Indeed, the early Ultima games were fairly big in Japan, and the first Final Fantasy game was an attempt to cash in on that by a company which was taking one more throw of the dice before it expected to go out of business (hence the title).
Acknowledging your point about this being a list of computer games rather than video games - if there was a Japanese RPG that deserved a place on the list, it would be the second Final Fantasy game. That's where you start to see the elements that would define JRPG storytelling (as opposed to the Western equivalent) introduced.
Sorry, don't believe you. The cheapest meals I eat each week are the ones I cook myself from fresh ingredients. The more expensive nights are the ones where I treat myself to a pre-prepared meal or a takeaway.
Fresh-cooked food takes longer to prepare and has a higher effort-barrier and, common pieties aside, unless you are a seriously good cook it may not actually taste as nice as the pre-processed stuff - but unless you're insisting on only buying organic and other daft middle-class obsessions, it's pretty much always cheaper.
I have both - and use both as part of my daily exercise routine. The both have their pros and cons. The balance board does have an awful lot of limitations, but it has one great benefit; a few routines you can do while the TV is tuned to another input (with occasional voice guidance via the Wiimote).
My daily routine now is 20 minutes or so of fairly vigorous stuff in Your Shape 2012 on the Kinect, followed by 20 minutes of either free jogging or free step on the Wii; just long enough to watch an episode from one of my anime DVDs, which keeps the thing interesting and keeps me motivated.
It does work; through a combination of this routine and controlling what I eat, I got from 238 pounds down to 160 pounds (I'm 6 foot tall) over the course of 9 months and have held the weight off for 6 months since managing that. I need some sort of goal-system thingy to keep me motivated for exercise, and Your Shape/Wii Fit do that pretty well.
I have a BD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive in my current PC (the latter because I prefer to use a cheaper drive for "everyday" tasks). I don't actually use either of them all that much (Steam saw to that), but I'm not quite ready to go without them yet. I still have a few old games on CD/DVD that I revisit from time to time. Plus the BD-RW drive is a pretty convenient means of quickly backing up low-priority stuff - 20 minutes to shift 24 gigs of data to something that goes in a little slot in a CD wallet. Pity about the media prices, though.
We're not missing adventure games at all. Telltale and others do a good line on them; on PC, 360, PS3 and iOS (and sometimes Wii, though that seems to have fallen out of favour). Avoid Jurassic Park (which isn't a proper adventure game, just a dire sequence of quick time events) and the rest range from the passable (Wallace & Grommit) to the really quite good (the Monkey Island reboot). They don't tend to get boxed releases, but they're still there.
I do miss the flight sims - particularly the space variants - however. And as somebody else has already posted, a new Descent would be absolutely fantastic - not least since the control issues have been comprehensively sorted by the passage of time. With a bit of configuration I managed to get Descent 3 using my 360-controller-for-Windows and it was far and away the best way I'd ever found of controlling a Descent game; far better than all of the old finger-breaking configurations we tried to use back in the 90s.
No, I just checked the quick setup guide again to make sure (having referred to it extensively last night). The UK guide, at least, makes no reference to setting up a temporary account if you need a firmware update. It only says to do so in cases where you do not have internet access. And yes, it does say to put the SIM in before you start up the console - but it doesn't indicate that not doing so will cause the weird situation I described. Nor, going off the forums I read last night, does doing so actually avoid that problem.
I picked up my 3G model this morning. It sat on my desk at work all day glowering at me, but I've been able to mess around with it a bit since I got home. My experiences thus far can be summed up in three observations:
1) As a piece of kit to hold in your hand, it is gorgeous. It looks and feels like a premium piece of kit. It's possibly a bit on the large side for a handheld, but the quality of build feels great. The display quality is amazing and the touchscreens are extremely precise.
2) As a handheld gaming console, it is excellent. The games I've tried thus far: Uncharted, Wipeout and Super Stardust are all closer to PS3 quality than to PSP/3DS quality. The dual analogue sticks are an absolute revelation and it would be very hard to go back to a portable gaming platform that didn't support them (be it the 3DS or iPad) without feeling a twinge of regret.
3) As a general user-experience it is, at best, below average. And here's where a bit of explanation is needed.
I get the machine home, fire it up and start going through the initial setup. I set my region, set the time and date and connect it to my home wifi. I decide to leave the 3G network setup for later. So far, so good. I then get prompted to link the device to my PSN account. Great - I like the idea of having the same account shared between my PS3 and my Vita and I'm sure that Sony have made the process nice and easy. So I tap the box for "I already have a PSN account" without a care in the world.
The device does a quick scan of the network and tells me that I need to do a firmware update before I can connect to the PSN. At this point, I feel a bit irritated. The PS3 has been massively compromised by the frequency of and time required for firmware updates, and it doesn't bode well that the Vita is headed down the same path. But... whatever.
I click "ok".
And now I'm back at the prompt asking me whether I have a PSN account or not. A bit confused, I tell it again that I do. Cue the message about needing a firmware update. I'm stuck in a loop.
A quick google shows me that I have to answer "no" and create a temporary account that I use to download the firmware update and then link my "proper" PSN account. At this point, I'm really starting to get quite cheesed off. This is a long way from optimal. But anyway - I follow the instructions and set the firmware update running.
10 minutes later, the machine reboots with its new firmware. Ok, that's about 5 minutes faster than the average PS3 firmware update, but it's still pretty poor.
Ok, so, the firmware's updated and the Vita can access the net through my home network. Time to get the 3G set up. I shut the machine off, insert the Vodafone pay-as-you-go SIM that's included with UK 3G models and fire it back up. There's a nice obvious icon on the start screen to set up the 3G provider, so I tap it.
