Writing a game is very very differnt than writing more traditional mediums. Each has their own language and style. I am always leary when I hear that "so and so" name writer has been brought in to "write" a videogame. It's also kind of sad that the videgame industry feels that they need to hire this outside talent rather than trust that people who make games for a living actually know how to make games.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that this started after it was hyped that Valve hired a writer to do the story for Half-Life. Of course, that depended on the fact that Half-Life did quite well in terms of sales, and was praised for it's story. Still, the game's story depends on the developers and level designers being able to get the story across to the players. Half-Life failed in that for me, but was successful for many others.
I think the funniest part about all of this fuss is that SC2 has been in the arcades for quite some time, so they at least had a good idea of how the game would play and look if they did a perfect port of it. Sure, there's the single player element to look at, and the additions made for the consoles, but overall they should've known what they were getting if they had taken the chance to look. Of course, the last time I saw an SC2 cabinet was over a year and a half ago, but that's mostly because I haven't been to an arcade and most of the game rooms at theaters where I now live (as opposed to 16 months ago) are off to the side and a bit closed off from the lobby.
That being said, I have a DC and bought SC for it the day after I bought the console (because the place I bought the console at didn't have the game, and it was 11PM). I'm wondering at this point whether or not SC2 will be a solid replacement, but I'll buy it anyway, once the arcade stick is released. Despite really liking my DC, I'll be glad when I've replaced all of the games I own on it and can safely put it away or in another room.
Two kids go on a murderous rampage? Parents are to blame for... well, what for? Not taking them to church often enough? Not locking them in a padded room, sanitised from reality?
How about not noticing their kids building pipe bombs in their garage?
Sure, my parents didn't know what I was doing all the time when I was 17, and even less so when I was 18 and they pretty much let the reigns go (and one of the two involved in Columbine was 18), but they sure as hell knew what was going on in their own house and garage.
The two that pulled the triggers are to blame for the acts, but the parents are to blame for simply not raising their children right. I don't care if you take them to church or not (in fact, I prefer that you don't, but that's another story), I don't care if you prevent them from playing Grand Theft Auto. What I do care about is that you know what's going on with your kids, and that you make informed choices about what your children do and are exposed to in your own home. You can't control your kids when they're away, but you can give them good values and bring them up to make good choices on their own. The TV is not a babysitter, and the babysitter is not there to raise your kids. The school may have your kids 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, but it's not the teachers' job to raise your kids, either.
By the time a kid is 16 or so, it's probably too late to prevent them from doing anything, but at least you can prevent them from doing it in your house, and if you can't do it yourself, have the guts to call the cops.
The Gamespy articles mention that the XBox version supports a higher resolution (720p) and doesn't have occasional slow-downs that appear on the other two consoles (though most often on PS2, still rare). They also said that Link didn't really appear to fit into the SC universe as well as Spawn, and that Heihachi seemed out of place (without a weapon and using the usual Tekken combos).
Granted, that's just what I read from the 3 articles. I was planning on getting the XBox version anyway, because of the 720p support, and I won't be picking up the game until the end of the week because that's when the controller comes out (and I get paid).
At what point does game simplicity break down from lack of control? When does complicated become too complicated?
These two questions are pretty much the same, but it all comes down to making a judgment on a game-by-game basis, and also shows where ports break down. If a developer could spend adequate time testing the controls of each console with their title, they might make adjustments to the interface to account for it, but overall it comes down to conditioning, and maybe they're just using the same testers over and over again on the same consoles.
Who, exactly, is to blame for shoddy control? Is Sony responsible for making a pad that's very open-ended as to which buttons are considered important to a game? Is Nintendo responsible for not giving developers enough freedom in their controls? Is Electronic Arts responsible for not using the Gamecube controller to its fullest extent?
I think it's yes for all of these. Sony's responsible for their controls being less than optimal because they aren't a strong game developer in the first place. Nintendo's responsible for not considering that some games just have to have a more complicated control scheme than what we had on the NES (though they must've realized this at some point because they put the extra buttons there). EA is responsible for just not even trying to make their controls work on the Nintendo system.
Can a football game work with simpler controls? Yes, most of us played at least one football game on the NES, it can be done. Will it be as good as the more complex control scheme? That probably depends more on the player's familiarity with the game. In other words, beginners will have no problems with the simpler controls, but advanced players will have more to gain from the more complex controls.
In the end, I think that if EA was really concerned about the control layout, they'd do the same thing that Namco is doing for Soul Calibur 2: release a controller suitable to the game that works on all 3 consoles.
While I agree with you to some extent, there are a couple of points that were missed:
No Nintendo (and most other consoles) has ever fit in a standard entertainment unit slot. This is especially true of top-loading systems (SNES, N64, GameCube, Sega Dreamcast). Even the front-loading systems usually don't fit because consoles tend to be made much smaller than A/V components (except maybe the X-Box which has an odd top surface).
The top 10 games in North America for the week ending Aug 19th included 3 Nintendo titles and 3 EA titles (2 of EA's titles were the XBox and PS2 versions of one title listed seperately). Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragonball Z do quite well in the US, and were definitely not originally intended for the US market. The fact that GTA:VC is still in the top 10 should speak volumes, though the fact that Enter the Matrix and Tomb Raider are still in the top 20 is pretty sad.
