It's extremely unlikely that any Wii that's listed for $250 + $30 shipping now is going to actually finish the auction at that price. Around $400-500 dollars is cheap/typical, and some dedicated online second-hand sellers are telling customers to expect prices in the $560 range-- roughly $50 higher than last year's top prices. Even two weeks ago, I seriously doubt that $250 + $30 was anything but a starting bid for the Wiis you were looking at. It is certainly not as easy/cheap to buy one secondhand as you are trying to suggest.
They did, but because people weren't buying 360s as quickly as Microsoft wanted them to. People are buying Wiis roughly 3-4 times faster than they bought 360s at the console's hottest point.
"Huge niche" is an oxymoron. The fact of the matter is that Nintendo is marketing the Wii to casual gamers with mainstream tastes, and creating a system everyone of every age and gender wants to play. By comparison, stuff like BioShock and Halo 3 is... well, niche. Though I'm sure you'd consider them huge niches.
They are, but the perception of cheapness is all that really matters to most people when it comes to making consumer decisions like that. As long as the Wii seems cheaper than the other consoles, which is certainly does, people will continue to consider it cheap regardless of its hidden costs.
Generally speaking, the final selling price of a second-hand Wii at this point isn't a $30 markup. It's far more likely to be in the $100-$200 dollar range, which nearly doubles the price of a $250 console. The closer we get to Christmas, the more likely it is that 100% or higher mark-ups are going to end up happening.
You assume I'm being metaphorical, and I'm not. The issue with a book's narrative is that you can flip to any page and at any time and see the same events depicted. With a movie, go to any frame of a particular timestamp and the same thing is happening. It is just a logical constraint of the format of games with a narrative that until the player picks up the controller and imbues life into the protagonist, nothing will ever happen. If you turn on Bioshock and choose to put down the controller at any point, the story essentially stops happening and will stop for hours or days until you pick up the controller again.
I remember having an e-mail conversation with an editor of VGChartz who bluntly stated that their numbers are based on aggregates of all sales figures they can find, and then they alter the numbers as they see fit (to reflect "underrepresented genres" or something) once their bizarre mathematical chicanery is done.
The problem is that while every outlet defines its 1-10 ratings scale differently, fans who like to aggregate scores together through sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings tend to assume that they're "school scores", with everything below 70 reflecting varying degrees of failure. Pressure from this overwhelming ignorance often leads to major outlets tweaking scores to fit gamer expectations moreso than their own definitions.
They're trademarked, the MPAA has taken action against unaffiliated websites that used the scale. Going to the MPAA system would probably result in the MPAA wanted to take over rating games from the current ESRB. This would not be a good thing.
It's because nothing happens in a video game with a traditional narrative until the player picks up the controller and chooses to do something within the confines of the game. This makes it a participatory medium totally unlike traditional cinema or prose.
The point of a game is to have fun, and this can be achieved without including any recognizable human-like characters or action/danger elements in a title at all.
I don't think implementing a deeper system is possible unless decisions in games are going to have significant consequences. The only way to implement that sort of thing is to write with branching plotlines, such that player decisions can result in totally different endings and plot outcomes. It will take that level of sophistication for in-game decisions to feel like more than just another vector for powergaming (which is, really, all the Little Sister choice amounts to).
1) There isn't a page for every Pokemon, hilariously enough.
2) There's only one incarnation of Gundam Wing, called Gundam Wing. Now if you want information about the Gundam franchise... well, Wikipedia used to have a lot of it that's rapidly being deleted.
I can sort of sympathize with the deletions. It's really irritating to look up an article about something, and half of it is sketchy and not-terribly-useful information, and half of it is trivia about the concept's use in various video games. Encouraging people to contribute less trivia and more solid information is not a bad thing, though sometimes I think they don't realize it's more how the stuff is being written about than whether or not it's being written about. Trivia really belongs on the fandom-specific wikis that are starting up, and the webcomics community could easily just go make their own webcomic wiki to serve their own purposes rather than expecting Wikipedia to do so.
I can agree that PS3 sales are much better than people try to make them sound. I can agree that the PSP should be considered a success, on some level, just for moving millions of units and surviving against Nintendo's decades-old handheld hegemony.
