Here is a direct quote from the writer of the article. That's not anti-technology? I can find similar quotes from other environmentalists if you'd like. Honestly, I'm not sure how implying that Ethiopians have better lives than us because they aren't distracted by pesky things like electricity is merely "technologically selective," but maybe you can explain it for me.
The article is about paid lobbyists representing the richest corporations in the world while pretending to be something else entirely. So where so-called "global warming fanatics" are concerned, I don't see the similarity, whether some of them are overly-selective or not.
If you're saying that environmentalists never have ulterior motives for their cause, then you're sadly mistaken. Many of them are anti-technology, including the author of this article, having bought into the myth of the noble savage. They realize that the only way to force people to abandon high technology is to make them fear it, and the best way to do that is to convince them that everyone will die if they don't stop using it.
To be sure, there are a number of people genuinely concerned about global warming, but most of them are also more concerned with more important related problems, such as the fact that gas costs too goddamn much to begin with and we'll eventually run out of it.
Which appears to be a lot of you, not that I'm really blaming anyone...
The reason why Big Tobacco has an interest in global warming is not because global warming might be linked to cigarettes. (Considering how difficult it is for the environmentalists to prove that cars cause global warming, it would be nigh impossible for them to do the same for tiny little cancer sticks.) No, what they want to do is discredit the EPA's stance on global warming so that they can then go, "Hey, if you thought that was crazy, they also said that second-hand smoke causes cancer! Can you believe those idiots?"
Basically it's argument by association. Very clever stuff; I can't remember another corporation doing anything quite like this before.
He's probably meta-moderating. I meta-moderated every day for a substantial amount of time and didn't get a single mod point. Then I got bored of it and suddenly I started getting mod points once every week or so.
With absolutely any game out there, if you want to update to the latest version you are 100% screwed if someone took your CD key.
Not if you're playing offline. A lot of people do that, you know.
In fact, I don't even have a CD Key for any of my Steam games because I bought them online - making it impossible to steal my CD key.
And if something ever happened to the Steam servers to make them shut down or lose your purchase information... oh, well. You can make back-ups, but even they require Steam authentication to run; their only purpose is to save you download time.
Steam is a great concept in theory, and I feel a lot better about its execution than I did back during the HL2 launch debacle, but it's certainly not invulnerable to legitimate complaints.
Who developed those games is irrelevant, besides. My point was that creative games are being made right now, and they will continue to be made whether or not the Wii succeeds.
In a landscape already filled with the carcasses of those that dared to try something new, and publishers more afraid than ever to try something a little different, the high-profile failure of a system that tried to put innovation and fun before graphics could be the final nail in the coffin of creativity.
Yeah, if the Wii fails, who's going to make interesting games like Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus?
After meditating on it for a bit, I realized that the woman who wrote this list used the word "influential" when she meant to use the word "powerful." It makes a whole lot more sense now.
People generally don't consider transsexual males to be women. That includes other women, who would usually be very nervous at the idea of even sharing the public bathroom with them, for example.
Now, the one omission I can't figure out is Stevie Case. Like her or not, despite the fact that she got her position mainly because she was John Romero's girlfriend, she was still more influential than most of the women on this list. (It doesn't have to be a good influence. Hell, I don't think the cynical commercialism of girl-only gamer groups like the PMS Clan is a good influence either, but one of its members is on the list.)
Oh, and others have mentioned Roberta Williams, which is an even better example of female influence. Maybe they have to be influential now?
It's impossible for a platform with a base that large to be considered a niche. What PC gaming is is a collection of niches supplemented by big-name FPSes, RTSes, and casual games. People go to the PC to create games with a small audience because PCs are cheaper to develop and distribute for, and the keyboard-and-mouse setup allow for a wider variety of control configurations than the console controllers do. There's no way you're going to see grognard war games, 4X strategy games, or Myst-like adventure games (just to name a few examples) gain a significant presence on consoles the way things are now.
A Resident Evil has been officially annouced from Capcom, and Square will have a Dragon Quest and an FF:Crystal Chronicles (as crappy as CC may be).
