Re:I saw this last night, some interesting points.
on
The Way the Music Died
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· Score: 1
I agree. It was all case study and very little analysis. The stuff outside the case studies was very interesting, and they people they talked to on that subject had some good stuff to say.
It's almost like the case study stuff belongs in another documentary about the making and promotion of music in today's industry. It'd be interesting in that context but in this one it was just filler.
Re:The thing I don't get about Nintendo...
on
E3 Wrapup Documented
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· Score: 3, Informative
I played around with the PSP a bit at E3, and I was initially very impressed with it. The screen is especially nice and the movies playing on it looked incredible. The performance for the games really varied in quality from barely PS1 quality to almost PS2 quality.
However, after thinking about it a while, I realized that there are some big problems with it.
1. It's a little bit too big to be truly portable. You can't really put it in your pocket, nor is there the built in screen protection that the SP (or DS) provides. The pictures they prepared showed a bunch of people wearing it around their necks, as if that was the recommended way of transporting it. The only thing geekier than that is sidetalkin.
2. It's going to be expensive. There is no way that piece of hardware is going to be under 200 bucks, even if sold at a loss. Look at all of Sony's other handheld products like the Clies. They are all expensive for what they are even while they have smaller screens and no internal media drive or fancy graphics processing. No Sony rep would even give me a ballpark figure of the price.
3. The battery life is going to be a big problem. I asked someone at the Sony booth about this and you could tell the response they had prepared was very calculated. "It's 10 hours, but..." and they'd go into this spiel about how it all depends on how the developers do things and how much drive access the game has and such.
If you've used any of the recent PDAs you know you cannot expect much more than maybe 2.5 hours of gameplay where you have a color screen, lots of on-screen action, and sound turned on. Now that's with no media drive and no memory card read/writes.
Any PS2 equivalent game is going to use the drive almost as much as a PS2 game would, which as we all know is a lot. If you're going to have a GTA style world you will still need to stream in all the geometry and textures by hitting the disc a lot. If you're going to have the good sports game commentary audio still, you'll have to hit the disc a lot. Basically, if they are going to deliver on the promise of near-PS2 quality games, they are going to have to have games that use the media drive almost constantly.
Running a motor is going to drain the heck out of the batteries even further, even if it's some sort of power-optimized drive. I really wonder if they can get even a couple of hours of PS2-style disc read usage out of it. Anonymous developer reports that have been posted online recently seem to confirm this problem.
These issues seem to make the PSP barely qualified as a portable system. A lot of people might say, "Oh, well who needs over an hour or two of battery life anyways?" Anyone who actually plays their portables would instantly say, "Me." And of course, if you were actually going to want to watch a full-length movie you'll need that much battery too.
If it's not qualified to be a portable, what is it qualified to do? If you're stuck just playing it at home while it's plugged in to a socket, why not just play a regular console game? The console systems are all going to be much cheaper than the PSP anyways, while I doubt the PSP games will be any cheaper. PS2 quality games means PS2 quality development costs which means full price games, while the consumer expects to pay less than console game prices for a portable game.
As many past failed portables show, a portable needs to be truly portable to succeed. Being extra powerful, which seems like it could only be a plus, becomes an albatross once you don't have the battery life to support it.
I went to US schools and we certainly learned that Tereshkova was the first woman in space. There was a picture of her in the history book with her helmet on and everything.
Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. People saying otherwise are just forgetting that qualification.
Actually overheard last week while xmas shopping at Target:
Real Man of Genius: (to wife) "I just saw this thing called N-Gage" Wife: (ignoring him while browsing) "Uh huh" Real Man of Genius: "They have games for it! And it's a phone!" Wife: "Uh huh" Real Man of Genius: "If we bought 2 of them we could play against each other!" Wife: "yeah... uh... That's cute."
This is one of those moments in life, as you could imagine, where you might have a real crisis of morals. Do you resort to immediate physical violence or take the passive moral high ground and not do anything about this horrible, horrible man?
