This whole thread really got me thinking about the progression of online gaming on the PC, and the more I think about it, the more I think that console gaming will follow a similar progression, without the added headache of the early years of the internet (and broadband, though it still has some distance to go).
First, there were the early adopters. The people that would do almost anything to play games online. It got to the point that you could download Kali and play games that didn't even support TCP/IP (they supported IPX for LAN gaming) over the internet. This I equate roughly to the people that found ways to play Halo online, even though it doesn't support XBox Live (just LAN gaming via the XBox's ethernet port). Also to the people that bought a DreamCast and the online games available for it, even though the DreamCast's system for playing online was significantly better than what most saw in the early days of online PC gaming.
Then came the wave of PC games that were online-enabled, and no one cared. Tons of games had online play available, and most people didn't bother. This is roughly equivalent to now for consoles, although this would be the early equivalent of those PC days, because there really aren't a lot of titles available, but there are a lot planned to ship this year. During this time, NetQuake was replaced with QuakeWorld, and online FPS gaming boomed on the PC. Then the floodgates opened and eventually along came Diablo and Ultima Online (and Everquest) and everything else. Some variant of Quake, Diablo, and UO/EQ makes up the vast majority of people playing online PC games now (and RTS games, mostly StarCraft/WC3 I'm sure), mostly Half-Life mods (HL being based on the Quake engine), Diablo 2, and EQ (SWG, DAoC, etc). What will happen with console games is that one game will come along that everyone wants to play online. What it is and how it will play no one knows, because FPS games, RTS games, and PC-style RPGs are not big on consoles, and MMO games will never show that all games can support online play. Of course, who knows, maybe SOCOM 2 really will be cheat-proof and everyone will flock to it (I doubt it though).
Then you have the current state of PC gaming: very few titles can really do well without online support, even if no one plays them online. The few cases where that's not true are mass-appeal games that no one could've predicted would've had the sales they did in the first place (the Sims for instance, which so far has flopped online, but sold really well when it was offline-only). I was looking forward to Unreal 2, but didn't buy it when I found out it didn't have multiplayer support. Quake 3 was supposed to be the next great thing in online FPS games, but it turned out that Counterstrike stomped it into the ground with an older engine. People can't predict what's going to be the thing that does it, but it's almost impossible that online gaming won't take off on consoles, because it's already possible, it just needs to be used.
My girlfriend's youngest brother stayed over for the weekend and it really opened my eyes about a few things. For one, he owns a GC and has a couple of the same games I do (ie a few months ago he talked about Mario Sunshine endlessly). However, now that he's 9, apparently he's too old for those games. All he wanted to play was Grand Theft Auto, and his sister let him play it, but after a while we cut him off (because he was playing it endlessly, and other people wanted to either play a 2+ player game or watch TV, or basically do anything but watch GTA). All he would do after that is gripe about having nothing to do (apparently having 4 consoles with 10+ games for each one isn't enough, but I can't blame him too much for not liking my PS1 selection, since he isn't into RPGs and looks too much towards graphics still). He played Ikaruga for a while (one of my new obsessions on the GC, why I didnt get the game earlier I do not know), but was put off by the fact that he kept getting killed.
Of course, anyone I can sit down long enough to play Zelda, Mario, or Smash Bros. loves it, but most are hesitant at first, and, like I said, the 9 year old is just too old for that stuff now (*laugh*). My gf is hooked on Pokemon Ruby right now, so I don't expect to get her to play anything else until she's at least beat the game once, if not until she's collected as many Pokemon as she can stand to get (and she isn't remotely interested in using the GB Player, which is good for me, since that means I can still use the GC or any other console, or the Player).
I'll have to buy Eternal Darkness, though, as I've heard many others say it's good. If it's not, well, there's always the chance that the 9 year old will play it (bleh, he'll play anything if it's got a rating on it that says he probably shouldn't play it).
The cartridge wasn't actually much larger than the normal Genesis game cartridges (about 1/2 again as tall as the Sonic cartridge that came with my Genesis), but it had an adapter sticking out the side of the cartridge near the top where you plugged in the coax cable. Cox cable had it as well, at something like $20/month. It basically revived my Genesis for a while because the only game I had was Sonic, and my parents were willing to foot the bill for the summer rather than renting games all the time.
You did have to wait for the game to download, but it wasn't too long a wait, and you could play that game until you cycled the power or they pulled the game off the service (or pulled your subscription for whatever reason). We played a lot of games we probably never would've rented because of that thing (a good thing, as some of them were very fun and we never would've known), but mostly we just played Mortal Kombat 3.
You can't really say that 1-2 million people isn't a good target market, though, especially when that's the early adopter numbers. Look at the number of games available at the moment for those two consoles and tell me there's even something there to appeal to everyone that owns each console as an offline title with online capabilities.
As I've said before, the only reason my consoles aren't online is because the titles aren't there yet to get me to shell out the cost for putting them online (an adapter in the case of GC and PS2, Live in the case of XBox; I'd have to buy a hub or change the way my network is setup regardless of which system I put online, so I'd probably have the XBox at least connected if one of the other two had a title (more like a couple of titles) that was at least worth the cost of the adapter for PS2 or GC).
Yes, Sony and (especially) Microsoft may be establishing themselves as an 'online' brand. But they are not getting a very big finnancial benefit out of it, and will it be a big boost in the long run? If brand was all that mattered, shouldn't Atari be ruling the market right now?
Microsoft's looking at building the network so it will be ready at launch for the next-gen XBox. Sony wants PS2 owners playing Everquest (and any other MMO game they decide to port to PS2). Both companies may also look at using their consoles as web appliances or for some other internet-enhanced uses.
As for brands, Atari's brand went down the toilet in the '80's, but Infogrames seems to think it's good enough for them. Enter the Matrix sales were pretty high despite the Atari brand and getting panned by any number of reviews (most of which didn't come out until the sales had already passed 1 million anyway). Consoles are all about building a brand, though, and that is why it's so hard for new-comers to enter the market, unless they already have a well-known name (Sony, Microsoft). Even then, they still have to produce to keep their brand in a good light.
Is there a central body that sets up an online environment for PC online games? If you play (played) an online game for PC, be it Ultima Online, Everquest or even Starcraft a few years back, you logged onto to that company's server. Sure, you had to logon to Battlenet for Blizzard games, but those were Blizzard's games. If a company wants to produce an online game for PC, they support the online functionality. Nintendo and SONY have it correct in that game vendors supply the servers.
Before Ultima Online, Everquest, etc. you normally downloaded a program like Gamespy, Kali, etc. or went to a website like MPlayer, Won, etc. Most of these programs/websites offered what the game developers did not include: matchmaking for internet- (or just LAN-) enabled games. Only after most of these had been successful for a while did game developers start including browsers in their own games (and many of them licensed the browser software from companies like GameSpy, in fact, I don't use the built-in browser for any games I play online except for battle.net games and MMO games). Even Microsoft had (do they still have it? I think so, they used it for their MMO games as well) an online matchmaking service for games (it's used for the games shipped with Windows XP as well). The vast majority of online games on the PC are supported at least as well through 3rd party software that allows users to browse most of their games through one interface as they are through the software that is built into the games themselves, and most users that play numerous online games prefer these interfaces. It would only make sense that a console have one interface for all of it's online games, unless you were Sony and you wanted to make sure that Everquest was similar on the console to the way it is on the PC.
Now, if Nintendo did it right, they would produce a broadband adapter (they have one for GCN) for the NextGen console and encourage vendors to port online games to the GCN.
Except that producing a broadband adapter means that your users have to find it (I am looking for the GC adapter, I've found one store so far that carries the modem, but they don't get enough of the adapters to keep them in stock for more than a couple days), and you have to convince developers that your users will buy it to play their game. Putting it on the system is not only cheaper per adapter (much cheaper to put it on the system board than to put the connectivity port on the board and then build the piece of plastic with the ethernet port and the connectivity port and the board that connects the two), but guarantees that the users have it.
Ports that allow consoles to connect to the general severs that everyone else connects to. Isn't this what SONY does?
Sony, like Nintendo, produces an adapter that connects to a port that's already on the console. The point to doing this is that modem users can use modems and cable/dsl users can use ethernet, but the reality is that Sony sells only an ethernet adapter (which is really easy to find, probably even easier than the GC dial-up adapter; if Sony does sell a dial-up adapter, then it's at least as hard to find as the GC ethernet adapter, or the DreamCast ethernet adapter that replaces the dial-up adapter that shipped with that console). After that, it's entirely up to the developer to determine how to support it. This means that each game you play online with a console will either cost you money to play each month, or will require some other mechanism to provide incentive for developers to support online play. With EA, the incentive is customer data (the reason they don't support XBox Live). With others it will be advertising. Still others will just use their existing PC support, or will throw all of the server duty on the console (which is no problem if they make the game and server properly).
No X-Box live type investment necessary. Then, if Nintendo wants to produce online versions of their games, they can support their own servers.
I think causality is in question. PS2 has a DVD player, and it also sold well. Therefore, the PS2 sold well because of the DVD player.
Actually there is some truth to that. The launch titles on the Ps2 sucked, but in Japan the units were gobbled up because in Japan, DVD players were spendy items and the PS2 was competitive.
If that were the case, the mass of returns would've hit long before GT3 came out (Gran Tourismo 3 was the first DVD title on the PS2). The first units that hit Japan couldn't read DVDs properly, and when GT3 was released the consoles came swarming back to Sony. A few consoles that couldn't read DVDs even made it to the US launch, though Sony had promised to have it fixed before then.
However, system sales does not a successful system make. Nintendo may not be in as many homes as Sony, but they sure as hell don't mind the millions of copies of software they sell every few months when they release a new game.
They'd sure like more 3rd party titles making those types of sales, though, since 3rd party titles give a return with almost no investment. Nintendo may talk a lot about not wanting overly-violent games, but I'm sure they'd love to have the money from an exclusive 3rd party title that sells like GTA3 and Vice City did.
Nintendo's in a better place than Sony. They have a following that'll chase them anywhere they go. Sony, on the other hand, is very much vulnerable to Microsoft or any other ambitious company who wants to make a new console. Sony doesn't have Mario or Fox McCloud to lure people over.