I meant exclusives of games that are normally on Sony systems, since, after all, the articles cited were suggesting that companies were actually moving away from the PS3. (Of course they're going to move towards the Wii; it's there, after all.) Hell, in the case of Square even just seeing ports of its top games (instead of spinoffs) would be problematic for Sony.
And yet it's the first time they release games on a Nintendo platform since the N64.
When that goes beyond rampant speculation, and when more developers than EA and SNK are cited, especially developers like Square, Capcom, and Konami, let me know, OK?
(Honestly, do you believe that EA won't make ports of its most popular games for the PS3 at the very least? I mean, it's EA. They port everything.)
The pinnacle of branding is to have a popular name that has nothing at all to do with your product, and stands on its own. Like Xerox, or Kleenex, or Apple.
They call it Kleenex because it's clean, unlike the handkerchiefs that people used to use.
Anyway, just because some wildly successful brand names have nothing to do with their products doesn't mean that they all don't. Along with Coca-Cola and Kleenex, another example of a popular descriptive brand name is Band-Aid. And I'm sure there are others.
Except that Coca-Cola is carbonated water, not a tropical African evergreen plant with reddish fragrant nutlike seeds, and it doesn't contain cocaine. So, apart from not describing the product at all, it describes it perfectly.
"Coca-Cola (often abbreviated to "Coke") is a carbonated cola drink... The formula for Coke, whose status as a trade secret has been embellished by company lore, once contained trace amounts of cocaine (about 1/400th of a grain, or 0.16 milligrams, per ounce of syrup, in 1902)[2], although this was removed around 1906 as health regulations were tightened.... Today's Coca-Cola uses "spent" coca leaves, those that have been through a cocaine extraction process, to flavor the beverage. Since this process cannot extract the cocaine alkaloids at a molecular level, the drink still contains trace amounts of the stimulant[25]." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola
The Nintendo machine is NOT a revolution - it is a game console.
And you accuse me of being too literal?
Did you have problems trying to refute my other examples?
Why do I have to refute your other examples? Where did this turn into an argument that all successful brand names are descriptive? All I'm arguing is that a significant number of them are.
Precisely. All you can think of are lame cliches.
We are talking about corporate marketing, right?
That just demonstrates that you are very much lacking in creativity
Well, actually that I didn't care enough to be creative. It only took me five seconds to think of those Revolution slogans too, you know.
Following your previous genital obsession, Xbox sounds like a vagina in a porn movie.
Uh... You said it, not me...
You are just proving that infantile names don't doom a product to failure.
I was supposed to be proving that they did? Man, and that moron who thinks that Snakes on a Plane was a great success said that I liked to use straw men...
Fanbases are rather irrelevant.
They're extremely relevant. If you do something that turns them off, even if it doesn't do enough to dissuade them from buying your product, chances are you did something wrong.
How the hell do you know what the reaction was outside the fanbase?
Because I've, er, talked to people?
Ahh, but why do you care so much about the name as to attack it?
I don't. Do I really have to explain this to you again?
Almost nobody (even on Slashdot) was talking about the Revolution before the name change.
Bullshit! Every time a bit of news came out of Nintendo all of the blogs grabbed onto it. Everybody went nuts when the Wiimote was revealed, which was, you remember, before the name change.
After the name change, people (even if only on Slashdot) have been talking about the Wii as the console to buy over the Xbox and Playstation.
People talked about how the Wii was going to be better than the XBox 360 and the PS3 before the name change as well. That's been the prevailing opinion on/. since the next-gen hype started a couple of years ago.
Maybe the name had nothing to do with the increased attention, but it's pretty obvious it hasn't hurt it.
Among the hardcore gamers, no. But I'm not just talking about the hardcore gamers. I'm talking about the guys who don't hang around
How do you know that? If it was tailored specifically for the English language, then why does it have two 'i's in a row?
Because "I" is the first-person singular pronoun in English. Nintendo even put out a press release explaining all of this.