At first, everything seems to be going well. The Vita opens the Vodafone website and I opt to purchase 10 GBP of credit using my credit card. I note at this point that the web-browser is a bit shit, but in fairness, I realise that the utterly crapulent nature of the Vodafone website isn't helping either.
I fill in the form with my credit card details and tap the button to pay. But what's this? An error - saying that the service isn't available at this time. I try again - same error. I try again with my emergency backup card. Same problem.
So I go to google again. A lot of trawling through the Vodafone forums finally reveals the problem; the SIM won't activate properly if the Vita tries to do its first top-up using wifi rather than the 3G connection. I need to go into the settings menu, disable wifi and then try again. I do so, and am finally able to buy my 3G credit.
Right, now, time to transfer some content off my PS3. I got rid of my old PSP for trade-in credit a few days ago, but shifted all of my downloaded games back onto my PS3, so I could stick them straight onto the Vita. I get the USB connector that came with the Vita and hook th
While the graphics situation on Windows is far better, it has actually slid back a bit from the user's (or at least the gamer's) point of view over the last 12 months or so.
I went for years with XP and Vista machines, never having to think about graphics drivers. I'd stick the latest set on when I bought the machine, and then they'd "just work" until I was ready for a new machine. But recently, there's been a real trend towards graphics drivers optimised towards particular games - which may give performance or even stability issues in other games. Suddenly, as a PC gamer, I'm back in the situation I was last in back around 2002 or so, of actually having to think and care about graphics drivers.
Not a positive development - and one which is seemingly being driven by ego-fuelled feuds between a few specific developers.
This isn't a particularly new idea. I know that certain shopping centres here in the UK have been using it for quite some time.
I've got mixed feelings. It's certainly unpleasant to have large groups of feral youths hanging around shopping centres and in principle, something that encourages them to be elsewhere without much fuss is a good thing. On the other hand... it just shifts the problem around. I'd rather have the gang of feral youths stood menacingly inside the brightly lit CCTV-infested shopping centre than in the unlit, unguarded car park outside.
At least using music for this is better than some of the alternatives. I know that one idea that was briefly used was high pitched noise emitters - the theory being that with young people generally being able to hear higher ranges than adults, only they would be irritated by the noise. I objected to this one very strongly indeed - the noise was outright painful (my hearing is odd - I'm bad at sorting conversation from background noise, but seem to have retained my ability to hear very high ranges) and it was indiscriminate. It was offensive to the "good kid" going shopping for their parents as it was to the feral youth looking for his next mugging victim. I seem to remember that particular trick had to be pulled due to legal reasons.
I guess I also have some gut concerns about whether this impinges on rights such as freedom of assembly. I guess if it's being used on private property, then it's fine. On subways... that seems a bit more morally dubious.
And as for the choice of music... I don't think classical music lovers should be particularly offended. Though as somebody who is relatively fond of classical music, I will admit that taken out of place, it can be intrusive. Anybody reading this who commutes through London's Victoria Station will be aware that every few weeks they have some opera singer (and supporting instrumentation) there, collecting money for a cancer research charity. I know it's for a good cause and I shouldn't whinge but... when you're waiting for a delayed train and just want to get home after a long day, the singing, while perfectly "cultured", due to its volume and pitch, can be as intrusive and offensive as blazingly loud gangsta rap would be.
This is what I did - across all platforms for games whose PC release contains this particular DRM. Actually, it's been surprisingly easy. Despite consuming games at a voracious pace (see my various journal posts etc), it's been quite striking how few of the Ubisoft franchises I actually care about. There have been times I've been vaguely irritated to be missing the Assassin's Creed sequels, which do look interesting (better than the first one, which I played on PS3 before the DRM plans were known), but even there... there's no shortage of alternatives.
I did buy one game by accident which included an "always online" DRM requirement - Command & Conquer 4. It wasn't made particularly clear when you bought the thing and, with it not being an Ubisoft game, I assumed it wouldn't be pulling a stunt like that. Ultimately, though, the best form of copy protection that C&C4 had was the fact that it was so utterly shit that nobody would want to play it (and I say that as somebody who liked C&C3).
I thought the whole "Got a problem with invasive species x? Import invasive species y!" schtick had gone wrong so many times over the years that there would be more caution about it now.
What are they going to import in 30 years time to deal with the plague of elephants? My vote's for genetically modified, cybernetically enhanced fire-breating giant battle-centipedes. What could possibly go wrong?
Or maybe the attraction is that elephants can actually be extremely dangerous to humans. Australia just doesn't have enough animals like that, right?
Shareholder owned companies don't get to sit on huge piles of cash for long. Those little things called "dividend payments". Sega went from "mega-successful console manufacturer" to "out of the hardware game" very quickly indeed in similar circumstances.
If the Wii-U fails, they're out of the hardware market. They survived the Gamecube generation because of the GBA and the DS, which they were selling at a hardware premium, with a solid 3rd party software lineup bringing them in free money. The 3DS is... finally... selling (though not quite as well as expected). But it's selling at a loss and with a pretty crap 3rd party lineup.
I agree with your point about the perception of the Wii's performance as opposed to the reality.
What people don't tend to realise is that there are two broad ways to make money from a console. The "Nintendo" model and the "everybody else" model.