But you yourself fall into the same logical fallacy as Sony haters by dismissing the Xbox is a failure simply because it did not outsell the PS2. Given the PS2's lower price point and much higher penetration level, the fact that Microsoft moved the units they did was a triumph. Creating the Halo franchise, become a third-party darling, and the creation of the now widely-imitated Live services are very compelling reasons why.
Also declaring a PS3:Wii::Xbox:PS2 sales comparison somehow meaningful is just laughable. The particulars of the market situations are so different that the statistics just don't say anything useful. Try again.
Spectral Souls is absolutely unplayable unless streamed from the memory stick. If you play it from UMD, you are faced with a turn-based strategy game where calling up any menu to make any input decision results in ~5-10 seconds of load times. The title is a localized port of a PS2 title, and the load time lag was simply the result of a poorly-done porting process. Somehow Sony of America still saw fit to declare this thing releasable in the US.
Regarding metacritic and determining software quality via review scores, I have a story about a game called Puzzle Quest to tell you. Was the #1 game for the NDS for a few weeks, check any sales figs to see. Sold slightly less well for the PSP but still charted. The NDS and PSP versions are essentially identical, although most outlets scored the PSP version slightly higher... despite the fact that fans quickly disocvered the PSP version is noticeably buggier than the NDS version, to the point where certain parts of the combat system simply didn't work at all.
Doesn't say much complimentary about the scores most outlets attached to the games, now does it? It's just enough to make you think that aggregate review scores from sites like metacritic and gamerankings probably aren't telling a complete or meaningful story about software quality. Linking to an aggregate score listing is definitely not much of a rebuttal.
The reason why has to be multiplayer. In a two-player game of baseball, you can't tell what kind of pitch the pitcher is about to throw your way unless you're staring rather closely at their fingers. You only know when they've begun to throw a pitch, and have to read the ball's onscreen motion to figure out what they did, and how to respond.
Nintendo's quality control is more lax these days, but it's there. If you want to see a total train wreck of QA failure, go look at the sort of god-awful shovelware Sony lets people publish on the PSP. It's the only system where I've seen games ship that are completely unplayable.
While it's true the Xbox never turned a profit, calling it "a flop" seems a bit much (if only because of Halo and the effect the system had on 3rd party devs and multiplatform development).
And where'd you see that statistic? Some people publishing video game stats online are far more credible than others. (I had an e-mail conversation with the maintainers of one particular site where they essentially admitted they fabricated some of the numbers, and didn't realize why that was bad.)
That's not at all impressive if you consider how much longer the 360's been on the market. In terms of sales rate, Nintendo is simply crushing Microsoft and Sony this go-round, and would probably have evened out their lead with Microsoft if they could manufacture the units more quickly.
Anything published on Kotaku ends up on every gaming blog on the internet. That's probably why Sony didn't want the rumor appearing on such a prominent and well-regarded site to begin with. It would repeatedly cited as fact even if it was not, and Sony has had previous negative experiences with similar blog-fueled rumors in the past. While their response is excessive, it's certainly not unexpected.
Kotaku won't really suffer for this; they're widely perceived as being very biased in favor of Nintendo's products, and ridiculously critical of Sony and Microsoft's. Fans are angry at Sony at the moment and will likely support Kotaku's move as "sticking it to the man". What remains to be seen is whether Sony loses more from not having Kotaku coverage, or whether Kotaku loses more for not having Sony coverage.
Thank you. I think that stuff makes articles that otherwise look like good jumping-off points for more in-depth research instead look sort of childish. I tend to immediately close articles where the "In popular culture" fancruft appears to be longer or just as long as the useful bits of the article.
I suppose I could start deleting instead....
Did they define "more content"? Because more stuff being there doesn't matter if it's not useful. There's an appalling number of entries where half the article's wordcount describes how a given subject appears in comics, video games, anime, TV shows, and etc. That's content, but it's not really going to be useful to most people.
