This is a total myth. I know plenty of people who regard Nintendo consoles as being for kids, and they are in their late 20's or 30's. You may as well try and argue that most adults sit down and watch cartoons all the time.
Now you're going in circles. The reason that Nintendo is making games using established characters is that they *are* marketable. People are buying the latest Zelda and the latest Metroid *because* we know the characters and we know the gameplay and we know that we'll probably like the new one too. The issue of sequels and licensed properties goes beyond Nintendo, actually. It's something that the whole industry is talking about a lot. Some people are arguing that sequels stifle creativity, others are arguing that sequels give you a little more freedom to push the boundaries.
Imagine if they'd tried to market Metroid Prime without the Metroid part. "Uh, it's a FPS... but you don't really shoot very much... there's some jumping and exploration... and uh.. it'll be great." vs "It's a Metroid game, but in 3d with a first person perspective."
Game Cube is having serious issues with their appeal to the older, say teenage to adult, crowd. Many of my gaming comrades believe that the game cube controller is shaped in a perculiar way for a reason ; to be shoved up the mother's cervix in order to reach it's intended audience.
Oh, puu-leeze. The only people concerned with "looking adult" are teens who are so worried about looking like a kid that they deny themselves fun things because a kid might enjoy them too. Real adults have stopped caring about whether or not we look like kids and will do fun things because they are fun. Nintendo's games are fun. And cheap!
Well, a lot of what this guy says doesn't mean very much. Blah blah, I can't stop myself from buying too much software etc.
When he gets into the episodic thing he starts to point to an interesting idea but one of the big problems with developing episodic content is that there's this huge initial risk (engine development). It's there whether you release a 50 hour game or a 3 hour game. It's just that ou can't charge as much for the three hour game so you'd better be damn sure that parts II-XX are going to sell as well.
On the other hand consider this: If most of your users never see the final ten hours of your game, why did you bother making it? Couldn't you, as a developer have spnt that time working on your next great game?
Someone should spend some time figuring out how much time most people devote to games they like. Not just the hardcore nerds like us but the casual customers.
Heaven's yes, let's go back to the seal of quality. There was certainly nothing wrong with that. As everyone knows the seal of quallity was definitely synonymous with quality.
In order to draw the conclusions that they want to draw from this statistic, we also need to know the ratio of male to female players, and ratio of male to female characters. Otherwise, the skew is easily explained by a mostly male population!
RTFA. They go through the numbers and explain how they came to the stats (your guess is right by the way).
No no you miss my point. Whatever the percentages, if it took a very simple adjustment to my design decisions (and no adjustment at all if I thought about it in advance) I'd go for it. If there was some super-easy way to appeal to female gamers (whatever that means) then sure make the change. The point is that it's stupid to reduce your consumer base needlessly.
And right now, most MMORPGS aren't very fun if you play them casually. Casual players don't play very much and want games they can pop into and out of. MMORPGS as they are now are not at all friendly to that kind of player.
For one thing, it takes a significant investment of time to move up from stabbing rabbits or whatever to doing anything remotely interesting. What's up with that? Why should I have invest ten hours in a game before I can start having fun? I want to have fun right now. Even if it's cosmetic, at leat make my first enemies *look* impressive*.
Secondly, MMORPGS give an unreasonably huge advantage to people who play a lot. Because your bonuses are cumulative, the more you play the more powerful you are and the more of a disadvantage new players will have. A level 40 wizard has nothing to fear from level 1 thief.
Consider the difference between that and games like Soul Caliber or Quake: in those games, people who play a lot will be more skilled, but even ((insert name of best player in the world)) gets killed by a rocket launcher weilded by a newb sometimes. There is still an advantage to playing more but it's not overwhelming.
I guess the question that MMO game designers have to decide is "What's more important about MMO games? The persistence or the fact that so many other people are playing?" If it's the former, then they'll never be casual games. If it's the latter, then maybe someone will start making MMO games that get reset every X period of time. Or games that feature persistent relationships but don't give cumulative advantages to the players. Or games that scale the advantage down as you get to higher levels.
After buying a few games the Nintendo could easily cost more than the PS2/Xbox if these games are in the new owners collection.
The price drop on the Game Cube was acompanied by price drops on some of the best Game Cube games.
I went into a Futureshop in Canada and bought a Game Cube, Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and a second controller and 2 memory cards for $252 CDN (after tax).
For comparison, Xbox with Amped, Halo and a single controller S costs $279.00 +Tax (Around $320.00 CDN total).
