You can play 14 RPGs a year if you're willing to play a lot of the more mediocre Japanese console offerings and also play everything the American studios are releasing, too. I can't say I think 100 hours per game is a fair estimate, though, people will only spend that kind of time on a particularly deep or interesting game. For most console RPGs, people will be tired of it within 30 to 60 hours, and few people play even excellent console RPGs beyond 60-70 hours.
Yeah. Nintendo knew the alternate companies really just Konami, and let them do it basically because of Konami's close relationship with Nintendo and a good history of Konami title sales on the NES.
This sort of blatant favoritism is what drew Nintendo so much ire from other third-parties, particularly companies based in America. A lot of developers at the time felt like Nintendo showed distinct favoritism in dealings with other Japanese software houses, and frankly, they did.
Go read Game Over by David Sheff. It's quite a bit better than the information provided in the current Wikipedia articles, which frankly reads like an "urban legend" version of events. The titles per year restriction was instated long before the chip shortage, as a reaction to how Atari managed to bust the market by flooding it with low-quality games in 1983 and 1984. Nintendo used the restriction as a selling point with early retailers who were skeptical of the NES.
It's obvious that Nintendo eventually parlayed this tactic into a strategy to enforce their hold on the market, but arguing that Nintendo did it purely to enforce their monopoly is simply not correct. It's also worth noting that it has been long since proven that Nintendo did not orchestrate the chip shortage, although they had some unfair sway over who got chips and who didn't; the chip shortage is a well-documented event that cause big impact in electronics industries in that particular year. However, Nintendo did some things that intensified the shortage's impact on video games in particular, such as turning down any alternate source of chips that wasn't from a Japanese manufacturer.
As for the antitrust actions, they were tainted from the beginning by a questionable influence from Atari, whose business practices regarding Nintendo had been declared illegal several times in civil courts. Most notably, Nintendo had no direct representation at the meetings that lead up to the antitrust hearings, but Atari did... frankly, I think this questionable motivation on Atari's part is why Nintendo ended up getting a mere slap on the wrist, even though some of their business practices at the time were rather monopolistic. Any harsher ruling would've prompted counter-action from Nintendo regarding Atari's role in events.
Nintendo, back in the NES days, used to restrict how many titles licensees could release a year basically to enforce this business model.
Re:Not the wrong games. The wrong girls.
on
Girls Got Game
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· Score: 1
I have to admit, if I end up playing an FPS, I can sort of appreciate it in an abstract way, but I won't get all that deeply into it. Whereas I played Lumines pretty much for a week straight after I got the import...
Re:Not the wrong games. The wrong girls.
on
Girls Got Game
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There's something to that, I think. The girl gamers who've always gotten highly publicized and fawned on have tended to be FPS players and such who can 'hang with the guys'. But most women I know who game without making a big deal out of it tend to like different sorts of RPGs, simulations, and games with simple interfaces (puzzlers, old-school shooters, Katamari Damacy, etc). Especially with console RPGs, the demographic for them has skewed a fair bit more female than the industry seems to know what to do with.
For the PS2, at least, there are USB devices that make it possible to load savedata downloaded off of internet sites and FTPs onto memory cards. I imagine when you get into the next console generation, wireless will make such devices unnecessary for data transfer.
And I never said a standard memory card could hold the 9 new Halo maps. I don't play Halo and I don't know how much data is involved with the maps. I just object to the PC guys saying that console users don't have any experience with user-created data in their games when it's not true at all.
The main problem I see with Q3 on the PSP is that the controls are just not well-suited to an FPS at all. Maybe when the mini-keyboard that Sony's been rumored to be working on comes out, but even then, the analog controller would be a poor substitute for a proper mouse. You could use some sort of USB mouse, I suppose, but then you're making your cute little portable awfully bulky....
Locally, Wipeout Pure was also selling out in many stores. I went to the extra effort to grab a copy from a store outside the area and... wow. It's a damn fun game, a nice sci-fi racer. The graphics convey a real sensation of speed and flight.
And consoles have had a lot in the way of user-created content for a few generations now. You don't see a lot in the way of user-created maps as with PC FPS, but "Character Creation" modes are extremely popular in a lot of different games. They usually store their data on the memory card for systems other than the X-Box.
Would porting triple the sales? Or will Namco sell as many units for the PS2 as they did across the three systems, while significantly cutting down their development and licensing costs, and probably collecting a fat fee from Sony for the exclusive?
It strikes me as something to think about. Namco is probably doing exactly what makes the most business sense.
I suspect a lot of this comes down to it being more cost-effective for Namco to code for the most popular system, rather than investing in a multi-system game. Most casual gamers who own an X-Box or GC own it alongside a PS2 anyway, and they're by far the most lucrative market.
