"OK, I think you're all misunderstanding this product."
OK. Shoot.
"It's not a destination, it's a journey."
Yeah, but I don't go on vacation for the highways, I go on vacation for the Disneylands. It may very well be a look at the future, but it's an etremely poorly designed look. I pay for tickets to see the movie, not the trailers - I'm not going to spend $200 on a phone (as ahead of it's time it might be) if it doesn't work right now.
"The day after tommorrow there won't be phones, mp3 players, games consoles, or even computers as we currently think of them."
Pretty bold prediction there.
"As it is why buy and ipod when your phone is going to have a Gb of storage and an mp3 player next year?"
Because the iPod will have 80 GB next year.
"Interfaces will vary according to function, so you'll still have a keyboard and montior on your desktop, and a pad and a stylus in your palm, and a TV and huge speakers in your home.
But the storage and processing and comms will all be the one package that you'll carry around everywhere you go."
That may be true, but I doubt it.
"Nokia want a piece of that, the N-Gage is a step down that path."
A baby step. It's a bad phone and a bad gaming machine. If, say, the PSP could play good games and work well as a phone, I would certainly be happy. But the N-Gage doesn't.
"Their building expertise and experience and making relationships with crucial content developers."
That sentence is pretty much incomprehensible. Moving along...
"Microsoft, Intel, and Sony also see themselves as possible players in the space.
who's going to win?"
Your guess is as good as mine...
"My money's on the guys that embrace open standards and open source, simply because all this stuff is going to have to play together really well."
For this stuff to play together really well, people will have to embrace open standards.
"Anyway Nokia are trying to make the best product they can for now, but even if the next dozen N-Gages are flops have to keep trying to get it right."
This is their best product? Ouch.
It's gonna take a lot of work to make such an all-in-one device more than a jack-of-all-trades affair. A few minor changes to the N-Gage won't fix that. I doubt a dozen revisions to the N-Gage will, because the N-Gage is extremely deeply flawed. When an all-in-one device comes, I will certainly praise it, like it, buy it.
So...hype goes from U.S.-to-Japan, but not the other way around? Kojima is a genius, but I have to disagree with him here - I think that, in most cases, hype from Japan travels to the U.S. The Japanese in general (there's always been a small market for western stuff) are just warming up to the idea of U.S. hype and all. I think that, much more often, we see the cool games that Japan has (and let's face it, they do have all the cool games ^_^) and either wait patiently for them to cross the Pacific, or, knowing that they will never come here, import them. I think that they would be a market for more Japanese games, especially the "odd" ones - not talking about dating sims (although *cough* I'm sure they'd be a market for those too...a large market...ahem) but the really weird ones, like Vib Ribbon (and it's psuedosequel, Mojib Ribbon, and it's other sequel, Vib Ripple) and the one where you roll debris up into a ball (I'm not going to even try to spell it...). I think the situation is improving for everybody - we're getting more quirky Japanese games (We got Guitaroo Man, which if you haven't played, you should; we got the Eye Toy, which I honestly expected to stay in Japan and Europe; and Fresh Games is supposed to bring us more unique games like Mr. Mosquito, although we haven't heard much from them recently...) and the Japanese are beginning to get a more mainstream taste of our culture (GTA3 came out there not long ago). Just my thoughts...
...isn't the ring tones, or people using it in theatres (never had that problem), or even people talking louder. I'm sure they are annoying ring tones and people who can't comprehend "Please turn of your phones now" or people who go "HELLO?!?" and whatnot - it's just that they don't bug me (as much).
Two things really bug me:
1) You only know half of the conversation. So, naturally, the person that you can't hear is apparently the funniest person alive, and the person on the phone can't stop laughing, or then he'll act like he can insult you, and so he does, as if he forgets you can hear him, etc.
2) You have the person over and you're hanging out with your friends and you're all having a good time, and then someone's phone rings, and they go and leave the room, or they just stay there (even worse) but they just kinda drop out of the party and all. It's like being socially antisocial or something.