Anyway, I think a lot of Japanese companies could learn from the statements Sega is making. At the same time, I would hope this doesn't mean that Sega (and others) decide to bring fewer titles to the US from Japan, because there still is a big audience for at least some Japanese titles. Even Nintendo understood this (though to what might be a lesser degree) when they allowed Metroid to come back, as an FPS no less, when neither Metroid nor FPS games tend to do well in Japan.
A game I picked up recently is Mobile Light Force 2 (for PS2), which has a miserable title but is a pretty good shooter. I found it new for ~$10.
I also picked up a game called Slipheed (also for PS2) that seems pretty decent, though I haven't played it much. You might want to skip the intro and the movies between missions if you get bored easily. Just load the ship up with 2 weapons and go.
Neither game was bundled with every one of those systems sold (neither was available when the systems launched), but you're right in that they were bundled with a lot of the hardware.
Super Mario Bros. 3 is the biggest selling title never bundled with the hardware according to this site:
http://www.gamecubicle.com/features-mario-units_ so ld_sales.htm
which also shows slightly different numbers for the Mario games (though SMB1 is still the same).
The article mentioned some detail (not much), but since I haven't played the N64 game I really couldn't tell you if it's the same or not. They did make it seem more like a sequel than a port, though.
It'd be nice for those of us that never owned an N64 (for various reasons) to have a pre-order bundle like they did with Wind Waker, but I'm not holding my breath. (of course, I didn't get in on the pre-order bundle either, but I did manage to pick up the bundle disc used)
Vehicle damage is often limited by licensing. In other words, at least one of the people they licensed the vehicles from (more than likely most of them) required that the vehicle(s) not be shown in a damaged condition.
Personally, I found that the game controlled really well with the D-Pad.
Windows Media Player as it is on a base install of Windows 98 doesn't play MP3 files. Additionally, there was a great deal of fuss about WMP's handling of MP3 files in WinXP that lead some people to believe it doesn't play them there, either (though this is incorrect, by default it doesn't rip MP3s, but it plays them fine).
The fact that Win98 could not play MP3s by default was also a big reason that WinAmp was so big for so long.
Actually, you can usually do this just by making a map in a particular way (very few spawn points, spawn the player directly on the ground).
If you have Half-Life you can try this out in TFC by downloading the map fortsaken. It's especially effective in clan matches when the prematch ends (in fact, the map looks good but plays so poorly that gib fountains were one of the few ways to amuse yourself on this map if you had to play it).
Of course, in Half-Life you not only have the gibs, but also the decals (blood splatters), so if you keep your gibs and decals at the standard levels the respawns look rather gruesome by the time the gib fountain ends.
I had problems with Q3, so I never bought Q3TA and can't really comment on that.
. It's been a while since I've played Q2 online, but from what I remember even the 64 player servers hosted on high end machines behind fat pipes were still kinda laggy.
I never had a problem with the 64 player servers, except that there weren't many of them and they didn't often fill up past 32 people (so maybe they did have problems, or at least many people perceived problems with them).
The only type of game I can think of that really benefits from this type of screen is a top-down shooter. On the other hand, that type of game isn't really very popular any more, and has gotten to the point where the extra space on the sides is usually used for status info (though there's often still wasted space). I wonder, though, whether the N-Gage can push enough polys for them in the first place (though I'm sure sprite-based games would be fine, poly-based shooters really took a while to come into their own in part due to the limitations of early poly-based systems (ie PS1 and N64)).
Most current games also use some retransmission while still using UDP, as well. The key is that you have much more control over the overhead if you build your own retransmission protocol in UDP packets than if you let TCP do it for you.
It sends the message to everyone so that the player that died is killed and everyone else is informed that he was killed. Everyone else sees a line of text at the top of the screen telling them who killed which player with what weapon.
Unfortunately, the reality is that one solid server can host 64 people in Quake 2, and they only got the grid up to 80 people (which really probably could be done on a single modern server if you built the map for it). Sure, Quake and Q3 only do 32 players, but Carmack was really big on the idea of really big games back when he put together Q2, and there were a handful of 64-player maps available.
I tend to believe the word from the horse's mouth. You still have not addressed their comment at all. Stop looking around, and just look at what they said.
Every other reason I stated came from their previous statements.
They have no intention of adding value for the positive sake of adding value. They, more than any other first party, don't care about you. They aren't even afraid to admit it anymore.
By your logic, the only one of the major console manufacturers that cares about anyone is Sony, because they're the only ones that include a progressive scan DVD player. Oh, wait, that's only if you buy the online bundle today, since they were so thoughtful as to not include the online adapter in the console from the start, or to include a decent DVD player in the first place.
Yes, if you want a DVD player in your console and you don't live in Japan, then apparently Nintendo doesn't care about what you want, or they tell you to go buy a $60 DVD player (which will be just as good as what you get with the original X-Box and PS2). If you want a game console, that's what Nintendo sells. The only value I get from the fact that my PS2 works like a cheap DVD player is that I can use it on the TV that my good DVD player isn't connected to. For $30 I can get the remote for the X-Box and have a better DVD player, but it's really not worth it to me when I can eventually get a better DVD player for that TV for a bit over $100. Or I guess I could inport a Q for $450.
