Retailers in Europe want to make money. They make money when they sell things. For instance, games. While it is all the same to Nintendo whether you buy their game in America or in Europe (Barring, of course, the fact that they'd like all of their regional offices to be profitable, and the fact that it's a lot easier to get a sense of where your system is popular if you have some region control), it is not the same to a British game store whether you buy the game in America or in Europe.
So if Nintendo begins having a high import rate, their retailers begin to complain about lost sales. If the retailers get angry enough, they stop stocking Nintendo products at all, because they're insufficiently profitable, and the shelf space could be used for, say, Sony products that sell better.
This would make Nintendo very sad.
Therefore, they have to keep their regional retailers happy, and to do that they have to enforce region-based distribution.
See, I think that the people who grew up on Super Mario and are still gamers are, in a lot of cases, still interested in Mario. It's the next generation, currently in high school and middle school, who have never played the original Zelda that have no interest in Nintendo titles. And I don't think it's edginess that sells. Lord knows FF7 wasn't edgy.
I think it's a distinctly different style of game that sells - not in terms of content, but in terms of what's emphasized in design. I don't think a lot of current game designers obsess substatially over interface, or over innovation. That's not essentially criticism of current game design... but it's not my thing.
And yet I would rather have just Wind Waker than 10 games for the XBox.
Quality > Quantity any day of the week. And Nintendo, while it has many flaws (Arrogance being the biggest), cannot seriously be accused of not putting out brilliant games.
It would be moderated down to -1 Flamebait instantly.
Its claims are absolutely ludicrous. Mario Sunshine has a worse camera than Mario 64? Wind Waker is identical to Ocarina? Games like Smash Brothers that made dramatic and substantial improvements on their originals aren't worth putting out? Sequels that expand on popular and fun ideas are bad? These are just stupid ideas, made no smarter by his "witty" retitling of games to be "Wind Wanker" and "Mario Squirt-Gun", or his claiming that Miyamoto would "wet himself" if a game contained real violence. (News flash: Miyamoto was a producer on Eternal Darkness, one of three games actually praised by the ranter)
God, you have no idea how depressed I am that the buzz story on Nintendo is "the company is doomed". The company is only doomed because of the arbitrary perception that it is doomed. Its consoles are profitable, its games reliably top "best of year lists", and it has a sizable installed fanbase. It's only assholes like this that are going to kill what is, in my opinion, the only company still reliably putting out games that remotely resemble the hobby I grew up on.
Hm. That "essay" appears to have pissed me off more than I thought. I guess I'll go find some more Shines until I calm down.
The move from ignoring Metroid for almost a decade to massive support of it on Nintendo's part is a strange one, particularly since Metroid Prime, though acclaimed, didn't do all that well for them in sales.
The sad thing is that a lot of what passes for modern 'biology' is so ridiculously practical as to ignore basic questions like why making a drug to save someone's life is worthwhile - what's so innately valuable about life? Modern biology is entirely unconcerned about ethical questions, relying on the unproven, unargued, and unacknowledged a priori assumption that knowledge about life is good.
What I find interesting is that people actually get *paid* to indulge int his masturbatory nonsense. Talk about an amazing con...
Right, now that we've shown that it's possible to gratuitously flame all sorts of academic disciplines, can we move on to an understanding that philosophy, like every other discipline, is a really complex thing that requires detailed study to make useful comments about. A non-graduate philosophy student has about the same chance of meaningfully engaging a graduate philosophy student as an undergraduate biology student does of being useful on the cutting edge of biotech.
Suffice it to say that there are a lot of very good arguments why, despite the problems you have with contemporary philosophy, it's still the best way to go. A relatively simple one, first formulated by J. Hillis Miller about deconstruction, is that if it were the case that we were living in the Matrix, even if that possibility seems unpleasant and intuitively unlikely, wouldn't it be best to know? Especially since almost all new ideas, and even lots of old ideas, seem intuitively unlikely.
