results, a Maildir simply can't compete in that area, its not even close.
The sad part about all those web based "OSs" is that they show that the real OSs pretty much completly failed to keep up with the demand of the users. Maintenance of a real OS has become such a huge issue that at least some people prefer to stick with a Javascript/DHTML hack of a thing that runs in a browser who never was build to be an operating system or run applications in the first place and the irony is that those apps indeed often run better, build in version tracking, easy group collaboration, fast search and other things often work out-of-the-box in those web OSs while they can be a huge pain to get up and running with a real OS and a real application.
Now of course a web OS can't replace the low-level stuff of real OS, the browser after all has to run on something but in terms of higher level functions, like GUI and such, web based OSs really do quite a good job, which really is sad, since a real OS should be able to do all those jobs a heck of a lot better, but they simply don't in practice. Real OS development has pretty much staled in the last ten years from a users point of view and everything that was broken back then still is (version tracking is non-existant, no proper undelete, manual save, no quick search, hard to clone a OS onto another machine, etc.).
If you want Monkey Island and all the other games on the DS, just buy a DS flashcard and download ScummvmDS.
### An Xbox with XBMC is great but an Xbox360 with XBMC360 would be able to play HD resolution media,
Question: Isn't a large part of the video decoding infrastructure on Linux based up on Windows dlls? And wouldn't those fail to work on an XBox360 due to lack of an x86 prozessor? That alone should make a XBox360 not all that attractive as media center, since it can't play half as much as an x86 system.
### If it's not that big of a deal, then why is Nintendo having a great success with their virtual console offerings?
Thats not backward compability, at least not in the PS3-sense. I can't stick a NES or SNES module in the Wii and work, instead I have to rebuy the games I already own.
Maybe its just me, but I found the first 10-20mins of HalfLife2 to be *by far* the best part of the entire game. It was good especially because you didn't have a gun and because you really hadn't all that much to do. You where after all in a city ruled by Combine, so you had to follow their orders and couldn't just wildly run around as you please. The beginning of HalfLife2 was great because it felt realistic, because it made sense, something I can't really say about the rest of the game. At the point where you get the gun the game fell pretty much apart for me and turned into yet another random run-and-gun game, maybe prettier then other, but not really any more interesting. There where a few other good cutscenes later on, but the core gameplay lacked any of the realism and feeling that was established in those first minutes. I would absolutely love a 'first person shooter' where you just run around like in those 10-20mins for all of the game, add a bit more interaction into the mix and you could end up with an awesome first-person-adventure kind of game, DeusEx already kind of did that and I would love to see a few more games in that direction, maybe with even less guns.
It is not that uncommon that you end up with stuff flashing on the screen for a fraction of a second in game programming. It can for example easily happen when try to place a sprite on the screen, but only initialize its positions position value after having gone through the draw loop once, i.e. something like this:
1. call update() to handle game events, one of them triggers the creation of a new object A
2. call draw() to draw the current game state
3. call update() and only now finalize the initialization of object A now
4. call draw() to redraw the screen again
With that code you would get some object flashing up at some random position. Other easy causes for random flashing could be texture loading that happens in a separate thread, since the game doesn't wait for the texture to be fully loaded, it will use a placeholder texture for the first few frames of a new scene till the real texture is loaded (see for example Halo2 on XBox). If that placeholder texture happens to not be specified the renderer might just use whatever texture is just in memory and so you would get the desired effect of textures appearing in the wrong places. Double buffering can also lead to all kinds of subliminal errors.
So in short, there are plenty of ways to get subliminal errors in game programming, if Konami did this by error or intentionally is of course a different question, but those kind of errors are not that uncommon.
### Seriously though, I like the basic idea, but the system does add an extra point of failure.
Does it? Its not totally fool proof since the original server hosting the link file could still go down, but thats not an extra point of failure, since its no different then the server going down when trying to download the real file from it in the first place. Once you have the Metalink file everything should be fine.
### Bittorrent already does this just about as effectively as this idea will.
If the tracker goes down or there happens to be a lack of seeds the link is dead. With Metalink on the other side a client could automatically use *all* ways to get a file, not just a single tracker or server, but multiple http servers, P2P networks and torrent all at the same time, if one goes down there might still be plenty of others left.
### Once again, bittorrent is just as easy. And its OS agnostic.
But not protocol or server agnostic.
### To me, this looks like a solution in search of a problem.
Ever tried to download a file from Sourceforge or any other server with a dozens of mirrors which you have to manually select? That is exactly the problem that Metalink solves, its a standard way to show where the mirrors are, completly independent of the protocol in use. Thus it allows the client to automatically select them or use them all at the same time for faster download, no more stupid manual mirror selection just to find out that the host is down or slow as hell.
Metalink doesn't try to replace bittorrent, quite the opposite, it tries to provide a way to simply bundle all links that lead to the same file, torrent included.
Isn't the official definition of space something like 100km above earth? This missile reached 150km, a good bit above that. Still along way to make it into a stable orbit, but it is still 'space'.