Most RPGs work like this: a princess is kidnapped, or in danger. A brave young man comes to the rescue and fights off some great evil. We wanted something different.
Well, all right then. What about, after fighting off the great evil, telling the player, "Sorry, #PLAYERNAME, but our princess is in another castle!"?
I intend to stay on as a storm spotter for the National Weather Service, so someday that might involve ham radios when the next F5 tornado pulls down half the cell phone towers in a given area. But that would really be the extent of what my ham usage would be.
Virtual Console: Wii will have downloadable access to 20 years of fan-favorite titles originally released for Nintendo 64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and even the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The Virtual Console also will feature a "best of" selection from Sega Genesis titles and games from the TurboGrafx console (a system jointly developed by NEC and Hudson). It also will be home to new games conceived by indie developers whose creativity is larger than their budgets.
(italics mine)
I can't help but think that this means Superman 64 is all out...
Trying to strike a middle ground between Microsoft and Nintendo to entice a mainstream audience, Sony Group President Ken Kutaragi at the company's May 8 media briefing unveiled a surprise of his own. In a nod to Nintendo's strategy, Sony announced it will add motion-sensor chip technology to its game controllers that will let players use gestures instead of their thumbs to move around on the screen in some game play. "I'm looking forward to seeing some exciting game applications and innovations with this controller," Kutaragi said.
The move stole thunder from Nintendo's decision not to develop high-priced hardware in favor of its innovative remote-like controller. Nintendo aims to make games easy to use for everyone, with the controller as the centerpiece of that strategy.
Funny, I thought it was an obvious inferior copy of pre-hyped Nintendo technology.
No, I distinctly remember being shot up by Zelda while I was trying to hammer Ganondorf at the end of Ocarina of Time. She has a bow, and she's a useless shot. Someone take those light arrows away from her!
That is the funniest website I've seen today, not counting the whole Windows Vista sucks bit. I'm going to post a note about sacrificing the cow in my younger brother's neighborhood and report the results...
Chicago Tribune review located here, registration semi-required, etc. etc. Reviewer's email address is at the bottom of the article, DON'T SHOOT THE MESSENGER!
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Nintendo plays with YOUR MIND `Brain Age' is for gamers who aren't all thumbs
Playing "Brain Age" is like taking the SAT all day long. If that sounds like your kind of fun, you'll love this new game for the Nintendo DS.
You'll solve more than 100 logic and memorization problems. Writing your answers on the DS' touch screen and speaking into the game system's microphone, you'll memorize words on a screen and try to recall as many of them as you can. You'll quickly count to 120. You'll solve match questions. And ultimately, the game will calculate how old your brain is, based on research by the Japanese professor whose book, "Brain Age," is a sensation in Japan and spurred Nintendo to create this video game in only 90 days. Nintendo plans to release another brain game, "Big Brain Academy," next month.
Uniquely, you play the game by turning the DS sideways and holding it like a book. "Brain Age" is meant to be played small chunks over a long period, up to one year. The more challenges you solve, the more challenges you unlock and the younger your brain age becomes. Age 20 is the goal. While I don't feel smarter than I did three weeks ago when I began playing the game, my brain age has become younger. That's because, according to research behind the book and the game, working on the problems stimulates blood flow to my prefrontal cortex.
My brain's age? I'm not telling; my brain is young enough to know better.
If I wanted to discuss the general wackiness of people proposing that gnomes created the universe, I would have picked another random site to feature. Since most works of religion do not state explicitly the methods and means of how I came to be typing on this laptop, there's this thing known as leeway, even with religious beliefs, if you come to it with an open mind and accept that.
A conjecture by its very nature is unscientific until it is tested. If I wanted to believe in the FSM, you'd find spaghetti, right? Besides, how would you test it? Neither you nor I can go back a million years in time and witness the dawn of four legged animals ourselves. We're both working with the same body of evidence; a fossil record and whatnot. What is lacking is an appropriate scientific hypothesis of creation, which, like most science, is being worked on and takes time.
If you disapprove with a specific stance or position paper of theirs, I'm not part of their organization, nor do I support them, but I'd be interested in hearing what it would be.