The biggest problem philosophy has as a discipline is people who think that what they discuss in the bar at 2am is remotely similar to what's discussed at a graduate or above philosophy seminar. It's not. Real philosophy is, quite honestly, vastly too complex for 99% of the posterbase here. Many of them could probably successfully study it and some might be able to get on to a PhD in it. But as it stands, the number of people on this board who are qualified to seriously comment on post-doctoral work in philosophy is negligible./rant off
I suspect this will be the move with which Sony self-destructs at least it's Playstation division, if not the entirety of the company. I have never seen a company that is not Disney really successfully synergize among its different branches, and even Disney has been having some trouble of late, in that its last few animated features have bombed.
Here, I think the problem is that parents look for game systems for their kids, and they look at DVD players/recorders and TiVos for the family. Therefore, when a parent is shopping for a game system, the fact that it has a DVD player/recorder and is a TiVo will not matter to them (And the fact that the box is more expensive will). Likewise, when they're looking for a DVD Player/Recorder or a TiVo, the game system will not be seen as an important bonus to them. Especially because I can't imagine that anyone who would be tempted at this point to buy a DVD recorder wouldn't already have a PS2.
Long term, I think this strategy is suicide as well. The gamers are already buying Sony, and the non-gamers will look at the product and go "But the Playstation is for teenagers and video game players. I want a Toshiba."
Raph Koster, the lead developer on SWG, is a really intelligent guy who writes some of the most insightful articles around on game design. Unfortunately, as particularly proven with some of his decisions while working on Ultima Online, his insight does not reliably pan out in his game design.
I expect SW:G to be a game with a lot of potential that has so many initial flaws it scares off a lot of its customer base in the first year, and has a hard time winning them back once Koster is replaced with someone more capable of keeping a playerbase together.
Seem to me greatly exaggerated. Is the GC a top-selling system? No. Is it even going to wind up second place when all is said and done? Very possibly not.
Nintendo, however, owns a market share very tightly. There are players who basically only enjoy Nintendo games. When pushed, we have some difficulty explaining why, except for some intangible aspect to the games. They're just... more fun. They seem to have been designed, always, to be fun, entertaining, easy to pick up, etc. And I don't get that feeling from most PS2 games. I buy them, and I'm almost always disappointed. They feel like they're a part of a different hobby than the one I grew up with.
I am not alone in this, either. Out of the dozen or so friends I have who own a console, about 5 own a Gamecube. I know this is an unusually high number, but, you know, I tend to associate with people who have similar taste and all. The point is, though, that the six of us are dedicated GC players. We own GC's because the GC is the only console that has the games we want.
My point, long-winded as it may be, is that I think the GC can and will survive on this niche. Sure, it'll go down to 10% of the market. Sure, it'll lose some of its third party support. But, as time goes on, a lot of developers will also start moving away from the Nintendo style of game entirely. And Nintendo will be the only company catering at all to people like me.
I figure it'll be like Apple. Never gonna be at the top of the game. Always gonna be around, and always gonna have a set of loyalists who would never seriously consider buying the competition.
And, furthermore, while I'm sure Longhorn will be a very problematic product, the day an Apple OS tears up a Microsoft OS will be the day after the Gamecube outsells the PS2, and the day before Beta makes a comeback.
I hope this doesn't replace the "free game" bundle. Between them, Nintendo has a really great bundle going. With this instead of the free game, though, I think it would be a step backward. =/
At the risk of being flamebait or troll, am I the only person who thinks that "The best Squaresoft games" (When talking about RPGs in particular) is rather like talking about "The best war crimes" or "The best Microsoft products"? With the exception of Chrono Trigger (And possibly Cross. I might play it this summer, if I have time), I find their RPGs almost across the board to feature boring combat mechanics, excessive numbers of random encounters, hackneyed plots, and generally little to reccomend them.
And I don't mean to troll the whole company. I did genuinely enjoy Chrono Trigger, what with its totally avoidable random encounters. And Final Fantasy I was nice, in that it was largely Dragon Warrior with a party. I still need to check out Tactics, and Crystal Chronicles gives me hope, but FF IV-X just totally missed me. I did not enjoy playing one of them. And I kept trying, because everyone insisted to me that Square was the most brilliant company ever.
Nope.
Just don't get it.
Why aren't there any lists of the top 25 Enix games? Now that'd be interesting.