The load times in those games weren't really that bad. If you want to see LONG load times, play FF Anthology or FF Chronicles. How ironic that SNES games would have the longest load times of any PS game (press triangle, wait four seconds, the menu appears...). Btw, FF Origins doesn't suffer from faulty emulation and the like.
...since half of you didn't read it (yes, I'm looking at you) I'll mention it here. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, you start the game in the "real" world. And I mean real - the main character's favorite game is Final Fantasy (he lives in a yellow house, too, which really freaked me out because I do, too - what are the odds?;-)). Well, anyhoo, he finds a magic book with his friends and they're all transported into a very Final Fantasy-like world. (The character even mentions that the world is just like the one in FF, and that the characters he meets, he's only seen before in video games and didn't think they were real). A classic example, and splendidly executed (OK! I get it! I'm an FF fanboy!).
I was kinda hoping that in Enter the Matrix they'd kinda poke some jokes about the essence of video games compared to the Matrix and all that, but alas, that would be far too non-crappy for EtM.:-|
I like "metagaming." It's fun - it does kinda draw you out of the game and make you realize that it's not real, but that's where the humor comes from - that's the point. The characters are realizing their own (non?-)existance.
FFTA is not a remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, the PlayStation game. It's entirely new - new story, new enemies, etc. I mean, it uses the same battle system, and the graphics are a bit similar, but it's about as far from a remake as you can get. An easy mistake, though.
Seriously, though. This model seems to be vastly improved - bigger screen (I think), easier cartridge changing, and no more sidetalking (I hope sidetalkin.com will stay). But I doubt Nokia will be able to have this be successful, simply because there isn't enough games, and because the N-Gage name isn't a plus when it comes to gamer opinion...
Just wanted to add a bit of a P.S. here (mainly stuff I forgot to add in the original post, but hey, that's what P.S.'s are for, right?) The Philips Key-Ring Camcorder can play MP3s and WMAs, the Gateway cannot. The Philips can take 25 minutes of video, the Gateway gets 5 (high quality) or 18 (low quality) - but remember, that's with the base memory, you can upgrade (and will probably want to). Oh, and Philips also sells a standalone Key-Ring MP3 player and a Key-Ring Camera (that they just upgraded to 2MP). And no, I don't work for Philips ^_^
This is so cool. I mean, new dungeons! I'm almost glad I haven't boughten Origins yet (although I'll probably end up buying them both - I get stupidly irrational when it comes to Square games). Now, if only they'd continue the trend and bring out CT, SMRPG, and, more importantly, FFIII.
...it sounds great, but it is $100 more expensive than the Gateway (the current best buy for tapeless camcorders, because it's not $800 like most). It has double the memory, but lacks a card slot (and an LCD display). So for it's value, well, I'd say they're both good buys for people who want an ultra-cheap camcorder that's small (these things go for convienience and such, not for super-high quality) and just fun. I'll probably buy one of these things just so I can always have a camcorder around to take video of stuff that happens (I don't want to have my "real" camcorder with me all the time). For now, that's really what I see the market for these (and, say, camcorder phones) is - when these things have hard drives, well, then they might be more of a viable alternative to a "real" camcorder. But like them a lot now - they're tiny, cheap, and you can always have them with you to capture life - in all its spontaneity.
I mean, sometimes it is actually cool to have a real product (wouldn't GTA be cooler with real cars?), but most game advertising doesn't make sense. A billboard along a racetrack or ads along a stadium, well, they kinda make sense, and I guess I could put up with them (I don't play many sports games anyway) but most game ads are crap. You'll find big ads for completely unrelated products plastered all over the levels, and worse still, sometimes integrated into the gameplay. Remember in Super Monkey Ball, how you picked up Dole bananas? Hmm...I kinda have mixed feelings on that. I mean, it's kinda funny, and not too out of place (except when they have the Dole logo on the floor of the level). Remember San Fransisco Rush? In one of the various sequels, I remember how you had to find cans of Mountain Dew that were hidden in the levels. That's just kinda dumb, and it's going to get worse. It's like product placement in movies: I've paid for the entertainment, I don't want ads.