I chose to stay out of it and just buy my nephew's gift... a decision that haunts me to this day.
This is a good point. If Nintendo had just backed off the cute factor just a little bit on Mario Golf they would've had much better sales figures. It wouldn't have to be Tiger Woods realistic, but maybe in between like Hot Shots Golf.
Nintendo sometimes seems to forget that there is a line between cute enough to be appealing to all ages but not embarrassing and cute enough that many adults will feel stupid playing the game. They sometimes cross this line.
It was one of the most original and engrossing RPGs ever and almost no one got to play it because it came out at the end of the Saturn lifecycle and only a handful of them were pressed.
I can't believe this got left off the list. There were some weird choices on there too. Rez and Ico are both great games but they all got pretty good reviews. Maybe they just mean underrated by the public?
We have a lot of Japanese people here at work. None of them want to go back to Japan anytime soon. A lot of them are going to try to still stay here in the US somehow after their Visas expire.
They say Japan in general right now is just a depressing place to be where there's no real hope that anything will get any better in the near future. Despite our problems here in the US, they'd rather raise their kids here than over there at the moment.
"Gamu o koeta", the phrase there, could also mean "beyond a game"
Nowhere in the text there does it mention it being a game, only that it's coming out for DVD. They mean DVD is the platform and not just the media.
If you look on the Quiter site, the heading of the news usually has the platform in front of the heading title. There, it's listed as "DVD" while other TGS coverage entries are listed as "PS2"
All signs points to not a game but a straight to DVD movie.
I think the red japanese text around that Sephiroth pic says "about Sephiroth... does he live?!?".. or something to that dramatic effect. The stuff at the top left says "Cloud vs Sephiroth... AGAIN?!?"
The screen at the bottom left is just talking about FF7 when it first came out, and how it sold like over 3 million copies worldwide blah blah blah. It's just a screen from FF7 and not an gameplay screen or anything.
The other text on there seriously implies it's a movie and not a game.
I had something similar going on for a while. I had one dominant good eye and one eye that couldn't see well. For a long time, I had the exact same sort of problems. It made gym class pretty tough and I would trip on stairs a lot.
Then in 10th grade I finally got around to getting a proper contact lens for the bad eye (parents finally got decent health insurance). Seriously, the moment they put that on I practically freaked out. The whole world was poppin' out at me. I must've looked like an idiot as I left the eye doctor's office. I was staring at the trees thinking, "Wow! They're soooo 3D!". It was pretty mindblowing to see what I was missing out on all that time and to finally see how other people see.
If Nokia had just made it so you could talk on the phone the regular way without looking like an idiot and made it so that you could change games in one easy step instead of 10, this thing might've done just fine actually.
Nokia usually designs good stuff. How the hell did this happen? How did a company with a history of designing fairly elegant devices mess this up so bad? I really don't get it.
Any other company, even other divisions within Nokia itself, would design such basic features to be easy to use. Did they not even bother to make a second draft of its design? What manager in their right mind would have approved this device as ready for production?
There are all kinds of innovations in this year's ESPN. There is much less innovation from last year's Madden to this year's Madden.
I'd say the addition of the "Crib" mode gimmick among others is a definite attempt at targetting EA's customers. Part of EAs success in their sports games is their use of putting references to pop and sports culture in their games. Madden himself, Al Michaels, the Horse Trailer Player of the Game: they're all technically extras that aren't actual gameplay, yet it makes the game seem more in tune with football culture. Included with Sega's crowd reaction animations and the ESPN-style presentation, the Crib and First Person Mode extras ups the football culture ante to include the players' culture into the mix.
As for actual gameplay, the running game in this year's ESPN is so much more rewarding than Madden's. You can follow and fluidly interact with your blockers to your benefit, instead of just hitting their collision bubble and awkwardly running in place behind them like in Madden. Sega's new audible system does everything Playmaker does in Madden and is more powerful and flexible.