I think what you're looking for can be better summed up with examples such as Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, which are set in the same time frame and place with the same overall story, but are centered on 2 different characters, giving a different perspective and different particulars on the story. Similarly, a game can tell the same story from a different perspective (think Resident Evil 2, or any number of RPGs, RTS games used to do this as well), or can change the story based on the player's decision (ie KOTOR or a number of other RPGs). Another example would be the Choose Your Own Adventure style books, which are very similar to the way many RPGs work on consoles/PCs.
You don't always need a complete world to make a solid game, and most of your examples are more like what franchise games often try to do: make something that fits in the existing universe or acts as a prequel/sequel to the existing works. Games need to not only have good story, but make use of the strengths of the game medium, and tell those stories in different ways according to how they're played and the decisions the player makes.
You explained alot of things. All of these are true. You completely ignored the main point of the original post. Why does all of that excuse Nintendo from trying to do something value-added? They won't make extra money on it, but they won't lose money either.
Nintendo's given a lot of different reasons for that, and the most recent one seems to be that the Cube is meant as a game console, and that is all. Further reasons would be mostly technical (piracy is harder, the disc is written in a different manner (outside-in rather than inside-out) which should reduce loading times somewhat), but overall it just comes down to this simple answer: ask them. If piracy is the main concern, then of course they lose money by going to DVD, because so far no DVD system has been safe from piracy, and there's no proof that there ever will be one that is. At the same time, they (through Panasonic) have a system capable of playing DVDs in Japan, so why not here? It obviously costs a lot more than the base console because the console uses a non-standard disc format, but it still exists.
Look at the XBOX model. The DVD functionality isn't technically built in, so they don't have to pay a fee to the DVD gods, UNLESS the end user wants the functionality then the end user buys the remote and covers the cost themselves. Give the user the option.
I agree that it's nice to give the user the option, but at the same time the price of the DVD remote for the XBox is exactly why I don't have it. I use the PS2 or go to the other room (where I have a DVD/VHS combo player), and plan to buy another DVD player for the living room eventually anyway (but for now it's just nice that the PS2 plays them, the capability had nothing to do with buying it in the first place because I already had a DVD player and didn't have either of the TVs I use now).
GTA3 is good, but it's not revolutionary. What Miyamoto could bring to a game like that would be incredible
I think it should also be added that this quote shows he's falling into the same trap that leads to today's game industry: 'Lets make GTA3 only better'. Except that it started much further in the past, and GTA3 is actually a good example of a game that DOESN'T do that. It's why we have FPS, RTS, PC RPG and Console RPG genres so well defined, because everyone keeps doing them the same way someone else did them.
If Miyamoto makes a GTA3 game, it's not going to be good because it's Miyamoto and GTA3, it's going to be good because of Miyamoto's vision, and it's not going to feel like GTA3 (and probably won't even draw any comparisons to GTA3). In the meantime, we'll get a bunch of half-assed GTA clones that aren't worth the discs they're on, and Miyamoto will keep overseeing the development of games that utilize Nintendo's IP in new ways, or with incremental improvements that end up gaining a lot of praise because very few others seem to consistantly do it as well. In fact, Nintendo is still creating a large amount of new IP for themselves, but the sheer amount of past IP they have to leverage for new games means that it's often overlooked (even when people actually mention the games that bring about the new IP) in the swarm of Mario, Wario, Zelda, and friends.
His complaints are only really valid for a small number of games. The primary problem is not IP, but the unwillingness in general to explore new ideas. Gameplay is not IP, but it does sell games. IP can sell games as well, but they get panned if the games don't play well (though in cases like Enter the Matrix or Tomb Raider they may sell so well that it doesn't matter if they get panned). As someone else has already mentioned, there are plenty of Star Wars games out there, but only certain ones sell and are praised by gamers (but at the same time Star Wars may not be the best example because some of the games do sell regardless of whether or not they're good). Even the Star Trek license, which is considered to have one of the worst catalogues of any license, has some good titles.
Notice that manufactures of players for DVD, VHS, CD, vinyl record, audio-tape, floppy-disks, etc. don't make money (directly) from sales of media -- but they still find a way to make money on the hardware to read them. Duh! Waaay long ago, there was a day where the manufacturer sold the playback device for a profit, rather than as a way to lock people into something.
The only way Nintendo could get video games back into people's homes was by controlling the content, and this also gave them a way to make money from the games (and reduce the need for the hardware to cost more, which would've meant lower sales).
As for the manufacturers of players for other media (music and movies), notice that most of those people are also in the business of creating the music and movies that are on those media, or are simply diversified companies engaged in selling a large number of products that don't depend on any specific market to thrive. Sony's in music, movies, video games, and home electronics, so it only makes sense for them to make a console that plays CDs (PS1) or DVDs(PS2), especially if it means you'll connect it to a Sony TV and a Sony receiver and play music from Sony artists and movies from Sony studios on it. Oh, and they pull a licensing fee from everyone that makes games so that they actually have a reason to be in the console market in the first place (the lesson learned from Atari by way of Nintendo). Sure, you should be able to sell 30 million PS2s and be happy with that, but the money coming in from the couple million copies of GTA that didn't require anything more than the console being there (from Sony anyway) means that that division of the company makes more money than either the electronics or music divisions, and almost as much money as the movie division, so they stick with it and invest more money into not only the current console but also future consoles. Microsoft's in it for the same reason, they want a chunk of that game money, and while they're at it setting up an online service and selling subscriptions for $50/year isn't a bad way to get some money, either (though they're supposedly losing money hand over fist on the hardware so it's a long term gamble for them). Nintendo, on the other hand, actually IS making money on the hardware, and most of the software that's making money for them is software they have invested in themselves (and in most cases completely developed themselves). Their hardware is a delivery mechanism for their content, just as a DVD or CD player is a delivery mechanism for Sony's content, and a computer (and a network connection) is a delivery mechanism for Microsoft's content.