$5 an hour seems pretty fair to me. Look at what arcade play will set me back. Or movies in the theater. I mean, 20 is a minimum, but it's an acceptable minimum. 40 is just the most I can deal with.
Am I the only person who thinks games are just getting too damn long? I mean, LoE is supposed to take 75 hours? Where the hell am I going to find 75 hours to play one game?
Games should be 40 hours tops. 20 is a perfectly fine length. I want to be done with a game in about two weeks of semi-casual play.
Grad school does not pay you. At least, not reliably. (Disclaimer: All of the following claims are about the humanities)
Hardly anyone offers substantial aid to mere Masters students. It's the PhDs they're looking for. On top of that, grad school applications went through the roof this year. 85% increase on an already big year, and there's no reason to think it'll fall off next year. The upshot being that grad school is a tremendously risky proposition, and you can easily get hit for another 30k of debt. Plus you don't get housing, so expect to have to find a way to pay for an apartment and food.
Grad school hurts your wallet.
No Season Passes?
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Frankly, season passes are what makes TiVos cool. Without them, they're just sort of neat gadgets. With them they become tremendously badass devices that change the way you interact with television and media.
TiVo Basic will be a failure. If they even allowed perpetual timeslot based recording (i.e. grab all episodes of Buffy on Tuesdays at 8:00), but didn't let me get things that air at multiple times on different days (i.e. grab all episodes of Good Eats that ever crop up on the Food Network), it would be a worthwhile service that would hook me, but ultimately make me want to upgrade.
But this is just too gimped to even convince people that the service is worthwhile, I think.
With those tastes, almost anything first or second party for the GC will be up your ally. Zelda and Mario are 3D, but they're 3D made with all the care and style of a Nintendo game. You also get Pikmin, which is a puzzle game that's fun in a way that little since Lolo has been, Eternal Darkness, which is Zelda with zombies, Smash Brothers, which is the fighting game to end all fighting games, and Metroid Prime, which is not entirely unlike Symphony of the Night and Quake.
I basically repeat the advice I always give. If you are a long-time gamer who grew up on the NES and SNES, the GC is the system for you. If you are looking for a system for your kid, the GC is the system for you. If you are in that middle generation that grew up on the PSX instead of the SNES, then the PS2 and XBox are for you. But the GC is still where the legacy of the old sk00l is. =)
If you want one or two games to occupy you for a month, I reccomend something in the MMOG flavor. EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, or Shadowbane. I'd reccomend one of the first two, personally.
If you're looking to grab a console and you haven't played a game since X-Wing, I'd actually advise the Gamecube. It's certainly got enough games to entertain for a month, if not longer, and its games tend to be a bit more "old sk00l", and will probably be just a bit more familiar in their style and reasoning than a PS2 or XBox game, which are really catered to the generation after those of us that grew up in the Nintendo era. Look into snagging Metroid Prime, the new Zelda, Star Wars: Rogue Leader, or Eternal Darkness.
How does the RIAA decide which students to sue? I mean, do they do careful research on who's most likely to settle, rather than contest it, or counter-sue for harrassment? Of all the piracy that goes on college campuses, how do they pick which people?
Oh well. Pity that the record industry has had to resort to extorting $12,000 out of people who can't defend themselves who probably aren't doing anything illegal.
To say that Baer is the sole inventor of video games is to say that Newton is the sole inventor of calculus. He was one of many people, and his contributions, frankly, aren't even among the most significant.
Personally, I see little reason to listen to him. His ideas sound well out of date, and while he displayed technical innovation, none of his games are sitting on any "greatest games of all time" lists.
When David Crane, Richard Garriott, or Shigeru Miyamoto speak out against GTA, let me know, and maybe I'll think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what you're missing:
Retailers in Europe want to make money. They make money when they sell things. For instance, games. While it is all the same to Nintendo whether you buy their game in America or in Europe (Barring, of course, the fact that they'd like all of their regional offices to be profitable, and the fact that it's a lot easier to get a sense of where your system is popular if you have some region control), it is not the same to a British game store whether you buy the game in America or in Europe.
So if Nintendo begins having a high import rate, their retailers begin to complain about lost sales. If the retailers get angry enough, they stop stocking Nintendo products at all, because they're insufficiently profitable, and the shelf space could be used for, say, Sony products that sell better.
