Whats the estimated PS3 release date? It might be as early as Spring 2006 in Japan. So MS might not be launching as early as some people think. We'll hopefully know for sure come E3.
Apparently the Japanese care about quality and so they realize that 90% of games coming out are crap unlike the consumers over here.;)
I know you are semi-joking, but it's always amusing to look at the best-selling games every week in Japan. They buy a lot of shitty games, just like gamers in other countries.:D
While I will certianly grant that there are good games coming out of the U.S. houses, now moreso than ever, the majority of console games are still translations of Japanese titles.
This isn't true any reasonable way you look at it. Japan buys less games than Europe or the US, being a pretty distant third as a videogame market. And in the West you just need to look at the top 20 or so sellers every year to see that though Japanese games are important, they aren't remotely the biggest factor.
It's possible Japan releases more console games than other countries, but 95% of these never make it out of Japan.
You have some good points, but a lot of your post is filled with this kind of nonsense (like the Greatest Hits argument - you know MS has followed this kind of strategy with Platinum Hits from a very early date, right?).
Mist Walker is also working on a strategy RPG for DS. Frankly, they smell to me like a studio that rents the name of their famous founder... but we'll see how they perform.
Though it is possible this will end up being true, this kind of thing is growing common in Japan. A lot of awesome developers are starting very small studios who then collaborate with larger studios to finish the games. In some ways more of a Hollywood model.
It is considered to be more powerful, and that's part of the problem. Far too many of Nintendo's games look like they were ported from the N64 (which is often true). And even their flagship titles like Super Mario Sunshine are pretty far from impressive when it comes to graphics and art. Third parties have obviously done some amazing things with the hardware, but Nintendo of Japan really hasn't.
If the parents are too stupid or uninformed to understand the ESRB ratings (or at least ask an employee what they mean) shouldn't be buying their kids videogames. It's not like they change every year or something.
It's data storage. It's faster than any hard drive. It's plenty large enough. What's the problem? It's mainly the fact that it can't be rewritten to all that much compared to a hard disk. Using it as a cache involves lots of little writes and reads. I forget what current flash memory is up to when it comes to longevity (it does get better every year), but it still isn't at the point where you can use it as a hard drive in this kind of situation. This is barring some new tech, of course (or the possibility of having to replace this 'memory card' every few years) - but it isn't a slam dunk replacement by any means, especially for backwards compatibility purposes.
An inability to perform random erasure/rewrites might also be a problem, though presumably this could be dealt with via the Xbox360's software libraries.
1. You do not need a hard drive for backwards compatability. A flash memory card can spoof a hard drive just fine. (In fact, there are several on the market which do exactly that on the current X-Box in order to offer game portability.) The problem with that is quite a few Xbox1 games use the hard drive as a large cache while playing. IIRC each game gets around a gig to do so. It is used for a lot more than just savegames and custom soundtracks.
(In general this fact is constantly ignored by the "why bother with a hard drive?" crowd for some reason I can't fathom.)
Existing flash memory is unsuitable as a large game cache area. Perhaps some new tech is being used, but that still strikes me as pricey.
That's certainly a valid way to look at it, and I would mostly agree. Of course, that perspective might negate some of your other points about Nintendo innovations, like with analog and multiple controller ports (ex: Mario64 was developed using the already created Saturn analog joystick).:D
I think the main complaint was specifically about the rumble being a standard controller feature. If you had to buy an add-on device to do it for N64, it really wasn't "standard", was it? Sony is actually the first company to make it a standard controller feature, AFAIK.
(And the correct answer to your question is "Grabbed by the Ghoulies". Unfortunately it was apparently too kiddie of a game for all the old school "gameplay matters" Nintendo fans to appreciate, with all of that unfair hate they have towards it.)
So you're correct in saying that the Gamecube didn't outsell the Xbox as of the end of 2004, but that's relatively recent, and the Gamecube is certainly much closer to the Xbox in terms of sales than either of them are to the Playstation 2. You can draw your own conclusions at this point--I don't have a preference either way--but I think it would be somewhat unfair and short-sighted to say that the Gamecube was a failure.