The Nintendo model is to sell the system at a profit - even if not a huge one - and then sell first-party games at it for a profit. This has to be quite an aggressively focussed approach and it generally results in putting out hardware that third party developers aren't interested in. But this doesn't matter, because you're making money off your own efforts. Nintendo didn't do so great with this strategy with the N64 and Gamecube, but it worked perfectly with the Wii, for the first 3 years. If they'd had a successor ready to go and repeat the trick in 2009/10, they could have made life very difficult for Sony and Microsoft. It's a "quick win" strategy - to sell consoles at a profit on day 1 these days, you need either a very high price point (3DS) or very weak hardware (Wii). If you go for the latter option, you will go obsolete quite quickly - so better stack up those early profits.
The "everybody else" strategy with console profits is to sell the hardware at a loss, not worry too much about first-party games development, but let third party games developers make your money for you. Remember, MS and Sony cream a good chunk of cash off every third party game sold for their system. Their only investment in producing those games has been a trivial amount of cash on certification. If the system is successful in attracting third party developers, then it becomes a source of "free money". This is a slower-burn strategy. Third party developers are nervous early in a console cycle, while the installed base is still small. You have to suck up a loss in those years. But then you've got a cash-cow out there and you can just sit back and milk it with minimal effort.
My instinct is that while Nintendo may exit this generation with the largest installed base, in overall terms, they may well be looking at chugging home in third place again, because they waited too long to jump to their next generation hardware (and had to do so in poor circumstances).
The cynic in me wants to say that if "school" was a game, it would be one which flashed up big signs saying "YOU WIN" and "1,000,000,000 POINT BONUS MULTIPLIER" every few seconds, until suddenly it was over and around 75% of players were then faced with a sign saying "Game over. Guess you sucked after all."
I remember some pretty fun experiences with a PC and a room full of people back in the early/mid 90s with the Battle Isle games (which I did a journal post on the other week).
Now admittedly, it was a room full of very nerdy people who actually found hex-based turn-based strategy games fun, but still...
This is interesting stuff - but it just serves to illustrate the problem. All of the questions I asked can be answered (as I said in my original post). But the answers don't fit into a simple narrative. And not all of the answers are particularly satisfactory or exciting. And when it comes to the last question (how it works with a room full of people), you basically have to just point out that developers for the 360 and PS3 have neglected the same market.
This is valid and true. But the point is that the "non-gamers" who bought the Wii (and never used it much once the novelty wore off) aren't going to buy the Wii-U because they feel neglected on the other platforms. They don't really care about the other platforms. They're not gamers - that's the whole point. They bought the Wii because "look, you play games by jumping around and waving your arms and that looks fun". There's no equivalent pitch out there for the Wii-U and that makes me suspect that Nintendo will not replicate the massive sales they saw in the Wii's first 3 years.
Having read both TFA and a few other more detailed articles out there (Eurogamer has a good one), the Nintendo Network looks like a good thing, albeit one which is many years overdue. It'll be good to have the it there, but it's hard to see anybody getting excited about it, given that at best it will bring functionality on a par with Xbox Live and the Playstation Network.
I think the Wii-U is a cause for greater concern. It's going to be launching in difficult economic times. The 3DS did that last year and its initial sales were poor. They've now recovered a bit (though they're still below forecast), but only at the expense of Nintendo having to sell the system at a loss. Now, selling at a loss isn't exactly a bad strategy (it worked wonders for Sony with the PS2), but it's very much counter to Nintendo's historic strategy. The Vita, also launching in difficult times, has had a poor Japanese launch despite a really quite good launch-games lineup. Having seen what the Vita can do, I very much want to own one - but I'll be surprised if its US and European sales don't fall well short of targets. I get the feeling that 2012 is going to be a really bad time to be launching a console - most people are unlikely to be feeling any kind of real economic recovery during the year. Microsoft and Sony have clearly decided to hold on and wait in the hope of a kinder economy; Nintendo, with Wii sales exhausted and their finances at an all-time low, don't have that option.
But more worrying still is the lack of a real public narrative around the Wii-U. The Wii had one of these. Motion control was easily grasped. You could watch somebody demonstrating one - or try a demo unit yourself - and "get" the concept instantly. If you actually used the thing more extensively, you'd come up against its limitations very quickly; the motion control was imprecise and in many cases placed a barrier between the player and the game that meant it ended up less immersive than traditional controllers. But by then, the sale was made. The Wii-U is a much harder concept to grasp. It's a home console which has some tablet-ish features. But how will it work with a room full of people? What will the tablet actually add to the games? And how is it going to be fun at a party with a room full of people with a few drinks inside them?
There are actually answers to those questions if you look around enough at the material that's been made available. But they're not simple answers and they're not easily communicated. On that basis, I just cannot see the Wii-U replicating the success of the Wii's early years. I'm also unsure that the pitch to the more traditional "gamer" crowd will work. There's a lot of frustration with the current generation's techological limitations. But I don't sense any confidence that Nintendo - who, let's not forget, have spent the time since the Wii's launch neglecting this demographic - are the people to usher in the next generation. I also find it hard to imagine developers doing much with the Wii-U's hardware - which is better than the current generation, but not by a huge margin - putting much resource into developing games for it that actually push it beyond what the 360 and PS3 can do. More likely, it will just get a lot of PS3/360 ports, which present little compelling reason for the "gamer" crowd to jump ship from their existing platforms until those get replaced.
The 3DS also suffered from a mis-managed message at launch. It was launched on the basis of "look 3d!" rather than "look, more powerful DS with better graphics". People weren't interested in 3d. A better DS is a stronger pitch and Nintendo have had more success with the 3DS since they switched to it. But I'm struggling to see what the pitch is with the Wii-U.