...it's pretty stupid. I'm tired of seeing politicians freak out about videogames because they don't understand them, while ignoring, say, movies. I think games should be treated like movies, not worse because...because...? I mean, a seperate section for AO (the equivalent of X or NC-17) games would make sense (we haven't seen one of those since the 3D0). But for a game that is rated M (supposed to be equivalent to R, personally, I think that in many cases is kinda between PG-13 and R)? Is there a seperate section of the store for R-rated movies? Sheesh, next we're going to see Wal-mart refuse to sell M rated games because they're supposedly worse than the goriest R-rated movies.
It's not the same thing. Paper Mario, (presumably) Paper Mario 2, and Mario & Luigi are all basically action-RPGs. They're some of my favorite RPGs, but none of them (IMHO) compare to Super Mario RPG for the SNES. It was actually made by Squaresoft ("Squaresoft"...haven't said that in a while) and it was more of a traditional RPG. It had lots of cool touches and stuff, like Nintendo character cameos. It also introduced lots of cool characters we haven't seen since, and the graphics were awesome (for the SNES), but nothing the GBA couldn't handle. Why haven't we seen it yet?
Other games I'd like to see include FFIII (not FFVI) because it's the only one we haven't seen imported officially yet (hopefully it could have improved graphics like the PS1 versions of FF and FFII), Earthbound (why don't we have Mother I+II yet?) a remake of DQIV, but more importantly, DQV and VI (we haven't seen those yet in the U.S. either.) OK, so I'm a RPG nut, but those are the games I want to see. Nintendo and Square Enix, I hope you're listening.;-)
I would love to play that game. Most any Square Enix classic RPG would do, though (like a port of CT without the super-long loading times of the PS version).
I don't know where you got the GP32 for less than $70, and I'd hardly say the GBA is inferior - yeah, the GP32 has homebrew support, and it supports MP3s, yada yada, but...inferior? The GBA has how many more games than the GP32? And how many of the GP32's games are crap? It has some nice emulator possibilities and stuff like that going on, but seriously - the GP32 is a fun homebrew toy, but it's not going to be a viable gaming platform anytime soon. Or ever. And the PSP will be here soon, which will play music and movies and all that, and will probably cost about the same to get a GP32 imported (at all the prices I've seen, anyway). You can have your opinion an all, but seriously...
In fact, Metroid Prime wasn't even made by Nintendo - it was made by Retro Studios, and published by Nintendo. MP may have been in development for the N64 at the beginning, but it was moved to the GC pretty quickly (before anyone knew it was first-person, etc.)
A few thoughts: The UMD probably won't show up in a burnable format anytime soon, Blu-ray is a generation after DVD-R/+R and all that (competing with HD-DVD) and "This new Electron one" is a generation after that. So yeah, I don't like hasseling with +R and -R and all that either, but you're exaggurating a bit. Besides, most DVD burners today burn both + and - formats, so it's not that huge of a deal (that type of thing does seem a quite unlikely for Blu-ray and HD-DVD, though.)
I think it's funny, and I'm certainly not a die-hard fan. In fact, I'm quite the opposite - I've only seen a few episodes to date (although I plan on trying to watch it more). They have all been recent episodes, and I thought they were funny. Maybe they do shadow in comparison to the first seasons...I wouldn't know (unless I buy the DVD sets, which I might). But it's still a funny show, even if it doesn't live up to its apparently legendary beginnings.
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"OK, I think you're all misunderstanding this product."
OK. Shoot.
"It's not a destination, it's a journey."
Yeah, but I don't go on vacation for the highways, I go on vacation for the Disneylands. It may very well be a look at the future, but it's an etremely poorly designed look. I pay for tickets to see the movie, not the trailers - I'm not going to spend $200 on a phone (as ahead of it's time it might be) if it doesn't work right now.
"The day after tommorrow there won't be phones, mp3 players, games consoles, or even computers as we currently think of them."