Saturn was an awful system all around, and even in 1997 when it came out, $200 for a cd-player was very pricey (as opposed to PS2's launch in which a dvd-standalone player could cost $250 itself)
I wonder where everyone that says this was living. At least one person responded that they lived in the UK, and the prices were obviously different there. My step-mother bought a $100 DVD player before I could even find a PS2 on the shelf (they were available in the US, but the stores didn't have them because of the shortages that drove EBay PS2 sales to $500). I bought a DVD player for $200 about 2 months earlier only because I was more concerned about quality (there's not really anything wrong with the DVD player she bought for $100, but the image quality is not quite as good and it does have problems with a handful of discs, much like the PS2). The PS2 launched at $299, the Dreamcast cut to half that (or one third that shortly after) around the same time.
My step-brother found out his PS2 couldn't play DVDs about a month after he bought it, when he rented a DVD and a couple of games (one of the games was a DVD) and it wouldn't acknowledge the presence of the movie or the DVD PS2 game. Luckily, the place he had bought it from had given him a pretty good warranty because he bought it used (it was one of the first run of PS2s to hit the US, apparently someone had either decided they didn't want a PS2 or had realized it had this problem, which also occured in the Japanese PS2 launch hardware but wasn't officially recognized until GT3 (the first DVD-based PS2 title in Japan) didn't work on most people's machines), and they traded it out for another PS2 that worked just fine. Did he buy it because it played DVDs? No, but once he had owned it for a while and DVDs were obviously becoming the next big thing (and places started renting DVDs, which not many places did when the PS2 launched), he certainly didn't mind using it for that purpose.
Christians have a world view that they (we) believe is real. The simple belief is that if you do not have a relationship with Jesus, then you will go to hell (a very un-fun place). By telling you about Jesus, they are actually trying to HELP you. For them to do otherwise would go against their world view.
I have a world view that people should leave me alone when I tell them I'm not interested in listening to them. For all the random people that walk up to me when I'm waiting in line to see a movie or knock on my friggin door on a weekend morning to assume they know anything about me based on the simple answer that I'm not interested in listening to them is offensive. For all they know, I could be a Biblical scholar with no interest in discussing the matter at the moment, or a firm belief that people should study the Bible on their own and not allow themselves to bend to my beliefs just because I may have studied more thoroughly than they have (not that this is necessarily true).
But I do freely admit that a lot of people go about it in completely the wrong way.
And bugging me about Christianity while I'm playing Everquest, an RPG based in a world in which Christ certainly did not exist, is at least as annoying as people running around going 'D00dz, did j00 c the Simpsonz last nite?'. Never mind that I have to pay to play the game.
Also, keep in mind that religion is all about the truth. You believe that there is no God. That is your choice. I believe that Jesus is part of the trinity. That is my choice. BUT we both cannot be right at the same time. Either there is a God or there isn't. It can't be both ways.
That's the difference between you and me. I see religion as a system of beliefs, each person holding to a different system (this being true even if all of those people attended the same church through the same time period at the same age and devoted the same amount of time to studying their religion). It can be both ways, or it can be neither way.
So, the essence of religion is the search for truth, not personal preference. I can have a belief that watching TV and eating potato chips and ice cream is the best way to stay healthy, but reality doesn't really care what I think no matter how much I believe it (if you don't believe me, I can e-mail you a picture of myself). God is the same way -- he either exists or does not exist no matter what you believe.
The last sentence is certainly true, but your analogy is not the best. With most religions, you're dealing with things that are at best hard to prove, and therefore it is not so much the search for truth that is important in religions, but faith and belief, and the search for meaning. People want to know why they are here and what happens when they die, this is the primary focus of religion. The secondary (and what I believe is more important, even though it seems overlooked by some) focus of religion is morality. No one can easily prove that morality is truth, nor what happens when we die, because in the case of morality it is subject to what is taught and in the case of when we die all of the observable functions tend to cease, what we can prove to be life is gone, and no one comes back to let us know.
Before you entirely dismiss Christianity, you should read the book "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel (available here [amazon.com] -- The author is a former newspaper reporter, and is the one who exposed the whole "exploding Ford Pinto" story). Since religion IS the search for truth, you should at least know about the evidence in favor of Jesus being God before dismissing it.
Personally, I'd rather read the actual texts (or as close to them as we can get given age and language barriers) instead of someone's interviews with Christians and interpretations of what those people have said. Most of the Christians I've run into (doing their little conversion game) have too little understanding of the Bible itself, and instead rely heavily on what they are told by the church. It could be said (and the case could be made) that this in itself goes against the teachings of Christ.