I've been wrong on calling "Nintendo are doomed" before. But I'm finding it very hard to see a convincing path to success for the Wii-U. The Wii was the right product at the right time (I admit it took me a while to recognise this). But for Nintendo to capitalise on that success, I think they needed to have a replacement ready by the back end of 2009 or early 2010 at the latest. As it is, they've endured a pretty grim second half of this console cycle and are in a very risky position now.
Well, in this area I'd expect it to work more like in the US/UK, where some non-specialist retailers decide not to stock 18-certificate products - I think Walmart is a good example here. I'd be very surprised to hear of a specialist entertainment bricks and mortar retailer deciding to avoid 18-cert stuff. So far as I know, that only happens in countries which have much more draconian sales regulations - basically stating that the titles in question can't be put out on display.
On the face of it, it looks like sanity might finally prevail. And in all likelihood, it probably will.
There's just this little nagging worry at the back of my mind that after going through the political process, what might happen is that a bunch of games that would previously have been released as 15+ will now be released as 18+ and that games which couldn't have been released before... still won't be able to be released because the 18+ guidelines won't actually be much/any more permissive than the old 15+.
But that's just paranoia, right? Perhaps somebody with more knowledge of Australian politics and their ratings system could provide comfort.
Mixed views on this one. I can see the reasons why it might be a good thing. I'm also conscious, however (having spent quite a lot of time around doctors back when I was doing summer work in a general surgery in the late 90s) that one of the big problems with giving patients too much information is that they will take it and - lacking medical training - use it to jump to the wrong conclusions, imagining all kinds of ailments that they just don't have.
Certainly, there are no end of cases of people looking up symptoms on the internet and deciding that they have a combination of ebola, bubonic plague and some obscure disease that only affected horses in 13th century Denmark, when in fact they have the flu. It wastes a lot of medical time and effort that would better be spent elsewhere.
That said, you do also hear the occasional stories of missed diagnoses of much more serious illnesses. Like I say - could go either way. I suspect that it would need to be accompanied by a lot of work on putting information into the appropriate context and providing advice on interpreting it, which could be expensive.
I've noticed your little stalker before - he's quite impressively broken (albeit often hilariously so).
You're right to point at some of the flaws in the mod system and the groupthink it promotes. I'd also agree with some of the specific examples you've picked. However, I'm going to play the optimist here; I think things are actually getting (slightly) better, rather than worse.
I've been posting on this account since the end of 2003 - mostly on the games stories, but also on some of the general business/sciency ones. I used to have a little challenge I'd set myself when making posts on relevant games threads: "say something critical of Nintendo and still end up at +5". I remember one post which fluctuated several times between +5 and -1 over the course of an afternoon (eventually ending up on +4). These days, that doesn't seem like such a problem.
Similarly with MS - five years ago, being even remotely nice about them was a 1-way ticket to modding oblivion. But then, I've had a number of posts which were fairly nice about them hit +5 uneventfully over the last few months. I've also noted a lot more modded-up posters who admit that they use Windows as their sole OS these days. Five years ago, I felt that put me in a minority on here. Not so much any more.
That said, I guess there's another explanation here. It might not be that the nature of the slashdot community has changed, but rather that companies/products themselves have evolved and the groupthink consensus has just evolved over time to follow suit. After all, over the last few years:
- Nintendo have upset a large portion of their hardcore fanbase by basically ignoring them through the product life of the Wii, focussing on 1-shot exercise and party games instead. They still have a few rabid fans left, but there's a big disillusioned crowd out there, which just wasn't the case 5 years ago.
- Apple have gone from being the charming underdog to being scarily big and powerful. The effects of their walled-garden mentality are becoming more relevant and painful.
- Microsoft haven't really done anything outright evil. They've been pretty incompetent in places (Vista, 360 RROD, anything their marketing department does), but the sense of malice you got in the 90s and early in the last decade just isn't there any more. They've also done some pretty cool things, such as Kinect.
- And at the same time, Windows has reached the point where it is, for the most part, stable, reliable and pleasant to use. This at a time when Linux on the desktop hasn't exactly been making great strides forwards.
I suppose there's an easy way to test this. Let's see if I can get a +5 modded post that says something nice about Sony (who seem to be the new favoured villain of choice).
There's particular relevance to this subject today in relation to the news (via Eurogamer) of a potential weakness in the password system protecting Xbox Live accounts.
If MS can't refute this one quickly, I suspect it's going to get quite serious. Potentially "Playstation Network hack" serious.
No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.
I'm by no means anti-MS (Windows 7 is the only OS on both of my home PCs these days), but I'd take issue with the blanket statement that "Windows is also secure now a days".
I went through endless fun thanks to the parents just before Christmas. They fell for one of those fake-DHL-shipping-notice spam e-mails (as they were actually expecting a Christmas-related DHL delivery) and, with a single click, landed their (3 month old, Norton-"protected", UAC-enabled) PC with one of the most vicious and persistent pieces of malware I've ever seen. One of those fake-AV-software ransomware jobbies. It disabled Norton, blocked Windows from accessing DVD and USB drives, did a dns redirect so that browsers could only access the ransomware page and all kinds of crap. I've sorted these before by doing a system restore from a backup point in safe-mode, but even though the restore allegedly worked in this case, the malware persisted through it quite happily. Ended up doing a full format and reinstall of Windows.
Now, there are a lot of failures in this story; my parents for clicking the link, Norton for being completely (and predictably) useless and so on. But I still have problems with describing an OS where a single click can land you in that kind of mess as "secure".
Personally, I use AVG, on the grounds that it provides some basic protection and makes my system chug less than most of its rivals. But it's by no means infallible, throws up a depressing number of false positives and the only way to avoid infection does appear to be abject paranoia (which is now my default policy).