Their argument was against this fantasy that the GC is outselling the Xbox worldwide. There didn't seem to be any argument that the GC is a failure, was there?
A source wasn't needed because console sales numbers are fact. The Xbox has been outselling the GC worldwide for at a year now and this is widely reported. Anyone who follows videogames semi-closely should know this (which apparently doesn't include several Nintendo-loving mods).
Somebody else already corrected you, but you could have always checked the Wikipedia link I provided. The screenshots make it pretty clear I am not referring to Wolf3D.:D
If we are going for the originator wouldn't it actually have been Castle Wolfenstein? That came out roughly six years before the original Metal Gear and featured stealth as an integral game mechanic.
Though I agree with the other poster who wrote that the stealth gameplay in Splinter Cell has far more in common with what Thief pioneered rather than the simpler Metal Gear/Castle Wolfenstein stealth gameplay models.
Please name a online multiplayer videogame that was fairly popular and didn't end up requiring a patch to fix something.
No matter how extensive your testing unit (and MS certainly has that for Xbox games), having 100,000+ players at nearly all times for months banging around in a reasonably complex competitive videogame is going to find unforeseen glitches. Sure it would be wonderful if this kind of thing didn't happen, but that seems to be an enormously unreasonable expectation on your part.
And why are you pretending online console games having patches is a new thing? Xbox, PS2, and IIRC even Dreamcast online games have all had patches of some kind. This thing happens.
AFAIK the Democrat-education correlation is stronger than the Republican-economic correlation. And I should point out that it was KARL ROVE there pointing that out.
You can cheat with hardware mods on the Xbox. But if you have a hardware mod you can't get access to Xbox Live (they can detect it since it is a fairly uniform platform). So that basically does eliminate cheating.
You certainly have people exploiting existing glitches in some Xbox Live games (which hopefully are patched, like Bungie is doing with Halo 2 this Monday), but you simply can't get the aimbots, speed hacks, map hacks, etc. you find in even the most popular PC online games. There's no way to implement them on a stock Xbox. I find it hard to believe Xbox360 will be any different. In this case the hardware does essentially prevent cheating. This is widely stated as a reason why some people (like myself) generally prefer playing online games nowadays on Xbox rather than the PC. It's a huge console advantage ("trusted computing" might bring similar benefits to the PC, but is it worth it?).
I should also note these exploitable glitches usually seem pretty rare. None of the Xbox Live games I play regularly (lately Phantom Dust and DOA2U) have any major ones that I have encountered.
(As an aside, the PS2 does have rampart online cheating - hardware needs to be well-designed to offer this advantage.)
Western RPGs are generally story-drived as well!
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Genre-Defining Games?
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I'm not sure you can really say Japanese RPGs are more story driven than their Western counterparts. Maybe this more "Adventure drive" style you speak of was true of early Western RPGs, but it was also true of early JRPGs (which featured no major story elements to speak of either). But Planescape Torment, maybe KOTOR, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, some of the Ultima games, and more all feature similar or even more storyline than what you find in current JRPGs.
I think the only major difference is that Japanese console RPGs generally have much larger budgets, and so they feature flashier and more extravagant storytelling (via plentiful cinemas, endless little 3D talking head scenes, and the like). Maybe it stands out more to some gamers because of this. There are also more of them released every year, probably because they are one of Japan's most popular game genres.
Another problem might be that a lot of gamers confuse games which definitely are nothing more than dungeon crawls like Diablo 2 with RPGs. They then associate that kind of game with Western RPGs, which is naturally nonsense. And it's also ignoring that Japan releases quite a few dungeon crawl RPGs every year as well.
JRPGs also feature storylines which are considerably more juvenile and shallow than what you find in a game like Planescape Torment, but that's another topic I suspect...
Slashdot Mirror
Whats the estimated PS3 release date?
It might be as early as Spring 2006 in Japan. So MS might not be launching as early as some people think. We'll hopefully know for sure come E3.
So Nintendo's real fanbase is a...collection of videogame critics?
This article might be about something similar, incidentally. Interesting stuff. I might have to try and find that television segment you are referring to...