Given that there is (I believe) a much larger installed base of PS2s and Xboxes in the US, there is a much larger market for second-thought GameCube purchases.
In Canada, here are the latest stats on installed base, as reported by GamaSutra on Oct 1st: PlayStation 2: 2.5 million units Xbox: 900,000 units GameCube: 700,000 units
At this point, the internet has been around long enough that most people realize this, especially if you have data on your machine that is so important that you can't risk getting a virus or a trojan (such as this, apparently) on it.
This would drive both vendors to improve the robustness of their chips and drivers. Knowing that the competitor is goign to try to crash your system would put pressure on the development team to avoid or fix bugs.
Here's the thing - when you run a game that crashes the graphics chips, you don't patch the drivers, you patch the game. Writing drivers that will survive running malicious code takes time away from addressing other programming issues and the thing is that no one except for your compititor is writing that kind of code into their App.
The more fundamental problem is that all any kind of test can ever measure is your ability to do well at that test. We'd like to hope that there is a correlation between the test and real world performance but as we've seen the driver coders are quite happy to tweak test results at the expense of real performance improvements.
Creating a new, even more artificial, set of tests does not solve this problem. It makes it worse.
We also have our own version of Fair Use which is similar to yours.
The law that this article is talking about is very different from that. The article explains that so you should know this but just to be clear: Recordable media sold in Canada has a levy placed on it. The money from this levy is distributed to various parts of the music industry to make up for supposed lost profits that arrise from the unpreventable copying of music by consumers. This is a provision that goes well beyond fair use.
Pitting open-ended gaming against whatever-the-opposite-of-open-ended-is gaming is kind of like pitting action movies against romance movies. If you're asking this kind of question, you're missing the point. Some people like action movies. Some people like romances. Some people like action-romances. Some people like to switch it up and try out the different kinds of movies at different times.
We live in a world where the market is large enough that you can make a game that doesn't appeal to everyone. In fact you probably should - it'll result in a more focused game.
The future of gaming isn't open-ended games or close-ended games. It's lots and lots of different kinds of games. Hopefully, lots and lots of good games, but I don't want to get my hopes up.
POLL: What was your favorite FF game of all time? And please be sure you mention which numbering system you are using ( for example FF3 US is FF6 JAP).
Any self respecting Half-Life player always keeps it in OpenGL mode, especially if it's in the land of NVidia.
That may be true for self-respecting Half-Life players but what about the self-respecting Half-Life 2 players? You know, the ones that will be playing the new game that will be running on a new engine? What do they have to say about this issue?
Nothing. Because they don't exist yet - the game needs to be released before there can be tribal knowledge about the optimal hardware configuration.
I don't play SW: G but I can tell you from the point of view of a regular member of the Neverwinter Nights community that the community members at SWG are probably breathing a sigh of relief. The BioBoards are divided into both 'registered owner-only' and 'open to the public' forums. The open forums tend to be a morass of bad threads, off-topic posts and people making wild complaints, sometimes about a game they HAVEN'T EVEN PLAYED.
The registered owner forums are much more civilized. Which is not to say that we don't have our fair share of complaints about the game - we do. It's just that the public boards seem to encourage flamebait and trolling.
As a dedicated PC gamer, I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to decide which of the three consoles I should buy. I only have a medium sized budget so I can't buy all three or anything.
I'll never understand all of the arguments that you shouldn't get a Game Cube because it doesn't have very many titles. I don't want very many titles, I just want about six great titles a year. My pocket book can't take much more, what with the PC gaming habit and the rent and food and all the other stuff.
On top of that, a big chunk of the best games for Xbox and PS2 will make their way to the PC at some point (GTA, Halo, and so on). Often with a better control scheme. I really don't want to plunk down a bunch of money for redundancy.
If I still had access to my friend's White Wolf books, I would be able to confirm this, but I SWEAR TO GOD that one of the Vampire books had a quotation that read "Creativity is not acknowledging your sources."
Color psychologists believe that certain hues generate specific, and often very strong responses in people. For example, black can foster strength and encourage independence, while red empowers and can stimulate the mind."
I've always assumed that the delight I got from splattering blood all over the place was due to some primal rage. Now I know that it's because it makes me smarter.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a total myth. I know plenty of people who regard Nintendo consoles as being for kids, and they are in their late 20's or 30's.
You may as well try and argue that most adults sit down and watch cartoons all the time.
Just the mature ones.