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Indeed, the early Ultima games were fairly big in Japan, and the first Final Fantasy game was an attempt to cash in on that by a company which was taking one more throw of the dice before it expected to go out of business (hence the title).
Acknowledging your point about this being a list of computer games rather than video games - if there was a Japanese RPG that deserved a place on the list, it would be the second Final Fantasy game. That's where you start to see the elements that would define JRPG storytelling (as opposed to the Western equivalent) introduced.
Sorry, don't believe you. The cheapest meals I eat each week are the ones I cook myself from fresh ingredients. The more expensive nights are the ones where I treat myself to a pre-prepared meal or a takeaway.
Fresh-cooked food takes longer to prepare and has a higher effort-barrier and, common pieties aside, unless you are a seriously good cook it may not actually taste as nice as the pre-processed stuff - but unless you're insisting on only buying organic and other daft middle-class obsessions, it's pretty much always cheaper.
I have both - and use both as part of my daily exercise routine. The both have their pros and cons. The balance board does have an awful lot of limitations, but it has one great benefit; a few routines you can do while the TV is tuned to another input (with occasional voice guidance via the Wiimote).
My daily routine now is 20 minutes or so of fairly vigorous stuff in Your Shape 2012 on the Kinect, followed by 20 minutes of either free jogging or free step on the Wii; just long enough to watch an episode from one of my anime DVDs, which keeps the thing interesting and keeps me motivated.
It does work; through a combination of this routine and controlling what I eat, I got from 238 pounds down to 160 pounds (I'm 6 foot tall) over the course of 9 months and have held the weight off for 6 months since managing that. I need some sort of goal-system thingy to keep me motivated for exercise, and Your Shape/Wii Fit do that pretty well.
I have a BD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive in my current PC (the latter because I prefer to use a cheaper drive for "everyday" tasks). I don't actually use either of them all that much (Steam saw to that), but I'm not quite ready to go without them yet. I still have a few old games on CD/DVD that I revisit from time to time. Plus the BD-RW drive is a pretty convenient means of quickly backing up low-priority stuff - 20 minutes to shift 24 gigs of data to something that goes in a little slot in a CD wallet. Pity about the media prices, though.
We're not missing adventure games at all. Telltale and others do a good line on them; on PC, 360, PS3 and iOS (and sometimes Wii, though that seems to have fallen out of favour). Avoid Jurassic Park (which isn't a proper adventure game, just a dire sequence of quick time events) and the rest range from the passable (Wallace & Grommit) to the really quite good (the Monkey Island reboot). They don't tend to get boxed releases, but they're still there.
I do miss the flight sims - particularly the space variants - however. And as somebody else has already posted, a new Descent would be absolutely fantastic - not least since the control issues have been comprehensively sorted by the passage of time. With a bit of configuration I managed to get Descent 3 using my 360-controller-for-Windows and it was far and away the best way I'd ever found of controlling a Descent game; far better than all of the old finger-breaking configurations we tried to use back in the 90s.
No, I just checked the quick setup guide again to make sure (having referred to it extensively last night). The UK guide, at least, makes no reference to setting up a temporary account if you need a firmware update. It only says to do so in cases where you do not have internet access. And yes, it does say to put the SIM in before you start up the console - but it doesn't indicate that not doing so will cause the weird situation I described. Nor, going off the forums I read last night, does doing so actually avoid that problem.
I picked up my 3G model this morning. It sat on my desk at work all day glowering at me, but I've been able to mess around with it a bit since I got home. My experiences thus far can be summed up in three observations:
1) As a piece of kit to hold in your hand, it is gorgeous. It looks and feels like a premium piece of kit. It's possibly a bit on the large side for a handheld, but the quality of build feels great. The display quality is amazing and the touchscreens are extremely precise.
2) As a handheld gaming console, it is excellent. The games I've tried thus far: Uncharted, Wipeout and Super Stardust are all closer to PS3 quality than to PSP/3DS quality. The dual analogue sticks are an absolute revelation and it would be very hard to go back to a portable gaming platform that didn't support them (be it the 3DS or iPad) without feeling a twinge of regret.
3) As a general user-experience it is, at best, below average. And here's where a bit of explanation is needed.
I get the machine home, fire it up and start going through the initial setup. I set my region, set the time and date and connect it to my home wifi. I decide to leave the 3G network setup for later. So far, so good. I then get prompted to link the device to my PSN account. Great - I like the idea of having the same account shared between my PS3 and my Vita and I'm sure that Sony have made the process nice and easy. So I tap the box for "I already have a PSN account" without a care in the world.
The device does a quick scan of the network and tells me that I need to do a firmware update before I can connect to the PSN. At this point, I feel a bit irritated. The PS3 has been massively compromised by the frequency of and time required for firmware updates, and it doesn't bode well that the Vita is headed down the same path. But... whatever.
I click "ok".
And now I'm back at the prompt asking me whether I have a PSN account or not. A bit confused, I tell it again that I do. Cue the message about needing a firmware update. I'm stuck in a loop.
A quick google shows me that I have to answer "no" and create a temporary account that I use to download the firmware update and then link my "proper" PSN account. At this point, I'm really starting to get quite cheesed off. This is a long way from optimal. But anyway - I follow the instructions and set the firmware update running.
10 minutes later, the machine reboots with its new firmware. Ok, that's about 5 minutes faster than the average PS3 firmware update, but it's still pretty poor.
Ok, so, the firmware's updated and the Vita can access the net through my home network. Time to get the 3G set up. I shut the machine off, insert the Vodafone pay-as-you-go SIM that's included with UK 3G models and fire it back up. There's a nice obvious icon on the start screen to set up the 3G provider, so I tap it.