Sony may not have Mario (is Fox that big of a deal? The only game I have ever owned with him in it is Smash Bros.), but if Nintendo is forced out of the console business from too many non-successful products in the market, Sony has the clout to get Mario.
Sony will be kicked out of it's roost one day, but Nintendo will always have it's following. Sort of reminds me of Apple in some ways
The console market is fickle. We had Atari, then Nintendo, Sega for a short while, Nintendo again, now Sony. Sure, Nintendo's still around (and I own a GameCube, the first Nintendo console I've bought since the NES), but the majority of their market is in the GBA, not the home console. I expect to see someone take over the top spot eventually, but I suspect that it will be someone no one's expecting. At the very least, the installed base of the PlayStation 2 will keep Sony going for a long while, and the GBA plus 1st party sequels will keep Nintendo going for a while. Microsoft will keep the XBox going on cash reserves until they find some profitable market to shove one of it's successors into, or their shareholders tell them to shove it down a sewer.
yeah, but anyone who felt so inclined could run a quake3 server, which probably isn't going to be the case with console online games. Serving all has to be done by the publisher or whoever, and they aren't going to incur that cost for free.
XBox Live games can run in a number of ways, including running the server on the consoles themselves, and using the Live infrastructure mostly as a matchmaking service (which is really no different from MS' previous PC gaming service, or any number of pc gaming services). The only time you really need a massive network of dedicated servers is when you either maximize the resources of the server (or client) with your game/server, or when you need to store massive amounts of information about the environment and players (MMO games). Blizzard can afford battle.net as a free service primarily because all it is (prior to Diablo 2) is a matchmaking service (and because they sell advertising on the service), Diablo, WarCraft2 (B.net edition), and StarCraft all run the server on (one or more of) the client computer(s). Diablo 2 still does this in the open (non-regulated) games, as well.
As someone else pointed out, though, you could always release the server as a free download and people could run it on their Windows/Linux/Mac boxes all day (or their modded XBoxes). Or you can have each developer run their own servers, or setup a service like Live that allows developers to setup servers on your network, and piss off EA when you tell them you won't let them take all sorts of customer information from the servers for their games.
Basically, that about covers the way things are being done now, anyway. The XBox offers a service that all online games have to go through, while the PS2 and Gamecube require the developer to do all of the work to get their games online and decide for themselves how they'll work (though Live still gives them some flexibility as to how they work, it's probably much cheaper for developers on XBox to run their online games without dedicated servers). Of course, Sony and Nintendo have given developers the added bonus of knowing that their audience is limited to those that will buy an adapter for their game (or already have an adapter), but then MS has limited things to only people that will buy their service for a game (which is why none of my consoles are online, oh, that and the fact that the DreamCast came with a modem instead of a network connector, and the network adapter is hard to find, and doesn't work with all of the online titles).
It wasnt the medium that was Nintendos beef with CDs, it was the loading time. Remember those games where it took damn near 5 minutes for the game to load?
Yeah, it's called Grand Theft Auto.
But if you want to get rid of that loading time, it's not as hard as Nintendo made it out to be, you just make the data you're loading roughly the same size as what you would load from an N64 cartridge, and use a decent speed drive (the second of which Sony did not do in the PlayStation). The load times are simply due to the amount of data being transferred, and not some mystic problem with CDs (though they ARE slower than most other methods of storage). It's not like anyone's going to go out and produce 650MB cartridges for a game system.
Miyamoto hated that. Once they could figure out how to eliminate (or reduce greatly) loading times, Nintendo embraced CD technology greatly.
More like they skipped CD technology altogether and went for mini-DVDs. It's understandable, though, because DVDs hold more data in the same space, and utilize faster drives (the slowest DVD drive I've seen is roughly equivalent to a 10x CD-ROM drive when reading CDs). As a bonus they write the data backwards, which may or may not help the load times (seems to me that the original design of CDs would've taken into account how long it takes to remove data from the disc when they made the spec).
The same is with online gaming. When Nintendo figures out how us consumers can play online without shelling out money every month (and still make a profit) they will embrace that too.
Online gaming has a chicken & egg problem that didn't exist when Sony went to CDs for the PlayStation. You have to get developers onboard to support it, and most developers aren't going to support it if the technology is not widely available. People may make a big deal about the GameCube's market share, but they seem to ignore that the installed base of the GameCube and the installed base of the PS2 network adapter is probably roughly the same, if not in the GC's favour. Of course, finding the network adapter for the GC is almost infinitely harder (though I can find a dial-up modem for it, like I have any use for that without wired phone service in my apartment). If the XBox could bring on more developers, it could show the promise of online gaming, because every XBox has a network adapter.
Don't forget that at the time many CD-based games were just "interactive" postage-stamp movies. I think the craze that nintendo was avoiding was the "multimedia" craze, not so much the "mass data storage on CD" craze.
While it may not have been out there during the planning stages, the Playstation had been in people's homes long before the N64 came out. I don't think you could say that the PS games were 'interactive' postage-stamp movies.
Also, most PC games and software were shifting to CD from floppy disks at the time, though it's easy enough to put that off as just the requirements of the platform (reality states that games were bloating to upwards of 10MB quite quickly, without the movies).
[Full-Motion Video] To cite a particular example, I would say that FF7 suffered immensely from its use of rendered video instead of in-game cinematics. The video looked very different from the game itself, more so in the PC than the PSX version, and took up so much disk space that they weren't even able to implement reviving Aeris.:)
I think what I was trying to point out is simply that the pre-rendered video replaced an even more mediocre method of story-telling in video games: putting up a screen or more of text and expecting the player to read all of it (usually at the game developer's choice of scrolling speed) to get the plot movement. A good example of this would be in the first Final Fantasy, especially at the point where you get past the first 'chapter' of the game and are permitted to explore beyond the first continent. This was actually the style used in a great deal of Nintendo titles (both first party and 3rd party), and it's very evident in the GBA titles coming out today (since the GBA doesn't have much in the way of capability to display FMV/pre-rendered scenes, and many of the titles are reproductions of NES/SNES titles anyway).
As for FFVII, I prefer the PS version since the PC version doesn't even play on my computer any more;p
More importantly, IMHO, is the process of transition; rendered videos produce a sort of shock as the game moves from relatively crude to much higher-quality video, and there is always thus a considerable difference. I like cinematic scenes as much as the next guy, but I'd say that the most effective and least harmful to immersion method to use them is that of Ocarina of Time, not the rendered approach.
I definitely agree, but at the same time, early games using in-game-engine cinematic sequences always appeared to me to be a cheap way of doing what Blizzard and others were doing with high-quality pre-rendered sequences. Of course, iirc, Blizzard did away with this on WarCraft 3, when they finally had a fairly high quality 3d engine in their game.
[Enix]
[Quality] I've not played too much beyond those [Dragon Quest] either, but after that kind of start I find it hard to believe that they ever recovered. When Square was producing the "Golden Age" Final Fantasies (4-6), what was Enix making? Illusion of Gaea, IIRC...
heh, Chrono Cross/Trigger were around that time, but then that was a joint effort;) Even more recently, in the last 3 or 4 years, Enix has only made a handful of games that were not tied to Dragon Quest (they release quite a few games in most years), and when I looked through a list of their titles there were only a few I recognized, mostly from store shelves. Square-Enix' Europe site states that Enix' strong point was their ability to branch out into other media, for instance making comics and magazines based on their titles. Looking at other popular (in the US) Japanese titles, I'd say this is a pretty important area for many companies, but how it affects Square I couldn't say.... but yeah, numerous companies have this tendency to sell based on graphics/technology...
IIRC Square didn't do this until FF7 came along, and they finally got their precioussss rendered video.
heh, I've always said that FF7 showed what the PS console could do, and FF8 showed what it couldn't do. FF9 probably should've been a PS2 title. Rendered video or not, FF7 certainly brought a lot of people to the series that had never seen an FF game before, especially since the last one most Americans saw was either the first or the fourth (depending on what consoles they had).
[The Merger] [Sega-Nintendo] This is why I say that it was completely out of character for Square to merge with its biggest competitor, and why something must be seriously wrong at one or both companies. Historical competitors don't cooperate unless they're desperate. (Mr. Churchill? Mr. Stalin? Do you have anything to say conc
why doesn't school challenge students as much as gaming does?
I think it's a simple matter of having to cater to a certain percentage of students. There's a combination of the students that must get those top grades, needs extra attention, and asks all of those explicitly detailed questions (and then the students that just aren't going to do well no matter how hard they work) that extends the amount of time that is required to get as many students as possible to get a decent education.
Personally, I can get through most classes with only passable attendance and very little attention, it comes mostly to being good at math and extremely good at multiple-guess tests (especially standardized tests). However, most of the classes that I've had to sit through tend to follow a slow pace, mostly required for those people that don't get things the first time they're explained to them (and good teachers will explain the same thing a different way, and about 50+% of the students that didn't get it the first time will get it the second time, but maybe 10% of the students that got it the first time will be confused after the second explanation; bad teachers will go over the same explanation again, but slower, much like tourists in countries where a different language is dominant). Some students take advantage of the extra time to get some work done (in the cases where the teachers give them the work ahead of time, if there's any work at all). I tend to be one of the people that loses focus when teachers start doing this, and then has to teach himself whatever material the teacher goes over later in the class session (and again, I'm fortunate in that, as long as the book is decent, I can do this).
Games, on the other hand, come in many flavours for many types of gamers. Some games come in the 60+ hours of gameplay (which may or may not be mind-numbing gameplay, but some of us will keep at it hoping that it will get better until we finish it and realize it didn't, hence MMORPGs gather large numbers of players), some are insanely difficult and require intense memorization of each level and the patterns of moves required to get through them, and so on. Then there's the basic card games and other games which offer fairly simple gameplay, but which almost anyone will admit to having gotten into the 'just one more time' loop over (ie Freecell, Checkers, etc). There are games that appeal to all kinds of different players, and games that appeal to nearly every skill level. No one game is normally built to appeal to all levels (and any game that says it is usually either aims for becoming more accessable and misses, or does so and becomes less appealing to 'hardcore' gamers).
On the other hand, Calculus is still Calculus, whether you have to take it or not, and whether you get it the first time or not. For some of us, it's only going to get challenging if you try to teach the first semester of it in a week of 1 hour sessions. For others, it's challenging enough in the full semester format.
