I wonder how well backwards compatibility would work if the new system only has a touch screen and gyro to control games? There must be some traditional buttons on the pad (or maybe you will be able to plug GC pads into the Revolution, but supposedly it's wireless...)
Another problem I could see with using a touch screen to have "dynamic" controls is that it's not tactile, you can't learn the position of the buttons by the feel because it's a flat surface. From playing Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS, you have to take your eyes off the top screen to locate the area you tap to switch to missles or go into ball mode, if this is Nintendo's plan I think it could backfire.
You're right there are a lot of interesting games on the web, however I would argue that there aren't too many that are a totally new way of playing games. Same with PDA games, many of them are "normal" games that are more or less forced to use the touch screen as the interface, rather than new ideas that take advantage of it. That said I'm not an expert on web/PDA games, I'm mostly familiar with the penguin-toss type Flash games!
The other disadvantage of web games is that I find Flash and Shockwave to be ever so slightly "laggy" and unresponsive to my inputs. I find the DS responds to my touches more immediately and makes me feel more in control of the game.
I'd say things like Wario Ware Touched, Yoshi's Touch 'n' Go and Pac-Pix are all games that I've not seen on any other system before.
The PS1 was integer based, non-texture-blending, nasty resolution, bitch to program for. The N64 was FAR superior in every respect than storage.
I agree with most of your post, but having programmed the PS1 and the N64, the N64 was much harder to program for. Thanks to excellent libraries from Sony it was a breeze to get things done on the PS1. God knows why they made the PS2 so hard to program for though...
Dvorak has an opinion on everything these days... probably just pissed people play WASD in FPS rather than >OEU.
I was playing Pac-Pix on my Nintendo DS the other day, while not all of the industry is innovating, the DS clearly shows there is creativity and originality still to be had in the industry. And with games like Nintendogs, Electroplankton, Goemon etc in the pipeline I think there's still plenty of originality if you look for it. The main problem is the big EA games with million dollar marketing budgets make the games industry seem more stale than it really it.
"The MPAA's president Dan Glickman applauded the move, stating he wanted to 'thank the congressional sponsors of this legislation for their strong advocacy for intellectual property rights.'"
The congressional sponsors of this legislation would like to thank the MPAA for their strong men who delivered large brief cases stuffed with cash.
If it monitors what I'm doing on my computer it should be classified as spyware. I don't care if it's for research rather than commercial uses, it's still spying.
The fact that the spying program is included with a free anti-virus program to entice people to download it says it all.
GTA is rated Mature 17+ in the US and it's rated 18 in the UK. If you can't distinguish right from wrong at 17+ you've got bigger problems than a silly video game "corrupting" you.
If you're younger than 17 you shouldn't be playing the game in the first place, that's what ESRB ratings are for. It's the responsibility of the parents to ensure they raise their children responsibly and not give them access to inappropriate material. Parents blaming video games when they do a shit job of teaching morals and boundaries is disgraceful.
I fucking hate it when games get blamed for society's problems. Worse still is when clueless politicians jump on the bandwagon.
Surely Groklaw could have had some fun with this and made minor alterations to all their documents so that SCO turned up to court armed with all the wrong information and made even bigger asses of themselves?
Only idiots read game reviews. Look at the glowing fault-free reviews IGN and GameSpot gave to all the big games from Christmas like San Andreas, Halo 2, MGS3, Prince of Persia 2, etc.
I stopped believing any games reviewer after every games journalist in the world creamed themselves over MGS2 in their reviews before having to admit some months later that it was a bit shit. I buy games now based solely on demos, movies and screenshots of games, it's far more accurate than trusting a games journalist's review as you get to see the actual game and judge if it's for you. Which is much better than letting some easily swayed hack back from his press junket in Hawaii convince you.
And what's wrong with paying for a game and expecting it to be finished? Anyone who claims that Halo 2 was finished as intended when it was released is not living in reality. I paid for a complete game, I didn't get that.
... looks like I won't be buying any more of your products. I might be one person but if there are enough who feel like I do then Apple will have to start taking note.
doesn't require comments at all. I admit this is a stupidly simple example, but I think it demonstrates that the naming of objects and variables as well as code layout is far more important than including reams of comments that can be ambiguous or just plain wrong. And it's not as if all programmers can write comments legibly either, spelling, grammar and punctuation seem to be thrown out the window sometimes.
Buzz Aldrin: Sir, please make sure your tray table and seat is returned to its upright position. Passenger: No! Where the hell's that beer I ordered??? Neil Armstrong: It won't be a minute, sir. I just need to make one giant leap to reach the cupboard where the beers are.
Better still, we know that Ubisoft has been tasked with developing the next America's Army video game. So could parents sue Ubisoft for releasing a game that the government asked them to make but is also trying to legislate against at the same time?