If you take away the ability to set the price of a garlic chicken sandwich from Madden, not much is new compared to last year's version. Running has been improved in Madden but not to the stellar degree it's been refined to in ESPN.
To me, this year, ESPN has superior presentation, gameplay, and extras. Madden is still a great football game but it's no longer the best. We can only benefit from this, as next year EA will definitely respond to being shown up this year with improvements.
There is no way ANY existing software company can out-market EA. The amount of money EA spends on marketing has no parallel, and likely more has been spent marketing this version of Madden than developing it. They can only do this because the high sales of the game are a foregone conclusion; Madden's sells millions of copies every year, on the year, regardless of its merits. Given that knowledge, spending that much on ads isn't even a financial risk for them. They can bank on it. No other company has a franchise so entrenched and so reliable. This is why they will protect it with all their marketing might. If you theoretically took away Madden's profits from EA, they'd probably instantly no longer be world's dominant developer.
If it came down to it, I doubt even Sony and Microsoft could be expected to outspend them in marketing a game, let alone Sega. It's unrealistic to think that they'd be able to compete with them in advertising. All they can realistically do is make a better game, and this year they did just that. In the long run, all that matters is that we get a great game and the company makes enough money off it so they can make more. As long as that happens, I don't really care if the majority is playing something else.
The last 5 times I've attempted to buy a CD at an actual store in my area I have not been able to find it. Each time I check the tower records, the circuit cities, or even the used CD stores around here I can't find what I'm looking for. I'm attempting to pay money for music I want, but it's not there.
The stuff I'm looking for isn't terribly popular, but it's not obscure either. A lot of it is from the mid 90s and not from this month. Apparently the stores have some sort of problem keeping stocks of stuff from only a few years ago.
I could always order them from Amazon or something, but I want my music the same day the impulse to have it comes. I don't order a burger online 5 days before I plan to eat it. If I'm going by impulse, why not just download it instead of waiting? If they won't supply the product why should I waste hours of effort trying to pay for it? Is this just their way of forcing people to buy newer inferior music instead of the older stuff?
This is the kind of thing that a decent legal downloading service would help with (for Windows). Impulse purchases with the same instant rewards of downloading, and no more driving all around town trying to find an album only to end up wasting gas and time.
The "cm'on lets fight" is actually from Ikari Warriors 2, but it's still an awesome sound clip.
You're fighting some weird ugly alien beast boss and it decides to attempt to deride you in high-pitched barely understandable English. What a way to strike terror into the hearts of your opponents! And the next boss does it... and the next...
I'd certainly put Gresham and Milwaukie down as current backwater Portland suburbs... and maybe Oregon City too.
Heck in '83 before the tech boom most PDX suburbs just had a few thousand people in them, now many of them are pushing 100K populations. It wouldn't be too off target to call them backwater back then.
I don't remember playing Polybius back then in any arcade around Portland, so the obvious answer is that I must've played it and it got deleted from my brain.
Maybe if they remade it Sega Ages style they'd actually finish the game up. In the original, there were caves that obviously were supposed to lead to a dungeon, but instead said "you can't go in here" or something to that effect.
If they made the combat include the character graphics and finish up some more content in there, it might be a pretty good game actually. But as it was released, yes, it did totally suck.
I have not yet found a single person that maintains the 'Nintendo is kiddie' opinion after sitting them down and having them play a handful of games on the system.
A lot of my older friends did enjoy Animal Crossing and Mario when I showed it to them and had them play it a little. But it wasn't like they said "OMG I MUST GET GAMECUBE NOW!" They mostly just said "oh, that's cool" and went back to playing Halo and MechAssault on their Xbox's or GT3 and GTA* on their PS2s
Many older gamers recognize that Nintendo games are still well crafted (they almost all had NES growing up), it's just that it's not their bag thematically now so they decide not to actively purchase it.