This comes as no suprise to those between 16 and 26. Not as though older people are ignorant of this fact, they just consistently misunderstand current culture.
I agree here (and no surprise as I'm 25). What I'm finding, though, as I work in an environment where I am definitely the youngest person working in-house (we have a few my age or younger working mostly on the road), is that older people are slowly getting more into gaming, although they typically stay in the sports games and only occasionally go into other areas (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, etc). A lot of people here have an XBox, and a couple have PS2s (though most of those for their kids, or nieces and nephews, at least that's what they say). (The reason for the high percentage of XBox users here has to do with HDTV support and online gaming, from what I've heard). Some of them played the occasional computer game, and a few of them had an Atari or an NES before, but most didn't bother really keeping up with what was recent in console or computer gaming, and for a few the XBox was the first console they've owned since the Atari or NES. I definitely think most of them would be surprised at this study, even though they have no problem putting in some game time with their work schedules.
My generation is one of multitaskers and speed-demons.
My biggest problem with college was the pace, especially when it came to computer courses, which seemed almost glacial. In one course in particular the assignments were handed out ahead of time, and I found myself well over half way through the work within 2 weeks, despite not really spending much time outside of class working on it (in fact, for the first week I didn't even have the compiler at home or any way to import outside work without typing it in during class, so I did no work outside of class). On the other hand, some courses definitely needed the semester schedule, although maybe people more oriented to those fields would not agree.
Everyone I knew at college did not just sitdown and write a paper, most would also have the TV on, play MP3s, actively IM, and perhaps have a game of Freecell going. It's not that these students magically have more time in their days to play games, sleep, and study, it's that most of the time they do activities simultaneously.
Exactly. Then again, some of us do survive on less sleep;) With the multitasking capabilities of modern computers, though, it's much easier to handle typing a paper, doing some research, and getting in a simple game (and some IM, MP3s, etc). I may not need to go to the library at all to do some research, and if I do, I can often have a fairly thick book list to look up when I get there, rather than trying to make that book list from the library's resources. Music has been a constant companion in my life since I was about 12 years old, and there's little time in my day when I'm not listening to it. Games are just another part, what I do with friends, or when I have nothing else to fill the time, or when I need a break from whatever I may be working on at home (can't play games at work, though I may catch a quick cell phone game on my smoke breaks if no one else is outside). I also tend to keep a fairly thick library of games at home. The point is not that I have time to play all of those games now, it's simply that I enjoy (or know that I will enjoy) those games, and may play each in short bursts, and would prefer to spend my entertainment money supporting developers that put out games I'd like to play, but may not have time to play now (but will eventually, as long as I can keep my consoles and computers working long enough).
The study surveyed college students in general, finding that 2/3rds of them play games, and then gave additional data on the ones that do play games. If you play 6 hours a day, you definitely are not in the majority anyway (though averaging in some of my weekends I could easily be in the 6+ hours a day group). My experience in college was that it was perfectly possible to balance even an average of 6+ hours of gaming a day and still get all of my work done, but it was much harder to do so when I started working full time. Many times gaming is just a 10-30 minute break from studying, while other times it was more like 10 of us drinking and playing tournament-mode KI on the SNES on a Saturday evening.
In answer to your question, they polled people who play 6+ hours a day, people who play 1 hour a day, people who play 1 hour a week, and people who don't play at all. The article states that while half of gamers (people that play games at all) felt that it detracted from their study time (this sounds about right, most of the people I know in college think that gaming cuts into their studies), the reality (as opposed to their perception) was that their study habits really didn't vary from the habits of those that didn't play games. In other words, the people that don't play games have plenty of distractions from their studies as well, or those that play games probably are the types that would study a lot more than they really need to;)
As someone else said, casual gaming is good for the industry. Not only does it pump money into it, but it also breeds more acceptance of it. Also, with the number of people that grew up with the Atari 2600 and now the NES, it's likely that we'll see more and more casual and hardcore gamers coming up, because more and more people started gaming at an early age and learned to balance gaming in their schedule as they saw fit.
If Square is doing so well, why did they need Fund Q money so badly? For that matter, why in Heck did they merge with Enix, at terms disadvantageous to themselves? (IIRC, 1 share of Squaresoft to.79 shares of Enix.)
The link you sited said it all, at least all that could be said in such a small item;) They were looking at competing against some of the huge western game publishers (EA, Activision, Infogrames / Atari). I really find it surprising that they'd bother to even try to put themselves up against those companies, since all of them are known for releasing some very poor titles, and making up for it with whatever good titles they manage to publish. At the same time, if you looked at RPG-oriented developers in the US and Europe, you'd probably find some very successful companies that would be ecstatic to have even Square's US numbers, nevermind their sales in Japan (or Enix' Dragon Quest (Japan) sales).
[Full-Motion Video]
Doesn't mean it's not bad design. Really bad design.:)
Compared to the standard (S)NES manner of displaying the character and some text to further the story? Actually, looking back at most of the Final Fantasy series which was released during the SNES/NES days, they were at least trying to tell the story mostly through the game itself, but they still always had those one or two times in each game where it just broke away to a screen that had a bunch of text on it to tell the next bit of story. They added in a couple of pre-rendered cut-scenes after the fact for the PlayStation re-releases, which imo neither helped nor hindered those particular games. Of course, now that I think about it, I find it slightly funny that FMV has taken on a different meaning over the years. The first argument I ever had over FMV was caused by the fact that FMV referred to film of actual actors, such as the Command & Conquer and Wing Commander series, and I think we can all agree that all but the best implementations of that sucked, and even the best ones did not help the games they were in.
[Enix] Enix still produces Legendarily Bad Games... Kind of like Bond movies, I guess.
I really couldn't comment, the only Enix stuff I've played was the early Dragon Warrior games (in other words, Dragon Quest). I've seen a couple of other Enix games that were released in the US on the PlayStation, but I haven't picked any of them up, yet.
#7 in the industry or not, they sure aren't acting complacent or self-confident. Did you hear the announcement that the latest Dragon Quest would have a larger base of appeal, e.g. places outside of the United States and Japanese mental institutions:), by virtue of having anime-like graphics? Crazy...
The whole industry does things like that, though. For instance, look at cell shaded graphics. I think eventually the industry will learn how to use this well, but for now I stay away from most cell-shaded titles because it just seems to be the new overdone, overhyped, mechanic of the day. Of course, why any Dragon Quest game would need broader appeal in Japan I do not know;)
As for mergers, following that logic, Nintendo and Sega should have merged around the time of the Genesis. What I'm arguing is that while it might make good business sense, the merger ran counter to a few substantial egos at Squaresoft, and wasn't the sort of thing they'd do readily.
Would that be the time the Genesis was #1 or the time the SNES was #1? Either way, I think Sega would've been better off merging with Nintendo before they released the Saturn than they are today, but that's the benefit of hindsite. Then again, if Sega had gone from the Genesis to being solely a developer, they'd probably be even better off, but everyone would've thought they were crazy.
As for Square, again I don't really understand why they think they need to compete on the same scale as the large western publishers, w
One suggestion. End the stupid region lock-out. They'll make much more profit if they do that overall. (To be honest, I can't think of a single reason to have a region lock-out at this point)
I pretty much agree with you, but the primary reason (and it is stated in the article iirc, or maybe that was another article) is that the games that use licensed content (which are a lot of them these days) often have to license the content from different companies in different regions (especially US and Asia, and especially with content that originated in Asia).
The XBox uses a fixed set of components that are mostly obsolete for PCs, and many of the more common components are specially made for the XBox anyway (ie the P3 processor is not the same P3 you'll find in a laptop or desktop, the nVidia graphics chip is not the same graphics chip you can get on an AGP or PCI board for your computer, or in a laptop). The hard drive is smaller than the platters on many current hard drives, so the best they could probably do there to keep costs down is to format larger drives down to the size the XBox expects to have.
Where they really reduce costs is by changing the fabrication process (and where they're assembled). Fewer circuit boards with less complexity can reduce costs significantly (and Sony did this recently, too, by combining the graphics processor and CPU into one chip, which could increase the cost of the chip slightly, but would reduce overall costs by making the system easier to produce). The cost of some of the individual chips MS is using might come down, especially if they're purchasing in high volume, but overall their costs are not going to come down nearly as quickly as what consumers see with PC parts, because PC parts are replaced with newer, faster parts (driving down the prices on the older, slower parts), and older parts are eventually obsoleted and no longer sold (try finding a 700-800 MHz P3 processor new in the box, you might find one, but it's cost is going to be pretty much fixed from now until 6 months from now, and is probably the same as it was 6 months ago).
Of course, no one really knows how much MS is paying to build an XBox, because MS isn't releasing that information. However, even at release the most detailed estimates were not quite up in the $400 range, and they have made changes that would reduce costs, so I'd expect something more like $200-250 currently, if not less. It's possible that they make money on each XBox sold now, but unlikely. It's more likely that they make money when you factor in the number of games sold per console, but you have to remember that they are still trying to make up for the original production, as well as the costs incurred in setting up XBox Live.
f Sony don't sell consoles/games in South America then they can't lose any money from piracy in South America!
Actually, Sony doesn't sell consoles/games in South America because piracy is so bad there, so they essentially lose every legitimate sale they could have made. At the same time, they chose not to sell their system there, so it's their problem. It's a nice little circle there.
What I find interesting is that Yamauchi thinks that the Gameboy and PSP will not be in direct competition because of the software.
Never mind the pricing and features of the two, right? I have a feeling that Sony may also have problems making disc-based portables work as well as cartridge systems, too, but that's their problem to work out, and remains to be seen.
HELLO! This is ancient thinking... look at what has happened to Nintendo with the N64 and GameCube? They lost LOTS of marketshare because it wasn't the software that dictated the market, but the PEOPLE who buy the games that dictate the market!
umm, don't the people buy the systems because of the software? Sony just allows almost anything to be released for their system, so that everyone can find at least some software they like.
Once an alternative hits the market, it's open season on portable gaming, be it the GBA or N-Gage or PSP... it comes down to price point and the types of consumers that want the games.