It looked more like another Joss Whedon anime ripoff personally, but that's just me. :D
(Outlaw Star instead of Devil Hunter Yoko this time.)
I basically agree, but remember that a fairly large portion of that 80% actually couldn't vote (as in it isn't legal).
Apparently the Japanese care about quality and so they realize that 90% of games coming out are crap unlike the consumers over here. ;)
:D
I know you are semi-joking, but it's always amusing to look at the best-selling games every week in Japan. They buy a lot of shitty games, just like gamers in other countries.
While I will certianly grant that there are good games coming out of the U.S. houses, now moreso than ever, the majority of console games are still translations of Japanese titles.
This isn't true any reasonable way you look at it. Japan buys less games than Europe or the US, being a pretty distant third as a videogame market. And in the West you just need to look at the top 20 or so sellers every year to see that though Japanese games are important, they aren't remotely the biggest factor.
It's possible Japan releases more console games than other countries, but 95% of these never make it out of Japan.
You have some good points, but a lot of your post is filled with this kind of nonsense (like the Greatest Hits argument - you know MS has followed this kind of strategy with Platinum Hits from a very early date, right?).
Mist Walker is also working on a strategy RPG for DS. Frankly, they smell to me like a studio that rents the name of their famous founder... but we'll see how they perform.
Though it is possible this will end up being true, this kind of thing is growing common in Japan. A lot of awesome developers are starting very small studios who then collaborate with larger studios to finish the games. In some ways more of a Hollywood model.
It is considered to be more powerful, and that's part of the problem. Far too many of Nintendo's games look like they were ported from the N64 (which is often true). And even their flagship titles like Super Mario Sunshine are pretty far from impressive when it comes to graphics and art. Third parties have obviously done some amazing things with the hardware, but Nintendo of Japan really hasn't.
If the parents are too stupid or uninformed to understand the ESRB ratings (or at least ask an employee what they mean) shouldn't be buying their kids videogames. It's not like they change every year or something.
If Microsoft really does release a product better than Firefox, it will be sad to see the underdog lose, but really the consumers will win.
How will consumers win when MS promptly stops all development of IE once they have won the 'second browser war'?
A win for consumers is if multiple browsers prosper. The market is actually pretty close to this point right now - let's hope it stays that way!
Wow. They look worse than I imagined. And that's the Xbox version?
Because???
It's data storage. It's faster than any hard drive. It's plenty large enough. What's the problem?
It's mainly the fact that it can't be rewritten to all that much compared to a hard disk. Using it as a cache involves lots of little writes and reads. I forget what current flash memory is up to when it comes to longevity (it does get better every year), but it still isn't at the point where you can use it as a hard drive in this kind of situation. This is barring some new tech, of course (or the possibility of having to replace this 'memory card' every few years) - but it isn't a slam dunk replacement by any means, especially for backwards compatibility purposes.
An inability to perform random erasure/rewrites might also be a problem, though presumably this could be dealt with via the Xbox360's software libraries.
1. You do not need a hard drive for backwards compatability. A flash memory card can spoof a hard drive just fine. (In fact, there are several on the market which do exactly that on the current X-Box in order to offer game portability.)
The problem with that is quite a few Xbox1 games use the hard drive as a large cache while playing. IIRC each game gets around a gig to do so. It is used for a lot more than just savegames and custom soundtracks.
(In general this fact is constantly ignored by the "why bother with a hard drive?" crowd for some reason I can't fathom.)
Existing flash memory is unsuitable as a large game cache area. Perhaps some new tech is being used, but that still strikes me as pricey.
That's certainly a valid way to look at it, and I would mostly agree. Of course, that perspective might negate some of your other points about Nintendo innovations, like with analog and multiple controller ports (ex: Mario64 was developed using the already created Saturn analog joystick). :D
I think the main complaint was specifically about the rumble being a standard controller feature. If you had to buy an add-on device to do it for N64, it really wasn't "standard", was it? Sony is actually the first company to make it a standard controller feature, AFAIK.
When's the last time Rare made a good game?
;)
When's the last time Nintendo made a good game?
(And the correct answer to your question is "Grabbed by the Ghoulies". Unfortunately it was apparently too kiddie of a game for all the old school "gameplay matters" Nintendo fans to appreciate, with all of that unfair hate they have towards it.)