Most of these people work long hours, some have kids, they don't really have a lot of time for games anymore. They can usually sneak an hour or 2 to play games on the weekends max (ouch!). Within that precious window of time, they'll tend to play games that are made specifically for their interests rather than playing other stuff
The "Nintendo is Kiddie" argument is pretty shallow. But that doesn't stop a large segment of the gaming populace from feeling it's the truth.
There's a lot of adults out there that feel silly playing games where the hero screeches italian stereotypes in an annoying falsetto. I personally think it's funny and just enjoy the gameplay, but I can't blame people for thinking it's annoying either.
I can't blame adults for wanting to play golf as Tiger Woods instead of as a giant green dinosaur. I can't blame adults for wanting games more like the movies they love and less like a Disney cartoon. I can't blame adults for liking stuff specifically made for them more than stuff made for a vague general audience.
That segment of gaming just can't get over that surface stuff. They'll NEVER "open their eyes up." They're the kind of casual gamer to whom the premise is more important than the game (probably for their other forms of entertainment too). It seems stupid to people like us, but that's just how those people are and more and more of them are joining the gaming market and deciding with their dollars. I can think of no better company that manipulates this fact than EA, and that's why they've profited so much from it.
Nintendo seems to think that somehow by making beautiful, misunderstood games that they will someday get those kind of people into their camp. The problem is that it will never work (just ask Sega). If they don't care about attracting those people, that's fine by me and I'll buy their hi-quality sparsely released stuff, but they'll have to settle for third place in the meantime.
Yeah MGS2's story was a complete train wreck, but the gameplay underneath it was as finely crafted as anything else out there. If the story wasn't such a glaring weakness, it might've been remembered as one of the best games ever made.
That's why I still play the Substance missions now. It's all the great gameplay without the annoying long-winded narrative.
Kojima still makes incredible games as long as you plug your ears/press skip repeatedly at certain points.
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I agree. It was all case study and very little analysis. The stuff outside the case studies was very interesting, and they people they talked to on that subject had some good stuff to say. It's almost like the case study stuff belongs in another documentary about the making and promotion of music in today's industry. It'd be interesting in that context but in this one it was just filler.
I played around with the PSP a bit at E3, and I was initially very impressed with it. The screen is especially nice and the movies playing on it looked incredible. The performance for the games really varied in quality from barely PS1 quality to almost PS2 quality.
However, after thinking about it a while, I realized that there are some big problems with it.
1. It's a little bit too big to be truly portable. You can't really put it in your pocket, nor is there the built in screen protection that the SP (or DS) provides. The pictures they prepared showed a bunch of people wearing it around their necks, as if that was the recommended way of transporting it. The only thing geekier than that is sidetalkin.
2. It's going to be expensive. There is no way that piece of hardware is going to be under 200 bucks, even if sold at a loss. Look at all of Sony's other handheld products like the Clies. They are all expensive for what they are even while they have smaller screens and no internal media drive or fancy graphics processing. No Sony rep would even give me a ballpark figure of the price.
3. The battery life is going to be a big problem. I asked someone at the Sony booth about this and you could tell the response they had prepared was very calculated. "It's 10 hours, but..." and they'd go into this spiel about how it all depends on how the developers do things and how much drive access the game has and such.
If you've used any of the recent PDAs you know you cannot expect much more than maybe 2.5 hours of gameplay where you have a color screen, lots of on-screen action, and sound turned on. Now that's with no media drive and no memory card read/writes.
Any PS2 equivalent game is going to use the drive almost as much as a PS2 game would, which as we all know is a lot. If you're going to have a GTA style world you will still need to stream in all the geometry and textures by hitting the disc a lot. If you're going to have the good sports game commentary audio still, you'll have to hit the disc a lot. Basically, if they are going to deliver on the promise of near-PS2 quality games, they are going to have to have games that use the media drive almost constantly.
Running a motor is going to drain the heck out of the batteries even further, even if it's some sort of power-optimized drive. I really wonder if they can get even a couple of hours of PS2-style disc read usage out of it. Anonymous developer reports that have been posted online recently seem to confirm this problem.