What about all of the failed hand-held systems the GameBoy faced before? The PSP and N-Gage are not the first systems to compete with the GameBoy. Nor are they the best suited to compete with it, in my opinion. Sega, NEC, and Atari all had systems that were superior to the GameBoy Color, at a time when the GameBoy Color didn't even exist, yet the GameBoy stomped all over each of those systems for different reasons. The backwards-compatibility that sold PS2 systems is now the GameBoy's advantage in the hand-held gaming market, and both Sony and Nokia are really looking at somewhat different markets from Nintendo's core GameBoy market with the 'extra features' of their systems, as most people that buy a GameBoy just want a GameBoy, not a GameBoy phone, mini-DVD player, MP3 player, etc.
Nintendo has traditionally catered to children, and now that has hurt them in their quest to remain a player in the gaming industry. It's time for Nintendo to realize the industry's gamers are growing up, the customers that have been relied on in the 80s and 90s are spending more money now this century, and nobody's going to put up with Disney-like videogames forever. Mature themed games are more appropriate for adults, just like R-rated movies.
Nintendo just needs to get people to play their games. People tend to be turned off by the ratings for whatever reason, and the 'for kids' image, but most people truly enjoy the games once they play them. Kingdom Hearts being a Disney-licensed game turned off a lot of people at first, but it turned out to be really successful because it's a good game underneath it all, and that wasn't even on a Nintendo system.
Nintendo: you will sink into the Pacific ocean if you don't get with the program... your consoles are tanking compared to the other console makers, and all you have left is your GBA to keep you making money... Shit, even MS gets this market better than you, even though they have been only doing consoles for 4 years (Dreamcast/XBox). It's sink or swim baby, and Mario just lost his dingy.
Ask Sega (who made that DreamCast you mentioned, not MS, as an anon poster already stated) what it means to a Japanese company when your console does well in the US but not in Japan. Nintendo's number 2 in Japan, which puts them in a much better position than you seem to think. Of course they have ground to make up against Sony, but who doesn't? Hell, Sony wants to stuff a hard drive into the PS2 and sell it for $800, and someone out there is going to buy it.
Just a nitpick here, but it seems to me that Square, not Nintendo, suffered after deserting to Sony. Their late Super Nintendo games (FF6, Chrono Trigger, RS3, SD3) were extremely good, but in retrospect after seeing the mess they made of FF7, FF Tactics, and subsequent games, it seems that this was *because* they were being censored up the wazoo and weren't able to do the FMVs that their lead FF designer (Hironobu Sakagami, IIRC) wanted so desperately.
Of course, the 'mess they made' resulted in the highest sales Square has ever seen in the US, not only for FF7, but also for 8, 9, 10; they expect 11, 10-2, and 12 to do so as well (though obviously 11 should have a drop in sales associated with the fact that it's online-only).
Pre-rendered video is now recognized pretty widely [gamasutra.com] [Item #6] as bad design and an impediment to storytelling and immersion. This was the issue that Square jumped ship over...
Yet it's what most games had, especially the best-of-breed games at the time. Only as the game engines have gotten better have developers (and, more importantly customers) embraced in-game rendering for driving the storylines of games that are not story-oriented in their gameplay.
They got what they wanted: no censorship and all the FMV they could possibly want. Result: Angsty foul-mouthed adolescent protagonists, unplayable games (FF10), and a merger with *shudder* Enix. They're a sinking ship, and no longer consequential. More importantly, they made themselves that way.
Enix, of course, being the company for which Japan legislated that their top series can not be released except on weekends and holidays. Not to mention that Square and Enix worked together on Chrono Trigger, which you already mentioned as one of their better early titles. When two Japanese companies see a chance to become a $500M/year company, what else do you expect? Number 7 in the industry, no longer consequential? That's just funny.
This is a good point, although IMHO anyone who wants to rob cars and kill prostitutes, even in a game, should get his head examined, and see whether his insurance would cover moral-compass-replacement surgery. Some activities are so depraved that even pretending to engage in them is very questionable.
Some psychologists believe it's healthy to take out aggression in other activities, even simulations (though it may be laughable to call GTA3 a simulation). Others believe that pretending to be violent leads to violence. Which psychologists you believe tends to be more of a personal and political choice than a real observation weighing the arguments against each other.
On a different subject -- a common one in this discussion, but not mentioned by Acts of Attrition -- I would say that a common misconception in America is that for a game to appeal to adults, it has to have "adult themes," e.g. liberal amounts of excessive violence, blood, and gore. (Our adolescent culture won't stand for sexual themes, of course.) This theory is nonsense; how much blood and gore, how much action-movie violence, is there in Gone With the Wind, say, or Ben-Hur, or the other memorable films of the Golden Age, or most of Shakespeare?
I haven't seen Gone With the Wind, but wasn't Ben-Hur one of those movies where someone died on-screen during production, and they left the footage in there? (the answer is yes) Generally a pretty violent film about a pretty violent portion of world history. Shakespeare tends towards 'mature' themes, including violence and rather odd sexual pairings, but people tend to interpret it as less because they don't get the imagery so well from his prose (and most interpret Shakespeare from plays and movies rather than his actual words).
Grand Theft Auto, Bond movies, Terminator 3, and so on are adolescent in their appeal, not mature. One can appeal to adults more effectively without "adult content," whether sexual or violent, beyond what might be needed in the story. In the end, it's mor
As the article stated: Sony doesn't sell Playstations or Playstation games in South America. That means the piracy rate is 100% minus whatever the import rate happens to be (which I doubt is very high, since it's normally pretty expensive to import consoles and games).
And you can be damn sure that if you went around trying to duplicate and sell those figurines, you would hear from the company.
They key is in the 'and sell' part. Only a small number of people would bother to justify selling copies of games (though more would try to justify buying those copies). Backing up copyrighted material is covered under fair use in the US.
Some PC game publishers do have a policy of sending replacement CDs for a small fee if you return a scratched or otherwise damaged disc to them directly. As long as software publishers continue to 'license' software instead of selling it, they should be obligated to replace licensed copies at a moderate fee to cover the cost of replacement.
Of course, in some cases, depending on how long you've had the game before it the media was broken, it may be easier to go pick up another copy, and may even cost the same amount (though in my experience console games stay at a higher price longer than PC games).
In the US, RPGs are a fairly small part of the market. The sales of all the PS1 Final Fantasy games combined were still less than the sales of Mario 64. Also keep in mind that Final Fantasy sells a lot better in the US than other RPGs.
Mario 64 sold 11.62 million units, was a US launch title, and was one of the choices for the bundled game for the N64 (the other was Pilotwings64 I believe). When FFIX reached ~3 million sales, the total for the series was 30 million. It was up to 38 million by the time FFX (a PS2 title) reached ~4 million sales. Of course, SMB1 (which many people received with their NES systems) sold 40.24 million units, and Super Mario World (which many received with their SNES systems) sold 20.6 million units, which goes to show just how bad N64 sales were compared to their previous systems, and what a system bundle can do for your sales.
However, a very large number of RPG fans, in particular Final Fantasy fans, visit GameFaqs. They are very unaware that they are in the minority, and get very upset if you even suggest that Final Fantasy is not the ultimate games ever made.
and how many people really need a FAQ to get through a Mario game? How long does it take to beat the average Mario game? (I used to be able to beat SMB1 within an hour, though that was with the warp to certain levels)
If you took a poll from a wider selection of people, Mario would totally destroy any Final Fantasy character. GameFaqs is one of the few places a Final Fantasy character would stand a chance.
This is true in any case not only because of the popularity of Mario, but also because of the fact that the Final Fantasy series rarely has sequels (FFX-2 being the first), and rarely continues characters. If anything, some of the villains are more well known than the playable characters, because they do return from time to time.
The reason Link beat Mario easily was because all the Final Fantasy fans voted for Link to spite Mario. Final Fantasy fansites posted links to the poll saying vote for Link, whereas the Nintendo fans didn't really care who won.
The Zelda game for the GameCube had the highest pre-order sales Nintendo has EVER had, and almost every Zelda game has done extremely well, regardless of what system it's on. While most people have Mario games because they were bundled with their systems (SMB2 and 3, despite the madness of their releases, did not sell nearly as much as any bundled Mario game, though they did sell better than any FF game), most people had to go out and buy Zelda games.
Don't write off Link so easily, especially as spite votes.
hmm I would think the Mishima family from the Tekken series could provide at least 2 or 3 characters. Unfortunately, I think Tekken 4 may have done too much damage by drastically changing one of the characters and leaving a little to be desired compared to the first 3 (and my stance on Tekken Tag shifts every few months).
Soul Blade/Calibur also has a few memorable characters, including Yoshimitsu (of Tekken fame as well), Nightmare/Siegfried, and the previously mentioned Ivy.
Then again, the popularity of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter even to this day leaves me a bit dumbfounded (though I do own the most recent MK title).
Of course, I find that you only need a thorough offline moves list and maybe some tips on how each character should be played for most fighting games. Anything else is really dependant on the style of the player rather than the characters themselves, and if you can't find a character that fits your style as a player, then it's either the game not giving enough choice or a 'pilot error' situation.
I never had any problems with the game cartridges themselves, just with the system (and we had 2 systems in the house eventually, both of which gained the same problems after about 2 years).
I've never had any problems with CD and DVD based games, but then I treat the discs much better than I ever did a cartridge. I've never had a major problem with a top-loading cartridge-based system, either, just the old front-loading NES systems. My Atari 2600 (the old wood-panelled one) still worked just fine when I sold it about a year after getting the NES in '87 (so '88 or so, about 8 years after we got the Atari). My Genesis still works today, and the TurboGrafx-16 disappeared somewhere in my parents house.
I've heard of a lot of problems with PS2 systems as they get older, but haven't had any problems with my disc-based systems (except that Project Gotham causes my XBox to not want to shut off until I pull the plug, which seems to have nothing to do with it being a DVD-based system).
I prefer the original (no longer made) American X-Box controller as well. The S Controller's buttons are arranged completely wrong, and the original controller is much easier to get ahold of and actually use for long periods of time.
That, and I can club people over the head with it. Oh, and most people prefer to use the S controller, so I never have any problems keeping tabs on my controller playing with friends (and my friends that bought the XBox when it came with the bigger controller all have one stuck in their 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) controller slot already). I'm thinking about going down and picking up 1 or 2 more before they're off the shelves around here (whether it's because other people actually like them too or because the stores just get rid of them).
