You did not need to say the exact same thing about Super Mario Sunshine in four different posts.
One would think the large number of people who are disagreeing with you, to say nothing of the substantial body of critical acclaim the Nintendo games you're so eager to criticize get.
You're remarkably quick to label anyone who likes Nintendo games a Nintendo fanboy, and to radically misrepresent their claims. And yet you get surprisingly defensive when anyone suggests that you're a troll - which is interesting, considering that your cumulative moderation in this thread, at this point, is -9, with an amazing total of -8 for trolling. (-4 for redundant, and one +3 for an insightful for your first contribution.)
There is a reason that this is a little known fact: it's not true.
Wertham was an accomplished psychiatrist who, noting a rise in juvenlile delinquancy, looked at his own patients, and observed identification with comic book figures in a number of cases. He then drew the connection. If you actually read Seduction of the Innocent, it's mostly not that hysterical - he's mostly reasonably raising the question of whether or not comic books were being sufficiently attentive to the fact that their audience was still psychologically developing, and extremely impressionable.
Seeing as there was no labeling whatsoever on comic books at the time, this is actually a fairly reasonable concern.
To say that the hysterical backlash that followed Wertham's book is his fault is not entirely dissimilar to blaming Columbine on id software, really. Wertham had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, of raising the question of whether comic books were being responsible or not at a time when people were looking for something to blame - Wertham inadvertantly provided it.
It's very easy to demonize people who try to look for societal causes for horrible things. Particularly when those societal causes are things like video games, or comic books. And so, in the 50 years since Seduction of the Innocent was published, Wertham has become a figure of comical ridicule - even by people who haven't read anything written by him beyond the oft-quoted paragraph about Batman and Robin.
The problem with things like that is that only token research paints a far more nuanced picture of Wertham.
I quote here from Will Brooker's excellent book Batman Unmasked, in which he gives a far more well-researched study of Wertham than most people do. He is reading here a passage in which Wertham talks about homosexuality:
"We might now quibble with the term 'malorientation', but overall, rather than expressing shock and outrage, Wertham's tone seems one of quite reasonable concern. He does not, in my opinion, come across as 'shrill' or 'anguished'. Rather than advocating a witch-hunt against deviants, he understands that in a climate where homosexuality is a great taboo, gay fantasies might be a source of worry for young men."... "If we learn that Wertham's suspicion of Superman comics was based on his discomfort with all aspects of Fascism and his fear that children might learn to admire both physical force and the domination of 'inferior' peoples, his writing on this subject may also make more sense.
It would no doubt surprise many of those who caricature him as a bigot to learn that, during the 1920s, Wertham was one of the few psychiatrists who would treat black patients; that he spent the war years campaigning without result and against great hostility to establish a low-cost clinic in Harlem; that his LaFargue Clinic was finally opened on 113th Street in March 1944 with the help of funding from Ralph Ellison and the support of New York's black ministers."
That is not to say that Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent is a good reading - his look at comic books is selective, and his case studies are limited.
But simplifying Wertham, or Thompson, for that matter, as an overzealous bigot looking to make a cheap buck off of popular hysteria is falling into the same trap you're accusing them of. As with most things, the issue is a lot more complex and nuanced than that.
I'm not saying that video games cause violence. But, considering the strong evidence that media does influence the attitudes of the people who consume it, I can see how a reasonable and intelligent person could believe video games to be harmful./shrug.
The way that the Linear Modeling Kit works is that it randomizes each element of the story independently. The user puts in the basic structure - all of the elements as defined by Propp, and then for each element creates a number of entries that could fit there. Then the program shuffles the entries for each element, and strings them together to form a story.
There are some complicating elements - the ability to skip steps, which is crucial to Propp, and the ability to make flags that have the effect of not giving the protagonist a sex change, but that's the basic idea - so it does work, insofar as Propp works.
Some English professors I worked with in the past actually worked on something akin to this once. Their goal was to provide a demonstration of either the success or failure of structuralist models of literature, such as those offered by Vladimir Propp in his book Morphology of Folktales.