"With the creation model approach every scientific idea is encouraged to participate in this process to see which theory best fits the emerging data," says Dr. Rana. "With this cutting edge program, where advancing scientific discoveries determine which model's predictions are successful, no philosophical or religious perspective is denied access."
"While many scientists are of the opinion that science and faith don't mix," continues Dr. Hugh Ross, "the team of scientists at Reasons To Believe is dedicated to reaching the scientific community with the understanding that science and Scripture firmly support and even help advance one another. After all, science is the search for truth. We must be willing to follow the trail of evidence wherever it leads."
Like most things I see on the Internet, I'll take that website with a grain of salt, but it's a much better approach than mindlessly calling creation Intelligent Design.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."— C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Now if you don't believe God is good, that's a whole other story.
If you're interested in more material in the same line of thinking, here's a good column that got published in the Chicago Tribune today. (Reg. required after 5 hits to the Trib website).
In a nutshell, it describes the anecdotal reactions of four to six year olds of various R-rated movies in movie theatres (the ones specifically mentioned are The Ring and Eurotrip). The column ends with the subject of the column (not the columnist) thinking of laws banning children (she thinks of 4-6 year olds, clearly everyone here would think 18 years and under) from watching R-rated movies, period.
A good quote from the column is this:
"Kids up to the age of 6 or 7," she said by phone, "don't know the difference between fantasy and reality. What they see, they experience as if it were happening."
What's more, she said, "Young kids are very responsive to visual images, and grotesque, violent visual images are inherently scary. If they see a monster or a vicious-looking villain chasing somebody with a knife, they don't make any allowances for the fact that this is somebody's dream or that it didn't really happen. Until their brains develop further, they can't put anything into context."
Also consider that, again anecdotally, children did not have nearly the same reaction to watching images of 9/11 as adults did. They didn't think it was real. Would the reaction have been the same in 1950?
Anyways, I'm not really pushing for or against any particular viewpoint at this time, other than I can't see why the CDC shouldn't at least look at the issue.
We're moving from CleverPath Reporter (Computer Associates) to... something else. Why? It's a program showing its age and inflexibility. And support was $1k a year.
I'm testing Crystal Reports, which seems to be the Oracle of reporting software. Everyone knows about it, there's a large support base, it's quite pricey, ($7.5k for essentially the stuff CleverPath did, only hopefully more intelligent) and if you put it down as a skill on your resume, it's worth something. We don't have very high demands (yet) but I'm reasonably sure that support on-hand (right here, right now) is a requirement, hence I don't think I'll be testing Jasper. The reports really are crucial to the business.
Haven't heard of the other solutions being thrown around; I'll give those a look too.
You know, that was a pretty good article. We could use more of those every day. Something that doesn't give the same old "The Revolution will rule!" or "OMG the controller!" takes.
That said, I can kind of see the marketing problems that Nintendo will have to overcome, but I don't think it'll be that bad. One TV, one Revolution hooked up to the Internet, one or two controllers. Demo three launch games that make the most use of the fact that the controller is the way it is (I dunno, Pilotwings, Zelda and Super Duper Duck Hunt come to mind) and demo 10 downloadable games from past generations. Then stick a sign next to it saying you can play all 2,000 Nintendo games... ever.
Then make it look pretty. Can't be that hard, but you are relying on the open-mindedness of the consumer to this whole concept. Alternatively, open up Nintendo Stores, a la the Apple Store concept of three (or so) years ago... (keeping in mind that Sony has already done it, to less effect)
That's interesting. Compare it to Ocarina of Time, whose controls, when they were announced, were almost universally criticized.
"No jump button? Why the hell don't I have a jump button in a 3-D game?"
And yet, Nintendo provided other opportunities to fill the gap (instead of timed jumping, solving puzzles) and, a few moments of fine-controls (a few heart containers took some maneuvering to get to).
That said, I seem to remember back then a distinct, strong desire not to become "the female Link". Perhaps things will be better.
I'm not a fanboy, but I do see there are reasons for everything. Plus I've consistently felt that Nintendo has had more games I want than the other systems. But I haven't been an active gamer in a few years, either.