I have to say that the weight is my only complaint with the PSP. If the battery life didn't make marathon gaming sessions impractical, having to hold this thing up would do it anyway. Revisions of the machine had better be lighter.
This being said, I can still fit it easily in a coat or jacket pocket, or slide it in my purse. The control scheme is pretty good when it's d-pad and buttons, but the analog nub is kind of a joke.
It's funny the way gamer's attitudes are changing. System exclusives used to be a point of pride for a game-- now gamers get rather angry when a title that 'should' be multi-platform isn't.
Re:Hardly a "new unqiue application"
on
PSPCasting
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· Score: 1
Image Converter is known to have some problems with certain file types (QuickTime), and some reports from Engadget have suggested that Image Converter needlessly bloats encode size.
I haven't tried PSP Video 9 out yet, but it's nice to have some options, and integration with Videora will probably be the selling point for the BitTorrent fiends. For me, it helps that I can use PSP Video 9 with the weird unregisterable import PSP I had to snap up for work.
It should be, but I've played with a Japanese one, and... it's not. For the most part, the software tends to resemble PSOne and early-gen PS2 titles more than anything else. Like... think Sega Saturn.
Basically all Grand Theft Auto-type games and a lot of action games require it (left analog to move, right to control camera). Also shooters - the Punisher, for instance, requires left analog to move, R3 analog for precision aiming.
The lack of that 2nd analog makes a big difference in PSP gameplay, trust me on this.
Wrong. PSP is 1 rather painful-to-use analog stick, PS2 is 2 comfortable analog sticks. Games coded for a PSP as if it were just a shrunk-down PS2 will be the ones that suck.
(You can code for it like a shrunk-down PSOne, though....)
Remember that Nintendo is adamantly insisting that the DS and the GBA lines are different - the DS is supposed to be the "third pillar" of Nintendo's system sales.
I think this is not smart, myself, as most people perceive the DS to be a new GBA, and having to compete against a next-Gen Game Boy could easily kill both systems. But the "third pillar" line is Nintendo's official philosophy and is clearly guiding their decisions as a company
X-Box 2 actually seems to be drawing some ire in the North American marketplace. A lot of X-Box users are very casual gamers, often teenagers and college students who are dumping PS2s or other gadgets to the get the sexy new system. These aren't the people who are posting to gaming forums, reading gaming sites, or necessarily even view themselves as gamers.
The few who actually know that MS is trying to release a new system get extremely angry over it, since "I just spent all this money on my X-Box! The new one will at least play my games, right?"
And right now, all indications on backwards compatibility in the X-Box 2 point to "no".
MS has a lot of goodwill in the American console market they could easily end up squandering, and almost exactly the same way Nintendo did with the SNES launch.
The main diff I can see is that X-Box is still #2 in Europe, and an American company will probably have an easier time with localizations than Nintendo (who've always had problems getting product into Europe). I think MS can reasonly expect to do at least as well or better in the next generation in the European market, while they've probably peaked in the Asian market.
Who controls Japan isn't even in question at this point. Nintendo has a better chance of toppling Sony over there than Microsoft does. Hardly anyone owns an X-Box and even Japan-exclusive games for the system sell poorly.
I somehow doubt MS was talking about the Japanese market when they mentioned "blowing by Sony", though. I really expect to see MS drop entirely out of the Asian market in the next console generation and just focus on Europe and North America. If they don't, then they really deserve whatever ill fortune comes their way; the Asian market has made it very clear that they don't like the X-Box and don't want MS in their console marketplace.
I bet Nintendo has new management which are trying to look like they add valuable by making 'moves.' This is a decidedly US style manover which to me is surprising from a Japanese company.
This is in no way a new manuever from Nintendo. The original Famicom (NES) had all the expansion bays necessary to turn it into a cheap home computer, and even had a modem port that was supported in Japan with a BBS-esque online service. After Tetris caused the Game Boy to become a minor hit with adult users, Nintendo quickly ushered out a slew of now-laughable productivity software titles for it. Even in the Game Boy's old age, Nintendo was trying to get people to spring for silly things like the Game Boy camera and Game Boy printer.
Nintendo's not-so-hidden goal from day one, which has been repeatedly articulated by Hiroshi Yamauchi in a variety of sources, was to use the gaming ability of its consoles to sneak an army of cheap computing devices into people's homes. After the Famicom failed to make this viable, Nintendo just seems to have shifted its focus onto trying to pull off the same thing with its portable systems instead. The fact that the DS had a chat program for its pack-in title struck me as an early hint that Nintendo would be trying, once again, to turn one of its systems into a cheap consumer computer.