If you're not familiar with Propp or with structuralism, you really should be before you do any work on this project. The basic idea is that all stories of a given genre have a common core structure, and amount to filling in the blanks in different ways from story to story. Propp only works with folktales, which are a fairly limited type of story, and structuralism collapsed under some of its own theoretical weight before anyone really got too much further with it, but you shouldn't have much trouble coming up with a structure for fantasy stories - Propp's folktales are actually a fairly good start, and you'd only have to complicate it a bit.
This is probably a good place to start looking at information about the program mentioned above. I tried the sites it used to be available for download at, and was unable to find a copy still up, but further research, including getting in touch with its creators, would probably prove fruitful.
What about the desires of scholars? I've done a not-entirely insiginificant amount of research into the philosophy espoused by Heinlein's books, and would find the chance to look at some of his earliest writings tremendously interesting - even if they're not aesthetically good, what they reveal about the writer is of import and interest to people.
Because it is incredibly dull seeing the same characters from the same company all the time.
Hang on, lemme look again at the sales of the last Zelda game... or the most recent Pokemon games... or the box office of the last James Bond movie...
Nope, looks like you're crazy.
MP isn't inventive at all - all the elements from it have been around in all the previous Metroid games for years.
What elements are those? Aside from a common weapon set, the appearance of the main character, Ridley, and the fact that its an action/exploration game, I'm not sure what resemblence MP has to the original Metroid. And, considering that the Metroid series, prior to 2002, had been around for 15 years with only 3 games, I have trouble seeing how it was done to death - an average of a game every five years just doesn't seem to me to be overreleasing.
Erm, what genres are these? They have done platforming and... more platforming. Not much else.
Action/Adventure: Zelda (Hardly any platforms, and with the auto-jump, I have trouble calling it a platformer. And, for all the similarities to Ocarina/Majora, Wind Waker was also a dramatic improvement as a game - I hardly mind if Nintendo keeps releasing games in that style, so long as each one improves on the last. Also Eternal Darkness. Again, no platforms there.
Fighting: Super Smash Brothers Melee. I know you derided it as a button mashing beat-em up, but that's fighting games for you. SSBM is the only fighting game I can easily hand a controller to someone who doesn't play many video games and get them playing capably within two minutes. And with the handicap system, I can then easily make it a fun fight for both of us.
Sadly, it's par for the course, particularly for SoE games. At least on SW:G you can still actually post in forums developers read. For EverQuest, you have to submit a question, and maybe, if the stars allign, and if they have a good bit of smoke to blow, your question will get posted and answered by a developer, after which there will be no further discussion.
Out of that list, all but one of the first party games are typical Nintendo franchise games. People were moaning about Lara Croft by the time Tomb Raider III was announced - I am sick to DEATH of Mario as he has been around for probably nearly 20 years.
So in your case "Mario" means "any Nintendo property that has had another game come out in the series"? That's an interesting definition.
I suppose my question would be why reinvent the wheel with new characters? Yes, they could have made Mario Golf with characters who weren't Mario characters... but why? Mario is a perfectly good franchise to use for a cartoony golf game.
Perhaps in your opinion they will, but not others. The only game out of that lot deserving high praise is Eternal Darkness. MP was just Metroid in 3D, and not as good as I had hoped. And how can Metal Gear Solid be so critically acclaimed, when it is just a remake of an older game?
I'd say Eternal Darkness is, on the whole, less inventive than Metroid Prime. Eternal Darkness is a Zelda-esque dungeon hack with some shiny insanity effects. It does a great job on them, and so is still a great game, but Metroid Prime takes the first-person-shooter in a direction it had never been taken before. More to the point, it did things with the first person shooter that people said couldn't be done - platforming sections that didn't suck, exploration based gameplay, etc.
And, I mean, what were you hoping for from Metroid Prime? Something that wasn't Metroid?
But Nintendo only developed Zelda themselves - the other two were done by other development studios.