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Writing a game is very very differnt than writing more traditional mediums. Each has their own language and style. I am always leary when I hear that "so and so" name writer has been brought in to "write" a videogame. It's also kind of sad that the videgame industry feels that they need to hire this outside talent rather than trust that people who make games for a living actually know how to make games.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that this started after it was hyped that Valve hired a writer to do the story for Half-Life. Of course, that depended on the fact that Half-Life did quite well in terms of sales, and was praised for it's story. Still, the game's story depends on the developers and level designers being able to get the story across to the players. Half-Life failed in that for me, but was successful for many others.
I think the funniest part about all of this fuss is that SC2 has been in the arcades for quite some time, so they at least had a good idea of how the game would play and look if they did a perfect port of it. Sure, there's the single player element to look at, and the additions made for the consoles, but overall they should've known what they were getting if they had taken the chance to look. Of course, the last time I saw an SC2 cabinet was over a year and a half ago, but that's mostly because I haven't been to an arcade and most of the game rooms at theaters where I now live (as opposed to 16 months ago) are off to the side and a bit closed off from the lobby.
That being said, I have a DC and bought SC for it the day after I bought the console (because the place I bought the console at didn't have the game, and it was 11PM). I'm wondering at this point whether or not SC2 will be a solid replacement, but I'll buy it anyway, once the arcade stick is released. Despite really liking my DC, I'll be glad when I've replaced all of the games I own on it and can safely put it away or in another room.
Two kids go on a murderous rampage? Parents are to blame for ... well, what for? Not taking them to church often enough? Not locking them in a padded room, sanitised from reality?
How about not noticing their kids building pipe bombs in their garage?
Sure, my parents didn't know what I was doing all the time when I was 17, and even less so when I was 18 and they pretty much let the reigns go (and one of the two involved in Columbine was 18), but they sure as hell knew what was going on in their own house and garage.
The two that pulled the triggers are to blame for the acts, but the parents are to blame for simply not raising their children right. I don't care if you take them to church or not (in fact, I prefer that you don't, but that's another story), I don't care if you prevent them from playing Grand Theft Auto. What I do care about is that you know what's going on with your kids, and that you make informed choices about what your children do and are exposed to in your own home. You can't control your kids when they're away, but you can give them good values and bring them up to make good choices on their own. The TV is not a babysitter, and the babysitter is not there to raise your kids. The school may have your kids 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, but it's not the teachers' job to raise your kids, either.
By the time a kid is 16 or so, it's probably too late to prevent them from doing anything, but at least you can prevent them from doing it in your house, and if you can't do it yourself, have the guts to call the cops.
The Gamespy articles mention that the XBox version supports a higher resolution (720p) and doesn't have occasional slow-downs that appear on the other two consoles (though most often on PS2, still rare). They also said that Link didn't really appear to fit into the SC universe as well as Spawn, and that Heihachi seemed out of place (without a weapon and using the usual Tekken combos).
Granted, that's just what I read from the 3 articles. I was planning on getting the XBox version anyway, because of the 720p support, and I won't be picking up the game until the end of the week because that's when the controller comes out (and I get paid).
At what point does game simplicity break down from lack of control? When does complicated become too complicated?
These two questions are pretty much the same, but it all comes down to making a judgment on a game-by-game basis, and also shows where ports break down. If a developer could spend adequate time testing the controls of each console with their title, they might make adjustments to the interface to account for it, but overall it comes down to conditioning, and maybe they're just using the same testers over and over again on the same consoles.
Who, exactly, is to blame for shoddy control? Is Sony responsible for making a pad that's very open-ended as to which buttons are considered important to a game? Is Nintendo responsible for not giving developers enough freedom in their controls? Is Electronic Arts responsible for not using the Gamecube controller to its fullest extent?
I think it's yes for all of these. Sony's responsible for their controls being less than optimal because they aren't a strong game developer in the first place. Nintendo's responsible for not considering that some games just have to have a more complicated control scheme than what we had on the NES (though they must've realized this at some point because they put the extra buttons there). EA is responsible for just not even trying to make their controls work on the Nintendo system.
Can a football game work with simpler controls? Yes, most of us played at least one football game on the NES, it can be done. Will it be as good as the more complex control scheme? That probably depends more on the player's familiarity with the game. In other words, beginners will have no problems with the simpler controls, but advanced players will have more to gain from the more complex controls.
In the end, I think that if EA was really concerned about the control layout, they'd do the same thing that Namco is doing for Soul Calibur 2: release a controller suitable to the game that works on all 3 consoles.
While I agree with you to some extent, there are a couple of points that were missed:
No Nintendo (and most other consoles) has ever fit in a standard entertainment unit slot. This is especially true of top-loading systems (SNES, N64, GameCube, Sega Dreamcast). Even the front-loading systems usually don't fit because consoles tend to be made much smaller than A/V components (except maybe the X-Box which has an odd top surface).
The top 10 games in North America for the week ending Aug 19th included 3 Nintendo titles and 3 EA titles (2 of EA's titles were the XBox and PS2 versions of one title listed seperately). Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragonball Z do quite well in the US, and were definitely not originally intended for the US market. The fact that GTA:VC is still in the top 10 should speak volumes, though the fact that Enter the Matrix and Tomb Raider are still in the top 20 is pretty sad.