If anything, console manufacturers view extensive homebrew communities as a sign of failure. That's why Sony is constantly updating the PSP's firmware, and frequently just to break homebrew apps. After all, if people are buying PSP's to hack them, then they probably aren't too interested in buying games or other accessories that let Sony turn a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
It's extremely unlikely that any Wii that's listed for $250 + $30 shipping now is going to actually finish the auction at that price. Around $400-500 dollars is cheap/typical, and some dedicated online second-hand sellers are telling customers to expect prices in the $560 range-- roughly $50 higher than last year's top prices. Even two weeks ago, I seriously doubt that $250 + $30 was anything but a starting bid for the Wiis you were looking at. It is certainly not as easy/cheap to buy one secondhand as you are trying to suggest.
They did, but because people weren't buying 360s as quickly as Microsoft wanted them to. People are buying Wiis roughly 3-4 times faster than they bought 360s at the console's hottest point.
"Huge niche" is an oxymoron. The fact of the matter is that Nintendo is marketing the Wii to casual gamers with mainstream tastes, and creating a system everyone of every age and gender wants to play. By comparison, stuff like BioShock and Halo 3 is... well, niche. Though I'm sure you'd consider them huge niches.
They are, but the perception of cheapness is all that really matters to most people when it comes to making consumer decisions like that. As long as the Wii seems cheaper than the other consoles, which is certainly does, people will continue to consider it cheap regardless of its hidden costs.
Generally speaking, the final selling price of a second-hand Wii at this point isn't a $30 markup. It's far more likely to be in the $100-$200 dollar range, which nearly doubles the price of a $250 console. The closer we get to Christmas, the more likely it is that 100% or higher mark-ups are going to end up happening.
You assume I'm being metaphorical, and I'm not. The issue with a book's narrative is that you can flip to any page and at any time and see the same events depicted. With a movie, go to any frame of a particular timestamp and the same thing is happening. It is just a logical constraint of the format of games with a narrative that until the player picks up the controller and imbues life into the protagonist, nothing will ever happen. If you turn on Bioshock and choose to put down the controller at any point, the story essentially stops happening and will stop for hours or days until you pick up the controller again.
I remember having an e-mail conversation with an editor of VGChartz who bluntly stated that their numbers are based on aggregates of all sales figures they can find, and then they alter the numbers as they see fit (to reflect "underrepresented genres" or something) once their bizarre mathematical chicanery is done.
The problem is that while every outlet defines its 1-10 ratings scale differently, fans who like to aggregate scores together through sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings tend to assume that they're "school scores", with everything below 70 reflecting varying degrees of failure. Pressure from this overwhelming ignorance often leads to major outlets tweaking scores to fit gamer expectations moreso than their own definitions.
They're trademarked, the MPAA has taken action against unaffiliated websites that used the scale. Going to the MPAA system would probably result in the MPAA wanted to take over rating games from the current ESRB. This would not be a good thing.
It's because nothing happens in a video game with a traditional narrative until the player picks up the controller and chooses to do something within the confines of the game. This makes it a participatory medium totally unlike traditional cinema or prose.
The point of a game is to have fun, and this can be achieved without including any recognizable human-like characters or action/danger elements in a title at all.
I don't think implementing a deeper system is possible unless decisions in games are going to have significant consequences. The only way to implement that sort of thing is to write with branching plotlines, such that player decisions can result in totally different endings and plot outcomes. It will take that level of sophistication for in-game decisions to feel like more than just another vector for powergaming (which is, really, all the Little Sister choice amounts to).
Interesting things here.
I can sort of sympathize with the deletions. It's really irritating to look up an article about something, and half of it is sketchy and not-terribly-useful information, and half of it is trivia about the concept's use in various video games. Encouraging people to contribute less trivia and more solid information is not a bad thing, though sometimes I think they don't realize it's more how the stuff is being written about than whether or not it's being written about. Trivia really belongs on the fandom-specific wikis that are starting up, and the webcomics community could easily just go make their own webcomic wiki to serve their own purposes rather than expecting Wikipedia to do so.
I would hope most things in real life are realistic...
I can agree that PS3 sales are much better than people try to make them sound. I can agree that the PSP should be considered a success, on some level, just for moving millions of units and surviving against Nintendo's decades-old handheld hegemony.
