I agree that sex as a taboo is responsible for a lot of the issues the US has. It really is not that big a deal. Once a child hits puberty, I have no qualms about them knowing everything they might ever want/need to know about sex. Even pre-puberty I'm not adverse to them understanding the concepts. And who cares if they see "private parts". They have some of their own, they're gonna have to learn to deal with them sometime. Making a part of the body seem as if it's naughty just confuses people, and leads to severe body image issues.
I disagree with your first statement though. Sex is a big deal. Everyone has sex (or should be having sex). It's a big part of our lives as human beings, and therefore it's only right and natural that it should be represented in our art, our writing, our business and our entertainment.
Whether you consider the gamecube a failure or not depends on what criteria you're considering. I personally don't consider the gamecube a failure, because I quite enjoy my 40 or so games on it, and will enjoy the 2 or 3 more I pick up before it's completely dead.
However, my point is more effective with the use of the world failure. I don't have to actually consider it a failure to illustrate a point.
I can understand saying that FFT begs to be portable, but there is really no comparison between FFT & FFTA. FFTA was a major disappointment. I felt cheated after I'd beaten it. FFT is better than it in every single way. Well, no, the original is better in all but one way. The original isn't portable. That's the only good thing FFTA had going for it in comparison.
Yeah, pretty words, but what Nintendo is saying now is the same thing they've always said. They're just saying it a different way so people will look at them differntly.
In the n64 years, when Nintendo said, "We make games for everyone!" people decided this meant their games were kiddy, and no mature person would play them.
Now, with the Revolution, Nintendo is saying, "We make games for everyone! See, we're focusing on casual gamers." Basically trying to justify their existing philosophy by pointing out they never said they were targetting children, people just interpreted it that way.
Want proof that Nintendo isn't ignoring hardcore gamers? What's the first thing Nintendo execs and spokespeople like to point out when someone asks them about the Revolution controller? "It'll be great for First Person Shooters!" Uh...yeah...okay. And, of course, casual gamers much prefer their FPS's to Bejeweled. I know when I give my mom a choice between Tetris and Metroid Prime, she goes for the Metroid everytime.
It's all a big show, with lights and flashes to confuse people. Nintendo isn't trying to change their philosophy, their philosophy is just fine. They have people from age 5 to age 85 playing their games. All this talk is just to change their image.
And since their image has been the primary reason for the failure of the GCN, it's a very good strategy on their part. Their games are still as good as always.
Never played PC games from Japan have you? There's an entire genre of sexually oriented story games. Sex can be found in a lot of games, and there are 2 or 3 sexually oriented MMORPGs in the works. But, I'll be honest, in general, games handle sex badly. Most games that focus on sex aren't actually good games, so I think they have a lot to talk about.
That's not entirely true, especially when you're speaking of Nintendo's core franchises.
Or do you really think the original Pikmin, a totally new IP & game mechanic, took more work and money than Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine or the upcoming Twilight Princess? I'm pretty certain of those 4 games, Pikmin was the cheapest & easiest to make. If there's one thing Nintendo is known for, it's going all out on their core franchises. They even spent tons of money on Metroid Prime, a game that was guaranteed not to sell well in Japan, just because it's so popular in the US.
It isn't laziness on their part. It's the certain knowledge that Mario, Link & Samus sell games, no matter what they're actually doing in the game (see the entire breadth of Mario Sports titles).
Yes, I agree. With n64 games they could probably improve on it, but control in NES & SNES games are already so simple changing the controls to utilized the revmote would just make things more confusing.
Yes actually, I do. My point stands. It uses gyros to detect angular movement, like you said pitch, yaw and roll.
It does not use the gyros the detect linear movement, it uses a sensor bar and triangulation. I don't have the exact equation to hand, but converting angular momentum into linear movement has a pretty hefty loss. If they want the controller to be precise in it's detection, it's probably more loss than they can afford.
And in my opinion, detecting that someone has tilted their controller is less of a big deal than detecting the x,y,z coordinates of an object in space as related only to an arbitrarily defined 0,0,0 position.
But yes, I can believe there are millions of PS2s in the sales channel. The number of retail stores currently extant worldwide, even with only 1 PS2 per storefront, would put the number of unsold PS2s right about in the million range. Assume a reasonable 3 PS2s per store front, and that's at least 3 million unsold. That's not an average, it takes into account no variables, that's giving the PS2 the benefit of the doubt and assuming no retail outlet could possibly keep more than 3 in stock without someone coming in to buy one.
I'm sorry, maybe I missed something here. At the beginning of his article, he says that current controllers give you three options. Do something, do something more, or do something different.