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This whole thread really got me thinking about the progression of online gaming on the PC, and the more I think about it, the more I think that console gaming will follow a similar progression, without the added headache of the early years of the internet (and broadband, though it still has some distance to go).
First, there were the early adopters. The people that would do almost anything to play games online. It got to the point that you could download Kali and play games that didn't even support TCP/IP (they supported IPX for LAN gaming) over the internet. This I equate roughly to the people that found ways to play Halo online, even though it doesn't support XBox Live (just LAN gaming via the XBox's ethernet port). Also to the people that bought a DreamCast and the online games available for it, even though the DreamCast's system for playing online was significantly better than what most saw in the early days of online PC gaming.
Then came the wave of PC games that were online-enabled, and no one cared. Tons of games had online play available, and most people didn't bother. This is roughly equivalent to now for consoles, although this would be the early equivalent of those PC days, because there really aren't a lot of titles available, but there are a lot planned to ship this year. During this time, NetQuake was replaced with QuakeWorld, and online FPS gaming boomed on the PC. Then the floodgates opened and eventually along came Diablo and Ultima Online (and Everquest) and everything else. Some variant of Quake, Diablo, and UO/EQ makes up the vast majority of people playing online PC games now (and RTS games, mostly StarCraft/WC3 I'm sure), mostly Half-Life mods (HL being based on the Quake engine), Diablo 2, and EQ (SWG, DAoC, etc). What will happen with console games is that one game will come along that everyone wants to play online. What it is and how it will play no one knows, because FPS games, RTS games, and PC-style RPGs are not big on consoles, and MMO games will never show that all games can support online play. Of course, who knows, maybe SOCOM 2 really will be cheat-proof and everyone will flock to it (I doubt it though).
Then you have the current state of PC gaming: very few titles can really do well without online support, even if no one plays them online. The few cases where that's not true are mass-appeal games that no one could've predicted would've had the sales they did in the first place (the Sims for instance, which so far has flopped online, but sold really well when it was offline-only). I was looking forward to Unreal 2, but didn't buy it when I found out it didn't have multiplayer support. Quake 3 was supposed to be the next great thing in online FPS games, but it turned out that Counterstrike stomped it into the ground with an older engine. People can't predict what's going to be the thing that does it, but it's almost impossible that online gaming won't take off on consoles, because it's already possible, it just needs to be used.
My girlfriend's youngest brother stayed over for the weekend and it really opened my eyes about a few things. For one, he owns a GC and has a couple of the same games I do (ie a few months ago he talked about Mario Sunshine endlessly). However, now that he's 9, apparently he's too old for those games. All he wanted to play was Grand Theft Auto, and his sister let him play it, but after a while we cut him off (because he was playing it endlessly, and other people wanted to either play a 2+ player game or watch TV, or basically do anything but watch GTA). All he would do after that is gripe about having nothing to do (apparently having 4 consoles with 10+ games for each one isn't enough, but I can't blame him too much for not liking my PS1 selection, since he isn't into RPGs and looks too much towards graphics still). He played Ikaruga for a while (one of my new obsessions on the GC, why I didnt get the game earlier I do not know), but was put off by the fact that he kept getting killed.
Of course, anyone I can sit down long enough to play Zelda, Mario, or Smash Bros. loves it, but most are hesitant at first, and, like I said, the 9 year old is just too old for that stuff now (*laugh*). My gf is hooked on Pokemon Ruby right now, so I don't expect to get her to play anything else until she's at least beat the game once, if not until she's collected as many Pokemon as she can stand to get (and she isn't remotely interested in using the GB Player, which is good for me, since that means I can still use the GC or any other console, or the Player).
I'll have to buy Eternal Darkness, though, as I've heard many others say it's good. If it's not, well, there's always the chance that the 9 year old will play it (bleh, he'll play anything if it's got a rating on it that says he probably shouldn't play it).
The cartridge wasn't actually much larger than the normal Genesis game cartridges (about 1/2 again as tall as the Sonic cartridge that came with my Genesis), but it had an adapter sticking out the side of the cartridge near the top where you plugged in the coax cable. Cox cable had it as well, at something like $20/month. It basically revived my Genesis for a while because the only game I had was Sonic, and my parents were willing to foot the bill for the summer rather than renting games all the time.
You did have to wait for the game to download, but it wasn't too long a wait, and you could play that game until you cycled the power or they pulled the game off the service (or pulled your subscription for whatever reason). We played a lot of games we probably never would've rented because of that thing (a good thing, as some of them were very fun and we never would've known), but mostly we just played Mortal Kombat 3.
You can't really say that 1-2 million people isn't a good target market, though, especially when that's the early adopter numbers. Look at the number of games available at the moment for those two consoles and tell me there's even something there to appeal to everyone that owns each console as an offline title with online capabilities.
As I've said before, the only reason my consoles aren't online is because the titles aren't there yet to get me to shell out the cost for putting them online (an adapter in the case of GC and PS2, Live in the case of XBox; I'd have to buy a hub or change the way my network is setup regardless of which system I put online, so I'd probably have the XBox at least connected if one of the other two had a title (more like a couple of titles) that was at least worth the cost of the adapter for PS2 or GC).
Yes, Sony and (especially) Microsoft may be establishing themselves as an 'online' brand. But they are not getting a very big finnancial benefit out of it, and will it be a big boost in the long run? If brand was all that mattered, shouldn't Atari be ruling the market right now?
Microsoft's looking at building the network so it will be ready at launch for the next-gen XBox. Sony wants PS2 owners playing Everquest (and any other MMO game they decide to port to PS2). Both companies may also look at using their consoles as web appliances or for some other internet-enhanced uses.
As for brands, Atari's brand went down the toilet in the '80's, but Infogrames seems to think it's good enough for them. Enter the Matrix sales were pretty high despite the Atari brand and getting panned by any number of reviews (most of which didn't come out until the sales had already passed 1 million anyway). Consoles are all about building a brand, though, and that is why it's so hard for new-comers to enter the market, unless they already have a well-known name (Sony, Microsoft). Even then, they still have to produce to keep their brand in a good light.
Is there a central body that sets up an online environment for PC online games? If you play (played) an online game for PC, be it Ultima Online, Everquest or even Starcraft a few years back, you logged onto to that company's server. Sure, you had to logon to Battlenet for Blizzard games, but those were Blizzard's games. If a company wants to produce an online game for PC, they support the online functionality. Nintendo and SONY have it correct in that game vendors supply the servers.
Before Ultima Online, Everquest, etc. you normally downloaded a program like Gamespy, Kali, etc. or went to a website like MPlayer, Won, etc. Most of these programs/websites offered what the game developers did not include: matchmaking for internet- (or just LAN-) enabled games. Only after most of these had been successful for a while did game developers start including browsers in their own games (and many of them licensed the browser software from companies like GameSpy, in fact, I don't use the built-in browser for any games I play online except for battle.net games and MMO games). Even Microsoft had (do they still have it? I think so, they used it for their MMO games as well) an online matchmaking service for games (it's used for the games shipped with Windows XP as well). The vast majority of online games on the PC are supported at least as well through 3rd party software that allows users to browse most of their games through one interface as they are through the software that is built into the games themselves, and most users that play numerous online games prefer these interfaces. It would only make sense that a console have one interface for all of it's online games, unless you were Sony and you wanted to make sure that Everquest was similar on the console to the way it is on the PC.
Now, if Nintendo did it right, they would produce a broadband adapter (they have one for GCN) for the NextGen console and encourage vendors to port online games to the GCN.
Except that producing a broadband adapter means that your users have to find it (I am looking for the GC adapter, I've found one store so far that carries the modem, but they don't get enough of the adapters to keep them in stock for more than a couple days), and you have to convince developers that your users will buy it to play their game. Putting it on the system is not only cheaper per adapter (much cheaper to put it on the system board than to put the connectivity port on the board and then build the piece of plastic with the ethernet port and the connectivity port and the board that connects the two), but guarantees that the users have it.
Ports that allow consoles to connect to the general severs that everyone else connects to. Isn't this what SONY does?
Sony, like Nintendo, produces an adapter that connects to a port that's already on the console. The point to doing this is that modem users can use modems and cable/dsl users can use ethernet, but the reality is that Sony sells only an ethernet adapter (which is really easy to find, probably even easier than the GC dial-up adapter; if Sony does sell a dial-up adapter, then it's at least as hard to find as the GC ethernet adapter, or the DreamCast ethernet adapter that replaces the dial-up adapter that shipped with that console). After that, it's entirely up to the developer to determine how to support it. This means that each game you play online with a console will either cost you money to play each month, or will require some other mechanism to provide incentive for developers to support online play. With EA, the incentive is customer data (the reason they don't support XBox Live). With others it will be advertising. Still others will just use their existing PC support, or will throw all of the server duty on the console (which is no problem if they make the game and server properly).
No X-Box live type investment necessary. Then, if Nintendo wants to produce online versions of their games, they can support their own servers.
Of co
I think causality is in question. PS2 has a DVD player, and it also sold well. Therefore, the PS2 sold well because of the DVD player.
Actually there is some truth to that. The launch titles on the Ps2 sucked, but in Japan the units were gobbled up because in Japan, DVD players were spendy items and the PS2 was competitive.
If that were the case, the mass of returns would've hit long before GT3 came out (Gran Tourismo 3 was the first DVD title on the PS2). The first units that hit Japan couldn't read DVDs properly, and when GT3 was released the consoles came swarming back to Sony. A few consoles that couldn't read DVDs even made it to the US launch, though Sony had promised to have it fixed before then.
However, system sales does not a successful system make. Nintendo may not be in as many homes as Sony, but they sure as hell don't mind the millions of copies of software they sell every few months when they release a new game.
They'd sure like more 3rd party titles making those types of sales, though, since 3rd party titles give a return with almost no investment. Nintendo may talk a lot about not wanting overly-violent games, but I'm sure they'd love to have the money from an exclusive 3rd party title that sells like GTA3 and Vice City did.
Nintendo's in a better place than Sony. They have a following that'll chase them anywhere they go. Sony, on the other hand, is very much vulnerable to Microsoft or any other ambitious company who wants to make a new console. Sony doesn't have Mario or Fox McCloud to lure people over.