At first, everything seems to be going well. The Vita opens the Vodafone website and I opt to purchase 10 GBP of credit using my credit card. I note at this point that the web-browser is a bit shit, but in fairness, I realise that the utterly crapulent nature of the Vodafone website isn't helping either.
I fill in the form with my credit card details and tap the button to pay. But what's this? An error - saying that the service isn't available at this time. I try again - same error. I try again with my emergency backup card. Same problem.
So I go to google again. A lot of trawling through the Vodafone forums finally reveals the problem; the SIM won't activate properly if the Vita tries to do its first top-up using wifi rather than the 3G connection. I need to go into the settings menu, disable wifi and then try again. I do so, and am finally able to buy my 3G credit.
Right, now, time to transfer some content off my PS3. I got rid of my old PSP for trade-in credit a few days ago, but shifted all of my downloaded games back onto my PS3, so I could stick them straight onto the Vita. I get the USB connector that came with the Vita and hook th
While the graphics situation on Windows is far better, it has actually slid back a bit from the user's (or at least the gamer's) point of view over the last 12 months or so.
I went for years with XP and Vista machines, never having to think about graphics drivers. I'd stick the latest set on when I bought the machine, and then they'd "just work" until I was ready for a new machine. But recently, there's been a real trend towards graphics drivers optimised towards particular games - which may give performance or even stability issues in other games. Suddenly, as a PC gamer, I'm back in the situation I was last in back around 2002 or so, of actually having to think and care about graphics drivers.
Not a positive development - and one which is seemingly being driven by ego-fuelled feuds between a few specific developers.
This isn't a particularly new idea. I know that certain shopping centres here in the UK have been using it for quite some time.
I've got mixed feelings. It's certainly unpleasant to have large groups of feral youths hanging around shopping centres and in principle, something that encourages them to be elsewhere without much fuss is a good thing. On the other hand... it just shifts the problem around. I'd rather have the gang of feral youths stood menacingly inside the brightly lit CCTV-infested shopping centre than in the unlit, unguarded car park outside.
At least using music for this is better than some of the alternatives. I know that one idea that was briefly used was high pitched noise emitters - the theory being that with young people generally being able to hear higher ranges than adults, only they would be irritated by the noise. I objected to this one very strongly indeed - the noise was outright painful (my hearing is odd - I'm bad at sorting conversation from background noise, but seem to have retained my ability to hear very high ranges) and it was indiscriminate. It was offensive to the "good kid" going shopping for their parents as it was to the feral youth looking for his next mugging victim. I seem to remember that particular trick had to be pulled due to legal reasons.
I guess I also have some gut concerns about whether this impinges on rights such as freedom of assembly. I guess if it's being used on private property, then it's fine. On subways... that seems a bit more morally dubious.
And as for the choice of music... I don't think classical music lovers should be particularly offended. Though as somebody who is relatively fond of classical music, I will admit that taken out of place, it can be intrusive. Anybody reading this who commutes through London's Victoria Station will be aware that every few weeks they have some opera singer (and supporting instrumentation) there, collecting money for a cancer research charity. I know it's for a good cause and I shouldn't whinge but... when you're waiting for a delayed train and just want to get home after a long day, the singing, while perfectly "cultured", due to its volume and pitch, can be as intrusive and offensive as blazingly loud gangsta rap would be.
This is what I did - across all platforms for games whose PC release contains this particular DRM. Actually, it's been surprisingly easy. Despite consuming games at a voracious pace (see my various journal posts etc), it's been quite striking how few of the Ubisoft franchises I actually care about. There have been times I've been vaguely irritated to be missing the Assassin's Creed sequels, which do look interesting (better than the first one, which I played on PS3 before the DRM plans were known), but even there... there's no shortage of alternatives.
I did buy one game by accident which included an "always online" DRM requirement - Command & Conquer 4. It wasn't made particularly clear when you bought the thing and, with it not being an Ubisoft game, I assumed it wouldn't be pulling a stunt like that. Ultimately, though, the best form of copy protection that C&C4 had was the fact that it was so utterly shit that nobody would want to play it (and I say that as somebody who liked C&C3).
I thought the whole "Got a problem with invasive species x? Import invasive species y!" schtick had gone wrong so many times over the years that there would be more caution about it now.
What are they going to import in 30 years time to deal with the plague of elephants? My vote's for genetically modified, cybernetically enhanced fire-breating giant battle-centipedes. What could possibly go wrong?
Or maybe the attraction is that elephants can actually be extremely dangerous to humans. Australia just doesn't have enough animals like that, right?
Shareholder owned companies don't get to sit on huge piles of cash for long. Those little things called "dividend payments". Sega went from "mega-successful console manufacturer" to "out of the hardware game" very quickly indeed in similar circumstances.
Seen their financial results lately?
Yeah.
If the Wii-U fails, they're out of the hardware market. They survived the Gamecube generation because of the GBA and the DS, which they were selling at a hardware premium, with a solid 3rd party software lineup bringing them in free money. The 3DS is... finally... selling (though not quite as well as expected). But it's selling at a loss and with a pretty crap 3rd party lineup.
I agree with your point about the perception of the Wii's performance as opposed to the reality.
What people don't tend to realise is that there are two broad ways to make money from a console. The "Nintendo" model and the "everybody else" model.