Slashdot Mirror
You can play 14 RPGs a year if you're willing to play a lot of the more mediocre Japanese console offerings and also play everything the American studios are releasing, too. I can't say I think 100 hours per game is a fair estimate, though, people will only spend that kind of time on a particularly deep or interesting game. For most console RPGs, people will be tired of it within 30 to 60 hours, and few people play even excellent console RPGs beyond 60-70 hours.
Yeah. Nintendo knew the alternate companies really just Konami, and let them do it basically because of Konami's close relationship with Nintendo and a good history of Konami title sales on the NES.
This sort of blatant favoritism is what drew Nintendo so much ire from other third-parties, particularly companies based in America. A lot of developers at the time felt like Nintendo showed distinct favoritism in dealings with other Japanese software houses, and frankly, they did.
Go read Game Over by David Sheff. It's quite a bit better than the information provided in the current Wikipedia articles, which frankly reads like an "urban legend" version of events. The titles per year restriction was instated long before the chip shortage, as a reaction to how Atari managed to bust the market by flooding it with low-quality games in 1983 and 1984. Nintendo used the restriction as a selling point with early retailers who were skeptical of the NES.
It's obvious that Nintendo eventually parlayed this tactic into a strategy to enforce their hold on the market, but arguing that Nintendo did it purely to enforce their monopoly is simply not correct. It's also worth noting that it has been long since proven that Nintendo did not orchestrate the chip shortage, although they had some unfair sway over who got chips and who didn't; the chip shortage is a well-documented event that cause big impact in electronics industries in that particular year. However, Nintendo did some things that intensified the shortage's impact on video games in particular, such as turning down any alternate source of chips that wasn't from a Japanese manufacturer.
As for the antitrust actions, they were tainted from the beginning by a questionable influence from Atari, whose business practices regarding Nintendo had been declared illegal several times in civil courts. Most notably, Nintendo had no direct representation at the meetings that lead up to the antitrust hearings, but Atari did... frankly, I think this questionable motivation on Atari's part is why Nintendo ended up getting a mere slap on the wrist, even though some of their business practices at the time were rather monopolistic. Any harsher ruling would've prompted counter-action from Nintendo regarding Atari's role in events.
Nintendo, back in the NES days, used to restrict how many titles licensees could release a year basically to enforce this business model.
I have to admit, if I end up playing an FPS, I can sort of appreciate it in an abstract way, but I won't get all that deeply into it. Whereas I played Lumines pretty much for a week straight after I got the import...
There's something to that, I think. The girl gamers who've always gotten highly publicized and fawned on have tended to be FPS players and such who can 'hang with the guys'. But most women I know who game without making a big deal out of it tend to like different sorts of RPGs, simulations, and games with simple interfaces (puzzlers, old-school shooters, Katamari Damacy, etc). Especially with console RPGs, the demographic for them has skewed a fair bit more female than the industry seems to know what to do with.
For the PS2, at least, there are USB devices that make it possible to load savedata downloaded off of internet sites and FTPs onto memory cards. I imagine when you get into the next console generation, wireless will make such devices unnecessary for data transfer.
And I never said a standard memory card could hold the 9 new Halo maps. I don't play Halo and I don't know how much data is involved with the maps. I just object to the PC guys saying that console users don't have any experience with user-created data in their games when it's not true at all.
The main problem I see with Q3 on the PSP is that the controls are just not well-suited to an FPS at all. Maybe when the mini-keyboard that Sony's been rumored to be working on comes out, but even then, the analog controller would be a poor substitute for a proper mouse. You could use some sort of USB mouse, I suppose, but then you're making your cute little portable awfully bulky....
Locally, Wipeout Pure was also selling out in many stores. I went to the extra effort to grab a copy from a store outside the area and... wow. It's a damn fun game, a nice sci-fi racer. The graphics convey a real sensation of speed and flight.
I never said consoles had as much user-created content as PC games, simply that user-created content for console games already exists.
Where would gamecube or PS2 store extra content?
On a memory card.
And consoles have had a lot in the way of user-created content for a few generations now. You don't see a lot in the way of user-created maps as with PC FPS, but "Character Creation" modes are extremely popular in a lot of different games. They usually store their data on the memory card for systems other than the X-Box.
Would porting triple the sales? Or will Namco sell as many units for the PS2 as they did across the three systems, while significantly cutting down their development and licensing costs, and probably collecting a fat fee from Sony for the exclusive?
It strikes me as something to think about. Namco is probably doing exactly what makes the most business sense.
I suspect a lot of this comes down to it being more cost-effective for Namco to code for the most popular system, rather than investing in a multi-system game. Most casual gamers who own an X-Box or GC own it alongside a PS2 anyway, and they're by far the most lucrative market.