Now you're going in circles. The reason that Nintendo is making games using established characters is that they *are* marketable. People are buying the latest Zelda and the latest Metroid *because* we know the characters and we know the gameplay and we know that we'll probably like the new one too. The issue of sequels and licensed properties goes beyond Nintendo, actually. It's something that the whole industry is talking about a lot. Some people are arguing that sequels stifle creativity, others are arguing that sequels give you a little more freedom to push the boundaries.
... but you don't really shoot very much ... there's some jumping and exploration ... and uh .. it'll be great." vs "It's a Metroid game, but in 3d with a first person perspective."
Imagine if they'd tried to market Metroid Prime without the Metroid part. "Uh, it's a FPS
Game Cube is having serious issues with their appeal to the older, say teenage to adult, crowd. Many of my gaming comrades believe that the game cube controller is shaped in a perculiar way for a reason ; to be shoved up the mother's cervix in order to reach it's intended audience.
Oh, puu-leeze. The only people concerned with "looking adult" are teens who are so worried about looking like a kid that they deny themselves fun things because a kid might enjoy them too. Real adults have stopped caring about whether or not we look like kids and will do fun things because they are fun. Nintendo's games are fun. And cheap!
Well, a lot of what this guy says doesn't mean very much. Blah blah, I can't stop myself from buying too much software etc.
When he gets into the episodic thing he starts to point to an interesting idea but one of the big problems with developing episodic content is that there's this huge initial risk (engine development). It's there whether you release a 50 hour game or a 3 hour game. It's just that ou can't charge as much for the three hour game so you'd better be damn sure that parts II-XX are going to sell as well.
On the other hand consider this: If most of your users never see the final ten hours of your game, why did you bother making it? Couldn't you, as a developer have spnt that time working on your next great game?
Someone should spend some time figuring out how much time most people devote to games they like. Not just the hardcore nerds like us but the casual customers.
Heaven's yes, let's go back to the seal of quality. There was certainly nothing wrong with that. As everyone knows the seal of quallity was definitely synonymous with quality.
In order to draw the conclusions that they want to draw from this statistic, we also need to know the ratio of male to female players, and ratio of male to female characters. Otherwise, the skew is easily explained by a mostly male population!
RTFA. They go through the numbers and explain how they came to the stats (your guess is right by the way).
No no you miss my point. Whatever the percentages, if it took a very simple adjustment to my design decisions (and no adjustment at all if I thought about it in advance) I'd go for it. If there was some super-easy way to appeal to female gamers (whatever that means) then sure make the change. The point is that it's stupid to reduce your consumer base needlessly.
If 13% of my potential userbase were blind and it would take minor adjustments in interface colouration to fix the problem, yes.
The released a colourblindness patch for Alpha Centauri. It was sorely needed, what with the world being a wash of red and green.
And right now, most MMORPGS aren't very fun if you play them casually. Casual players don't play very much and want games they can pop into and out of. MMORPGS as they are now are not at all friendly to that kind of player.
For one thing, it takes a significant investment of time to move up from stabbing rabbits or whatever to doing anything remotely interesting. What's up with that? Why should I have invest ten hours in a game before I can start having fun? I want to have fun right now. Even if it's cosmetic, at leat make my first enemies *look* impressive*.
Secondly, MMORPGS give an unreasonably huge advantage to people who play a lot. Because your bonuses are cumulative, the more you play the more powerful you are and the more of a disadvantage new players will have. A level 40 wizard has nothing to fear from level 1 thief.
Consider the difference between that and games like Soul Caliber or Quake: in those games, people who play a lot will be more skilled, but even ((insert name of best player in the world)) gets killed by a rocket launcher weilded by a newb sometimes. There is still an advantage to playing more but it's not overwhelming.
I guess the question that MMO game designers have to decide is "What's more important about MMO games? The persistence or the fact that so many other people are playing?" If it's the former, then they'll never be casual games. If it's the latter, then maybe someone will start making MMO games that get reset every X period of time. Or games that feature persistent relationships but don't give cumulative advantages to the players. Or games that scale the advantage down as you get to higher levels.
Maybe Uru will be the one that breaks the mold.
After buying a few games the Nintendo could easily cost more than the PS2/Xbox if these games are in the new owners collection.
The price drop on the Game Cube was acompanied by price drops on some of the best Game Cube games.
I went into a Futureshop in Canada and bought a Game Cube, Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and a second controller and 2 memory cards for $252 CDN (after tax).
For comparison, Xbox with Amped, Halo and a single controller S costs $279.00 +Tax (Around $320.00 CDN total).
Given that there is (I believe) a much larger installed base of PS2s and Xboxes in the US, there is a much larger market for second-thought GameCube purchases.