Pretty bold prediction there.
"As it is why buy and ipod when your phone is going to have a Gb of storage and an mp3 player next year?"
Because the iPod will have 80 GB next year.
"Interfaces will vary according to function, so you'll still have a keyboard and montior on your desktop, and a pad and a stylus in your palm, and a TV and huge speakers in your home.
But the storage and processing and comms will all be the one package that you'll carry around everywhere you go."
That may be true, but I doubt it.
"Nokia want a piece of that, the N-Gage is a step down that path."
A baby step. It's a bad phone and a bad gaming machine. If, say, the PSP could play good games and work well as a phone, I would certainly be happy. But the N-Gage doesn't.
"Their building expertise and experience and making relationships with crucial content developers."
That sentence is pretty much incomprehensible. Moving along...
"Microsoft, Intel, and Sony also see themselves as possible players in the space.
who's going to win?"
Your guess is as good as mine...
"My money's on the guys that embrace open standards and open source, simply because all this stuff is going to have to play together really well."
For this stuff to play together really well, people will have to embrace open standards.
"Anyway Nokia are trying to make the best product they can for now, but even if the next dozen N-Gages are flops have to keep trying to get it right."
This is their best product? Ouch.
It's gonna take a lot of work to make such an all-in-one device more than a jack-of-all-trades affair. A few minor changes to the N-Gage won't fix that. I doubt a dozen revisions to the N-Gage will, because the N-Gage is extremely deeply flawed. When an all-in-one device comes, I will certainly praise it, like it, buy it.
But the N-Gage is not that device.
1. Super Monkey Ball Jr.
;-) but I disagree on the future of handheld games.
2. Sonic Battle
3. Top Gear Rally
All of those games are full 3d, and all of them are good (especially SMBJ).
Why would anyone want 3d on a handheld? You might as well ask why anyone would every want 3d on a console or PC.
You have good taste in games
So...hype goes from U.S.-to-Japan, but not the other way around? Kojima is a genius, but I have to disagree with him here - I think that, in most cases, hype from Japan travels to the U.S. The Japanese in general (there's always been a small market for western stuff) are just warming up to the idea of U.S. hype and all. I think that, much more often, we see the cool games that Japan has (and let's face it, they do have all the cool games ^_^) and either wait patiently for them to cross the Pacific, or, knowing that they will never come here, import them. I think that they would be a market for more Japanese games, especially the "odd" ones - not talking about dating sims (although *cough* I'm sure they'd be a market for those too...a large market...ahem) but the really weird ones, like Vib Ribbon (and it's psuedosequel, Mojib Ribbon, and it's other sequel, Vib Ripple) and the one where you roll debris up into a ball (I'm not going to even try to spell it...). I think the situation is improving for everybody - we're getting more quirky Japanese games (We got Guitaroo Man, which if you haven't played, you should; we got the Eye Toy, which I honestly expected to stay in Japan and Europe; and Fresh Games is supposed to bring us more unique games like Mr. Mosquito, although we haven't heard much from them recently...) and the Japanese are beginning to get a more mainstream taste of our culture (GTA3 came out there not long ago). Just my thoughts...
...isn't the ring tones, or people using it in theatres (never had that problem), or even people talking louder. I'm sure they are annoying ring tones and people who can't comprehend "Please turn of your phones now" or people who go "HELLO?!?" and whatnot - it's just that they don't bug me (as much).
Two things really bug me:
1) You only know half of the conversation. So, naturally, the person that you can't hear is apparently the funniest person alive, and the person on the phone can't stop laughing, or then he'll act like he can insult you, and so he does, as if he forgets you can hear him, etc.
2) You have the person over and you're hanging out with your friends and you're all having a good time, and then someone's phone rings, and they go and leave the room, or they just stay there (even worse) but they just kinda drop out of the party and all. It's like being socially antisocial or something.
Just bugs me.
The load times in those games weren't really that bad. If you want to see LONG load times, play FF Anthology or FF Chronicles. How ironic that SNES games would have the longest load times of any PS game (press triangle, wait four seconds, the menu appears...). Btw, FF Origins doesn't suffer from faulty emulation and the like.