Second party development studios that, with heavy input and control from Nintendo. I do not consider the fact that Nintendo has begun to expand and take in some other development studios to mean that those games are not Nintendo games.
You yourself said that their games do not change much - so how can they have an 'edge' if that is true?
Nintendo continues to do what it's always done - perfect styles of games, and invent new styles of games. Even their new styles of games, though, have a certain... Nintendoness to them. They display elegance of control, and are typically very easy to pick up and play, but not nearly so easy to beat, and harder still to "fully" beat (i.e. unlock everything, get 100% completion, etc).
Regardless, in every genre and style Nintendo has attempted, they are reliably among the best at it.
Before trolling endlessly about the Gamecube, making repetative and easily refuted claims (Nintendo has no innovative games, all their games feature the Mario gang), and pimping your site, you might want to make sure your site actually loads.
Just a tip, so you can get it fixed and pimp it before your karma goes through the floor with the -1 trolls.
Endless games with Mario in them? For the Gamecube, that would be... let's see... Mario Golf, Mario Party 4, and Super Mario Sunshine? Oh, right, and if you really want to count it, Super Smash Bros Melee. With two more coming - Mario Party 5, and Mario Kart: Double Dash.
Yup. That's the GC library. Except, of course, for Zelda, Metroid, Eternal Darkness, Pikmin, F-Zero, and Nintendo's lock on the Super Monkey Ball, Rogue Squadron, and Resident Evil series.
As you said, Nintendo's games are not much different from what they did before. So perhaps its your idea of fun that's changed, not Nintendo's games.
In a given year, Nintendo will make 2-3 of the best games of the year. Last year they did Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime. This year, it looks like Zelda and F-Zero, though with Mario Kart, Pikmin 2, and their Metal Gear Solid remake, all still coming out this year, they might easily get another. On top of these instant classics, they line the edges with games that are great and worth owning - Pikmin, Mario Golf, etc.
There is no other game company that comes close to that level of quality, for either consoles or PCs. Blizzard takes 2-3 years to come out with one game as great as Zelda, Metroid, or Eternal Darkness.
Considering that, I can't imagine buying a console other than the Nintendo console. Especially since the alleged highlights of other systems - Final Fantasy X, Grand Theft Auto 3, and Halo, for instance, did nothing for me.
So, do I think Nintendo has lost its edge?
I think Nintendo are the only people left who have an edge.
Considering how tightly Garriott has held onto that persona in the past - to the point of very deliberately blurring the line between Lord British and himself, allowing a company he is no longer at all associated with to continue using it is somewhat surprising - especially considering that the relationship between Garriott and EA has not always been cordial.
Then again, now that Garriott no longer has any rights to the Ultima line, which Lord British was always associated with, maybe he's just letting go of the past and moving on to entirely new ventures.
They didn't remove hate across the board. They removed it in Germany, which has extremely strict hate speech laws, which Google was probably running afoul of.
Nor did they say anything about copyright infringement being wrong. They complied with a DMCA request. The DMCA being the evil thing that it is, they were, quite likely, in violation of it.
In other words, both cases were not Google being evil, they were the law being evil. Google is not the legislative body in either the US or Germany, so that's not really their fault.
The difference, to me, is the difference between calling and saying "I was watching you through your bedroom window" and saying "I can see through your bedroom window". In the former, they admit that they were a peeping tom. In the latter, they just give me a heads up that they noticed as they were walking by.
I cannot imagine that anyone has ever gone buy a console, picked up and considered the GC, but then said "Ooh, but there aren't a lot of Acclaim and Eidos titles for it", and then went and bought a PS2.
People buy consoles because of the games that already exist for it. They want Halo or KOTOR, so they buy an XBox. They want GTA:VC or Final Fantasy, so they buy a PS2. They want Zelda or Metroid, so they buy a GC.
The thing is that the XBox and the PS2 are fighting for very similar customers there - especially now that the GTA games are coming out for the XBox. People who like XBox games are also likely to like PS2 games.