So you're correct in saying that the Gamecube didn't outsell the Xbox as of the end of 2004, but that's relatively recent, and the Gamecube is certainly much closer to the Xbox in terms of sales than either of them are to the Playstation 2. You can draw your own conclusions at this point--I don't have a preference either way--but I think it would be somewhat unfair and short-sighted to say that the Gamecube was a failure.
Their argument was against this fantasy that the GC is outselling the Xbox worldwide. There didn't seem to be any argument that the GC is a failure, was there?
A source wasn't needed because console sales numbers are fact. The Xbox has been outselling the GC worldwide for at a year now and this is widely reported. Anyone who follows videogames semi-closely should know this (which apparently doesn't include several Nintendo-loving mods).
Somebody else already corrected you, but you could have always checked the Wikipedia link I provided. The screenshots make it pretty clear I am not referring to Wolf3D. :D
If we are going for the originator wouldn't it actually have been Castle Wolfenstein? That came out roughly six years before the original Metal Gear and featured stealth as an integral game mechanic.
Though I agree with the other poster who wrote that the stealth gameplay in Splinter Cell has far more in common with what Thief pioneered rather than the simpler Metal Gear/Castle Wolfenstein stealth gameplay models.
Please name a online multiplayer videogame that was fairly popular and didn't end up requiring a patch to fix something.
No matter how extensive your testing unit (and MS certainly has that for Xbox games), having 100,000+ players at nearly all times for months banging around in a reasonably complex competitive videogame is going to find unforeseen glitches. Sure it would be wonderful if this kind of thing didn't happen, but that seems to be an enormously unreasonable expectation on your part.
And why are you pretending online console games having patches is a new thing? Xbox, PS2, and IIRC even Dreamcast online games have all had patches of some kind. This thing happens.
AFAIK the Democrat-education correlation is stronger than the Republican-economic correlation. And I should point out that it was KARL ROVE there pointing that out.
You can cheat with hardware mods on the Xbox. But if you have a hardware mod you can't get access to Xbox Live (they can detect it since it is a fairly uniform platform). So that basically does eliminate cheating.
You certainly have people exploiting existing glitches in some Xbox Live games (which hopefully are patched, like Bungie is doing with Halo 2 this Monday), but you simply can't get the aimbots, speed hacks, map hacks, etc. you find in even the most popular PC online games. There's no way to implement them on a stock Xbox. I find it hard to believe Xbox360 will be any different. In this case the hardware does essentially prevent cheating. This is widely stated as a reason why some people (like myself) generally prefer playing online games nowadays on Xbox rather than the PC. It's a huge console advantage ("trusted computing" might bring similar benefits to the PC, but is it worth it?).
I should also note these exploitable glitches usually seem pretty rare. None of the Xbox Live
games I play regularly (lately Phantom Dust and DOA2U) have any major ones that I have encountered.
(As an aside, the PS2 does have rampart online cheating - hardware needs to be well-designed to offer this advantage.)
I'm not sure you can really say Japanese RPGs are more story driven than their Western counterparts. Maybe this more "Adventure drive" style you speak of was true of early Western RPGs, but it was also true of early JRPGs (which featured no major story elements to speak of either). But Planescape Torment, maybe KOTOR, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, some of the Ultima games, and more all feature similar or even more storyline than what you find in current JRPGs.
I think the only major difference is that Japanese console RPGs generally have much larger budgets, and so they feature flashier and more extravagant storytelling (via plentiful cinemas, endless little 3D talking head scenes, and the like). Maybe it stands out more to some gamers because of this. There are also more of them released every year, probably because they are one of Japan's most popular game genres.
Another problem might be that a lot of gamers confuse games which definitely are nothing more than dungeon crawls like Diablo 2 with RPGs. They then associate that kind of game with Western RPGs, which is naturally nonsense. And it's also ignoring that Japan releases quite a few dungeon crawl RPGs every year as well.
JRPGs also feature storylines which are considerably more juvenile and shallow than what you find in a game like Planescape Torment, but that's another topic I suspect...