Say who? Exactly. It's a matter of taste.
I never said that it wasn't. The only thing I claim is that most people agree with me that if the Wii turns out to be a good system, it will be despite the name.
So, what does that have to do with the name? Names usually don't reflect function.
But Nintendo obviously wants the name of this console to reflect its function, as both names were references to something that the console is intended to do.
Right. So tell me again why the name matters.
Because it's what people call your product. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Of course, it is entirely possible for a product to be successful without being revolutionary, so your idea that if it is not revolutionary, then it will be a failure is also unwarranted.
Not in this case. The Wii has no legs to stand on if the controller is rejected.
I've already rebutted the first part of your post in another post. Suffice it to say that the PS2 was in a very similar situation with the Dreamcast, and everyone knows how that turned out.
The fact that Nintendo didn't sell as many systems as the PS2 is more a sign that gamers (in general) don't care that much about graphics
Or, in reality, the Gamecube didn't sell as well because it didn't have many games. So you're right, it doesn't have much to do with graphics, but that doesn't mean that the system with the best graphics is going to be the loser all of the time. The system with the highest number of fun games always wins, and there's currently no reason to think that the PS3 will have less fun games than the PS2 did, or that the Wii will have more than the Gamecube did. And if Nintendo had decided to make a system that was more like the other two in this generation, they definitely wouldn't have gotten more fun games, and they would've had to sell at a loss. Thus, it's not viable because they couldn't do it.
Nintendo has arranged a Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy game to be released early in the life of the system (although they are not "core" games in their series), have got Ubisoft to make crazy love to the system, have EA attempting to be inovative (Madden looks cool, and I bet Tiger Woods will rule, but NFS:Carbon looks like an assy control setup), and Sega is making the Sonic game people have waited a decade for.
How many of those are going to be cash-in gimmick games like FF Crystal Chronicles was, or games that are meant to cater to the non-gamer Wii audience as opposed to the traditional gamer audience on the other two systems? I believe that the number is likely to be high.
Also, hardcore fanboys like to play games for long periods of time. As I've said before, I'm certainly not professing to be a psychic, but I find it hard to believe that the Wiimote will be comfortable to use for more than thirty minutes at a time. Since it's based on absolute motion, the Wiimote makes it a lot harder to shift around, move around the room, and do other things that people do to stay comfortable. And it's not as simple as pausing the game because you have to recalibrate the controller as well. What I'm saying is that the controller design itself seems to discourage hardcore play.
Oh, and the best launch ever for a console in terms of quality was the Dreamcast's. Not good company.
Anaconda was intended as a serious thriller with nearly twice the budget of its sequel.
So? Anaconda is a dumb snake movie (and if Anaconda was a "serious thriller," then so was Snakes on a Plane), and Snakes on a Plane is a dumb snake movie. They should appeal to the same audience regardless of how big their budgets are; 99% of movie-goers couldn't care less about a movie's budget as long as it doesn't interfere with the movie, which it didn't in either given case. But Snakes on a Plane made less despite the hype surrounding its name. You still have not proven that the hype had any significant effect on sales.
Oh yeah. You knocked that strawman down good. I'm betting it's really smarting from that encounter. Don't forget to yell, "you don't come back now, ya' hear?!?"
What, are you simply arguing that the Wii will just be generically "more successful" than it would've been without the name change?
OK, possibly, though you still haven't proven that effect with Snakes on a Plane. So what? The Gamecube was already "successful" by this rather unambitious definition. No one outside of Nintendo cares if the Wii gets a tiny boost off of its name when its competitors control about 80% of the market. That doesn't make it a genius decision at all. At best you could describe it as flailing around for straws.
Insults? How childish.
Ah, the usual "You're the one that started the insults, not me" deflection. Took that one right out of the handbook, I suppose.
Does it? How so? Does the machine rotate on some kind of turntable? Will it cause a social uprising to overthrow the current political order?
No, but it might keep people from being deliberately obtuse.
A good name does not necessarily describe the product.