This would make Nintendo very sad.
Therefore, they have to keep their regional retailers happy, and to do that they have to enforce region-based distribution.
See, I have the exact same problem, only reversed. I couldn't stand Ocarina, but absolutely love Wind Waker.
Then again, I have a friend who loves the Game Boy Zeldas, but couldn't get into Link to the Past. No accounting for taste, I suppose.
See, I think that the people who grew up on Super Mario and are still gamers are, in a lot of cases, still interested in Mario. It's the next generation, currently in high school and middle school, who have never played the original Zelda that have no interest in Nintendo titles. And I don't think it's edginess that sells. Lord knows FF7 wasn't edgy.
I think it's a distinctly different style of game that sells - not in terms of content, but in terms of what's emphasized in design. I don't think a lot of current game designers obsess substatially over interface, or over innovation. That's not essentially criticism of current game design... but it's not my thing.
And yet I would rather have just Wind Waker than 10 games for the XBox.
Quality > Quantity any day of the week. And Nintendo, while it has many flaws (Arrogance being the biggest), cannot seriously be accused of not putting out brilliant games.
It would be moderated down to -1 Flamebait instantly.
Its claims are absolutely ludicrous. Mario Sunshine has a worse camera than Mario 64? Wind Waker is identical to Ocarina? Games like Smash Brothers that made dramatic and substantial improvements on their originals aren't worth putting out? Sequels that expand on popular and fun ideas are bad? These are just stupid ideas, made no smarter by his "witty" retitling of games to be "Wind Wanker" and "Mario Squirt-Gun", or his claiming that Miyamoto would "wet himself" if a game contained real violence. (News flash: Miyamoto was a producer on Eternal Darkness, one of three games actually praised by the ranter)
God, you have no idea how depressed I am that the buzz story on Nintendo is "the company is doomed". The company is only doomed because of the arbitrary perception that it is doomed. Its consoles are profitable, its games reliably top "best of year lists", and it has a sizable installed fanbase. It's only assholes like this that are going to kill what is, in my opinion, the only company still reliably putting out games that remotely resemble the hobby I grew up on.
Hm. That "essay" appears to have pissed me off more than I thought. I guess I'll go find some more Shines until I calm down.
Last I checked, the top criterion for a game was whether it's fun.
You want realism? Go outside.
Funny you should mention that. Megaman X6 was so bad that I actually wanted to go outside.
The move from ignoring Metroid for almost a decade to massive support of it on Nintendo's part is a strange one, particularly since Metroid Prime, though acclaimed, didn't do all that well for them in sales.
Still, I can't say I mind. =)
The sad thing is that a lot of what passes for modern 'biology' is so ridiculously practical as to ignore basic questions like why making a drug to save someone's life is worthwhile - what's so innately valuable about life? Modern biology is entirely unconcerned about ethical questions, relying on the unproven, unargued, and unacknowledged a priori assumption that knowledge about life is good.
/rant off
What I find interesting is that people actually get *paid* to indulge int his masturbatory nonsense. Talk about an amazing con...
Right, now that we've shown that it's possible to gratuitously flame all sorts of academic disciplines, can we move on to an understanding that philosophy, like every other discipline, is a really complex thing that requires detailed study to make useful comments about. A non-graduate philosophy student has about the same chance of meaningfully engaging a graduate philosophy student as an undergraduate biology student does of being useful on the cutting edge of biotech.
Suffice it to say that there are a lot of very good arguments why, despite the problems you have with contemporary philosophy, it's still the best way to go. A relatively simple one, first formulated by J. Hillis Miller about deconstruction, is that if it were the case that we were living in the Matrix, even if that possibility seems unpleasant and intuitively unlikely, wouldn't it be best to know? Especially since almost all new ideas, and even lots of old ideas, seem intuitively unlikely.
The biggest problem philosophy has as a discipline is people who think that what they discuss in the bar at 2am is remotely similar to what's discussed at a graduate or above philosophy seminar. It's not. Real philosophy is, quite honestly, vastly too complex for 99% of the posterbase here. Many of them could probably successfully study it and some might be able to get on to a PhD in it. But as it stands, the number of people on this board who are qualified to seriously comment on post-doctoral work in philosophy is negligible.