Prior the the release of the GameCube (now verging on 4-5 years ago), Nintendo's president (Iwataki, I believe) and Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the lead developers, expressed serious concerns about Sony and Microsoft getting in the game. It wasn't so much because competition was unhealthy for Nintendo, it was the direction major game developers were taking the industry. Nintendo saw a future where every platform would look alike -- development studios would create one game off one codebase, port it to three different platforms and everyone would get the same game experience. IGN (back when I was a subscriber) even did head-to-head reviews of the exact same game on two to three different platforms and judged which platform a gamer should buy the game for. Unsurprisingly, since Nintendo never really emphasized the horsepower of a system, the Gamecube came in at the short end of the stick.
Things that Nintendo did during that time, like licensing Resident Evil exclusively for themselves, were sort of just precursors for what the Revolution is. (side note: imagine how much of an uproar that would be caused if, say, Microsoft licensed exclusive rights to Major League Baseball.) They decided that since you can't very well differentiate yourself based on a system and a handheld, joystick-like controller... differentiate yourself on the experience.
Nowadays, Sony and Microsoft are fighting for the market that Nintendo used to own, and many (if not most) of those gamers could at one time be described as Nintendo Fanboys. Wasn't everyone a NES fanboy in 1988? I think the parent is asking if Nintendo is risking losing its remaining fanboys with the Revolution, and I'm saying that they've already lost so many, it's worth betting the farm on something new. By no means are they a failing company, but this is an opportunity that the company has probably been preparing for since the introduction of Microsoft into the gaming arena and the realization that the hardcore gaming market would just be an arms race. It's a big market, moneywise, to ignore, but the reason Sony and Microsoft aren't copying this idea, this time around, is because their accountants and managers won't let them.
Anyways, I don't hope either way whether or not this works out for Nintendo, but at the same time I don't think this will end up like the Newton. Consider how many people considered the DS to be a failure at launch...
Because Nintendo has been specifically targeting a games market, I would put the Revolution in the range of 200-300, and possibly 150-200. If you don't have a DVD player in the system, Nintendo doesn't have to pay for the supplies for it. The GameCube launched at $199. If I'm not mistaken, (completely off memory here), the NES launched at $99, the SNES at $199, and the N64 at $199. (the first two of the three launched with a game with the system, though. N64 was too long ago for me to remember.)
They seem to always have been concerned about keeping prices within the reach of the general consumer, so I wouldn't be surprised if they repeated that launch price.
In this regard, the animated series can hardly be said to be unfaithful to the games on which it is based. Let's face it: the princess Zelda has always been a symbol of sexual desire, and the act of "rescuing" her is but a polite euphemism for sexual conquest. Insofar as the cartoon series recognizes these aspects of Zelda lore, it is only making explicit what had previously been confined to implicit snickering.
Heck yeah. I learned so many things from even the original Legend of Zelda. Among them are the following:
Theft of wooden swords from old men are a good thing
When at full strength, even you can defy the laws of gravity via sword throwing!
Candles may at any time generate fireballs my size or larger. But only once...
...unless you have the red candle, which is infinitely funner.
There are few costs to burning yourself repeatedly, other than the laws of gravity via sword throwing returning to your presence.
There are no costs to blowing yourself up.
If you ever need to choose between being stronger or being healthier... go with strength.
The death of wild animals will make you rich!
...if you desire, rich to no end, except for the whole 255 rupee thing.
I guess Link had an 8 bit pouch.
Rafts are utterly useless.
Ladders are effective for crossing decent sized bodies of water, but ineffected for climbing.
Swords are cool, but pointy swords with handles that are at a 22 degree angle are even cooler!
Attacking old men sometimes goes without consequence, but some other old men get cranky and have their pet statues throw fireballs at you.
I'm not sure what to think of this. Super Mario Brothers 2, if implied as a sequel to Super Mario Brothers, definitely didn't have the same characteristics. There are enough differences between SMB, SMB2, SMB3, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine to say that they may be sequels, but you definitely got a different playing experience each time. Oh, and it helps that those six games cover almost 20 years (!!!) of NES history.
The one drag is that Nintendo can't seem to get another franchise going like Mario. It's not Star Fox Tennis, it's Mario Tennis (and Mario Power Tennis, which was a step down from the N64 version). Pokémon is about dead, and Metroid has only had about four games to its name. Would Animal Crossing have sold better if it had been... I dunno... Mario Crossing? Would Super Mario Strikers sell if it were just some ordinary soccer game?