The GC, on the other hand, is marketing to such a different market segment that it's tough to even call it a competitor. The people who like Zelda and Metroid are substantially different from the GTA fans. That's not to say that you can't like both - just that there's a huge chunk of potential Zelda buyers who will never, ever pick up GTA. Or Final Fantasy X. Or Halo.
The fact of the matter is that Eidos and Acclaim don't make games like Zelda and Metroid. They make games like GTA and Halo. So the Gamecube probably isn't the right console for them.
And that's fine. Because, ultimately, Nintendo doesn't care if Acclaim is profitable. Nintendo cares if Nintendo is profitable. And if they can maintain a model of making a small profit on every console they sell (Which they can), and of getting the outrageous sell-through rate they do on their A-List games (Which, so long as their A-list games continue to be of the quality of Zelda and Metroid), while also generating respectable numbers on their B-List titles (Eternal Darkness, Pikmin), then there is nothing, financially, for them to worry about.
Warner bought Atari, and split it into two divisions, home and arcade. When Atari stopped being profitable, Warner sold the divisions separately. Arcade eventually wound up as part of Midway (Who you may remember publishing games like Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, and other capitalizations on Atari licenses), which closed out that division, effectively ending that half of Atari. The parent article is about the end of the arcade branch of Atari.
Home, on the other hand, through a long chain of purchases, got eaten by Hasbro and then by Infogrames. Infogrames, in a bid to increase their image and video game credibility, renamed their games publishing Atari (Since they had now aquired the name). Enter the Matrix was the first game to be published fully as Atari, though they'd been tacking Atari onto their games for a year or so before that.
Art Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer, and is regularly assigned in universities.
Dark Knight is less studied, but Alan Moore's Watchmen gets a fair amount of critical attention. And Sandman gets quite a good deal of critical attention, and would probably be assigned almost as much as Maus if it weren't for the fact that the whole series costs roughly $200, which is a bit excessive for textbooks.
Because JLA/Avengers is of interest only to comic geeks, whereas Gaiman is a NYT bestselling author who's come back to comics, and this release stands a serious chance of being a bestseller - indeed, if sales in comic shops counted as well as sales in traditional bookstores, it would probably be a sure shot.
Not to knock JLA/Avengers. I'm excited about it. But its sales will not surpass Endless Nights.
Gaiman didn't influence Miller - Miller predates Gaiman. Gaiman's earliest comics publication, Violent Cases, came out a year after Dark Knight Returns.
Ummm... yeah, considering that his last two novels hit the NYT Bestseller list, he's actually got very little to gain from going back to comics, where he'll certainly make less money than his novels make.
To say nothing of the fact that there's no evidence he ever slept with Tori Amos - he's been married for years - he has kids in college.
At the risk of nitpicking, 1602 is not about the Marvel universe "as if" it manifested in 1602. Gaiman has made clear in interviews that it is not an Elseworlds or a What If story - rather, something has happened in the real Marvel universe to cause this to happen - part of the fun of the series is trying to untangle what happened to put things this way.
Sandman is a 75 issue comic series, which ran from late 1988 to 1996, published by DC. Gaiman is in a lot of ways a protege of Moore, and some would argue (Myself included) that he more than surpassed his mentor.
To quote from the introduction to one volume, "there are seven beings that aren't gods, who existed before humanity dreamed of gods and will exist after the last god is dead. They are called The Endless. They are embodiments of (in order of age) Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium."
The Endless are personifications fo the ideas they are named after. Sandman begins in 1989, when Dream escapes from a prison he has been in since 1916, when a magician captured him.
The series can be bought in 10 graphic novels very easily on Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for the love of God.
You did not need to say the exact same thing about Super Mario Sunshine in four different posts.
One would think the large number of people who are disagreeing with you, to say nothing of the substantial body of critical acclaim the Nintendo games you're so eager to criticize get.