Anyway, I think a lot of Japanese companies could learn from the statements Sega is making. At the same time, I would hope this doesn't mean that Sega (and others) decide to bring fewer titles to the US from Japan, because there still is a big audience for at least some Japanese titles. Even Nintendo understood this (though to what might be a lesser degree) when they allowed Metroid to come back, as an FPS no less, when neither Metroid nor FPS games tend to do well in Japan.
A game I picked up recently is Mobile Light Force 2 (for PS2), which has a miserable title but is a pretty good shooter. I found it new for ~$10.
I also picked up a game called Slipheed (also for PS2) that seems pretty decent, though I haven't played it much. You might want to skip the intro and the movies between missions if you get bored easily. Just load the ship up with 2 weapons and go.
Neither game was bundled with every one of those systems sold (neither was available when the systems launched), but you're right in that they were bundled with a lot of the hardware.
_ so ld_sales.htm
Super Mario Bros. 3 is the biggest selling title never bundled with the hardware according to this site:
http://www.gamecubicle.com/features-mario-units
which also shows slightly different numbers for the Mario games (though SMB1 is still the same).
But you could play up to 4 players in a WarCraft 2 game with spawned copies.
The Quake shareware disc and keygen made some major rounds when I was in college.
The article mentioned some detail (not much), but since I haven't played the N64 game I really couldn't tell you if it's the same or not. They did make it seem more like a sequel than a port, though.
It'd be nice for those of us that never owned an N64 (for various reasons) to have a pre-order bundle like they did with Wind Waker, but I'm not holding my breath. (of course, I didn't get in on the pre-order bundle either, but I did manage to pick up the bundle disc used)
Vehicle damage is often limited by licensing. In other words, at least one of the people they licensed the vehicles from (more than likely most of them) required that the vehicle(s) not be shown in a damaged condition.
Personally, I found that the game controlled really well with the D-Pad.
Windows Media Player as it is on a base install of Windows 98 doesn't play MP3 files. Additionally, there was a great deal of fuss about WMP's handling of MP3 files in WinXP that lead some people to believe it doesn't play them there, either (though this is incorrect, by default it doesn't rip MP3s, but it plays them fine).
The fact that Win98 could not play MP3s by default was also a big reason that WinAmp was so big for so long.
mmm gib fountains
Actually, you can usually do this just by making a map in a particular way (very few spawn points, spawn the player directly on the ground).
If you have Half-Life you can try this out in TFC by downloading the map fortsaken. It's especially effective in clan matches when the prematch ends (in fact, the map looks good but plays so poorly that gib fountains were one of the few ways to amuse yourself on this map if you had to play it).
Of course, in Half-Life you not only have the gibs, but also the decals (blood splatters), so if you keep your gibs and decals at the standard levels the respawns look rather gruesome by the time the gib fountain ends.
I had problems with Q3, so I never bought Q3TA and can't really comment on that.
. It's been a while since I've played Q2 online, but from what I remember even the 64 player servers hosted on high end machines behind fat pipes were still kinda laggy.
I never had a problem with the 64 player servers, except that there weren't many of them and they didn't often fill up past 32 people (so maybe they did have problems, or at least many people perceived problems with them).
The only type of game I can think of that really benefits from this type of screen is a top-down shooter. On the other hand, that type of game isn't really very popular any more, and has gotten to the point where the extra space on the sides is usually used for status info (though there's often still wasted space). I wonder, though, whether the N-Gage can push enough polys for them in the first place (though I'm sure sprite-based games would be fine, poly-based shooters really took a while to come into their own in part due to the limitations of early poly-based systems (ie PS1 and N64)).
Most current games also use some retransmission while still using UDP, as well. The key is that you have much more control over the overhead if you build your own retransmission protocol in UDP packets than if you let TCP do it for you.
It sends the message to everyone so that the player that died is killed and everyone else is informed that he was killed. Everyone else sees a line of text at the top of the screen telling them who killed which player with what weapon.
Unfortunately, the reality is that one solid server can host 64 people in Quake 2, and they only got the grid up to 80 people (which really probably could be done on a single modern server if you built the map for it). Sure, Quake and Q3 only do 32 players, but Carmack was really big on the idea of really big games back when he put together Q2, and there were a handful of 64-player maps available.
I tend to believe the word from the horse's mouth. You still have not addressed their comment at all. Stop looking around, and just look at what they said.
Every other reason I stated came from their previous statements.
They have no intention of adding value for the positive sake of adding value. They, more than any other first party, don't care about you. They aren't even afraid to admit it anymore.
By your logic, the only one of the major console manufacturers that cares about anyone is Sony, because they're the only ones that include a progressive scan DVD player. Oh, wait, that's only if you buy the online bundle today, since they were so thoughtful as to not include the online adapter in the console from the start, or to include a decent DVD player in the first place.
Yes, if you want a DVD player in your console and you don't live in Japan, then apparently Nintendo doesn't care about what you want, or they tell you to go buy a $60 DVD player (which will be just as good as what you get with the original X-Box and PS2). If you want a game console, that's what Nintendo sells. The only value I get from the fact that my PS2 works like a cheap DVD player is that I can use it on the TV that my good DVD player isn't connected to. For $30 I can get the remote for the X-Box and have a better DVD player, but it's really not worth it to me when I can eventually get a better DVD player for that TV for a bit over $100. Or I guess I could inport a Q for $450.