......what the hell other options are there? You either do something, or you do nothing. That right there is the sum total of everything that has ever happened, ever. How is the revolution controller going to change that? Sure, it'll change the way you do things, but it isn't going to automatically present you with more options that are actually possible.
This article tries a little too hard. It's great as a philosophical piece, but is wholly lacking in substance.
Let's see if we can figure out why this doesn't apply.
Oh yes. Microsoft has already manufactured the units. Not only that, but any profit they are going to make on the sale of those units they have already made! That's right, they sold the units to retailers. Once the units are out of their warehouse, they've made all the money on the hardware they're going to make. It matters not one whit to Microsoft, profit-wise, if you buy an Xbox360, at least, not directly. When you go to a shop and buy your 360, Microsoft neither gains nor loses money. Doesn't happen, doesn't matter.
Selling more units does not lose them more money than selling less units, unless they manufacture less units. The parent's point is, if they manufacture the units, but don't sell them, they lose more money than they do if they sell every unit they manufacture. Since the unit exists, they obviously manufactured it, and so buying it and giving them money will not somehow magically make them lose more money than they've already lost manufacturing it.
But again, they've already sold the unit. However, if it sits there unsold, then they can't tell 3rd party developers they've sold so many million units, developers lose faith in them, and less games are made. Less games are made, so less games are bought. The less games that are bought, the less they make on licensing fees (or whatever they're called), while still paying out money for marketing, running Xbox Live & whatnot. So, once again, buying a 360 only helps Microsoft. If, for some reason, you are bent on destroying Microsoft, stop people from buying the 360, don't encourage them to buy.
Uh-huh. There are so many things about what you said that are just wrong, so let's start with the most obvious.
Sony has not sold 100 million PS2's. First off, the 100 million mark was meant for the PS1, not the PS2, second, it was the number of PS1's shipped not sold. The PS2 has shipped over 75 million consoles since it's release, there are no concrete statistics on how many it has sold.
Second, unfortunately, the video game market is pretty much reaching saturation. Nearly everyone who wants a PS2 has one. At this point, most people are simply replacing broken PS2's. While it's a crappy piece of hardware that breaks pretty easily, that's still unlikely to account for another 10 million sales this year.
As well as I'm certain the PS3 will sell, it will not manage to overtake the 360 in 3 months, especially not if it's delayed until 2008. With a 2006 or even early 2007 release, you have people who will save their money, not buy a 360 to wait for the PS3. But if PS3 releases later than first quarter 2007, people will just give up on it and get either a 360 or Rev, and then won't have the money to afford the PS3.
However, I agree that Sony should release the PS3 in the US first. The Japanese might not like it, but it would effectively cripple Microsoft's marketing hype, and with the 360 doing so badly in Japan, they can afford to wait there.
Why does everyone just say the controller uses gyros as if that's the big deal. Sure, it has gyros, but that's fairly unimportant, since that's not how it senses 3 dimensional movement. That's what the sensors are for.
Now that's hardly a reasonable conclusion since even the best looking game for 360 isn't anywhere near being twice as good looking as the best game for gamecube. Not that it's fair to microsoft to make a judgement yet as the 360 is significantly different from the original Xbox to develop for.
What the parent was talking about, processing physics and especially AI, the PPC architecture used on the cores in the 360 are inferior to the Intel and AMD architecture's for branching predictions, so having 3 cores, with hyperthreading, does you no good if the cores themselves are inferior. Of course, the PPC architecture is also faster than the Intel/AMD architecture, so it's especially good for graphics hungry console systems.
It's interesting to note that the Revolution (which has been rumored to have 2 cores) is also using a PPC based architecture. It will get around the poor AI perfomance in the same way the GC did. Faster RAM, and increased cache. I believe the GC had about 4 times as much cache as a standard computer had at the time, which still puts it at have twice as much cache as your typical high-end gaming pc these days. I expect the Rev will have even more cache, so that's why the speculation is that Rev games will have better AI.
The second thing to consider is the graphics card. Whatever else the 360 may have, it doesn't have the graphics processor that the GC had. The Flipper GPU developed by ArtX (shortly before they were bought out by ATI) was so powerful that the CPU in the GC was incapable of handling even 50% of what it could do. The GPU is an improved version of Flipper with more RAM, and some of the advances ATI has put in their newer generation of graphics cards, like combined vertex/pixel shaders & whatnot. Since it will only be displaying at 480i/p resolutions, instead of the enforced 720p of 360 games, at 480 resolution, graphics quality will probably be indistinguishable between the two systems. Only someone with a high def tv running 360 games at a higher resolution would be able to tell the difference, which accounts for less than 10% of gamers. In 5 years everyone might have HDTV's, but in 5 years, Rev's successor will be debuting.