True, but that's one of the reasons why this name, along with those of many other products, is relatively good.
Coca-Cola. What does that mean?
Cola with cocaine in it. So, um, bad example for your point, a great one for mine.
Are you sure of that? I can't think of any reason that name would make a marketing campaign successful.
Seriously? Without trying, I can think of a number of slogans that would work, for example: "Join the Revolution," "Bring on the Revolution," "The Revolution Will Be Televised," and so on. The best thing I can think of for the Wii is "Now It's OK to Play with Your Wii." I can only imagine the ads that would center around that.
"Revolution" sounds much more infantile to me, like someone who needs to sound tough and big.
So does "XBox." Seems to have worked OK for Microsoft.
BTW, I should remind you that Nintendo themselves were the ones making a big deal about how their console was going to be a revolution. "Tough and big" indeed. Moreover, the fanbase seemed to really enjoy the antics of Reggie Fils-Aime and his "Reggielution." The reaction to the name change has been rather defensive at best for most fans, on the other hand, and outright negative for people outside of the fanbase.
What I don't understand is who would attack the name?
As an example of bad decisions from the new Nintendo, I said that "Wii" was a bad name. Someone asked me why I thought it was a bad name, so I attacked it. I'm not sure what you expected other than that. It's not like I go around telling people that the name sucks for no reason, thinking about it 24 hours a day until nothing else exists in my mind and I start chanting KILL KILL KILL
Strange, I blacked out there for a minute, and my hands are bleeding. Anyway.
If the Wii was the greatest product ever, would you refuse to buy it because of urination jokes? If the Revolution was the biggest rip-off ever, would you still buy it because the name makes you feel big?
Of course not, on either score. That doesn't suddenly make the name change a good decision.
Aside from that, there are many people who don't immediately think "urination" when they hear the word. To a Scottish person, Wee means "small." In many languages, it might not mean anything at all.
The name was designed with the English language in mind. It sounds like "We" and has two 'I's put together. The problem with that, besides what I've already noted, is that the focus of the Wii thus far hasn't been on social gaming; online is going to be pretty limited at first, for one thing. Instead, the focus has been on the "revolutionary" controller.
And "wee" is definitely used as slang over in the UK, as a number of Brits I know can attest.
The name is much more inline with current trends and fashion than "Revolution" which is incredibly dated and lame.
Says who? I'll agree that it was more popular to call things "revolutions" in the 90's, but I don't see how it's ever been popular to seriously refer to a game console as "piss." Unless it sucked, anyway.
What if it turns out not to be a revolution that changes gaming forever?
Then the Wii will be a footnote in gaming history and no one will care about its name. If the Wii doesn't succeed with its controller, then it will only do as well as the Gamecube did, at best.
Well, the way you describe the games on the PS2 and XBox versus the games on the DS does make you sound a lot like a Nintendo fanboy. The only thing I can't figure out is why you don't have a Gamecube. They've been $100 for years.
Anyway, since you're firmly in the target audience for the Wii, I wish you luck that it works out for you. It's just that there really aren't that many gamers that are in the target audience for the Wii, and a lot of Nintendo fans have fooled themselves into thinking otherwise.
Because it describes the product. Because it describes the intent of the company making the product. Because even an idiot could've designed successful ad campaigns around it. There are probably other reasons that I'm not thinking of.
And why is "Wii" offensively bad to you?
Besides the penis and urination jokes? Well, it just sounds childish. That's a reputation that Nintendo of all companies definitely should want to get away from.
I wonder how many people would defend this name if Sony or Microsoft came up with it?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a direct quote from the writer of the article. That's not anti-technology? I can find similar quotes from other environmentalists if you'd like. Honestly, I'm not sure how implying that Ethiopians have better lives than us because they aren't distracted by pesky things like electricity is merely "technologically selective," but maybe you can explain it for me.
Rob
The article is about paid lobbyists representing the richest corporations in the world while pretending to be something else entirely. So where so-called "global warming fanatics" are concerned, I don't see the similarity, whether some of them are overly-selective or not.