You're remarkably quick to label anyone who likes Nintendo games a Nintendo fanboy, and to radically misrepresent their claims. And yet you get surprisingly defensive when anyone suggests that you're a troll - which is interesting, considering that your cumulative moderation in this thread, at this point, is -9, with an amazing total of -8 for trolling. (-4 for redundant, and one +3 for an insightful for your first contribution.)
Or are the mods just Nintendo fanbois too?
There is a reason that this is a little known fact: it's not true.
Wertham was an accomplished psychiatrist who, noting a rise in juvenlile delinquancy, looked at his own patients, and observed identification with comic book figures in a number of cases. He then drew the connection. If you actually read Seduction of the Innocent, it's mostly not that hysterical - he's mostly reasonably raising the question of whether or not comic books were being sufficiently attentive to the fact that their audience was still psychologically developing, and extremely impressionable.
Seeing as there was no labeling whatsoever on comic books at the time, this is actually a fairly reasonable concern.
To say that the hysterical backlash that followed Wertham's book is his fault is not entirely dissimilar to blaming Columbine on id software, really. Wertham had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, of raising the question of whether comic books were being responsible or not at a time when people were looking for something to blame - Wertham inadvertantly provided it.
It's very easy to demonize people who try to look for societal causes for horrible things. Particularly when those societal causes are things like video games, or comic books. And so, in the 50 years since Seduction of the Innocent was published, Wertham has become a figure of comical ridicule - even by people who haven't read anything written by him beyond the oft-quoted paragraph about Batman and Robin.
...
/shrug.
The problem with things like that is that only token research paints a far more nuanced picture of Wertham.
I quote here from Will Brooker's excellent book Batman Unmasked, in which he gives a far more well-researched study of Wertham than most people do. He is reading here a passage in which Wertham talks about homosexuality:
"We might now quibble with the term 'malorientation', but overall, rather than expressing shock and outrage, Wertham's tone seems one of quite reasonable concern. He does not, in my opinion, come across as 'shrill' or 'anguished'. Rather than advocating a witch-hunt against deviants, he understands that in a climate where homosexuality is a great taboo, gay fantasies might be a source of worry for young men."
"If we learn that Wertham's suspicion of Superman comics was based on his discomfort with all aspects of Fascism and his fear that children might learn to admire both physical force and the domination of 'inferior' peoples, his writing on this subject may also make more sense.
It would no doubt surprise many of those who caricature him as a bigot to learn that, during the 1920s, Wertham was one of the few psychiatrists who would treat black patients; that he spent the war years campaigning without result and against great hostility to establish a low-cost clinic in Harlem; that his LaFargue Clinic was finally opened on 113th Street in March 1944 with the help of funding from Ralph Ellison and the support of New York's black ministers."
That is not to say that Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent is a good reading - his look at comic books is selective, and his case studies are limited.
But simplifying Wertham, or Thompson, for that matter, as an overzealous bigot looking to make a cheap buck off of popular hysteria is falling into the same trap you're accusing them of. As with most things, the issue is a lot more complex and nuanced than that.
I'm not saying that video games cause violence. But, considering the strong evidence that media does influence the attitudes of the people who consume it, I can see how a reasonable and intelligent person could believe video games to be harmful.
Demonizing things is bad, mmkay?
The way that the Linear Modeling Kit works is that it randomizes each element of the story independently. The user puts in the basic structure - all of the elements as defined by Propp, and then for each element creates a number of entries that could fit there. Then the program shuffles the entries for each element, and strings them together to form a story.
There are some complicating elements - the ability to skip steps, which is crucial to Propp, and the ability to make flags that have the effect of not giving the protagonist a sex change, but that's the basic idea - so it does work, insofar as Propp works.
Some English professors I worked with in the past actually worked on something akin to this once. Their goal was to provide a demonstration of either the success or failure of structuralist models of literature, such as those offered by Vladimir Propp in his book Morphology of Folktales.