Anyways, yeah. No answers. Just questions. Ultimate, a good chunk of sequelitis (most notably, iterations 3 and onwards), we gamers bring upon ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Maya comes to mind, but she's very clearly aimed at the 18 to 35 female audience.
Well, all right then. What about, after fighting off the great evil, telling the player, "Sorry, #PLAYERNAME, but our princess is in another castle!"?
I intend to stay on as a storm spotter for the National Weather Service, so someday that might involve ham radios when the next F5 tornado pulls down half the cell phone towers in a given area. But that would really be the extent of what my ham usage would be.
(italics mine)
I can't help but think that this means Superman 64 is all out...
Mister Rogers. He would give Chuck Norris a run for his money.
BusinessWeek Online:
Funny, I thought it was an obvious inferior copy of pre-hyped Nintendo technology.
No, I distinctly remember being shot up by Zelda while I was trying to hammer Ganondorf at the end of Ocarina of Time. She has a bow, and she's a useless shot. Someone take those light arrows away from her!
That is the funniest website I've seen today, not counting the whole Windows Vista sucks bit. I'm going to post a note about sacrificing the cow in my younger brother's neighborhood and report the results...
----
Nintendo plays with YOUR MIND
`Brain Age' is for gamers who aren't all thumbs
Playing "Brain Age" is like taking the SAT all day long. If that sounds like your kind of fun, you'll love this new game for the Nintendo DS.
You'll solve more than 100 logic and memorization problems. Writing your answers on the DS' touch screen and speaking into the game system's microphone, you'll memorize words on a screen and try to recall as many of them as you can. You'll quickly count to 120. You'll solve match questions. And ultimately, the game will calculate how old your brain is, based on research by the Japanese professor whose book, "Brain Age," is a sensation in Japan and spurred Nintendo to create this video game in only 90 days. Nintendo plans to release another brain game, "Big Brain Academy," next month.
Uniquely, you play the game by turning the DS sideways and holding it like a book. "Brain Age" is meant to be played small chunks over a long period, up to one year. The more challenges you solve, the more challenges you unlock and the younger your brain age becomes. Age 20 is the goal. While I don't feel smarter than I did three weeks ago when I began playing the game, my brain age has become younger. That's because, according to research behind the book and the game, working on the problems stimulates blood flow to my prefrontal cortex.
My brain's age? I'm not telling; my brain is young enough to know better.
----------
egwinn@tribune.com
A conjecture by its very nature is unscientific until it is tested. If I wanted to believe in the FSM, you'd find spaghetti, right? Besides, how would you test it? Neither you nor I can go back a million years in time and witness the dawn of four legged animals ourselves. We're both working with the same body of evidence; a fossil record and whatnot. What is lacking is an appropriate scientific hypothesis of creation, which, like most science, is being worked on and takes time.
If you disapprove with a specific stance or position paper of theirs, I'm not part of their organization, nor do I support them, but I'd be interested in hearing what it would be.
Now if you don't believe God is good, that's a whole other story.
Really, our company will probably be drawing up migration plans to Vista in 2008 anyways, so I feel your pain. :-)
If the result is anything like the battle between a lion and 42 midgets, I would put my money on the pit bull.
In a nutshell, it describes the anecdotal reactions of four to six year olds of various R-rated movies in movie theatres (the ones specifically mentioned are The Ring and Eurotrip). The column ends with the subject of the column (not the columnist) thinking of laws banning children (she thinks of 4-6 year olds, clearly everyone here would think 18 years and under) from watching R-rated movies, period.
A good quote from the column is this:
Also consider that, again anecdotally, children did not have nearly the same reaction to watching images of 9/11 as adults did. They didn't think it was real. Would the reaction have been the same in 1950?
Anyways, I'm not really pushing for or against any particular viewpoint at this time, other than I can't see why the CDC shouldn't at least look at the issue.