If you're saying that environmentalists never have ulterior motives for their cause, then you're sadly mistaken. Many of them are anti-technology, including the author of this article, having bought into the myth of the noble savage. They realize that the only way to force people to abandon high technology is to make them fear it, and the best way to do that is to convince them that everyone will die if they don't stop using it.
To be sure, there are a number of people genuinely concerned about global warming, but most of them are also more concerned with more important related problems, such as the fact that gas costs too goddamn much to begin with and we'll eventually run out of it.
Rob
Which appears to be a lot of you, not that I'm really blaming anyone...
The reason why Big Tobacco has an interest in global warming is not because global warming might be linked to cigarettes. (Considering how difficult it is for the environmentalists to prove that cars cause global warming, it would be nigh impossible for them to do the same for tiny little cancer sticks.) No, what they want to do is discredit the EPA's stance on global warming so that they can then go, "Hey, if you thought that was crazy, they also said that second-hand smoke causes cancer! Can you believe those idiots?"
Basically it's argument by association. Very clever stuff; I can't remember another corporation doing anything quite like this before.
Rob
He's probably meta-moderating. I meta-moderated every day for a substantial amount of time and didn't get a single mod point. Then I got bored of it and suddenly I started getting mod points once every week or so.
Rob
With absolutely any game out there, if you want to update to the latest version you are 100% screwed if someone took your CD key.
Not if you're playing offline. A lot of people do that, you know.
In fact, I don't even have a CD Key for any of my Steam games because I bought them online - making it impossible to steal my CD key.
And if something ever happened to the Steam servers to make them shut down or lose your purchase information... oh, well. You can make back-ups, but even they require Steam authentication to run; their only purpose is to save you download time.
Steam is a great concept in theory, and I feel a lot better about its execution than I did back during the HL2 launch debacle, but it's certainly not invulnerable to legitimate complaints.
Rob
Who developed those games is irrelevant, besides. My point was that creative games are being made right now, and they will continue to be made whether or not the Wii succeeds.
Rob
I actually mentioned them because they were different; I didn't want my examples to sound redundant.
Rob
In a landscape already filled with the carcasses of those that dared to try something new, and publishers more afraid than ever to try something a little different, the high-profile failure of a system that tried to put innovation and fun before graphics could be the final nail in the coffin of creativity.
Yeah, if the Wii fails, who's going to make interesting games like Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus?
Oh, wait.
Rob
Is there a Pseudointellectual kind as well?
Rob
After meditating on it for a bit, I realized that the woman who wrote this list used the word "influential" when she meant to use the word "powerful." It makes a whole lot more sense now.
Rob
People generally don't consider transsexual males to be women. That includes other women, who would usually be very nervous at the idea of even sharing the public bathroom with them, for example.
Now, the one omission I can't figure out is Stevie Case. Like her or not, despite the fact that she got her position mainly because she was John Romero's girlfriend, she was still more influential than most of the women on this list. (It doesn't have to be a good influence. Hell, I don't think the cynical commercialism of girl-only gamer groups like the PMS Clan is a good influence either, but one of its members is on the list.)
Oh, and others have mentioned Roberta Williams, which is an even better example of female influence. Maybe they have to be influential now?
Rob
It's impossible for a platform with a base that large to be considered a niche. What PC gaming is is a collection of niches supplemented by big-name FPSes, RTSes, and casual games. People go to the PC to create games with a small audience because PCs are cheaper to develop and distribute for, and the keyboard-and-mouse setup allow for a wider variety of control configurations than the console controllers do. There's no way you're going to see grognard war games, 4X strategy games, or Myst-like adventure games (just to name a few examples) gain a significant presence on consoles the way things are now.
Rob
Here is what happened the last time Todd McFarlane tried to make a video game. Go about three-quarters into the video to see it.
Rob
A Resident Evil has been officially annouced from Capcom, and Square will have a Dragon Quest and an FF:Crystal Chronicles (as crappy as CC may be).