If you're not familiar with Propp or with structuralism, you really should be before you do any work on this project. The basic idea is that all stories of a given genre have a common core structure, and amount to filling in the blanks in different ways from story to story. Propp only works with folktales, which are a fairly limited type of story, and structuralism collapsed under some of its own theoretical weight before anyone really got too much further with it, but you shouldn't have much trouble coming up with a structure for fantasy stories - Propp's folktales are actually a fairly good start, and you'd only have to complicate it a bit.
This is probably a good place to start looking at information about the program mentioned above. I tried the sites it used to be available for download at, and was unable to find a copy still up, but further research, including getting in touch with its creators, would probably prove fruitful.
What about the desires of scholars? I've done a not-entirely insiginificant amount of research into the philosophy espoused by Heinlein's books, and would find the chance to look at some of his earliest writings tremendously interesting - even if they're not aesthetically good, what they reveal about the writer is of import and interest to people.
Because it is incredibly dull seeing the same characters from the same company all the time.
Hang on, lemme look again at the sales of the last Zelda game... or the most recent Pokemon games... or the box office of the last James Bond movie...
Nope, looks like you're crazy.
MP isn't inventive at all - all the elements from it have been around in all the previous Metroid games for years.
What elements are those? Aside from a common weapon set, the appearance of the main character, Ridley, and the fact that its an action/exploration game, I'm not sure what resemblence MP has to the original Metroid. And, considering that the Metroid series, prior to 2002, had been around for 15 years with only 3 games, I have trouble seeing how it was done to death - an average of a game every five years just doesn't seem to me to be overreleasing.
Erm, what genres are these? They have done platforming and... more platforming. Not much else.
Action/Adventure: Zelda (Hardly any platforms, and with the auto-jump, I have trouble calling it a platformer. And, for all the similarities to Ocarina/Majora, Wind Waker was also a dramatic improvement as a game - I hardly mind if Nintendo keeps releasing games in that style, so long as each one improves on the last. Also Eternal Darkness. Again, no platforms there.
Fighting: Super Smash Brothers Melee. I know you derided it as a button mashing beat-em up, but that's fighting games for you. SSBM is the only fighting game I can easily hand a controller to someone who doesn't play many video games and get them playing capably within two minutes. And with the handicap system, I can then easily make it a fun fight for both of us.
Racing: F-Zero.
Puzzle: Pikmin.
Party: Mario Party.
Sadly, it's par for the course, particularly for SoE games. At least on SW:G you can still actually post in forums developers read. For EverQuest, you have to submit a question, and maybe, if the stars allign, and if they have a good bit of smoke to blow, your question will get posted and answered by a developer, after which there will be no further discussion.
It doesn't tend to go much worse than bringing a regular book.
Except that it's somewhat more expensive to drop it...
Out of that list, all but one of the first party games are typical Nintendo franchise games. People were moaning about Lara Croft by the time Tomb Raider III was announced - I am sick to DEATH of Mario as he has been around for probably nearly 20 years.
So in your case "Mario" means "any Nintendo property that has had another game come out in the series"? That's an interesting definition.
I suppose my question would be why reinvent the wheel with new characters? Yes, they could have made Mario Golf with characters who weren't Mario characters... but why? Mario is a perfectly good franchise to use for a cartoony golf game.
Perhaps in your opinion they will, but not others. The only game out of that lot deserving high praise is Eternal Darkness. MP was just Metroid in 3D, and not as good as I had hoped. And how can Metal Gear Solid be so critically acclaimed, when it is just a remake of an older game?
I'd say Eternal Darkness is, on the whole, less inventive than Metroid Prime. Eternal Darkness is a Zelda-esque dungeon hack with some shiny insanity effects. It does a great job on them, and so is still a great game, but Metroid Prime takes the first-person-shooter in a direction it had never been taken before. More to the point, it did things with the first person shooter that people said couldn't be done - platforming sections that didn't suck, exploration based gameplay, etc.
And, I mean, what were you hoping for from Metroid Prime? Something that wasn't Metroid?