In Canada, here are the latest stats on installed base, as reported by GamaSutra on Oct 1st: PlayStation 2: 2.5 million units
Xbox: 900,000 units
GameCube: 700,000 units
I assume the ratios are similar in the States.
So, he's like the Woz of DnD?
At this point, the internet has been around long enough that most people realize this, especially if you have data on your machine that is so important that you can't risk getting a virus or a trojan (such as this, apparently) on it.
Gabe Newell being a notable exception.
This would drive both vendors to improve the robustness of their chips and drivers. Knowing that the competitor is goign to try to crash your system would put pressure on the development team to avoid or fix bugs.
Here's the thing - when you run a game that crashes the graphics chips, you don't patch the drivers, you patch the game. Writing drivers that will survive running malicious code takes time away from addressing other programming issues and the thing is that no one except for your compititor is writing that kind of code into their App.
The more fundamental problem is that all any kind of test can ever measure is your ability to do well at that test. We'd like to hope that there is a correlation between the test and real world performance but as we've seen the driver coders are quite happy to tweak test results at the expense of real performance improvements.
Creating a new, even more artificial, set of tests does not solve this problem. It makes it worse.
Or they'd spend all of their time writing suites that crash the other guy's system.
No, this is very different from Fair Use.
Your fair use system requires that:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
(more here)
We also have our own version of Fair Use which is similar to yours.
The law that this article is talking about is very different from that. The article explains that so you should know this but just to be clear: Recordable media sold in Canada has a levy placed on it. The money from this levy is distributed to various parts of the music industry to make up for supposed lost profits that arrise from the unpreventable copying of music by consumers. This is a provision that goes well beyond fair use.
Lucky us.
Pitting open-ended gaming against whatever-the-opposite-of-open-ended-is gaming is kind of like pitting action movies against romance movies. If you're asking this kind of question, you're missing the point. Some people like action movies. Some people like romances. Some people like action-romances. Some people like to switch it up and try out the different kinds of movies at different times.
We live in a world where the market is large enough that you can make a game that doesn't appeal to everyone. In fact you probably should - it'll result in a more focused game.
The future of gaming isn't open-ended games or close-ended games. It's lots and lots of different kinds of games. Hopefully, lots and lots of good games, but I don't want to get my hopes up.
There exists an RPG out there which has to he hands down THE Open Ended RPG. One word:
Morrowind
And some people found it really, really boring.
POLL: What was your favorite FF game of all time? And please be sure you mention which numbering system you are using ( for example FF3 US is FF6 JAP).
I liked the final one.
Any self respecting Half-Life player always keeps it in OpenGL mode, especially if it's in the land of NVidia.
That may be true for self-respecting Half-Life players but what about the self-respecting Half-Life 2 players? You know, the ones that will be playing the new game that will be running on a new engine? What do they have to say about this issue?
Nothing. Because they don't exist yet - the game needs to be released before there can be tribal knowledge about the optimal hardware configuration.
I don't play SW: G but I can tell you from the point of view of a regular member of the Neverwinter Nights community that the community members at SWG are probably breathing a sigh of relief. The BioBoards are divided into both 'registered owner-only' and 'open to the public' forums. The open forums tend to be a morass of bad threads, off-topic posts and people making wild complaints, sometimes about a game they HAVEN'T EVEN PLAYED.
The registered owner forums are much more civilized. Which is not to say that we don't have our fair share of complaints about the game - we do. It's just that the public boards seem to encourage flamebait and trolling.
As a dedicated PC gamer, I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to decide which of the three consoles I should buy. I only have a medium sized budget so I can't buy all three or anything.
I'll never understand all of the arguments that you shouldn't get a Game Cube because it doesn't have very many titles. I don't want very many titles, I just want about six great titles a year. My pocket book can't take much more, what with the PC gaming habit and the rent and food and all the other stuff.
On top of that, a big chunk of the best games for Xbox and PS2 will make their way to the PC at some point (GTA, Halo, and so on). Often with a better control scheme. I really don't want to plunk down a bunch of money for redundancy.
Game Cube, here I come.
If I still had access to my friend's White Wolf books, I would be able to confirm this, but I SWEAR TO GOD that one of the Vampire books had a quotation that read "Creativity is not acknowledging your sources."
Color psychologists believe that certain hues generate specific, and often very strong responses in people. For example, black can foster strength and encourage independence, while red empowers and can stimulate the mind."
I've always assumed that the delight I got from splattering blood all over the place was due to some primal rage. Now I know that it's because it makes me smarter.