I meant exclusives of games that are normally on Sony systems, since, after all, the articles cited were suggesting that companies were actually moving away from the PS3. (Of course they're going to move towards the Wii; it's there, after all.) Hell, in the case of Square even just seeing ports of its top games (instead of spinoffs) would be problematic for Sony.
And yet it's the first time they release games on a Nintendo platform since the N64.
Uh, no.
And they start with 6 games right out of the bat... using Wii controls (not going the easier path of the classic controller)
I can imagine how well that's going to turn out, too. Remember how the XBox 360 port of Madden 06 was worse than the old-generation versions?
Rob
When that goes beyond rampant speculation, and when more developers than EA and SNK are cited, especially developers like Square, Capcom, and Konami, let me know, OK?
(Honestly, do you believe that EA won't make ports of its most popular games for the PS3 at the very least? I mean, it's EA. They port everything.)
Rob
The pinnacle of branding is to have a popular name that has nothing at all to do with your product, and stands on its own. Like Xerox, or Kleenex, or Apple.
... The formula for Coke, whose status as a trade secret has been embellished by company lore, once contained trace amounts of cocaine (about 1/400th of a grain, or 0.16 milligrams, per ounce of syrup, in 1902)[2], although this was removed around 1906 as health regulations were tightened. ... Today's Coca-Cola uses "spent" coca leaves, those that have been through a cocaine extraction process, to flavor the beverage. Since this process cannot extract the cocaine alkaloids at a molecular level, the drink still contains trace amounts of the stimulant[25]."
/. since the next-gen hype started a couple of years ago.
They call it Kleenex because it's clean, unlike the handkerchiefs that people used to use.
Anyway, just because some wildly successful brand names have nothing to do with their products doesn't mean that they all don't. Along with Coca-Cola and Kleenex, another example of a popular descriptive brand name is Band-Aid. And I'm sure there are others.
Except that Coca-Cola is carbonated water, not a tropical African evergreen plant with reddish fragrant nutlike seeds, and it doesn't contain cocaine. So, apart from not describing the product at all, it describes it perfectly.
"Coca-Cola (often abbreviated to "Coke") is a carbonated cola drink
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola
The Nintendo machine is NOT a revolution - it is a game console.
And you accuse me of being too literal?
Did you have problems trying to refute my other examples?
Why do I have to refute your other examples? Where did this turn into an argument that all successful brand names are descriptive? All I'm arguing is that a significant number of them are.
Precisely. All you can think of are lame cliches.
We are talking about corporate marketing, right?
That just demonstrates that you are very much lacking in creativity
Well, actually that I didn't care enough to be creative. It only took me five seconds to think of those Revolution slogans too, you know.
Following your previous genital obsession, Xbox sounds like a vagina in a porn movie.
Uh... You said it, not me...
You are just proving that infantile names don't doom a product to failure.
I was supposed to be proving that they did? Man, and that moron who thinks that Snakes on a Plane was a great success said that I liked to use straw men...
Fanbases are rather irrelevant.
They're extremely relevant. If you do something that turns them off, even if it doesn't do enough to dissuade them from buying your product, chances are you did something wrong.
How the hell do you know what the reaction was outside the fanbase?
Because I've, er, talked to people?
Ahh, but why do you care so much about the name as to attack it?
I don't. Do I really have to explain this to you again?
Almost nobody (even on Slashdot) was talking about the Revolution before the name change.
Bullshit! Every time a bit of news came out of Nintendo all of the blogs grabbed onto it. Everybody went nuts when the Wiimote was revealed, which was, you remember, before the name change.
After the name change, people (even if only on Slashdot) have been talking about the Wii as the console to buy over the Xbox and Playstation.
People talked about how the Wii was going to be better than the XBox 360 and the PS3 before the name change as well. That's been the prevailing opinion on
Maybe the name had nothing to do with the increased attention, but it's pretty obvious it hasn't hurt it.
Among the hardcore gamers, no. But I'm not just talking about the hardcore gamers. I'm talking about the guys who don't hang around
And that pretty much sums up your knowledge on the subject.