I have to say that the weight is my only complaint with the PSP. If the battery life didn't make marathon gaming sessions impractical, having to hold this thing up would do it anyway. Revisions of the machine had better be lighter.
This being said, I can still fit it easily in a coat or jacket pocket, or slide it in my purse. The control scheme is pretty good when it's d-pad and buttons, but the analog nub is kind of a joke.
It's funny the way gamer's attitudes are changing. System exclusives used to be a point of pride for a game-- now gamers get rather angry when a title that 'should' be multi-platform isn't.
Image Converter is known to have some problems with certain file types (QuickTime), and some reports from Engadget have suggested that Image Converter needlessly bloats encode size.
I haven't tried PSP Video 9 out yet, but it's nice to have some options, and integration with Videora will probably be the selling point for the BitTorrent fiends. For me, it helps that I can use PSP Video 9 with the weird unregisterable import PSP I had to snap up for work.
It should be, but I've played with a Japanese one, and... it's not. For the most part, the software tends to resemble PSOne and early-gen PS2 titles more than anything else. Like... think Sega Saturn.
Most PS2 games are developed in 3:4 ratio, tho I've played one title that has an optional 16:9 mode.
PSP games are natively in 16:9 mode. It's a big difference, unless you're playing Darkstalkers or something.
Basically all Grand Theft Auto-type games and a lot of action games require it (left analog to move, right to control camera). Also shooters - the Punisher, for instance, requires left analog to move, R3 analog for precision aiming.
The lack of that 2nd analog makes a big difference in PSP gameplay, trust me on this.
Wrong. PSP is 1 rather painful-to-use analog stick, PS2 is 2 comfortable analog sticks. Games coded for a PSP as if it were just a shrunk-down PS2 will be the ones that suck.
(You can code for it like a shrunk-down PSOne, though....)
Remember that Nintendo is adamantly insisting that the DS and the GBA lines are different - the DS is supposed to be the "third pillar" of Nintendo's system sales.
I think this is not smart, myself, as most people perceive the DS to be a new GBA, and having to compete against a next-Gen Game Boy could easily kill both systems. But the "third pillar" line is Nintendo's official philosophy and is clearly guiding their decisions as a company
.X-Box 2 actually seems to be drawing some ire in the North American marketplace. A lot of X-Box users are very casual gamers, often teenagers and college students who are dumping PS2s or other gadgets to the get the sexy new system. These aren't the people who are posting to gaming forums, reading gaming sites, or necessarily even view themselves as gamers.
The few who actually know that MS is trying to release a new system get extremely angry over it, since "I just spent all this money on my X-Box! The new one will at least play my games, right?" And right now, all indications on backwards compatibility in the X-Box 2 point to "no".
MS has a lot of goodwill in the American console market they could easily end up squandering, and almost exactly the same way Nintendo did with the SNES launch.
Hm, interesting figures...
The main diff I can see is that X-Box is still #2 in Europe, and an American company will probably have an easier time with localizations than Nintendo (who've always had problems getting product into Europe). I think MS can reasonly expect to do at least as well or better in the next generation in the European market, while they've probably peaked in the Asian market.
Who controls Japan isn't even in question at this point. Nintendo has a better chance of toppling Sony over there than Microsoft does. Hardly anyone owns an X-Box and even Japan-exclusive games for the system sell poorly.
I somehow doubt MS was talking about the Japanese market when they mentioned "blowing by Sony", though. I really expect to see MS drop entirely out of the Asian market in the next console generation and just focus on Europe and North America. If they don't, then they really deserve whatever ill fortune comes their way; the Asian market has made it very clear that they don't like the X-Box and don't want MS in their console marketplace.
I bet Nintendo has new management which are trying to look like they add valuable by making 'moves.' This is a decidedly US style manover which to me is surprising from a Japanese company.
This is in no way a new manuever from Nintendo. The original Famicom (NES) had all the expansion bays necessary to turn it into a cheap home computer, and even had a modem port that was supported in Japan with a BBS-esque online service. After Tetris caused the Game Boy to become a minor hit with adult users, Nintendo quickly ushered out a slew of now-laughable productivity software titles for it. Even in the Game Boy's old age, Nintendo was trying to get people to spring for silly things like the Game Boy camera and Game Boy printer.
Nintendo's not-so-hidden goal from day one, which has been repeatedly articulated by Hiroshi Yamauchi in a variety of sources, was to use the gaming ability of its consoles to sneak an army of cheap computing devices into people's homes. After the Famicom failed to make this viable, Nintendo just seems to have shifted its focus onto trying to pull off the same thing with its portable systems instead. The fact that the DS had a chat program for its pack-in title struck me as an early hint that Nintendo would be trying, once again, to turn one of its systems into a cheap consumer computer.