The Nintendo model is to sell the system at a profit - even if not a huge one - and then sell first-party games at it for a profit. This has to be quite an aggressively focussed approach and it generally results in putting out hardware that third party developers aren't interested in. But this doesn't matter, because you're making money off your own efforts. Nintendo didn't do so great with this strategy with the N64 and Gamecube, but it worked perfectly with the Wii, for the first 3 years. If they'd had a successor ready to go and repeat the trick in 2009/10, they could have made life very difficult for Sony and Microsoft. It's a "quick win" strategy - to sell consoles at a profit on day 1 these days, you need either a very high price point (3DS) or very weak hardware (Wii). If you go for the latter option, you will go obsolete quite quickly - so better stack up those early profits.
The "everybody else" strategy with console profits is to sell the hardware at a loss, not worry too much about first-party games development, but let third party games developers make your money for you. Remember, MS and Sony cream a good chunk of cash off every third party game sold for their system. Their only investment in producing those games has been a trivial amount of cash on certification. If the system is successful in attracting third party developers, then it becomes a source of "free money". This is a slower-burn strategy. Third party developers are nervous early in a console cycle, while the installed base is still small. You have to suck up a loss in those years. But then you've got a cash-cow out there and you can just sit back and milk it with minimal effort.
My instinct is that while Nintendo may exit this generation with the largest installed base, in overall terms, they may well be looking at chugging home in third place again, because they waited too long to jump to their next generation hardware (and had to do so in poor circumstances).
The cynic in me wants to say that if "school" was a game, it would be one which flashed up big signs saying "YOU WIN" and "1,000,000,000 POINT BONUS MULTIPLIER" every few seconds, until suddenly it was over and around 75% of players were then faced with a sign saying "Game over. Guess you sucked after all."
But then, I'm a hopeless cynic.
I remember some pretty fun experiences with a PC and a room full of people back in the early/mid 90s with the Battle Isle games (which I did a journal post on the other week).
Now admittedly, it was a room full of very nerdy people who actually found hex-based turn-based strategy games fun, but still...
This is interesting stuff - but it just serves to illustrate the problem. All of the questions I asked can be answered (as I said in my original post). But the answers don't fit into a simple narrative. And not all of the answers are particularly satisfactory or exciting. And when it comes to the last question (how it works with a room full of people), you basically have to just point out that developers for the 360 and PS3 have neglected the same market.
This is valid and true. But the point is that the "non-gamers" who bought the Wii (and never used it much once the novelty wore off) aren't going to buy the Wii-U because they feel neglected on the other platforms. They don't really care about the other platforms. They're not gamers - that's the whole point. They bought the Wii because "look, you play games by jumping around and waving your arms and that looks fun". There's no equivalent pitch out there for the Wii-U and that makes me suspect that Nintendo will not replicate the massive sales they saw in the Wii's first 3 years.
Having read both TFA and a few other more detailed articles out there (Eurogamer has a good one), the Nintendo Network looks like a good thing, albeit one which is many years overdue. It'll be good to have the it there, but it's hard to see anybody getting excited about it, given that at best it will bring functionality on a par with Xbox Live and the Playstation Network.
I think the Wii-U is a cause for greater concern. It's going to be launching in difficult economic times. The 3DS did that last year and its initial sales were poor. They've now recovered a bit (though they're still below forecast), but only at the expense of Nintendo having to sell the system at a loss. Now, selling at a loss isn't exactly a bad strategy (it worked wonders for Sony with the PS2), but it's very much counter to Nintendo's historic strategy. The Vita, also launching in difficult times, has had a poor Japanese launch despite a really quite good launch-games lineup. Having seen what the Vita can do, I very much want to own one - but I'll be surprised if its US and European sales don't fall well short of targets. I get the feeling that 2012 is going to be a really bad time to be launching a console - most people are unlikely to be feeling any kind of real economic recovery during the year. Microsoft and Sony have clearly decided to hold on and wait in the hope of a kinder economy; Nintendo, with Wii sales exhausted and their finances at an all-time low, don't have that option.
But more worrying still is the lack of a real public narrative around the Wii-U. The Wii had one of these. Motion control was easily grasped. You could watch somebody demonstrating one - or try a demo unit yourself - and "get" the concept instantly. If you actually used the thing more extensively, you'd come up against its limitations very quickly; the motion control was imprecise and in many cases placed a barrier between the player and the game that meant it ended up less immersive than traditional controllers. But by then, the sale was made. The Wii-U is a much harder concept to grasp. It's a home console which has some tablet-ish features. But how will it work with a room full of people? What will the tablet actually add to the games? And how is it going to be fun at a party with a room full of people with a few drinks inside them?
There are actually answers to those questions if you look around enough at the material that's been made available. But they're not simple answers and they're not easily communicated. On that basis, I just cannot see the Wii-U replicating the success of the Wii's early years. I'm also unsure that the pitch to the more traditional "gamer" crowd will work. There's a lot of frustration with the current generation's techological limitations. But I don't sense any confidence that Nintendo - who, let's not forget, have spent the time since the Wii's launch neglecting this demographic - are the people to usher in the next generation. I also find it hard to imagine developers doing much with the Wii-U's hardware - which is better than the current generation, but not by a huge margin - putting much resource into developing games for it that actually push it beyond what the 360 and PS3 can do. More likely, it will just get a lot of PS3/360 ports, which present little compelling reason for the "gamer" crowd to jump ship from their existing platforms until those get replaced.
The 3DS also suffered from a mis-managed message at launch. It was launched on the basis of "look 3d!" rather than "look, more powerful DS with better graphics". People weren't interested in 3d. A better DS is a stronger pitch and Nintendo have had more success with the 3DS since they switched to it. But I'm struggling to see what the pitch is with the Wii-U.