I've seen Anaconda. It's a dumb snake movie.
Rob
How do you know that? If it was tailored specifically for the English language, then why does it have two 'i's in a row?
Because "I" is the first-person singular pronoun in English. Nintendo even put out a press release explaining all of this.
Say who? Exactly. It's a matter of taste.
I never said that it wasn't. The only thing I claim is that most people agree with me that if the Wii turns out to be a good system, it will be despite the name.
So, what does that have to do with the name? Names usually don't reflect function.
But Nintendo obviously wants the name of this console to reflect its function, as both names were references to something that the console is intended to do.
Right. So tell me again why the name matters.
Because it's what people call your product. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Of course, it is entirely possible for a product to be successful without being revolutionary, so your idea that if it is not revolutionary, then it will be a failure is also unwarranted.
Not in this case. The Wii has no legs to stand on if the controller is rejected.
Rob
I've already rebutted the first part of your post in another post. Suffice it to say that the PS2 was in a very similar situation with the Dreamcast, and everyone knows how that turned out.
The fact that Nintendo didn't sell as many systems as the PS2 is more a sign that gamers (in general) don't care that much about graphics
Or, in reality, the Gamecube didn't sell as well because it didn't have many games. So you're right, it doesn't have much to do with graphics, but that doesn't mean that the system with the best graphics is going to be the loser all of the time. The system with the highest number of fun games always wins, and there's currently no reason to think that the PS3 will have less fun games than the PS2 did, or that the Wii will have more than the Gamecube did. And if Nintendo had decided to make a system that was more like the other two in this generation, they definitely wouldn't have gotten more fun games, and they would've had to sell at a loss. Thus, it's not viable because they couldn't do it.
Nintendo has arranged a Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy game to be released early in the life of the system (although they are not "core" games in their series), have got Ubisoft to make crazy love to the system, have EA attempting to be inovative (Madden looks cool, and I bet Tiger Woods will rule, but NFS:Carbon looks like an assy control setup), and Sega is making the Sonic game people have waited a decade for.
How many of those are going to be cash-in gimmick games like FF Crystal Chronicles was, or games that are meant to cater to the non-gamer Wii audience as opposed to the traditional gamer audience on the other two systems? I believe that the number is likely to be high.
Also, hardcore fanboys like to play games for long periods of time. As I've said before, I'm certainly not professing to be a psychic, but I find it hard to believe that the Wiimote will be comfortable to use for more than thirty minutes at a time. Since it's based on absolute motion, the Wiimote makes it a lot harder to shift around, move around the room, and do other things that people do to stay comfortable. And it's not as simple as pausing the game because you have to recalibrate the controller as well. What I'm saying is that the controller design itself seems to discourage hardcore play.
Oh, and the best launch ever for a console in terms of quality was the Dreamcast's. Not good company.
Rob
Anaconda was intended as a serious thriller with nearly twice the budget of its sequel.
So? Anaconda is a dumb snake movie (and if Anaconda was a "serious thriller," then so was Snakes on a Plane), and Snakes on a Plane is a dumb snake movie. They should appeal to the same audience regardless of how big their budgets are; 99% of movie-goers couldn't care less about a movie's budget as long as it doesn't interfere with the movie, which it didn't in either given case. But Snakes on a Plane made less despite the hype surrounding its name. You still have not proven that the hype had any significant effect on sales.
Oh yeah. You knocked that strawman down good. I'm betting it's really smarting from that encounter. Don't forget to yell, "you don't come back now, ya' hear?!?"
What, are you simply arguing that the Wii will just be generically "more successful" than it would've been without the name change?
OK, possibly, though you still haven't proven that effect with Snakes on a Plane. So what? The Gamecube was already "successful" by this rather unambitious definition. No one outside of Nintendo cares if the Wii gets a tiny boost off of its name when its competitors control about 80% of the market. That doesn't make it a genius decision at all. At best you could describe it as flailing around for straws.
Insults? How childish.
Ah, the usual "You're the one that started the insults, not me" deflection. Took that one right out of the handbook, I suppose.