But Nintendo only developed Zelda themselves - the other two were done by other development studios.
Second party development studios that, with heavy input and control from Nintendo. I do not consider the fact that Nintendo has begun to expand and take in some other development studios to mean that those games are not Nintendo games.
You yourself said that their games do not change much - so how can they have an 'edge' if that is true?
Nintendo continues to do what it's always done - perfect styles of games, and invent new styles of games. Even their new styles of games, though, have a certain... Nintendoness to them. They display elegance of control, and are typically very easy to pick up and play, but not nearly so easy to beat, and harder still to "fully" beat (i.e. unlock everything, get 100% completion, etc).
Regardless, in every genre and style Nintendo has attempted, they are reliably among the best at it.
That seems an edge to me.
Before trolling endlessly about the Gamecube, making repetative and easily refuted claims (Nintendo has no innovative games, all their games feature the Mario gang), and pimping your site, you might want to make sure your site actually loads.
Just a tip, so you can get it fixed and pimp it before your karma goes through the floor with the -1 trolls.
Endless games with Mario in them? For the Gamecube, that would be... let's see... Mario Golf, Mario Party 4, and Super Mario Sunshine? Oh, right, and if you really want to count it, Super Smash Bros Melee. With two more coming - Mario Party 5, and Mario Kart: Double Dash.
Yup. That's the GC library. Except, of course, for Zelda, Metroid, Eternal Darkness, Pikmin, F-Zero, and Nintendo's lock on the Super Monkey Ball, Rogue Squadron, and Resident Evil series.
As you said, Nintendo's games are not much different from what they did before. So perhaps its your idea of fun that's changed, not Nintendo's games.
In a given year, Nintendo will make 2-3 of the best games of the year. Last year they did Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime. This year, it looks like Zelda and F-Zero, though with Mario Kart, Pikmin 2, and their Metal Gear Solid remake, all still coming out this year, they might easily get another. On top of these instant classics, they line the edges with games that are great and worth owning - Pikmin, Mario Golf, etc.
There is no other game company that comes close to that level of quality, for either consoles or PCs. Blizzard takes 2-3 years to come out with one game as great as Zelda, Metroid, or Eternal Darkness.
Considering that, I can't imagine buying a console other than the Nintendo console. Especially since the alleged highlights of other systems - Final Fantasy X, Grand Theft Auto 3, and Halo, for instance, did nothing for me.
So, do I think Nintendo has lost its edge?
I think Nintendo are the only people left who have an edge.
Considering how tightly Garriott has held onto that persona in the past - to the point of very deliberately blurring the line between Lord British and himself, allowing a company he is no longer at all associated with to continue using it is somewhat surprising - especially considering that the relationship between Garriott and EA has not always been cordial.
Then again, now that Garriott no longer has any rights to the Ultima line, which Lord British was always associated with, maybe he's just letting go of the past and moving on to entirely new ventures.
They didn't remove hate across the board. They removed it in Germany, which has extremely strict hate speech laws, which Google was probably running afoul of.
Nor did they say anything about copyright infringement being wrong. They complied with a DMCA request. The DMCA being the evil thing that it is, they were, quite likely, in violation of it.
In other words, both cases were not Google being evil, they were the law being evil. Google is not the legislative body in either the US or Germany, so that's not really their fault.
It's hard to stop giving them my money?
I thought the whole point of KaZaA was that it was suddenly really easy not to give them my money...
The difference, to me, is the difference between calling and saying "I was watching you through your bedroom window" and saying "I can see through your bedroom window". In the former, they admit that they were a peeping tom. In the latter, they just give me a heads up that they noticed as they were walking by.
I cannot imagine that anyone has ever gone buy a console, picked up and considered the GC, but then said "Ooh, but there aren't a lot of Acclaim and Eidos titles for it", and then went and bought a PS2.
People buy consoles because of the games that already exist for it. They want Halo or KOTOR, so they buy an XBox. They want GTA:VC or Final Fantasy, so they buy a PS2. They want Zelda or Metroid, so they buy a GC.