...since half of you didn't read it (yes, I'm looking at you) I'll mention it here. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, you start the game in the "real" world. And I mean real - the main character's favorite game is Final Fantasy (he lives in a yellow house, too, which really freaked me out because I do, too - what are the odds? ;-)). Well, anyhoo, he finds a magic book with his friends and they're all transported into a very Final Fantasy-like world. (The character even mentions that the world is just like the one in FF, and that the characters he meets, he's only seen before in video games and didn't think they were real). A classic example, and splendidly executed (OK! I get it! I'm an FF fanboy!).
I was kinda hoping that in Enter the Matrix they'd kinda poke some jokes about the essence of video games compared to the Matrix and all that, but alas, that would be far too non-crappy for EtM. :-|
I like "metagaming." It's fun - it does kinda draw you out of the game and make you realize that it's not real, but that's where the humor comes from - that's the point. The characters are realizing their own (non?-)existance.
...but they really should change the name. It's like they're just throwing on 3 adjectives to make a long title that sounds Japanese. :-|
EGM had a demo disc? News to me.
;-)
Why don't they give that kind of thing to, hmm, say, their subscribers?
You may have thought the disc sucked, but I'd at least like to have recieved one.
Anyhoo, I would agree that having a disc (a good disc) with video reviews and the like to supplement the magazine would really be cool.
But until then, there's X-play.
Hope you have 4 of them, then - you'll need them for the entire movie...
I can't wait to see how many people mistake this for a UFO. ;-)
...who will answer?
FFTA is not a remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, the PlayStation game. It's entirely new - new story, new enemies, etc. I mean, it uses the same battle system, and the graphics are a bit similar, but it's about as far from a remake as you can get. An easy mistake, though.
Seriously, though. This model seems to be vastly improved - bigger screen (I think), easier cartridge changing, and no more sidetalking (I hope sidetalkin.com will stay). But I doubt Nokia will be able to have this be successful, simply because there isn't enough games, and because the N-Gage name isn't a plus when it comes to gamer opinion...
Just wanted to add a bit of a P.S. here (mainly stuff I forgot to add in the original post, but hey, that's what P.S.'s are for, right?) The Philips Key-Ring Camcorder can play MP3s and WMAs, the Gateway cannot. The Philips can take 25 minutes of video, the Gateway gets 5 (high quality) or 18 (low quality) - but remember, that's with the base memory, you can upgrade (and will probably want to). Oh, and Philips also sells a standalone Key-Ring MP3 player and a Key-Ring Camera (that they just upgraded to 2MP). And no, I don't work for Philips ^_^
This is so cool. I mean, new dungeons! I'm almost glad I haven't boughten Origins yet (although I'll probably end up buying them both - I get stupidly irrational when it comes to Square games). Now, if only they'd continue the trend and bring out CT, SMRPG, and, more importantly, FFIII.
That wasn't a camcorder, though - it was a camera.
...it sounds great, but it is $100 more expensive than the Gateway (the current best buy for tapeless camcorders, because it's not $800 like most). It has double the memory, but lacks a card slot (and an LCD display). So for it's value, well, I'd say they're both good buys for people who want an ultra-cheap camcorder that's small (these things go for convienience and such, not for super-high quality) and just fun. I'll probably buy one of these things just so I can always have a camcorder around to take video of stuff that happens (I don't want to have my "real" camcorder with me all the time). For now, that's really what I see the market for these (and, say, camcorder phones) is - when these things have hard drives, well, then they might be more of a viable alternative to a "real" camcorder. But like them a lot now - they're tiny, cheap, and you can always have them with you to capture life - in all its spontaneity.