These issues seem to make the PSP barely qualified as a portable system. A lot of people might say, "Oh, well who needs over an hour or two of battery life anyways?" Anyone who actually plays their portables would instantly say, "Me." And of course, if you were actually going to want to watch a full-length movie you'll need that much battery too.
If it's not qualified to be a portable, what is it qualified to do? If you're stuck just playing it at home while it's plugged in to a socket, why not just play a regular console game? The console systems are all going to be much cheaper than the PSP anyways, while I doubt the PSP games will be any cheaper. PS2 quality games means PS2 quality development costs which means full price games, while the consumer expects to pay less than console game prices for a portable game.
As many past failed portables show, a portable needs to be truly portable to succeed. Being extra powerful, which seems like it could only be a plus, becomes an albatross once you don't have the battery life to support it.
I went to US schools and we certainly learned that Tereshkova was the first woman in space. There was a picture of her in the history book with her helmet on and everything.
Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. People saying otherwise are just forgetting that qualification.
Actually overheard last week while xmas shopping at Target:
Real Man of Genius: (to wife) "I just saw this thing called N-Gage"
Wife: (ignoring him while browsing) "Uh huh"
Real Man of Genius: "They have games for it! And it's a phone!"
Wife: "Uh huh"
Real Man of Genius: "If we bought 2 of them we could play against each other!"
Wife: "yeah... uh... That's cute."
This is one of those moments in life, as you could imagine, where you might have a real crisis of morals. Do you resort to immediate physical violence or take the passive moral high ground and not do anything about this horrible, horrible man?
I chose to stay out of it and just buy my nephew's gift... a decision that haunts me to this day.
Sony makes several devices that play MP3s, including their PDA line.
Apparently Sony Music doesn't really have as much sway over what the rest of the company makes as one might think.
Back in the day before the boot disk technique was discovered, modchips were the only way to go.
This is a good point. If Nintendo had just backed off the cute factor just a little bit on Mario Golf they would've had much better sales figures. It wouldn't have to be Tiger Woods realistic, but maybe in between like Hot Shots Golf.
Nintendo sometimes seems to forget that there is a line between cute enough to be appealing to all ages but not embarrassing and cute enough that many adults will feel stupid playing the game. They sometimes cross this line.
"The Druids...
Nobody knows who they were
Or... what they were doing
But their legacy remains...."
No Panzer Dragoon Saga? Boooooo.
It was one of the most original and engrossing RPGs ever and almost no one got to play it because it came out at the end of the Saturn lifecycle and only a handful of them were pressed.
I can't believe this got left off the list. There were some weird choices on there too. Rez and Ico are both great games but they all got pretty good reviews. Maybe they just mean underrated by the public?
We have a lot of Japanese people here at work. None of them want to go back to Japan anytime soon. A lot of them are going to try to still stay here in the US somehow after their Visas expire.
They say Japan in general right now is just a depressing place to be where there's no real hope that anything will get any better in the near future. Despite our problems here in the US, they'd rather raise their kids here than over there at the moment.
"Gamu o koeta", the phrase there, could also mean "beyond a game"
Nowhere in the text there does it mention it being a game, only that it's coming out for DVD. They mean DVD is the platform and not just the media.
If you look on the Quiter site, the heading of the news usually has the platform in front of the heading title. There, it's listed as "DVD" while other TGS coverage entries are listed as "PS2"
All signs points to not a game but a straight to DVD movie.
I think the red japanese text around that Sephiroth pic says "about Sephiroth... does he live?!?".. or something to that dramatic effect. The stuff at the top left says "Cloud vs Sephiroth... AGAIN?!?"
The screen at the bottom left is just talking about FF7 when it first came out, and how it sold like over 3 million copies worldwide blah blah blah. It's just a screen from FF7 and not an gameplay screen or anything.
The other text on there seriously implies it's a movie and not a game.
I had something similar going on for a while. I had one dominant good eye and one eye that couldn't see well. For a long time, I had the exact same sort of problems. It made gym class pretty tough and I would trip on stairs a lot.