But you yourself fall into the same logical fallacy as Sony haters by dismissing the Xbox is a failure simply because it did not outsell the PS2. Given the PS2's lower price point and much higher penetration level, the fact that Microsoft moved the units they did was a triumph. Creating the Halo franchise, become a third-party darling, and the creation of the now widely-imitated Live services are very compelling reasons why.
Also declaring a PS3:Wii::Xbox:PS2 sales comparison somehow meaningful is just laughable. The particulars of the market situations are so different that the statistics just don't say anything useful. Try again.
Spectral Souls is absolutely unplayable unless streamed from the memory stick. If you play it from UMD, you are faced with a turn-based strategy game where calling up any menu to make any input decision results in ~5-10 seconds of load times. The title is a localized port of a PS2 title, and the load time lag was simply the result of a poorly-done porting process. Somehow Sony of America still saw fit to declare this thing releasable in the US.
Regarding metacritic and determining software quality via review scores, I have a story about a game called Puzzle Quest to tell you. Was the #1 game for the NDS for a few weeks, check any sales figs to see. Sold slightly less well for the PSP but still charted. The NDS and PSP versions are essentially identical, although most outlets scored the PSP version slightly higher... despite the fact that fans quickly disocvered the PSP version is noticeably buggier than the NDS version, to the point where certain parts of the combat system simply didn't work at all.
Doesn't say much complimentary about the scores most outlets attached to the games, now does it? It's just enough to make you think that aggregate review scores from sites like metacritic and gamerankings probably aren't telling a complete or meaningful story about software quality. Linking to an aggregate score listing is definitely not much of a rebuttal.
The reason why has to be multiplayer. In a two-player game of baseball, you can't tell what kind of pitch the pitcher is about to throw your way unless you're staring rather closely at their fingers. You only know when they've begun to throw a pitch, and have to read the ball's onscreen motion to figure out what they did, and how to respond.
Nintendo's quality control is more lax these days, but it's there. If you want to see a total train wreck of QA failure, go look at the sort of god-awful shovelware Sony lets people publish on the PSP. It's the only system where I've seen games ship that are completely unplayable.
While it's true the Xbox never turned a profit, calling it "a flop" seems a bit much (if only because of Halo and the effect the system had on 3rd party devs and multiplatform development).
And where'd you see that statistic? Some people publishing video game stats online are far more credible than others. (I had an e-mail conversation with the maintainers of one particular site where they essentially admitted they fabricated some of the numbers, and didn't realize why that was bad.)
Trauma Center is a direct remake of a Nintendo DS game.
That's not at all impressive if you consider how much longer the 360's been on the market. In terms of sales rate, Nintendo is simply crushing Microsoft and Sony this go-round, and would probably have evened out their lead with Microsoft if they could manufacture the units more quickly.
Anything published on Kotaku ends up on every gaming blog on the internet. That's probably why Sony didn't want the rumor appearing on such a prominent and well-regarded site to begin with. It would repeatedly cited as fact even if it was not, and Sony has had previous negative experiences with similar blog-fueled rumors in the past. While their response is excessive, it's certainly not unexpected.
Kotaku won't really suffer for this; they're widely perceived as being very biased in favor of Nintendo's products, and ridiculously critical of Sony and Microsoft's. Fans are angry at Sony at the moment and will likely support Kotaku's move as "sticking it to the man". What remains to be seen is whether Sony loses more from not having Kotaku coverage, or whether Kotaku loses more for not having Sony coverage.
Thank you. I think that stuff makes articles that otherwise look like good jumping-off points for more in-depth research instead look sort of childish. I tend to immediately close articles where the "In popular culture" fancruft appears to be longer or just as long as the useful bits of the article. I suppose I could start deleting instead....
Did they define "more content"? Because more stuff being there doesn't matter if it's not useful. There's an appalling number of entries where half the article's wordcount describes how a given subject appears in comics, video games, anime, TV shows, and etc. That's content, but it's not really going to be useful to most people.
If anything, console manufacturers view extensive homebrew communities as a sign of failure. That's why Sony is constantly updating the PSP's firmware, and frequently just to break homebrew apps. After all, if people are buying PSP's to hack them, then they probably aren't too interested in buying games or other accessories that let Sony turn a profit.