The thing is that the XBox and the PS2 are fighting for very similar customers there - especially now that the GTA games are coming out for the XBox. People who like XBox games are also likely to like PS2 games.
The GC, on the other hand, is marketing to such a different market segment that it's tough to even call it a competitor. The people who like Zelda and Metroid are substantially different from the GTA fans. That's not to say that you can't like both - just that there's a huge chunk of potential Zelda buyers who will never, ever pick up GTA. Or Final Fantasy X. Or Halo.
The fact of the matter is that Eidos and Acclaim don't make games like Zelda and Metroid. They make games like GTA and Halo. So the Gamecube probably isn't the right console for them.
And that's fine. Because, ultimately, Nintendo doesn't care if Acclaim is profitable. Nintendo cares if Nintendo is profitable. And if they can maintain a model of making a small profit on every console they sell (Which they can), and of getting the outrageous sell-through rate they do on their A-List games (Which, so long as their A-list games continue to be of the quality of Zelda and Metroid), while also generating respectable numbers on their B-List titles (Eternal Darkness, Pikmin), then there is nothing, financially, for them to worry about.
Short form:
Warner bought Atari, and split it into two divisions, home and arcade. When Atari stopped being profitable, Warner sold the divisions separately. Arcade eventually wound up as part of Midway (Who you may remember publishing games like Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, and other capitalizations on Atari licenses), which closed out that division, effectively ending that half of Atari. The parent article is about the end of the arcade branch of Atari.
Home, on the other hand, through a long chain of purchases, got eaten by Hasbro and then by Infogrames. Infogrames, in a bid to increase their image and video game credibility, renamed their games publishing Atari (Since they had now aquired the name). Enter the Matrix was the first game to be published fully as Atari, though they'd been tacking Atari onto their games for a year or so before that.
Yes, but Sandman would be assigned in English departments, where we have such concepts as "mercy" =)
They can't be?
Art Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer, and is regularly assigned in universities.
Dark Knight is less studied, but Alan Moore's Watchmen gets a fair amount of critical attention. And Sandman gets quite a good deal of critical attention, and would probably be assigned almost as much as Maus if it weren't for the fact that the whole series costs roughly $200, which is a bit excessive for textbooks.
Because JLA/Avengers is of interest only to comic geeks, whereas Gaiman is a NYT bestselling author who's come back to comics, and this release stands a serious chance of being a bestseller - indeed, if sales in comic shops counted as well as sales in traditional bookstores, it would probably be a sure shot.
Not to knock JLA/Avengers. I'm excited about it. But its sales will not surpass Endless Nights.
Gaiman didn't influence Miller - Miller predates Gaiman. Gaiman's earliest comics publication, Violent Cases, came out a year after Dark Knight Returns.
/blink
Ummm... yeah, considering that his last two novels hit the NYT Bestseller list, he's actually got very little to gain from going back to comics, where he'll certainly make less money than his novels make.
To say nothing of the fact that there's no evidence he ever slept with Tori Amos - he's been married for years - he has kids in college.
At the risk of nitpicking, 1602 is not about the Marvel universe "as if" it manifested in 1602. Gaiman has made clear in interviews that it is not an Elseworlds or a What If story - rather, something has happened in the real Marvel universe to cause this to happen - part of the fun of the series is trying to untangle what happened to put things this way.
Sandman is a 75 issue comic series, which ran from late 1988 to 1996, published by DC. Gaiman is in a lot of ways a protege of Moore, and some would argue (Myself included) that he more than surpassed his mentor.
To quote from the introduction to one volume, "there are seven beings that aren't gods, who existed before humanity dreamed of gods and will exist after the last god is dead. They are called The Endless. They are embodiments of (in order of age) Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium."
The Endless are personifications fo the ideas they are named after. Sandman begins in 1989, when Dream escapes from a prison he has been in since 1916, when a magician captured him.
The series can be bought in 10 graphic novels very easily on Amazon.