Then in 10th grade I finally got around to getting a proper contact lens for the bad eye (parents finally got decent health insurance). Seriously, the moment they put that on I practically freaked out. The whole world was poppin' out at me. I must've looked like an idiot as I left the eye doctor's office. I was staring at the trees thinking, "Wow! They're soooo 3D!". It was pretty mindblowing to see what I was missing out on all that time and to finally see how other people see.
If Nokia had just made it so you could talk on the phone the regular way without looking like an idiot and made it so that you could change games in one easy step instead of 10, this thing might've done just fine actually.
Nokia usually designs good stuff. How the hell did this happen? How did a company with a history of designing fairly elegant devices mess this up so bad? I really don't get it.
Any other company, even other divisions within Nokia itself, would design such basic features to be easy to use. Did they not even bother to make a second draft of its design? What manager in their right mind would have approved this device as ready for production?
There are all kinds of innovations in this year's ESPN. There is much less innovation from last year's Madden to this year's Madden.
I'd say the addition of the "Crib" mode gimmick among others is a definite attempt at targetting EA's customers. Part of EAs success in their sports games is their use of putting references to pop and sports culture in their games. Madden himself, Al Michaels, the Horse Trailer Player of the Game: they're all technically extras that aren't actual gameplay, yet it makes the game seem more in tune with football culture. Included with Sega's crowd reaction animations and the ESPN-style presentation, the Crib and First Person Mode extras ups the football culture ante to include the players' culture into the mix.
As for actual gameplay, the running game in this year's ESPN is so much more rewarding than Madden's. You can follow and fluidly interact with your blockers to your benefit, instead of just hitting their collision bubble and awkwardly running in place behind them like in Madden. Sega's new audible system does everything Playmaker does in Madden and is more powerful and flexible.
If you take away the ability to set the price of a garlic chicken sandwich from Madden, not much is new compared to last year's version. Running has been improved in Madden but not to the stellar degree it's been refined to in ESPN.
To me, this year, ESPN has superior presentation, gameplay, and extras. Madden is still a great football game but it's no longer the best. We can only benefit from this, as next year EA will definitely respond to being shown up this year with improvements.
There is no way ANY existing software company can out-market EA. The amount of money EA spends on marketing has no parallel, and likely more has been spent marketing this version of Madden than developing it. They can only do this because the high sales of the game are a foregone conclusion; Madden's sells millions of copies every year, on the year, regardless of its merits. Given that knowledge, spending that much on ads isn't even a financial risk for them. They can bank on it. No other company has a franchise so entrenched and so reliable. This is why they will protect it with all their marketing might. If you theoretically took away Madden's profits from EA, they'd probably instantly no longer be world's dominant developer.
If it came down to it, I doubt even Sony and Microsoft could be expected to outspend them in marketing a game, let alone Sega. It's unrealistic to think that they'd be able to compete with them in advertising. All they can realistically do is make a better game, and this year they did just that. In the long run, all that matters is that we get a great game and the company makes enough money off it so they can make more. As long as that happens, I don't really care if the majority is playing something else.
The last 5 times I've attempted to buy a CD at an actual store in my area I have not been able to find it. Each time I check the tower records, the circuit cities, or even the used CD stores around here I can't find what I'm looking for. I'm attempting to pay money for music I want, but it's not there.
The stuff I'm looking for isn't terribly popular, but it's not obscure either. A lot of it is from the mid 90s and not from this month. Apparently the stores have some sort of problem keeping stocks of stuff from only a few years ago.
I could always order them from Amazon or something, but I want my music the same day the impulse to have it comes. I don't order a burger online 5 days before I plan to eat it. If I'm going by impulse, why not just download it instead of waiting? If they won't supply the product why should I waste hours of effort trying to pay for it? Is this just their way of forcing people to buy newer inferior music instead of the older stuff?