I suspect this will be the move with which Sony self-destructs at least it's Playstation division, if not the entirety of the company. I have never seen a company that is not Disney really successfully synergize among its different branches, and even Disney has been having some trouble of late, in that its last few animated features have bombed.
Here, I think the problem is that parents look for game systems for their kids, and they look at DVD players/recorders and TiVos for the family. Therefore, when a parent is shopping for a game system, the fact that it has a DVD player/recorder and is a TiVo will not matter to them (And the fact that the box is more expensive will). Likewise, when they're looking for a DVD Player/Recorder or a TiVo, the game system will not be seen as an important bonus to them. Especially because I can't imagine that anyone who would be tempted at this point to buy a DVD recorder wouldn't already have a PS2.
Long term, I think this strategy is suicide as well. The gamers are already buying Sony, and the non-gamers will look at the product and go "But the Playstation is for teenagers and video game players. I want a Toshiba."
Which is fine by me. I like the Gamecube. =)
Yes, I want to disagree.
Raph Koster, the lead developer on SWG, is a really intelligent guy who writes some of the most insightful articles around on game design. Unfortunately, as particularly proven with some of his decisions while working on Ultima Online, his insight does not reliably pan out in his game design.
I expect SW:G to be a game with a lot of potential that has so many initial flaws it scares off a lot of its customer base in the first year, and has a hard time winning them back once Koster is replaced with someone more capable of keeping a playerbase together.
Seem to me greatly exaggerated. Is the GC a top-selling system? No. Is it even going to wind up second place when all is said and done? Very possibly not.
Nintendo, however, owns a market share very tightly. There are players who basically only enjoy Nintendo games. When pushed, we have some difficulty explaining why, except for some intangible aspect to the games. They're just... more fun. They seem to have been designed, always, to be fun, entertaining, easy to pick up, etc. And I don't get that feeling from most PS2 games. I buy them, and I'm almost always disappointed. They feel like they're a part of a different hobby than the one I grew up with.
I am not alone in this, either. Out of the dozen or so friends I have who own a console, about 5 own a Gamecube. I know this is an unusually high number, but, you know, I tend to associate with people who have similar taste and all. The point is, though, that the six of us are dedicated GC players. We own GC's because the GC is the only console that has the games we want.
My point, long-winded as it may be, is that I think the GC can and will survive on this niche. Sure, it'll go down to 10% of the market. Sure, it'll lose some of its third party support. But, as time goes on, a lot of developers will also start moving away from the Nintendo style of game entirely. And Nintendo will be the only company catering at all to people like me.
I figure it'll be like Apple. Never gonna be at the top of the game. Always gonna be around, and always gonna have a set of loyalists who would never seriously consider buying the competition.
And, furthermore, while I'm sure Longhorn will be a very problematic product, the day an Apple OS tears up a Microsoft OS will be the day after the Gamecube outsells the PS2, and the day before Beta makes a comeback.
I hope this doesn't replace the "free game" bundle. Between them, Nintendo has a really great bundle going. With this instead of the free game, though, I think it would be a step backward. =/
At the risk of being flamebait or troll, am I the only person who thinks that "The best Squaresoft games" (When talking about RPGs in particular) is rather like talking about "The best war crimes" or "The best Microsoft products"? With the exception of Chrono Trigger (And possibly Cross. I might play it this summer, if I have time), I find their RPGs almost across the board to feature boring combat mechanics, excessive numbers of random encounters, hackneyed plots, and generally little to reccomend them.
And I don't mean to troll the whole company. I did genuinely enjoy Chrono Trigger, what with its totally avoidable random encounters. And Final Fantasy I was nice, in that it was largely Dragon Warrior with a party. I still need to check out Tactics, and Crystal Chronicles gives me hope, but FF IV-X just totally missed me. I did not enjoy playing one of them. And I kept trying, because everyone insisted to me that Square was the most brilliant company ever.
Nope.
Just don't get it.
Why aren't there any lists of the top 25 Enix games? Now that'd be interesting.