I think what you're looking for can be better summed up with examples such as Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, which are set in the same time frame and place with the same overall story, but are centered on 2 different characters, giving a different perspective and different particulars on the story. Similarly, a game can tell the same story from a different perspective (think Resident Evil 2, or any number of RPGs, RTS games used to do this as well), or can change the story based on the player's decision (ie KOTOR or a number of other RPGs). Another example would be the Choose Your Own Adventure style books, which are very similar to the way many RPGs work on consoles/PCs.
You don't always need a complete world to make a solid game, and most of your examples are more like what franchise games often try to do: make something that fits in the existing universe or acts as a prequel/sequel to the existing works. Games need to not only have good story, but make use of the strengths of the game medium, and tell those stories in different ways according to how they're played and the decisions the player makes.
You explained alot of things. All of these are true. You completely ignored the main point of the original post. Why does all of that excuse Nintendo from trying to do something value-added? They won't make extra money on it, but they won't lose money either.
Nintendo's given a lot of different reasons for that, and the most recent one seems to be that the Cube is meant as a game console, and that is all. Further reasons would be mostly technical (piracy is harder, the disc is written in a different manner (outside-in rather than inside-out) which should reduce loading times somewhat), but overall it just comes down to this simple answer: ask them. If piracy is the main concern, then of course they lose money by going to DVD, because so far no DVD system has been safe from piracy, and there's no proof that there ever will be one that is. At the same time, they (through Panasonic) have a system capable of playing DVDs in Japan, so why not here? It obviously costs a lot more than the base console because the console uses a non-standard disc format, but it still exists.
Look at the XBOX model. The DVD functionality isn't technically built in, so they don't have to pay a fee to the DVD gods, UNLESS the end user wants the functionality then the end user buys the remote and covers the cost themselves. Give the user the option.
I agree that it's nice to give the user the option, but at the same time the price of the DVD remote for the XBox is exactly why I don't have it. I use the PS2 or go to the other room (where I have a DVD/VHS combo player), and plan to buy another DVD player for the living room eventually anyway (but for now it's just nice that the PS2 plays them, the capability had nothing to do with buying it in the first place because I already had a DVD player and didn't have either of the TVs I use now).
GTA3 is good, but it's not revolutionary. What Miyamoto could bring to a game like that would be incredible
I think it should also be added that this quote shows he's falling into the same trap that leads to today's game industry: 'Lets make GTA3 only better'. Except that it started much further in the past, and GTA3 is actually a good example of a game that DOESN'T do that. It's why we have FPS, RTS, PC RPG and Console RPG genres so well defined, because everyone keeps doing them the same way someone else did them.
If Miyamoto makes a GTA3 game, it's not going to be good because it's Miyamoto and GTA3, it's going to be good because of Miyamoto's vision, and it's not going to feel like GTA3 (and probably won't even draw any comparisons to GTA3). In the meantime, we'll get a bunch of half-assed GTA clones that aren't worth the discs they're on, and Miyamoto will keep overseeing the development of games that utilize Nintendo's IP in new ways, or with incremental improvements that end up gaining a lot of praise because very few others seem to consistantly do it as well. In fact, Nintendo is still creating a large amount of new IP for themselves, but the sheer amount of past IP they have to leverage for new games means that it's often overlooked (even when people actually mention the games that bring about the new IP) in the swarm of Mario, Wario, Zelda, and friends.
His complaints are only really valid for a small number of games. The primary problem is not IP, but the unwillingness in general to explore new ideas. Gameplay is not IP, but it does sell games. IP can sell games as well, but they get panned if the games don't play well (though in cases like Enter the Matrix or Tomb Raider they may sell so well that it doesn't matter if they get panned). As someone else has already mentioned, there are plenty of Star Wars games out there, but only certain ones sell and are praised by gamers (but at the same time Star Wars may not be the best example because some of the games do sell regardless of whether or not they're good). Even the Star Trek license, which is considered to have one of the worst catalogues of any license, has some good titles.
Notice that manufactures of players for DVD, VHS, CD, vinyl record, audio-tape, floppy-disks, etc. don't make money (directly) from sales of media -- but they still find a way to make money on the hardware to read them. Duh! Waaay long ago, there was a day where the manufacturer sold the playback device for a profit, rather than as a way to lock people into something.
The only way Nintendo could get video games back into people's homes was by controlling the content, and this also gave them a way to make money from the games (and reduce the need for the hardware to cost more, which would've meant lower sales).
As for the manufacturers of players for other media (music and movies), notice that most of those people are also in the business of creating the music and movies that are on those media, or are simply diversified companies engaged in selling a large number of products that don't depend on any specific market to thrive. Sony's in music, movies, video games, and home electronics, so it only makes sense for them to make a console that plays CDs (PS1) or DVDs(PS2), especially if it means you'll connect it to a Sony TV and a Sony receiver and play music from Sony artists and movies from Sony studios on it. Oh, and they pull a licensing fee from everyone that makes games so that they actually have a reason to be in the console market in the first place (the lesson learned from Atari by way of Nintendo). Sure, you should be able to sell 30 million PS2s and be happy with that, but the money coming in from the couple million copies of GTA that didn't require anything more than the console being there (from Sony anyway) means that that division of the company makes more money than either the electronics or music divisions, and almost as much money as the movie division, so they stick with it and invest more money into not only the current console but also future consoles. Microsoft's in it for the same reason, they want a chunk of that game money, and while they're at it setting up an online service and selling subscriptions for $50/year isn't a bad way to get some money, either (though they're supposedly losing money hand over fist on the hardware so it's a long term gamble for them). Nintendo, on the other hand, actually IS making money on the hardware, and most of the software that's making money for them is software they have invested in themselves (and in most cases completely developed themselves). Their hardware is a delivery mechanism for their content, just as a DVD or CD player is a delivery mechanism for Sony's content, and a computer (and a network connection) is a delivery mechanism for Microsoft's content.
