Some argue that these days a "hardcore" game* tends to have guaranteed progression (you get ahead as long as you keep playing) but instead is very long and "epic", taking a long time to finish. Meanwhile the "new" gaming the Wii brought focusses more on immediate challenge and high scores with short "content" for the games and a design more reminescent of the arcade days with each play starting from the beginning and ending not long after, at best storing the resulting score. Weird as that may sound, the current market does indeed have a tendency to make easy but time consuming games that quite frankly seem to assert the player is a total idiot who has no idea what an analog stick does (if that was the case he wouldn't have gotten the console set up) and once he figured that out should never be subjected to anything requiring more thought than pulling levers in the right order that's spelt out in ten different places.
*=These articles, for example, though they assert that hardcore refers to the core market of gaming which is as good a definition as any other considering noone really knows what "hardcore" means.
Preorder-only demo? Isn't the point of a demo to let you see the awesome gameplay (at least from the POV of the developer) and sell the game to you rather than tell you "hey, you'll get to play more of this when we finish it but thanks for the money!"?
Some people always believe that anything bad is the result of a conspiracy by the groups they are not part of (and which they claim have the exact opposite stance on everything)...
2. If I were to bitch about a name change there, I'd rather bitch about the weapon names. Fallout always had real weapon names, like the G11 or AK-47 or FN-FAL or whatnot. Now suddenly we have non-descript stuff like "chinese pistol" and "chinese assault-rifle." WTF?
Weapon makers have started taking their trademarks a bit more seriously I think so the game simply can't use the real names.
I think he meant puzzle games that aren't just about blocks, there's Toki Tori though which is more like Lode Runner and Braid which I heard is a puzzle game too (haven't played it yet).
It's not about taste but about requirements, for casual gaming it's necessary that the game is not very time consuming so you can play it during a coffee break while still having fun and the game must seem very easy to get into. Nintendo isn't the only one to do that, many flash game makers fulfill those requirements too but the Wii ups the accessibility again by reducing the control abstraction and generally looking less techy.
Boom Blox and Zack & Wiki are NOT casual. They are regular games. Many so-called "casual" games are really just regular games with lowered difficulty and dumbed down mechanics.
Of course the Wii doesn't have exclusively those new gamers, there's a lot of old gamers on there too that buy the regular games but the problems start when companies want to target the new gamers.
BTW, I think the Mario & Sonic game was sold more by Sonic than by Mario, at least in regions like the UK.
Don't trust Metacritic on new market games, Wii Sports has a 77% score on Gamerankings but it's one of the greatest games on the market from the view of the new gamer (while many of our great games simply are no-gos for them).
Nonsense. You know the impact Wii Sports and Fit have? Making people who had zero interest in gaming suddently start playing. They don't create any universes since those are just excuses to justify the rules of the game, most Nintendo characters are just empty placeholders that were designed only so the player has some avatar in the game. Now we have Miis that eliminate the need for a fixed avatar, instead letting the player use a character he designed himself.
They are discerning, they just aren't looking for the same things you are. You don't look for the things they want so you don't notice when a game is inadequate for them but you notice when it's inadequate for you. I wouldn't be surprised if third parties have the same limited vision, they see that the "casual" gamers don't look for high quality in the areas a core gamer values so they decide that "casuals" must not be discerning and will take anything you throw at them. Until they figure out which values the "casual" gamer is looking for they will never be able to consistently produce hit games. The best they can do currently is copy the company that does know what to look for and hope they don't accidentally break the parts that sell the game.
Careful, Wii reviews are often useless because the reviewers are part of the old market and judge with the old values resulting in low scores for games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit while the new market with its new values likes these games WAY better than the games the reviewers rate highly.
Of course the Wii is inadequate by the values of the old market, it's a paradigm shift so it no longer aims for the old values and instead goes for new values that aren't reflected in reviews.
I'm aware that they have some new IPs, like Wii Fit, Wii Music and Wii Sports, but these are really just novelty IPs, not quite the kind of games I'm into.
But they are what you'll get if you wish for new IPs, new IPs that leverage the new gaming concepts.
I don't think carts were about piracy, they were because previous attempts at CD-pased gaming (Sega CD, TurboGrafx CD, CDi) were horrible failures. Additionally CDs had horrible load times at the time and the need for them wasn't that big, the game content could still fit on a cart, only the FMVs that started getting used much in games (previously they were only used for crappy "interactive movie" games) and the CD music required CDs, Nintendo probably thought the negatives outweight the positives.
BTW, currently the Blu-Ray console is losing to the two consoles that use plain DVDs.
The PSP actually didn't get killed only by itself, the DS tapped into some massive market expansions with games like Nintendogs and Brain Age that the PSP was unable to contest.
I'd wager the Wii is getting bad support more because the GC sold so badly, because third parties all want the glory of High Definition titles since those are "real gamer games" and because third parties think noone can beat Nintendo on their opwn platform so they only put their worst teams on the job and provide excuses to shareholders. A part of the problem is also that they don't understand the "casual" market the Wii has reached into and just try to take their regular games, dumb them down by making them easy and shallow and calling that casual. The requirements are more time contraints than low difficulty, a "casual" player won't put in 3 hours in one session and if the game isn't fun when played in 15 minute increments or so (which for many modern games is less than the length of one cutscene!) it fails to appeal to that type of customer.