I mean, sometimes it is actually cool to have a real product (wouldn't GTA be cooler with real cars?), but most game advertising doesn't make sense. A billboard along a racetrack or ads along a stadium, well, they kinda make sense, and I guess I could put up with them (I don't play many sports games anyway) but most game ads are crap. You'll find big ads for completely unrelated products plastered all over the levels, and worse still, sometimes integrated into the gameplay. Remember in Super Monkey Ball, how you picked up Dole bananas? Hmm...I kinda have mixed feelings on that. I mean, it's kinda funny, and not too out of place (except when they have the Dole logo on the floor of the level). Remember San Fransisco Rush? In one of the various sequels, I remember how you had to find cans of Mountain Dew that were hidden in the levels. That's just kinda dumb, and it's going to get worse. It's like product placement in movies: I've paid for the entertainment, I don't want ads.
...it's pretty stupid. I'm tired of seeing politicians freak out about videogames because they don't understand them, while ignoring, say, movies. I think games should be treated like movies, not worse because...because...? I mean, a seperate section for AO (the equivalent of X or NC-17) games would make sense (we haven't seen one of those since the 3D0). But for a game that is rated M (supposed to be equivalent to R, personally, I think that in many cases is kinda between PG-13 and R)? Is there a seperate section of the store for R-rated movies? Sheesh, next we're going to see Wal-mart refuse to sell M rated games because they're supposedly worse than the goriest R-rated movies.
It's not the same thing. Paper Mario, (presumably) Paper Mario 2, and Mario & Luigi are all basically action-RPGs. They're some of my favorite RPGs, but none of them (IMHO) compare to Super Mario RPG for the SNES. It was actually made by Squaresoft ("Squaresoft"...haven't said that in a while) and it was more of a traditional RPG. It had lots of cool touches and stuff, like Nintendo character cameos. It also introduced lots of cool characters we haven't seen since, and the graphics were awesome (for the SNES), but nothing the GBA couldn't handle. Why haven't we seen it yet?
;-)
Other games I'd like to see include FFIII (not FFVI) because it's the only one we haven't seen imported officially yet (hopefully it could have improved graphics like the PS1 versions of FF and FFII), Earthbound (why don't we have Mother I+II yet?) a remake of DQIV, but more importantly, DQV and VI (we haven't seen those yet in the U.S. either.) OK, so I'm a RPG nut, but those are the games I want to see. Nintendo and Square Enix, I hope you're listening.
I would love to play that game. Most any Square Enix classic RPG would do, though (like a port of CT without the super-long loading times of the PS version).
I don't know where you got the GP32 for less than $70, and I'd hardly say the GBA is inferior - yeah, the GP32 has homebrew support, and it supports MP3s, yada yada, but...inferior? The GBA has how many more games than the GP32? And how many of the GP32's games are crap? It has some nice emulator possibilities and stuff like that going on, but seriously - the GP32 is a fun homebrew toy, but it's not going to be a viable gaming platform anytime soon. Or ever. And the PSP will be here soon, which will play music and movies and all that, and will probably cost about the same to get a GP32 imported (at all the prices I've seen, anyway). You can have your opinion an all, but seriously...
In fact, Metroid Prime wasn't even made by Nintendo - it was made by Retro Studios, and published by Nintendo. MP may have been in development for the N64 at the beginning, but it was moved to the GC pretty quickly (before anyone knew it was first-person, etc.)
A few thoughts: The UMD probably won't show up in a burnable format anytime soon, Blu-ray is a generation after DVD-R/+R and all that (competing with HD-DVD) and "This new Electron one" is a generation after that. So yeah, I don't like hasseling with +R and -R and all that either, but you're exaggurating a bit. Besides, most DVD burners today burn both + and - formats, so it's not that huge of a deal (that type of thing does seem a quite unlikely for Blu-ray and HD-DVD, though.)
I think it's funny, and I'm certainly not a die-hard fan. In fact, I'm quite the opposite - I've only seen a few episodes to date (although I plan on trying to watch it more). They have all been recent episodes, and I thought they were funny. Maybe they do shadow in comparison to the first seasons...I wouldn't know (unless I buy the DVD sets, which I might). But it's still a funny show, even if it doesn't live up to its apparently legendary beginnings.