I think if MS had secured an exclusive on Capcom games like Resident Evil they'd be telling us that. The whole "joined forces with the company" sounds to me like Mizuguchi and Okamoto are going to executive produce some games. i.e. MS will make the game, and the Capcom guys will then give them suggestions and feedback.
This could be something similar to Hideo Kojima's interaction with Silicon Knights on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. If it is like this then it suggests that Capcom have committed their resources to developing primarily on PS3 (and maybe Revolution) and that this is the best deal MS were able to get out of Capcom.
You mean something like these guys: New Voyages? While the quality of the acting and story is debatable the authenticity of the sets and effects are quite stunning.:)
It's reckoned to be $1.6M per episode, so technically they need $36M to make a 22 episode season. But it all depends on how much Paramount want, they could accept $18M as enough to offset production costs or they could play hardball and raise the target to $50M.
I'm not convinced that dual-cores are the answer to the problem both Intel and AMD are now having scaling up CPU performance.
Using dual-core for games for example will certainly allow developers to make some enhancement to their games by parallelising non-dependant parts of their engine e.g. split A.I. and physics up, but at the end of the day once you've broken the game down to these parts you're going to be limited by processor speed again. Things can only be sub-divided into smaller tasks so much, once that limit is hit you again are reliant on faster clock speeds to do more.
I believe dual-cores are a distraction while the fundamental problem of reducing transistor leakage is addressed.
When will this generation of lazy parents start actually teaching morals to their kids? It's rather poor of them to expect games developers to do it for them. And even if developers started adding morals to games, I'm sure parents would still sue them when their kids go on killing sprees by saying they didn't teach the "right" morals.
... a big screen, better graphics than the PSP and an analogue stick Sony are going to walk away with the handheld market. If as TFA suggests the next GB is just be a hardware bump then Nintendo are making a big mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how well backwards compatibility would work if the new system only has a touch screen and gyro to control games? There must be some traditional buttons on the pad (or maybe you will be able to plug GC pads into the Revolution, but supposedly it's wireless...)
Another problem I could see with using a touch screen to have "dynamic" controls is that it's not tactile, you can't learn the position of the buttons by the feel because it's a flat surface. From playing Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS, you have to take your eyes off the top screen to locate the area you tap to switch to missles or go into ball mode, if this is Nintendo's plan I think it could backfire.
Don't worry that's not inflammatory.
You're right there are a lot of interesting games on the web, however I would argue that there aren't too many that are a totally new way of playing games. Same with PDA games, many of them are "normal" games that are more or less forced to use the touch screen as the interface, rather than new ideas that take advantage of it. That said I'm not an expert on web/PDA games, I'm mostly familiar with the penguin-toss type Flash games!
The other disadvantage of web games is that I find Flash and Shockwave to be ever so slightly "laggy" and unresponsive to my inputs. I find the DS responds to my touches more immediately and makes me feel more in control of the game.
I'd say things like Wario Ware Touched, Yoshi's Touch 'n' Go and Pac-Pix are all games that I've not seen on any other system before.
The PS1 was integer based, non-texture-blending, nasty resolution, bitch to program for. The N64 was FAR superior in every respect than storage.
I agree with most of your post, but having programmed the PS1 and the N64, the N64 was much harder to program for. Thanks to excellent libraries from Sony it was a breeze to get things done on the PS1. God knows why they made the PS2 so hard to program for though...
Dvorak has an opinion on everything these days... probably just pissed people play WASD in FPS rather than >OEU.
I was playing Pac-Pix on my Nintendo DS the other day, while not all of the industry is innovating, the DS clearly shows there is creativity and originality still to be had in the industry. And with games like Nintendogs, Electroplankton, Goemon etc in the pipeline I think there's still plenty of originality if you look for it. The main problem is the big EA games with million dollar marketing budgets make the games industry seem more stale than it really it.
"The MPAA's president Dan Glickman applauded the move, stating he wanted to 'thank the congressional sponsors of this legislation for their strong advocacy for intellectual property rights.'"
The congressional sponsors of this legislation would like to thank the MPAA for their strong men who delivered large brief cases stuffed with cash.
If it monitors what I'm doing on my computer it should be classified as spyware. I don't care if it's for research rather than commercial uses, it's still spying.
The fact that the spying program is included with a free anti-virus program to entice people to download it says it all.
It's only running at 3.2Ghz too, with two cores it must be producing some serious heat if they've had to clock it back so far.
GTA is rated Mature 17+ in the US and it's rated 18 in the UK. If you can't distinguish right from wrong at 17+ you've got bigger problems than a silly video game "corrupting" you.