$5 an hour seems pretty fair to me. Look at what arcade play will set me back. Or movies in the theater. I mean, 20 is a minimum, but it's an acceptable minimum. 40 is just the most I can deal with.
Am I the only person who thinks games are just getting too damn long? I mean, LoE is supposed to take 75 hours? Where the hell am I going to find 75 hours to play one game?
Games should be 40 hours tops. 20 is a perfectly fine length. I want to be done with a game in about two weeks of semi-casual play.
Yeah, but, see, I'd be miserable in science, and not in English, so I'll happily take the pay cut so as not to hate my life. =)
Grad school does not pay you. At least, not reliably. (Disclaimer: All of the following claims are about the humanities) Hardly anyone offers substantial aid to mere Masters students. It's the PhDs they're looking for. On top of that, grad school applications went through the roof this year. 85% increase on an already big year, and there's no reason to think it'll fall off next year. The upshot being that grad school is a tremendously risky proposition, and you can easily get hit for another 30k of debt. Plus you don't get housing, so expect to have to find a way to pay for an apartment and food. Grad school hurts your wallet.
Frankly, season passes are what makes TiVos cool. Without them, they're just sort of neat gadgets. With them they become tremendously badass devices that change the way you interact with television and media.
TiVo Basic will be a failure. If they even allowed perpetual timeslot based recording (i.e. grab all episodes of Buffy on Tuesdays at 8:00), but didn't let me get things that air at multiple times on different days (i.e. grab all episodes of Good Eats that ever crop up on the Food Network), it would be a worthwhile service that would hook me, but ultimately make me want to upgrade.
But this is just too gimped to even convince people that the service is worthwhile, I think.
See, I have trouble getting worked up over bad covers to shooters. Because, really, it'll never be as bad as Phalanx.
With those tastes, almost anything first or second party for the GC will be up your ally. Zelda and Mario are 3D, but they're 3D made with all the care and style of a Nintendo game. You also get Pikmin, which is a puzzle game that's fun in a way that little since Lolo has been, Eternal Darkness, which is Zelda with zombies, Smash Brothers, which is the fighting game to end all fighting games, and Metroid Prime, which is not entirely unlike Symphony of the Night and Quake.
I basically repeat the advice I always give. If you are a long-time gamer who grew up on the NES and SNES, the GC is the system for you. If you are looking for a system for your kid, the GC is the system for you. If you are in that middle generation that grew up on the PSX instead of the SNES, then the PS2 and XBox are for you. But the GC is still where the legacy of the old sk00l is. =)
If you want one or two games to occupy you for a month, I reccomend something in the MMOG flavor. EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, or Shadowbane. I'd reccomend one of the first two, personally.
If you're looking to grab a console and you haven't played a game since X-Wing, I'd actually advise the Gamecube. It's certainly got enough games to entertain for a month, if not longer, and its games tend to be a bit more "old sk00l", and will probably be just a bit more familiar in their style and reasoning than a PS2 or XBox game, which are really catered to the generation after those of us that grew up in the Nintendo era. Look into snagging Metroid Prime, the new Zelda, Star Wars: Rogue Leader, or Eternal Darkness.
How does the RIAA decide which students to sue? I mean, do they do careful research on who's most likely to settle, rather than contest it, or counter-sue for harrassment? Of all the piracy that goes on college campuses, how do they pick which people?
Oh well. Pity that the record industry has had to resort to extorting $12,000 out of people who can't defend themselves who probably aren't doing anything illegal.
To say that Baer is the sole inventor of video games is to say that Newton is the sole inventor of calculus. He was one of many people, and his contributions, frankly, aren't even among the most significant.
Personally, I see little reason to listen to him. His ideas sound well out of date, and while he displayed technical innovation, none of his games are sitting on any "greatest games of all time" lists.
When David Crane, Richard Garriott, or Shigeru Miyamoto speak out against GTA, let me know, and maybe I'll think about it.
I haven't heard about a game that's promised this much since Daikatana.
Suffice it to say, therefore, that I don't expect to see this game in the next five years. Nor do I really expect it to be very good.
Which really is a pity. Because I still find myself playing through Doom or Doom 2 about once a year. And I'd love a good sequel.