Miyamoto has full veto power on any game he participates in AFAIK. Still, the recent Zelda games were led by Aonuma instead who seems to be mostly about emulating what Miyamoto did instead of defining his own game. Well, if he's taking it in any direction it's more story heavy, kinda like Final Fantasy with a different gameplay between the cutscenes. This is the antithesis of the new generation gaming the Wii has started (short, hard, instant-fun games you can fit into a coffee break or play all day).
Super Mario Galaxy wasn't a primary Wii game, it was a regular game that ran on the Wii, just a sequel to an old franchise. The Wii's main games are the likes of Wii Sports and Wii Fit.
The Wii was not a gimmick, it was a component in a business strategy that had its main focus on a new kind of gaming (that being gaming that ANYONE can partake in*) and had motion sensing and such added in order to perform its role in the strategy. The sales numbers confirm that the strategy worked flawlessly and the responses from the former competition (they had a chance to compete, they chose to let the Wii run away with the new market instead) were just as expected in a best case scenario. The Wii is neither motion sensing nor "casual" games, it is the combination of both and only in that combination is it able to work.
*=No, regular games don't cut it and neither do dumbed down regular games. The new customer is neither stupid nor incompetent, just unwilling to deal with the interface and rules of regular games.
Not really, no. Here in Germany PC games sell well and stores allocate a lot of space to them. In the US they don't sell well and stores reduce their space.
When he was asked about Galaxy's planets resembling those of some Ratchet & Clank game he replied "I haven't heard of that game, is it a PC game?". He also doesn't play videogames much according to interviews. The fact that he played Portal marks it as special already.
Of course they sell that, the problem is that anyone can produce copies of it at the same price but without the "R&D" investment (i.e. writing it) which turns that market into a competition of who can manufacture printed paper the best instead of who can design the best data to print on that paper.
And writers.... um.... what? A writer can't exactly perform his book live. Sure, he could hold a reading but that's not very effective for making money. Writing isn't manual labor and can't be used like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Some argue that these days a "hardcore" game* tends to have guaranteed progression (you get ahead as long as you keep playing) but instead is very long and "epic", taking a long time to finish. Meanwhile the "new" gaming the Wii brought focusses more on immediate challenge and high scores with short "content" for the games and a design more reminescent of the arcade days with each play starting from the beginning and ending not long after, at best storing the resulting score. Weird as that may sound, the current market does indeed have a tendency to make easy but time consuming games that quite frankly seem to assert the player is a total idiot who has no idea what an analog stick does (if that was the case he wouldn't have gotten the console set up) and once he figured that out should never be subjected to anything requiring more thought than pulling levers in the right order that's spelt out in ten different places.
*=These articles, for example, though they assert that hardcore refers to the core market of gaming which is as good a definition as any other considering noone really knows what "hardcore" means.
Preorder-only demo? Isn't the point of a demo to let you see the awesome gameplay (at least from the POV of the developer) and sell the game to you rather than tell you "hey, you'll get to play more of this when we finish it but thanks for the money!"?
Some people always believe that anything bad is the result of a conspiracy by the groups they are not part of (and which they claim have the exact opposite stance on everything)...
I bet if you had a libertarian in charge he'd take money from all the same bribes and do the same things.
I think the proposal was more to remove stuff from orbit (where it can hurt the useful things we try to keep up there) than to prevent impacts.
To be fair there is talk about how it has reduced maintenance costs, I suspect you don't get enough data to say that for sure until years later.
2. If I were to bitch about a name change there, I'd rather bitch about the weapon names. Fallout always had real weapon names, like the G11 or AK-47 or FN-FAL or whatnot. Now suddenly we have non-descript stuff like "chinese pistol" and "chinese assault-rifle." WTF?
Weapon makers have started taking their trademarks a bit more seriously I think so the game simply can't use the real names.
Because you can kill everyone else in the game? Magical protection for the children just doesn't make sense.
I think he meant puzzle games that aren't just about blocks, there's Toki Tori though which is more like Lode Runner and Braid which I heard is a puzzle game too (haven't played it yet).
Can you get Mazer Mayhem to work? It always crashes when I try to start it and yes, I have installed the .net and XNA stuff it needs.
Sounds a bit like Kernel Panic.
I bet former SWG players cringe at that name.
Yeah, NSDAP and SCEA are an easy mistake, the keys are right next to each other! NoE is pretty damn close to SED, too!
It's not about taste but about requirements, for casual gaming it's necessary that the game is not very time consuming so you can play it during a coffee break while still having fun and the game must seem very easy to get into. Nintendo isn't the only one to do that, many flash game makers fulfill those requirements too but the Wii ups the accessibility again by reducing the control abstraction and generally looking less techy.
Boom Blox and Zack & Wiki are NOT casual. They are regular games. Many so-called "casual" games are really just regular games with lowered difficulty and dumbed down mechanics.