Sony may not have Mario (is Fox that big of a deal? The only game I have ever owned with him in it is Smash Bros.), but if Nintendo is forced out of the console business from too many non-successful products in the market, Sony has the clout to get Mario.
Sony will be kicked out of it's roost one day, but Nintendo will always have it's following. Sort of reminds me of Apple in some ways
The console market is fickle. We had Atari, then Nintendo, Sega for a short while, Nintendo again, now Sony. Sure, Nintendo's still around (and I own a GameCube, the first Nintendo console I've bought since the NES), but the majority of their market is in the GBA, not the home console. I expect to see someone take over the top spot eventually, but I suspect that it will be someone no one's expecting. At the very least, the installed base of the PlayStation 2 will keep Sony going for a long while, and the GBA plus 1st party sequels will keep Nintendo going for a while. Microsoft will keep the XBox going on cash reserves until they find some profitable market to shove one of it's successors into, or their shareholders tell them to shove it down a sewer.
yeah, but anyone who felt so inclined could run a quake3 server, which probably isn't going to be the case with console online games. Serving all has to be done by the publisher or whoever, and they aren't going to incur that cost for free.
XBox Live games can run in a number of ways, including running the server on the consoles themselves, and using the Live infrastructure mostly as a matchmaking service (which is really no different from MS' previous PC gaming service, or any number of pc gaming services). The only time you really need a massive network of dedicated servers is when you either maximize the resources of the server (or client) with your game/server, or when you need to store massive amounts of information about the environment and players (MMO games). Blizzard can afford battle.net as a free service primarily because all it is (prior to Diablo 2) is a matchmaking service (and because they sell advertising on the service), Diablo, WarCraft2 (B.net edition), and StarCraft all run the server on (one or more of) the client computer(s). Diablo 2 still does this in the open (non-regulated) games, as well.
As someone else pointed out, though, you could always release the server as a free download and people could run it on their Windows/Linux/Mac boxes all day (or their modded XBoxes). Or you can have each developer run their own servers, or setup a service like Live that allows developers to setup servers on your network, and piss off EA when you tell them you won't let them take all sorts of customer information from the servers for their games.
Basically, that about covers the way things are being done now, anyway. The XBox offers a service that all online games have to go through, while the PS2 and Gamecube require the developer to do all of the work to get their games online and decide for themselves how they'll work (though Live still gives them some flexibility as to how they work, it's probably much cheaper for developers on XBox to run their online games without dedicated servers). Of course, Sony and Nintendo have given developers the added bonus of knowing that their audience is limited to those that will buy an adapter for their game (or already have an adapter), but then MS has limited things to only people that will buy their service for a game (which is why none of my consoles are online, oh, that and the fact that the DreamCast came with a modem instead of a network connector, and the network adapter is hard to find, and doesn't work with all of the online titles).
It wasnt the medium that was Nintendos beef with CDs, it was the loading time. Remember those games where it took damn near 5 minutes for the game to load?
Yeah, it's called Grand Theft Auto.
But if you want to get rid of that loading time, it's not as hard as Nintendo made it out to be, you just make the data you're loading roughly the same size as what you would load from an N64 cartridge, and use a decent speed drive (the second of which Sony did not do in the PlayStation). The load times are simply due to the amount of data being transferred, and not some mystic problem with CDs (though they ARE slower than most other methods of storage). It's not like anyone's going to go out and produce 650MB cartridges for a game system.
Miyamoto hated that. Once they could figure out how to eliminate (or reduce greatly) loading times, Nintendo embraced CD technology greatly.
More like they skipped CD technology altogether and went for mini-DVDs. It's understandable, though, because DVDs hold more data in the same space, and utilize faster drives (the slowest DVD drive I've seen is roughly equivalent to a 10x CD-ROM drive when reading CDs). As a bonus they write the data backwards, which may or may not help the load times (seems to me that the original design of CDs would've taken into account how long it takes to remove data from the disc when they made the spec).
The same is with online gaming. When Nintendo figures out how us consumers can play online without shelling out money every month (and still make a profit) they will embrace that too.
Online gaming has a chicken & egg problem that didn't exist when Sony went to CDs for the PlayStation. You have to get developers onboard to support it, and most developers aren't going to support it if the technology is not widely available. People may make a big deal about the GameCube's market share, but they seem to ignore that the installed base of the GameCube and the installed base of the PS2 network adapter is probably roughly the same, if not in the GC's favour. Of course, finding the network adapter for the GC is almost infinitely harder (though I can find a dial-up modem for it, like I have any use for that without wired phone service in my apartment). If the XBox could bring on more developers, it could show the promise of online gaming, because every XBox has a network adapter.
Don't forget that at the time many CD-based games were just "interactive" postage-stamp movies. I think the craze that nintendo was avoiding was the "multimedia" craze, not so much the "mass data storage on CD" craze.
While it may not have been out there during the planning stages, the Playstation had been in people's homes long before the N64 came out. I don't think you could say that the PS games were 'interactive' postage-stamp movies.
Also, most PC games and software were shifting to CD from floppy disks at the time, though it's easy enough to put that off as just the requirements of the platform (reality states that games were bloating to upwards of 10MB quite quickly, without the movies).
[Full-Motion Video] :)
;p
;) Even more recently, in the last 3 or 4 years, Enix has only made a handful of games that were not tied to Dragon Quest (they release quite a few games in most years), and when I looked through a list of their titles there were only a few I recognized, mostly from store shelves. Square-Enix' Europe site states that Enix' strong point was their ability to branch out into other media, for instance making comics and magazines based on their titles. Looking at other popular (in the US) Japanese titles, I'd say this is a pretty important area for many companies, but how it affects Square I couldn't say. ... but yeah, numerous companies have this tendency to sell based on graphics/technology...
To cite a particular example, I would say that FF7 suffered immensely from its use of rendered video instead of in-game cinematics. The video looked very different from the game itself, more so in the PC than the PSX version, and took up so much disk space that they weren't even able to implement reviving Aeris.
I think what I was trying to point out is simply that the pre-rendered video replaced an even more mediocre method of story-telling in video games: putting up a screen or more of text and expecting the player to read all of it (usually at the game developer's choice of scrolling speed) to get the plot movement. A good example of this would be in the first Final Fantasy, especially at the point where you get past the first 'chapter' of the game and are permitted to explore beyond the first continent. This was actually the style used in a great deal of Nintendo titles (both first party and 3rd party), and it's very evident in the GBA titles coming out today (since the GBA doesn't have much in the way of capability to display FMV/pre-rendered scenes, and many of the titles are reproductions of NES/SNES titles anyway).
As for FFVII, I prefer the PS version since the PC version doesn't even play on my computer any more
More importantly, IMHO, is the process of transition; rendered videos produce a sort of shock as the game moves from relatively crude to much higher-quality video, and there is always thus a considerable difference. I like cinematic scenes as much as the next guy, but I'd say that the most effective and least harmful to immersion method to use them is that of Ocarina of Time, not the rendered approach.
I definitely agree, but at the same time, early games using in-game-engine cinematic sequences always appeared to me to be a cheap way of doing what Blizzard and others were doing with high-quality pre-rendered sequences. Of course, iirc, Blizzard did away with this on WarCraft 3, when they finally had a fairly high quality 3d engine in their game.
[Enix]
[Quality]
I've not played too much beyond those [Dragon Quest] either, but after that kind of start I find it hard to believe that they ever recovered. When Square was producing the "Golden Age" Final Fantasies (4-6), what was Enix making? Illusion of Gaea, IIRC...
heh, Chrono Cross/Trigger were around that time, but then that was a joint effort
IIRC Square didn't do this until FF7 came along, and they finally got their precioussss rendered video.
heh, I've always said that FF7 showed what the PS console could do, and FF8 showed what it couldn't do. FF9 probably should've been a PS2 title. Rendered video or not, FF7 certainly brought a lot of people to the series that had never seen an FF game before, especially since the last one most Americans saw was either the first or the fourth (depending on what consoles they had).
[The Merger]
[Sega-Nintendo]
This is why I say that it was completely out of character for Square to merge with its biggest competitor, and why something must be seriously wrong at one or both companies. Historical competitors don't cooperate unless they're desperate. (Mr. Churchill? Mr. Stalin? Do you have anything to say conc
why doesn't school challenge students as much as gaming does?
I think it's a simple matter of having to cater to a certain percentage of students. There's a combination of the students that must get those top grades, needs extra attention, and asks all of those explicitly detailed questions (and then the students that just aren't going to do well no matter how hard they work) that extends the amount of time that is required to get as many students as possible to get a decent education.
Personally, I can get through most classes with only passable attendance and very little attention, it comes mostly to being good at math and extremely good at multiple-guess tests (especially standardized tests). However, most of the classes that I've had to sit through tend to follow a slow pace, mostly required for those people that don't get things the first time they're explained to them (and good teachers will explain the same thing a different way, and about 50+% of the students that didn't get it the first time will get it the second time, but maybe 10% of the students that got it the first time will be confused after the second explanation; bad teachers will go over the same explanation again, but slower, much like tourists in countries where a different language is dominant). Some students take advantage of the extra time to get some work done (in the cases where the teachers give them the work ahead of time, if there's any work at all). I tend to be one of the people that loses focus when teachers start doing this, and then has to teach himself whatever material the teacher goes over later in the class session (and again, I'm fortunate in that, as long as the book is decent, I can do this).
Games, on the other hand, come in many flavours for many types of gamers. Some games come in the 60+ hours of gameplay (which may or may not be mind-numbing gameplay, but some of us will keep at it hoping that it will get better until we finish it and realize it didn't, hence MMORPGs gather large numbers of players), some are insanely difficult and require intense memorization of each level and the patterns of moves required to get through them, and so on. Then there's the basic card games and other games which offer fairly simple gameplay, but which almost anyone will admit to having gotten into the 'just one more time' loop over (ie Freecell, Checkers, etc). There are games that appeal to all kinds of different players, and games that appeal to nearly every skill level. No one game is normally built to appeal to all levels (and any game that says it is usually either aims for becoming more accessable and misses, or does so and becomes less appealing to 'hardcore' gamers).
On the other hand, Calculus is still Calculus, whether you have to take it or not, and whether you get it the first time or not. For some of us, it's only going to get challenging if you try to teach the first semester of it in a week of 1 hour sessions. For others, it's challenging enough in the full semester format.