If you're younger than 17 you shouldn't be playing the game in the first place, that's what ESRB ratings are for. It's the responsibility of the parents to ensure they raise their children responsibly and not give them access to inappropriate material. Parents blaming video games when they do a shit job of teaching morals and boundaries is disgraceful.
I fucking hate it when games get blamed for society's problems. Worse still is when clueless politicians jump on the bandwagon.
So Nintendo has a patent for an external rumble device, and the GC controller is an extension of this patent?
;)
Presumably this means the GC controller is a rumble pack with a joypad built-in rather than a joypad with rumble built-in...
Surely Groklaw could have had some fun with this and made minor alterations to all their documents so that SCO turned up to court armed with all the wrong information and made even bigger asses of themselves?
Only idiots read game reviews. Look at the glowing fault-free reviews IGN and GameSpot gave to all the big games from Christmas like San Andreas, Halo 2, MGS3, Prince of Persia 2, etc.
I stopped believing any games reviewer after every games journalist in the world creamed themselves over MGS2 in their reviews before having to admit some months later that it was a bit shit. I buy games now based solely on demos, movies and screenshots of games, it's far more accurate than trusting a games journalist's review as you get to see the actual game and judge if it's for you. Which is much better than letting some easily swayed hack back from his press junket in Hawaii convince you.
And what's wrong with paying for a game and expecting it to be finished? Anyone who claims that Halo 2 was finished as intended when it was released is not living in reality. I paid for a complete game, I didn't get that.
... will I finally get the ending I paid for or is this just a bunch of multiplayer maps they're thrown together?
Embracing the modding community sounds like a great idea, except companies like Tecmo seem to think suing their fans is a good idea.
Thank goodness for companies like Bungie who actually enjoy seeing all the mods people make for their games.
... looks like I won't be buying any more of your products. I might be one person but if there are enough who feel like I do then Apple will have to start taking note.
"and will make the decision based on what is best for customers"
Uh, don't the customers get to decide what is best for themselves any more?
Exactly, something like
if (x.doIt())
{
//...
}
is unintelligable, but something like
if (database.isConnected())
{
//...
}
doesn't require comments at all. I admit this is a stupidly simple example, but I think it demonstrates that the naming of objects and variables as well as code layout is far more important than including reams of comments that can be ambiguous or just plain wrong. And it's not as if all programmers can write comments legibly either, spelling, grammar and punctuation seem to be thrown out the window sometimes.
Buzz Aldrin: Sir, please make sure your tray table and seat is returned to its upright position.
Passenger: No! Where the hell's that beer I ordered???
Neil Armstrong: It won't be a minute, sir. I just need to make one giant leap to reach the cupboard where the beers are.
Better still, we know that Ubisoft has been tasked with developing the next America's Army video game. So could parents sue Ubisoft for releasing a game that the government asked them to make but is also trying to legislate against at the same time?
Yes but will your parents sue the game's developers when you go on your killing spree immiatating [insert favourite violent game here]?
Joking aside I think tighter ratings are vital before we end up with games being forcibly censored or restricted.
I think if MS had secured an exclusive on Capcom games like Resident Evil they'd be telling us that. The whole "joined forces with the company" sounds to me like Mizuguchi and Okamoto are going to executive produce some games. i.e. MS will make the game, and the Capcom guys will then give them suggestions and feedback.
This could be something similar to Hideo Kojima's interaction with Silicon Knights on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. If it is like this then it suggests that Capcom have committed their resources to developing primarily on PS3 (and maybe Revolution) and that this is the best deal MS were able to get out of Capcom.
You mean something like these guys: New Voyages? While the quality of the acting and story is debatable the authenticity of the sets and effects are quite stunning. :)
It's reckoned to be $1.6M per episode, so technically they need $36M to make a 22 episode season. But it all depends on how much Paramount want, they could accept $18M as enough to offset production costs or they could play hardball and raise the target to $50M.
I'm not convinced that dual-cores are the answer to the problem both Intel and AMD are now having scaling up CPU performance.
Using dual-core for games for example will certainly allow developers to make some enhancement to their games by parallelising non-dependant parts of their engine e.g. split A.I. and physics up, but at the end of the day once you've broken the game down to these parts you're going to be limited by processor speed again. Things can only be sub-divided into smaller tasks so much, once that limit is hit you again are reliant on faster clock speeds to do more.
I believe dual-cores are a distraction while the fundamental problem of reducing transistor leakage is addressed.
When will this generation of lazy parents start actually teaching morals to their kids? It's rather poor of them to expect games developers to do it for them. And even if developers started adding morals to games, I'm sure parents would still sue them when their kids go on killing sprees by saying they didn't teach the "right" morals.
... a big screen, better graphics than the PSP and an analogue stick Sony are going to walk away with the handheld market. If as TFA suggests the next GB is just be a hardware bump then Nintendo are making a big mistake.