Rob
Does it? How so? Does the machine rotate on some kind of turntable? Will it cause a social uprising to overthrow the current political order?
No, but it might keep people from being deliberately obtuse.
A good name does not necessarily describe the product.
True, but that's one of the reasons why this name, along with those of many other products, is relatively good.
Coca-Cola. What does that mean?
Cola with cocaine in it. So, um, bad example for your point, a great one for mine.
Are you sure of that? I can't think of any reason that name would make a marketing campaign successful.
Seriously? Without trying, I can think of a number of slogans that would work, for example: "Join the Revolution," "Bring on the Revolution," "The Revolution Will Be Televised," and so on. The best thing I can think of for the Wii is "Now It's OK to Play with Your Wii." I can only imagine the ads that would center around that.
"Revolution" sounds much more infantile to me, like someone who needs to sound tough and big.
So does "XBox." Seems to have worked OK for Microsoft.
BTW, I should remind you that Nintendo themselves were the ones making a big deal about how their console was going to be a revolution. "Tough and big" indeed. Moreover, the fanbase seemed to really enjoy the antics of Reggie Fils-Aime and his "Reggielution." The reaction to the name change has been rather defensive at best for most fans, on the other hand, and outright negative for people outside of the fanbase.
What I don't understand is who would attack the name?
As an example of bad decisions from the new Nintendo, I said that "Wii" was a bad name. Someone asked me why I thought it was a bad name, so I attacked it. I'm not sure what you expected other than that. It's not like I go around telling people that the name sucks for no reason, thinking about it 24 hours a day until nothing else exists in my mind and I start chanting KILL KILL KILL
Strange, I blacked out there for a minute, and my hands are bleeding. Anyway.
If the Wii was the greatest product ever, would you refuse to buy it because of urination jokes? If the Revolution was the biggest rip-off ever, would you still buy it because the name makes you feel big?
Of course not, on either score. That doesn't suddenly make the name change a good decision.
Rob
Aside from that, there are many people who don't immediately think "urination" when they hear the word. To a Scottish person, Wee means "small." In many languages, it might not mean anything at all.
The name was designed with the English language in mind. It sounds like "We" and has two 'I's put together. The problem with that, besides what I've already noted, is that the focus of the Wii thus far hasn't been on social gaming; online is going to be pretty limited at first, for one thing. Instead, the focus has been on the "revolutionary" controller.
And "wee" is definitely used as slang over in the UK, as a number of Brits I know can attest.
The name is much more inline with current trends and fashion than "Revolution" which is incredibly dated and lame.
Says who? I'll agree that it was more popular to call things "revolutions" in the 90's, but I don't see how it's ever been popular to seriously refer to a game console as "piss." Unless it sucked, anyway.
What if it turns out not to be a revolution that changes gaming forever?
Then the Wii will be a footnote in gaming history and no one will care about its name. If the Wii doesn't succeed with its controller, then it will only do as well as the Gamecube did, at best.
Rob
Well, the way you describe the games on the PS2 and XBox versus the games on the DS does make you sound a lot like a Nintendo fanboy. The only thing I can't figure out is why you don't have a Gamecube. They've been $100 for years.
Anyway, since you're firmly in the target audience for the Wii, I wish you luck that it works out for you. It's just that there really aren't that many gamers that are in the target audience for the Wii, and a lot of Nintendo fans have fooled themselves into thinking otherwise.
Rob
Why is "Revolution" a better name?
Because it describes the product. Because it describes the intent of the company making the product. Because even an idiot could've designed successful ad campaigns around it. There are probably other reasons that I'm not thinking of.
And why is "Wii" offensively bad to you?
Besides the penis and urination jokes? Well, it just sounds childish. That's a reputation that Nintendo of all companies definitely should want to get away from.
I wonder how many people would defend this name if Sony or Microsoft came up with it?
Rob
What's wrong with the name "Wii"?
It should be pretty obvious from all of the penis and urination jokes made about it since it was revealed.
Rob