This comes as no suprise to those between 16 and 26. Not as though older people are ignorant of this fact, they just consistently misunderstand current culture.
;) With the multitasking capabilities of modern computers, though, it's much easier to handle typing a paper, doing some research, and getting in a simple game (and some IM, MP3s, etc). I may not need to go to the library at all to do some research, and if I do, I can often have a fairly thick book list to look up when I get there, rather than trying to make that book list from the library's resources. Music has been a constant companion in my life since I was about 12 years old, and there's little time in my day when I'm not listening to it. Games are just another part, what I do with friends, or when I have nothing else to fill the time, or when I need a break from whatever I may be working on at home (can't play games at work, though I may catch a quick cell phone game on my smoke breaks if no one else is outside). I also tend to keep a fairly thick library of games at home. The point is not that I have time to play all of those games now, it's simply that I enjoy (or know that I will enjoy) those games, and may play each in short bursts, and would prefer to spend my entertainment money supporting developers that put out games I'd like to play, but may not have time to play now (but will eventually, as long as I can keep my consoles and computers working long enough).
I agree here (and no surprise as I'm 25). What I'm finding, though, as I work in an environment where I am definitely the youngest person working in-house (we have a few my age or younger working mostly on the road), is that older people are slowly getting more into gaming, although they typically stay in the sports games and only occasionally go into other areas (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, etc). A lot of people here have an XBox, and a couple have PS2s (though most of those for their kids, or nieces and nephews, at least that's what they say). (The reason for the high percentage of XBox users here has to do with HDTV support and online gaming, from what I've heard). Some of them played the occasional computer game, and a few of them had an Atari or an NES before, but most didn't bother really keeping up with what was recent in console or computer gaming, and for a few the XBox was the first console they've owned since the Atari or NES. I definitely think most of them would be surprised at this study, even though they have no problem putting in some game time with their work schedules.
My generation is one of multitaskers and speed-demons.
My biggest problem with college was the pace, especially when it came to computer courses, which seemed almost glacial. In one course in particular the assignments were handed out ahead of time, and I found myself well over half way through the work within 2 weeks, despite not really spending much time outside of class working on it (in fact, for the first week I didn't even have the compiler at home or any way to import outside work without typing it in during class, so I did no work outside of class). On the other hand, some courses definitely needed the semester schedule, although maybe people more oriented to those fields would not agree.
Everyone I knew at college did not just sitdown and write a paper, most would also have the TV on, play MP3s, actively IM, and perhaps have a game of Freecell going. It's not that these students magically have more time in their days to play games, sleep, and study, it's that most of the time they do activities simultaneously.
Exactly. Then again, some of us do survive on less sleep
The study surveyed college students in general, finding that 2/3rds of them play games, and then gave additional data on the ones that do play games. If you play 6 hours a day, you definitely are not in the majority anyway (though averaging in some of my weekends I could easily be in the 6+ hours a day group). My experience in college was that it was perfectly possible to balance even an average of 6+ hours of gaming a day and still get all of my work done, but it was much harder to do so when I started working full time. Many times gaming is just a 10-30 minute break from studying, while other times it was more like 10 of us drinking and playing tournament-mode KI on the SNES on a Saturday evening.
;)
In answer to your question, they polled people who play 6+ hours a day, people who play 1 hour a day, people who play 1 hour a week, and people who don't play at all. The article states that while half of gamers (people that play games at all) felt that it detracted from their study time (this sounds about right, most of the people I know in college think that gaming cuts into their studies), the reality (as opposed to their perception) was that their study habits really didn't vary from the habits of those that didn't play games. In other words, the people that don't play games have plenty of distractions from their studies as well, or those that play games probably are the types that would study a lot more than they really need to
As someone else said, casual gaming is good for the industry. Not only does it pump money into it, but it also breeds more acceptance of it. Also, with the number of people that grew up with the Atari 2600 and now the NES, it's likely that we'll see more and more casual and hardcore gamers coming up, because more and more people started gaming at an early age and learned to balance gaming in their schedule as they saw fit.
If Square is doing so well, why did they need Fund Q money so badly? For that matter, why in Heck did they merge with Enix, at terms disadvantageous to themselves? (IIRC, 1 share of Squaresoft to .79 shares of Enix.)
;) They were looking at competing against some of the huge western game publishers (EA, Activision, Infogrames / Atari). I really find it surprising that they'd bother to even try to put themselves up against those companies, since all of them are known for releasing some very poor titles, and making up for it with whatever good titles they manage to publish. At the same time, if you looked at RPG-oriented developers in the US and Europe, you'd probably find some very successful companies that would be ecstatic to have even Square's US numbers, nevermind their sales in Japan (or Enix' Dragon Quest (Japan) sales).
:)
:), by virtue of having anime-like graphics? Crazy...
;)
The link you sited said it all, at least all that could be said in such a small item
[Full-Motion Video]
Doesn't mean it's not bad design. Really bad design.
Compared to the standard (S)NES manner of displaying the character and some text to further the story? Actually, looking back at most of the Final Fantasy series which was released during the SNES/NES days, they were at least trying to tell the story mostly through the game itself, but they still always had those one or two times in each game where it just broke away to a screen that had a bunch of text on it to tell the next bit of story. They added in a couple of pre-rendered cut-scenes after the fact for the PlayStation re-releases, which imo neither helped nor hindered those particular games. Of course, now that I think about it, I find it slightly funny that FMV has taken on a different meaning over the years. The first argument I ever had over FMV was caused by the fact that FMV referred to film of actual actors, such as the Command & Conquer and Wing Commander series, and I think we can all agree that all but the best implementations of that sucked, and even the best ones did not help the games they were in.
[Enix]
Enix still produces Legendarily Bad Games... Kind of like Bond movies, I guess.
I really couldn't comment, the only Enix stuff I've played was the early Dragon Warrior games (in other words, Dragon Quest). I've seen a couple of other Enix games that were released in the US on the PlayStation, but I haven't picked any of them up, yet.
#7 in the industry or not, they sure aren't acting complacent or self-confident. Did you hear the announcement that the latest Dragon Quest would have a larger base of appeal, e.g. places outside of the United States and Japanese mental institutions
The whole industry does things like that, though. For instance, look at cell shaded graphics. I think eventually the industry will learn how to use this well, but for now I stay away from most cell-shaded titles because it just seems to be the new overdone, overhyped, mechanic of the day. Of course, why any Dragon Quest game would need broader appeal in Japan I do not know
As for mergers, following that logic, Nintendo and Sega should have merged around the time of the Genesis. What I'm arguing is that while it might make good business sense, the merger ran counter to a few substantial egos at Squaresoft, and wasn't the sort of thing they'd do readily.
Would that be the time the Genesis was #1 or the time the SNES was #1? Either way, I think Sega would've been better off merging with Nintendo before they released the Saturn than they are today, but that's the benefit of hindsite. Then again, if Sega had gone from the Genesis to being solely a developer, they'd probably be even better off, but everyone would've thought they were crazy.
As for Square, again I don't really understand why they think they need to compete on the same scale as the large western publishers, w
One suggestion. End the stupid region lock-out. They'll make much more profit if they do that overall. (To be honest, I can't think of a single reason to have a region lock-out at this point)
I pretty much agree with you, but the primary reason (and it is stated in the article iirc, or maybe that was another article) is that the games that use licensed content (which are a lot of them these days) often have to license the content from different companies in different regions (especially US and Asia, and especially with content that originated in Asia).
The XBox uses a fixed set of components that are mostly obsolete for PCs, and many of the more common components are specially made for the XBox anyway (ie the P3 processor is not the same P3 you'll find in a laptop or desktop, the nVidia graphics chip is not the same graphics chip you can get on an AGP or PCI board for your computer, or in a laptop). The hard drive is smaller than the platters on many current hard drives, so the best they could probably do there to keep costs down is to format larger drives down to the size the XBox expects to have.
Where they really reduce costs is by changing the fabrication process (and where they're assembled). Fewer circuit boards with less complexity can reduce costs significantly (and Sony did this recently, too, by combining the graphics processor and CPU into one chip, which could increase the cost of the chip slightly, but would reduce overall costs by making the system easier to produce). The cost of some of the individual chips MS is using might come down, especially if they're purchasing in high volume, but overall their costs are not going to come down nearly as quickly as what consumers see with PC parts, because PC parts are replaced with newer, faster parts (driving down the prices on the older, slower parts), and older parts are eventually obsoleted and no longer sold (try finding a 700-800 MHz P3 processor new in the box, you might find one, but it's cost is going to be pretty much fixed from now until 6 months from now, and is probably the same as it was 6 months ago).
Of course, no one really knows how much MS is paying to build an XBox, because MS isn't releasing that information. However, even at release the most detailed estimates were not quite up in the $400 range, and they have made changes that would reduce costs, so I'd expect something more like $200-250 currently, if not less. It's possible that they make money on each XBox sold now, but unlikely. It's more likely that they make money when you factor in the number of games sold per console, but you have to remember that they are still trying to make up for the original production, as well as the costs incurred in setting up XBox Live.
f Sony don't sell consoles/games in South America then they can't lose any money from piracy in South America!
Actually, Sony doesn't sell consoles/games in South America because piracy is so bad there, so they essentially lose every legitimate sale they could have made. At the same time, they chose not to sell their system there, so it's their problem. It's a nice little circle there.
What I find interesting is that Yamauchi thinks that the Gameboy and PSP will not be in direct competition because of the software.
Never mind the pricing and features of the two, right? I have a feeling that Sony may also have problems making disc-based portables work as well as cartridge systems, too, but that's their problem to work out, and remains to be seen.
HELLO! This is ancient thinking... look at what has happened to Nintendo with the N64 and GameCube? They lost LOTS of marketshare because it wasn't the software that dictated the market, but the PEOPLE who buy the games that dictate the market!
umm, don't the people buy the systems because of the software? Sony just allows almost anything to be released for their system, so that everyone can find at least some software they like.
Once an alternative hits the market, it's open season on portable gaming, be it the GBA or N-Gage or PSP... it comes down to price point and the types of consumers that want the games.