I'm testing Crystal Reports, which seems to be the Oracle of reporting software. Everyone knows about it, there's a large support base, it's quite pricey, ($7.5k for essentially the stuff CleverPath did, only hopefully more intelligent) and if you put it down as a skill on your resume, it's worth something. We don't have very high demands (yet) but I'm reasonably sure that support on-hand (right here, right now) is a requirement, hence I don't think I'll be testing Jasper. The reports really are crucial to the business.
Haven't heard of the other solutions being thrown around; I'll give those a look too.
That said, I can kind of see the marketing problems that Nintendo will have to overcome, but I don't think it'll be that bad. One TV, one Revolution hooked up to the Internet, one or two controllers. Demo three launch games that make the most use of the fact that the controller is the way it is (I dunno, Pilotwings, Zelda and Super Duper Duck Hunt come to mind) and demo 10 downloadable games from past generations. Then stick a sign next to it saying you can play all 2,000 Nintendo games... ever.
Then make it look pretty. Can't be that hard, but you are relying on the open-mindedness of the consumer to this whole concept. Alternatively, open up Nintendo Stores, a la the Apple Store concept of three (or so) years ago... (keeping in mind that Sony has already done it, to less effect)
"No jump button? Why the hell don't I have a jump button in a 3-D game?"
And yet, Nintendo provided other opportunities to fill the gap (instead of timed jumping, solving puzzles) and, a few moments of fine-controls (a few heart containers took some maneuvering to get to).
That said, I seem to remember back then a distinct, strong desire not to become "the female Link". Perhaps things will be better.
While stomping out your spam, you can also chant repeatedly: "Developers! Developers! Developers!" MS Microphone attachment sold separately.
I'm thinking it's the 11 extensions.
Prior the the release of the GameCube (now verging on 4-5 years ago), Nintendo's president (Iwataki, I believe) and Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the lead developers, expressed serious concerns about Sony and Microsoft getting in the game. It wasn't so much because competition was unhealthy for Nintendo, it was the direction major game developers were taking the industry. Nintendo saw a future where every platform would look alike -- development studios would create one game off one codebase, port it to three different platforms and everyone would get the same game experience. IGN (back when I was a subscriber) even did head-to-head reviews of the exact same game on two to three different platforms and judged which platform a gamer should buy the game for. Unsurprisingly, since Nintendo never really emphasized the horsepower of a system, the Gamecube came in at the short end of the stick.
Things that Nintendo did during that time, like licensing Resident Evil exclusively for themselves, were sort of just precursors for what the Revolution is. (side note: imagine how much of an uproar that would be caused if, say, Microsoft licensed exclusive rights to Major League Baseball.) They decided that since you can't very well differentiate yourself based on a system and a handheld, joystick-like controller... differentiate yourself on the experience.
Nowadays, Sony and Microsoft are fighting for the market that Nintendo used to own, and many (if not most) of those gamers could at one time be described as Nintendo Fanboys. Wasn't everyone a NES fanboy in 1988? I think the parent is asking if Nintendo is risking losing its remaining fanboys with the Revolution, and I'm saying that they've already lost so many, it's worth betting the farm on something new. By no means are they a failing company, but this is an opportunity that the company has probably been preparing for since the introduction of Microsoft into the gaming arena and the realization that the hardcore gaming market would just be an arms race. It's a big market, moneywise, to ignore, but the reason Sony and Microsoft aren't copying this idea, this time around, is because their accountants and managers won't let them.
Anyways, I don't hope either way whether or not this works out for Nintendo, but at the same time I don't think this will end up like the Newton. Consider how many people considered the DS to be a failure at launch...
They seem to always have been concerned about keeping prices within the reach of the general consumer, so I wouldn't be surprised if they repeated that launch price.
Heck yeah. I learned so many things from even the original Legend of Zelda. Among them are the following:
The one drag is that Nintendo can't seem to get another franchise going like Mario. It's not Star Fox Tennis, it's Mario Tennis (and Mario Power Tennis, which was a step down from the N64 version). Pokémon is about dead, and Metroid has only had about four games to its name. Would Animal Crossing have sold better if it had been... I dunno... Mario Crossing? Would Super Mario Strikers sell if it were just some ordinary soccer game?
Anyways, yeah. No answers. Just questions. Ultimate, a good chunk of sequelitis (most notably, iterations 3 and onwards), we gamers bring upon ourselves.