Of course the Wii doesn't have exclusively those new gamers, there's a lot of old gamers on there too that buy the regular games but the problems start when companies want to target the new gamers.
BTW, I think the Mario & Sonic game was sold more by Sonic than by Mario, at least in regions like the UK.
Don't trust Metacritic on new market games, Wii Sports has a 77% score on Gamerankings but it's one of the greatest games on the market from the view of the new gamer (while many of our great games simply are no-gos for them).
Nonsense. You know the impact Wii Sports and Fit have? Making people who had zero interest in gaming suddently start playing. They don't create any universes since those are just excuses to justify the rules of the game, most Nintendo characters are just empty placeholders that were designed only so the player has some avatar in the game. Now we have Miis that eliminate the need for a fixed avatar, instead letting the player use a character he designed himself.
They are discerning, they just aren't looking for the same things you are. You don't look for the things they want so you don't notice when a game is inadequate for them but you notice when it's inadequate for you. I wouldn't be surprised if third parties have the same limited vision, they see that the "casual" gamers don't look for high quality in the areas a core gamer values so they decide that "casuals" must not be discerning and will take anything you throw at them. Until they figure out which values the "casual" gamer is looking for they will never be able to consistently produce hit games. The best they can do currently is copy the company that does know what to look for and hope they don't accidentally break the parts that sell the game.
Careful, Wii reviews are often useless because the reviewers are part of the old market and judge with the old values resulting in low scores for games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit while the new market with its new values likes these games WAY better than the games the reviewers rate highly.
Of course the Wii is inadequate by the values of the old market, it's a paradigm shift so it no longer aims for the old values and instead goes for new values that aren't reflected in reviews.
I'm aware that they have some new IPs, like Wii Fit, Wii Music and Wii Sports, but these are really just novelty IPs, not quite the kind of games I'm into.
But they are what you'll get if you wish for new IPs, new IPs that leverage the new gaming concepts.
I don't think carts were about piracy, they were because previous attempts at CD-pased gaming (Sega CD, TurboGrafx CD, CDi) were horrible failures. Additionally CDs had horrible load times at the time and the need for them wasn't that big, the game content could still fit on a cart, only the FMVs that started getting used much in games (previously they were only used for crappy "interactive movie" games) and the CD music required CDs, Nintendo probably thought the negatives outweight the positives.
BTW, currently the Blu-Ray console is losing to the two consoles that use plain DVDs.
The PSP actually didn't get killed only by itself, the DS tapped into some massive market expansions with games like Nintendogs and Brain Age that the PSP was unable to contest.
I'd wager the Wii is getting bad support more because the GC sold so badly, because third parties all want the glory of High Definition titles since those are "real gamer games" and because third parties think noone can beat Nintendo on their opwn platform so they only put their worst teams on the job and provide excuses to shareholders. A part of the problem is also that they don't understand the "casual" market the Wii has reached into and just try to take their regular games, dumb them down by making them easy and shallow and calling that casual. The requirements are more time contraints than low difficulty, a "casual" player won't put in 3 hours in one session and if the game isn't fun when played in 15 minute increments or so (which for many modern games is less than the length of one cutscene!) it fails to appeal to that type of customer.
Miyamoto has full veto power on any game he participates in AFAIK. Still, the recent Zelda games were led by Aonuma instead who seems to be mostly about emulating what Miyamoto did instead of defining his own game. Well, if he's taking it in any direction it's more story heavy, kinda like Final Fantasy with a different gameplay between the cutscenes. This is the antithesis of the new generation gaming the Wii has started (short, hard, instant-fun games you can fit into a coffee break or play all day).
Super Mario Galaxy wasn't a primary Wii game, it was a regular game that ran on the Wii, just a sequel to an old franchise. The Wii's main games are the likes of Wii Sports and Wii Fit.
The Wii was not a gimmick, it was a component in a business strategy that had its main focus on a new kind of gaming (that being gaming that ANYONE can partake in*) and had motion sensing and such added in order to perform its role in the strategy. The sales numbers confirm that the strategy worked flawlessly and the responses from the former competition (they had a chance to compete, they chose to let the Wii run away with the new market instead) were just as expected in a best case scenario. The Wii is neither motion sensing nor "casual" games, it is the combination of both and only in that combination is it able to work.
*=No, regular games don't cut it and neither do dumbed down regular games. The new customer is neither stupid nor incompetent, just unwilling to deal with the interface and rules of regular games.
Not really, no. Here in Germany PC games sell well and stores allocate a lot of space to them. In the US they don't sell well and stores reduce their space.
When he was asked about Galaxy's planets resembling those of some Ratchet & Clank game he replied "I haven't heard of that game, is it a PC game?". He also doesn't play videogames much according to interviews. The fact that he played Portal marks it as special already.
Of course they sell that, the problem is that anyone can produce copies of it at the same price but without the "R&D" investment (i.e. writing it) which turns that market into a competition of who can manufacture printed paper the best instead of who can design the best data to print on that paper.
And writers.... um.... what? A writer can't exactly perform his book live. Sure, he could hold a reading but that's not very effective for making money. Writing isn't manual labor and can't be used like that.
I see it more as a Serious Sam competitor.