What about all of the failed hand-held systems the GameBoy faced before? The PSP and N-Gage are not the first systems to compete with the GameBoy. Nor are they the best suited to compete with it, in my opinion. Sega, NEC, and Atari all had systems that were superior to the GameBoy Color, at a time when the GameBoy Color didn't even exist, yet the GameBoy stomped all over each of those systems for different reasons. The backwards-compatibility that sold PS2 systems is now the GameBoy's advantage in the hand-held gaming market, and both Sony and Nokia are really looking at somewhat different markets from Nintendo's core GameBoy market with the 'extra features' of their systems, as most people that buy a GameBoy just want a GameBoy, not a GameBoy phone, mini-DVD player, MP3 player, etc.
Nintendo has traditionally catered to children, and now that has hurt them in their quest to remain a player in the gaming industry. It's time for Nintendo to realize the industry's gamers are growing up, the customers that have been relied on in the 80s and 90s are spending more money now this century, and nobody's going to put up with Disney-like videogames forever. Mature themed games are more appropriate for adults, just like R-rated movies.
Nintendo just needs to get people to play their games. People tend to be turned off by the ratings for whatever reason, and the 'for kids' image, but most people truly enjoy the games once they play them. Kingdom Hearts being a Disney-licensed game turned off a lot of people at first, but it turned out to be really successful because it's a good game underneath it all, and that wasn't even on a Nintendo system.
Nintendo: you will sink into the Pacific ocean if you don't get with the program... your consoles are tanking compared to the other console makers, and all you have left is your GBA to keep you making money... Shit, even MS gets this market better than you, even though they have been only doing consoles for 4 years (Dreamcast/XBox). It's sink or swim baby, and Mario just lost his dingy.
Ask Sega (who made that DreamCast you mentioned, not MS, as an anon poster already stated) what it means to a Japanese company when your console does well in the US but not in Japan. Nintendo's number 2 in Japan, which puts them in a much better position than you seem to think. Of course they have ground to make up against Sony, but who doesn't? Hell, Sony wants to stuff a hard drive into the PS2 and sell it for $800, and someone out there is going to buy it.
Just a nitpick here, but it seems to me that Square, not Nintendo, suffered after deserting to Sony. Their late Super Nintendo games (FF6, Chrono Trigger, RS3, SD3) were extremely good, but in retrospect after seeing the mess they made of FF7, FF Tactics, and subsequent games, it seems that this was *because* they were being censored up the wazoo and weren't able to do the FMVs that their lead FF designer (Hironobu Sakagami, IIRC) wanted so desperately.
Of course, the 'mess they made' resulted in the highest sales Square has ever seen in the US, not only for FF7, but also for 8, 9, 10; they expect 11, 10-2, and 12 to do so as well (though obviously 11 should have a drop in sales associated with the fact that it's online-only).
Pre-rendered video is now recognized pretty widely [gamasutra.com] [Item #6] as bad design and an impediment to storytelling and immersion. This was the issue that Square jumped ship over...
Yet it's what most games had, especially the best-of-breed games at the time. Only as the game engines have gotten better have developers (and, more importantly customers) embraced in-game rendering for driving the storylines of games that are not story-oriented in their gameplay.
They got what they wanted: no censorship and all the FMV they could possibly want. Result: Angsty foul-mouthed adolescent protagonists, unplayable games (FF10), and a merger with *shudder* Enix. They're a sinking ship, and no longer consequential. More importantly, they made themselves that way.
Enix, of course, being the company for which Japan legislated that their top series can not be released except on weekends and holidays. Not to mention that Square and Enix worked together on Chrono Trigger, which you already mentioned as one of their better early titles. When two Japanese companies see a chance to become a $500M/year company, what else do you expect? Number 7 in the industry, no longer consequential? That's just funny.
This is a good point, although IMHO anyone who wants to rob cars and kill prostitutes, even in a game, should get his head examined, and see whether his insurance would cover moral-compass-replacement surgery. Some activities are so depraved that even pretending to engage in them is very questionable.
Some psychologists believe it's healthy to take out aggression in other activities, even simulations (though it may be laughable to call GTA3 a simulation). Others believe that pretending to be violent leads to violence. Which psychologists you believe tends to be more of a personal and political choice than a real observation weighing the arguments against each other.
On a different subject -- a common one in this discussion, but not mentioned by Acts of Attrition -- I would say that a common misconception in America is that for a game to appeal to adults, it has to have "adult themes," e.g. liberal amounts of excessive violence, blood, and gore. (Our adolescent culture won't stand for sexual themes, of course.) This theory is nonsense; how much blood and gore, how much action-movie violence, is there in Gone With the Wind, say, or Ben-Hur, or the other memorable films of the Golden Age, or most of Shakespeare?
I haven't seen Gone With the Wind, but wasn't Ben-Hur one of those movies where someone died on-screen during production, and they left the footage in there? (the answer is yes) Generally a pretty violent film about a pretty violent portion of world history. Shakespeare tends towards 'mature' themes, including violence and rather odd sexual pairings, but people tend to interpret it as less because they don't get the imagery so well from his prose (and most interpret Shakespeare from plays and movies rather than his actual words).
Grand Theft Auto, Bond movies, Terminator 3, and so on are adolescent in their appeal, not mature. One can appeal to adults more effectively without "adult content," whether sexual or violent, beyond what might be needed in the story. In the end, it's mor
As the article stated: Sony doesn't sell Playstations or Playstation games in South America. That means the piracy rate is 100% minus whatever the import rate happens to be (which I doubt is very high, since it's normally pretty expensive to import consoles and games).
And you can be damn sure that if you went around trying to duplicate and sell those figurines, you would hear from the company.
They key is in the 'and sell' part. Only a small number of people would bother to justify selling copies of games (though more would try to justify buying those copies). Backing up copyrighted material is covered under fair use in the US.
Some PC game publishers do have a policy of sending replacement CDs for a small fee if you return a scratched or otherwise damaged disc to them directly. As long as software publishers continue to 'license' software instead of selling it, they should be obligated to replace licensed copies at a moderate fee to cover the cost of replacement.
Of course, in some cases, depending on how long you've had the game before it the media was broken, it may be easier to go pick up another copy, and may even cost the same amount (though in my experience console games stay at a higher price longer than PC games).
In the US, RPGs are a fairly small part of the market. The sales of all the PS1 Final Fantasy games combined were still less than the sales of Mario 64. Also keep in mind that Final Fantasy sells a lot better in the US than other RPGs.
Mario 64 sold 11.62 million units, was a US launch title, and was one of the choices for the bundled game for the N64 (the other was Pilotwings64 I believe). When FFIX reached ~3 million sales, the total for the series was 30 million. It was up to 38 million by the time FFX (a PS2 title) reached ~4 million sales. Of course, SMB1 (which many people received with their NES systems) sold 40.24 million units, and Super Mario World (which many received with their SNES systems) sold 20.6 million units, which goes to show just how bad N64 sales were compared to their previous systems, and what a system bundle can do for your sales.
However, a very large number of RPG fans, in particular Final Fantasy fans, visit GameFaqs. They are very unaware that they are in the minority, and get very upset if you even suggest that Final Fantasy is not the ultimate games ever made.
and how many people really need a FAQ to get through a Mario game? How long does it take to beat the average Mario game? (I used to be able to beat SMB1 within an hour, though that was with the warp to certain levels)
If you took a poll from a wider selection of people, Mario would totally destroy any Final Fantasy character. GameFaqs is one of the few places a Final Fantasy character would stand a chance.
This is true in any case not only because of the popularity of Mario, but also because of the fact that the Final Fantasy series rarely has sequels (FFX-2 being the first), and rarely continues characters. If anything, some of the villains are more well known than the playable characters, because they do return from time to time.
The reason Link beat Mario easily was because all the Final Fantasy fans voted for Link to spite Mario. Final Fantasy fansites posted links to the poll saying vote for Link, whereas the Nintendo fans didn't really care who won.
The Zelda game for the GameCube had the highest pre-order sales Nintendo has EVER had, and almost every Zelda game has done extremely well, regardless of what system it's on. While most people have Mario games because they were bundled with their systems (SMB2 and 3, despite the madness of their releases, did not sell nearly as much as any bundled Mario game, though they did sell better than any FF game), most people had to go out and buy Zelda games.
Don't write off Link so easily, especially as spite votes.
hmm I would think the Mishima family from the Tekken series could provide at least 2 or 3 characters. Unfortunately, I think Tekken 4 may have done too much damage by drastically changing one of the characters and leaving a little to be desired compared to the first 3 (and my stance on Tekken Tag shifts every few months).
Soul Blade/Calibur also has a few memorable characters, including Yoshimitsu (of Tekken fame as well), Nightmare/Siegfried, and the previously mentioned Ivy.
Then again, the popularity of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter even to this day leaves me a bit dumbfounded (though I do own the most recent MK title).
Of course, I find that you only need a thorough offline moves list and maybe some tips on how each character should be played for most fighting games. Anything else is really dependant on the style of the player rather than the characters themselves, and if you can't find a character that fits your style as a player, then it's either the game not giving enough choice or a 'pilot error' situation.
I never had any problems with the game cartridges themselves, just with the system (and we had 2 systems in the house eventually, both of which gained the same problems after about 2 years).
I've never had any problems with CD and DVD based games, but then I treat the discs much better than I ever did a cartridge. I've never had a major problem with a top-loading cartridge-based system, either, just the old front-loading NES systems. My Atari 2600 (the old wood-panelled one) still worked just fine when I sold it about a year after getting the NES in '87 (so '88 or so, about 8 years after we got the Atari). My Genesis still works today, and the TurboGrafx-16 disappeared somewhere in my parents house.
I've heard of a lot of problems with PS2 systems as they get older, but haven't had any problems with my disc-based systems (except that Project Gotham causes my XBox to not want to shut off until I pull the plug, which seems to have nothing to do with it being a DVD-based system).
I prefer the original (no longer made) American X-Box controller as well. The S Controller's buttons are arranged completely wrong, and the original controller is much easier to get ahold of and actually use for long periods of time.
That, and I can club people over the head with it.
Oh, and most people prefer to use the S controller, so I never have any problems keeping tabs on my controller playing with friends (and my friends that bought the XBox when it came with the bigger controller all have one stuck in their 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) controller slot already). I'm thinking about going down and picking up 1 or 2 more before they're off the shelves around here (whether it's because other people actually like them too or because the stores just get rid of them).