Saturn was an awful system all around, and even in 1997 when it came out, $200 for a cd-player was very pricey (as opposed to PS2's launch in which a dvd-standalone player could cost $250 itself)
I wonder where everyone that says this was living. At least one person responded that they lived in the UK, and the prices were obviously different there. My step-mother bought a $100 DVD player before I could even find a PS2 on the shelf (they were available in the US, but the stores didn't have them because of the shortages that drove EBay PS2 sales to $500). I bought a DVD player for $200 about 2 months earlier only because I was more concerned about quality (there's not really anything wrong with the DVD player she bought for $100, but the image quality is not quite as good and it does have problems with a handful of discs, much like the PS2). The PS2 launched at $299, the Dreamcast cut to half that (or one third that shortly after) around the same time.
My step-brother found out his PS2 couldn't play DVDs about a month after he bought it, when he rented a DVD and a couple of games (one of the games was a DVD) and it wouldn't acknowledge the presence of the movie or the DVD PS2 game. Luckily, the place he had bought it from had given him a pretty good warranty because he bought it used (it was one of the first run of PS2s to hit the US, apparently someone had either decided they didn't want a PS2 or had realized it had this problem, which also occured in the Japanese PS2 launch hardware but wasn't officially recognized until GT3 (the first DVD-based PS2 title in Japan) didn't work on most people's machines), and they traded it out for another PS2 that worked just fine. Did he buy it because it played DVDs? No, but once he had owned it for a while and DVDs were obviously becoming the next big thing (and places started renting DVDs, which not many places did when the PS2 launched), he certainly didn't mind using it for that purpose.
Christians have a world view that they (we) believe is real. The simple belief is that if you do not have a relationship with Jesus, then you will go to hell (a very un-fun place). By telling you about Jesus, they are actually trying to HELP you. For them to do otherwise would go against their world view.
I have a world view that people should leave me alone when I tell them I'm not interested in listening to them. For all the random people that walk up to me when I'm waiting in line to see a movie or knock on my friggin door on a weekend morning to assume they know anything about me based on the simple answer that I'm not interested in listening to them is offensive. For all they know, I could be a Biblical scholar with no interest in discussing the matter at the moment, or a firm belief that people should study the Bible on their own and not allow themselves to bend to my beliefs just because I may have studied more thoroughly than they have (not that this is necessarily true).
But I do freely admit that a lot of people go about it in completely the wrong way.
And bugging me about Christianity while I'm playing Everquest, an RPG based in a world in which Christ certainly did not exist, is at least as annoying as people running around going 'D00dz, did j00 c the Simpsonz last nite?'. Never mind that I have to pay to play the game.
Also, keep in mind that religion is all about the truth. You believe that there is no God. That is your choice. I believe that Jesus is part of the trinity. That is my choice. BUT we both cannot be right at the same time. Either there is a God or there isn't. It can't be both ways.
That's the difference between you and me. I see religion as a system of beliefs, each person holding to a different system (this being true even if all of those people attended the same church through the same time period at the same age and devoted the same amount of time to studying their religion). It can be both ways, or it can be neither way.
So, the essence of religion is the search for truth, not personal preference. I can have a belief that watching TV and eating potato chips and ice cream is the best way to stay healthy, but reality doesn't really care what I think no matter how much I believe it (if you don't believe me, I can e-mail you a picture of myself). God is the same way -- he either exists or does not exist no matter what you believe.
The last sentence is certainly true, but your analogy is not the best. With most religions, you're dealing with things that are at best hard to prove, and therefore it is not so much the search for truth that is important in religions, but faith and belief, and the search for meaning. People want to know why they are here and what happens when they die, this is the primary focus of religion. The secondary (and what I believe is more important, even though it seems overlooked by some) focus of religion is morality. No one can easily prove that morality is truth, nor what happens when we die, because in the case of morality it is subject to what is taught and in the case of when we die all of the observable functions tend to cease, what we can prove to be life is gone, and no one comes back to let us know.
Before you entirely dismiss Christianity, you should read the book "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel (available here [amazon.com] -- The author is a former newspaper reporter, and is the one who exposed the whole "exploding Ford Pinto" story). Since religion IS the search for truth, you should at least know about the evidence in favor of Jesus being God before dismissing it.
Personally, I'd rather read the actual texts (or as close to them as we can get given age and language barriers) instead of someone's interviews with Christians and interpretations of what those people have said. Most of the Christians I've run into (doing their little conversion game) have too little understanding of the Bible itself, and instead rely heavily on what they are told by the church. It could be said (and the case could be made) that this in itself goes against the teachings of Christ.