I've been wrong on calling "Nintendo are doomed" before. But I'm finding it very hard to see a convincing path to success for the Wii-U. The Wii was the right product at the right time (I admit it took me a while to recognise this). But for Nintendo to capitalise on that success, I think they needed to have a replacement ready by the back end of 2009 or early 2010 at the latest. As it is, they've endured a pretty grim second half of this console cycle and are in a very risky position now.
Well, in this area I'd expect it to work more like in the US/UK, where some non-specialist retailers decide not to stock 18-certificate products - I think Walmart is a good example here. I'd be very surprised to hear of a specialist entertainment bricks and mortar retailer deciding to avoid 18-cert stuff. So far as I know, that only happens in countries which have much more draconian sales regulations - basically stating that the titles in question can't be put out on display.
On the face of it, it looks like sanity might finally prevail. And in all likelihood, it probably will.
There's just this little nagging worry at the back of my mind that after going through the political process, what might happen is that a bunch of games that would previously have been released as 15+ will now be released as 18+ and that games which couldn't have been released before... still won't be able to be released because the 18+ guidelines won't actually be much/any more permissive than the old 15+.
But that's just paranoia, right? Perhaps somebody with more knowledge of Australian politics and their ratings system could provide comfort.
Mixed views on this one. I can see the reasons why it might be a good thing. I'm also conscious, however (having spent quite a lot of time around doctors back when I was doing summer work in a general surgery in the late 90s) that one of the big problems with giving patients too much information is that they will take it and - lacking medical training - use it to jump to the wrong conclusions, imagining all kinds of ailments that they just don't have.
Certainly, there are no end of cases of people looking up symptoms on the internet and deciding that they have a combination of ebola, bubonic plague and some obscure disease that only affected horses in 13th century Denmark, when in fact they have the flu. It wastes a lot of medical time and effort that would better be spent elsewhere.
That said, you do also hear the occasional stories of missed diagnoses of much more serious illnesses. Like I say - could go either way. I suspect that it would need to be accompanied by a lot of work on putting information into the appropriate context and providing advice on interpreting it, which could be expensive.
I've noticed your little stalker before - he's quite impressively broken (albeit often hilariously so).
You're right to point at some of the flaws in the mod system and the groupthink it promotes. I'd also agree with some of the specific examples you've picked. However, I'm going to play the optimist here; I think things are actually getting (slightly) better, rather than worse.
I've been posting on this account since the end of 2003 - mostly on the games stories, but also on some of the general business/sciency ones. I used to have a little challenge I'd set myself when making posts on relevant games threads: "say something critical of Nintendo and still end up at +5". I remember one post which fluctuated several times between +5 and -1 over the course of an afternoon (eventually ending up on +4). These days, that doesn't seem like such a problem.
Similarly with MS - five years ago, being even remotely nice about them was a 1-way ticket to modding oblivion. But then, I've had a number of posts which were fairly nice about them hit +5 uneventfully over the last few months. I've also noted a lot more modded-up posters who admit that they use Windows as their sole OS these days. Five years ago, I felt that put me in a minority on here. Not so much any more.
That said, I guess there's another explanation here. It might not be that the nature of the slashdot community has changed, but rather that companies/products themselves have evolved and the groupthink consensus has just evolved over time to follow suit. After all, over the last few years:
- Nintendo have upset a large portion of their hardcore fanbase by basically ignoring them through the product life of the Wii, focussing on 1-shot exercise and party games instead. They still have a few rabid fans left, but there's a big disillusioned crowd out there, which just wasn't the case 5 years ago.
- Apple have gone from being the charming underdog to being scarily big and powerful. The effects of their walled-garden mentality are becoming more relevant and painful.
- Microsoft haven't really done anything outright evil. They've been pretty incompetent in places (Vista, 360 RROD, anything their marketing department does), but the sense of malice you got in the 90s and early in the last decade just isn't there any more. They've also done some pretty cool things, such as Kinect.
- And at the same time, Windows has reached the point where it is, for the most part, stable, reliable and pleasant to use. This at a time when Linux on the desktop hasn't exactly been making great strides forwards.
I suppose there's an easy way to test this. Let's see if I can get a +5 modded post that says something nice about Sony (who seem to be the new favoured villain of choice).
There's particular relevance to this subject today in relation to the news (via Eurogamer) of a potential weakness in the password system protecting Xbox Live accounts.
If MS can't refute this one quickly, I suspect it's going to get quite serious. Potentially "Playstation Network hack" serious.
No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.
I'm by no means anti-MS (Windows 7 is the only OS on both of my home PCs these days), but I'd take issue with the blanket statement that "Windows is also secure now a days".
I went through endless fun thanks to the parents just before Christmas. They fell for one of those fake-DHL-shipping-notice spam e-mails (as they were actually expecting a Christmas-related DHL delivery) and, with a single click, landed their (3 month old, Norton-"protected", UAC-enabled) PC with one of the most vicious and persistent pieces of malware I've ever seen. One of those fake-AV-software ransomware jobbies. It disabled Norton, blocked Windows from accessing DVD and USB drives, did a dns redirect so that browsers could only access the ransomware page and all kinds of crap. I've sorted these before by doing a system restore from a backup point in safe-mode, but even though the restore allegedly worked in this case, the malware persisted through it quite happily. Ended up doing a full format and reinstall of Windows.
Now, there are a lot of failures in this story; my parents for clicking the link, Norton for being completely (and predictably) useless and so on. But I still have problems with describing an OS where a single click can land you in that kind of mess as "secure".
Personally, I use AVG, on the grounds that it provides some basic protection and makes my system chug less than most of its rivals. But it's by no means infallible, throws up a depressing number of false positives and the only way to avoid infection does appear to be abject paranoia (which is now my default policy).