This is the kind of thing that a decent legal downloading service would help with (for Windows). Impulse purchases with the same instant rewards of downloading, and no more driving all around town trying to find an album only to end up wasting gas and time.
The "cm'on lets fight" is actually from Ikari Warriors 2, but it's still an awesome sound clip.
You're fighting some weird ugly alien beast boss and it decides to attempt to deride you in high-pitched barely understandable English. What a way to strike terror into the hearts of your opponents! And the next boss does it... and the next...
I'd certainly put Gresham and Milwaukie down as current backwater Portland suburbs... and maybe Oregon City too.
Heck in '83 before the tech boom most PDX suburbs just had a few thousand people in them, now many of them are pushing 100K populations. It wouldn't be too off target to call them backwater back then.
I don't remember playing Polybius back then in any arcade around Portland, so the obvious answer is that I must've played it and it got deleted from my brain.
Maybe if they remade it Sega Ages style they'd actually finish the game up. In the original, there were caves that obviously were supposed to lead to a dungeon, but instead said "you can't go in here" or something to that effect.
If they made the combat include the character graphics and finish up some more content in there, it might be a pretty good game actually. But as it was released, yes, it did totally suck.
Remember, Sega also was basically broke, while Nintendo has billions and billions of dollars saved up.
Nintendo has enough money to make consoles, failed or not, for years to come, even ignoring the profits from their other lucrative platforms.
A lot of my older friends did enjoy Animal Crossing and Mario when I showed it to them and had them play it a little. But it wasn't like they said "OMG I MUST GET GAMECUBE NOW!" They mostly just said "oh, that's cool" and went back to playing Halo and MechAssault on their Xbox's or GT3 and GTA* on their PS2s
Many older gamers recognize that Nintendo games are still well crafted (they almost all had NES growing up), it's just that it's not their bag thematically now so they decide not to actively purchase it.
Most of these people work long hours, some have kids, they don't really have a lot of time for games anymore. They can usually sneak an hour or 2 to play games on the weekends max (ouch!). Within that precious window of time, they'll tend to play games that are made specifically for their interests rather than playing other stuff
The "Nintendo is Kiddie" argument is pretty shallow. But that doesn't stop a large segment of the gaming populace from feeling it's the truth.
There's a lot of adults out there that feel silly playing games where the hero screeches italian stereotypes in an annoying falsetto. I personally think it's funny and just enjoy the gameplay, but I can't blame people for thinking it's annoying either.
I can't blame adults for wanting to play golf as Tiger Woods instead of as a giant green dinosaur. I can't blame adults for wanting games more like the movies they love and less like a Disney cartoon. I can't blame adults for liking stuff specifically made for them more than stuff made for a vague general audience.
That segment of gaming just can't get over that surface stuff. They'll NEVER "open their eyes up." They're the kind of casual gamer to whom the premise is more important than the game (probably for their other forms of entertainment too). It seems stupid to people like us, but that's just how those people are and more and more of them are joining the gaming market and deciding with their dollars. I can think of no better company that manipulates this fact than EA, and that's why they've profited so much from it.
Nintendo seems to think that somehow by making beautiful, misunderstood games that they will someday get those kind of people into their camp. The problem is that it will never work (just ask Sega). If they don't care about attracting those people, that's fine by me and I'll buy their hi-quality sparsely released stuff, but they'll have to settle for third place in the meantime.
Guess who's firewall just happens to have port 4444 open for his FTP server?
Uh, if you'll excuse me, I'm going home for lunch...
Yeah MGS2's story was a complete train wreck, but the gameplay underneath it was as finely crafted as anything else out there. If the story wasn't such a glaring weakness, it might've been remembered as one of the best games ever made.
That's why I still play the Substance missions now. It's all the great gameplay without the annoying long-winded narrative.
Kojima still makes incredible games as long as you plug your ears/press skip repeatedly at certain points.
... have they done any calculations on the accuracy of the Kramer Theory of Risk, namely that "the Ukraine is weak!"