Personally, I've always preferred Nvidia cards to ATI cards, there are different advantages to each. I really cant' say what the ps3 will be capable of, since it's hard to say what the cell will be capable of since it's incomplete, and totally different from any CPU on the market today...even though it's also PPC based.
You're actually incorrect about that. Japanese people of recent generations, depending on what region of the country they were born in, are actually fairly fluent in English. There English is pretty bad to a native speaker, but it's more than enough for them to comprehend the text in games, movies, books and music with much more ease than your average American can comprehend the same things in Spanish. The Japanese know that English is the language of the business world, and business is very important in Japan. English classes are very prevalent in all schools in the major cities there.
Hey, now that sounds pretty sweet. I'd read reviews for Another Code which had said it was rather disappointing. No one I know picked it up, so I hadn't had a chance to try it out, but it sounds like a lot more fun than I'd heard. I may get that, since Phoenix Wright seems to have disappeared from every store in the city.
I was about to ask if you had a PS2. While I love my gamecube and all the games for it (I have nearly 40 now), there are still a lot of games on the PS2 that are more than worthwhile. I've got about 50 PS2 games so far, with plans to get more. Unfortunately the only game coming out for the GC I have any interest in at the moment is Twilight Princess. It seems to be a dying system, while PS2 still has Kingdom Hearts II, FFXII and a host of other games planned for it.
On the other hand, I still end up spending more time with my DS than with my PS2 lately, so I guess I'm not one to talk.
Not about the PSP thing. Part of the reason the DS is doing so well is definitely because the PSP was such a dissapointment. I don't know how many stories I've heard of people trading in their PSP and picking up a DS. A good strong game lineup would definitely have increased the PSP's marketshare.
That being said, you have played the games on the DS right? It took it a while, but it has a very strong game lineup, starting about June of 2005 (at least in the US, the strong lineup started in April 2005 for Japan). That means the PSP had a period of about 5-7 months to produce games of equal or greater quality to what the DS has to offer. This should not have been a difficult task, and yet it has not come to pass.
An important thing to note though, as far as the strength of the library is concerned, the majority of the system selling games available on the DS were developed by Nintendo 1st or 2nd parties (Nintendogs, Kirby Canvas Curse, Advance Wars, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing Wild World, Brain Training, Mario & Luigi). The rare exceptions being Phoenix Wright (Capcom), Trauma Center (Atlus), Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Konami), Feel the Magic (Sega) and Meteos (Q Entertainment). By no stretch of the imagination does Sony have the 1st party talent that Nintendo has, so that may explain some of it.
Also, as to your other point, about developers being unwilling to downgrade their games to run on the Revolution. Remember the GC was a more powerful console than the PS2, and that never stopped anyone from downgrading games (most notably Resident Evil 4) to run on the PS2. Most developers don't care about how powerful the hardware is. What they care about is how many copies of the game they can sell. As long as the Revolution is capable of playing the games at all, developers will willingly do whatever they need to to put their games on Rev, so long as there are enough Revs in households to warrant it.
So they took out the extra 2 control schemes they offered in the demo you got if you bought one of the original release DSs? That seems kinda odd. Did they give any reason for it?
The only game I have a problem with is Mario Kart, specifically because it requires you to use the shoulder buttons regularly while at the same time using the face buttons. Using one or the other, or switching back and forth between them normally, causes no problems. But holding down A, and trying to press R at the same time makes all the muscles in my hand cramp.
You know, that's weird, cause, thinking back, I've not actually met anyone under the age of 20 who owns one. I'm sure there are people who have them, of various ages, but I've never seen them. I don't use public transportation though, so that might affect it.
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I disagree with your first statement though. Sex is a big deal. Everyone has sex (or should be having sex). It's a big part of our lives as human beings, and therefore it's only right and natural that it should be represented in our art, our writing, our business and our entertainment.
However, my point is more effective with the use of the world failure. I don't have to actually consider it a failure to illustrate a point.
I can understand saying that FFT begs to be portable, but there is really no comparison between FFT & FFTA. FFTA was a major disappointment. I felt cheated after I'd beaten it. FFT is better than it in every single way. Well, no, the original is better in all but one way. The original isn't portable. That's the only good thing FFTA had going for it in comparison.
Superior Story, Superior Gameplay, Excellent Customization, it's a hard game to beat. The FF license is just gravy.
In the n64 years, when Nintendo said, "We make games for everyone!" people decided this meant their games were kiddy, and no mature person would play them.
Now, with the Revolution, Nintendo is saying, "We make games for everyone! See, we're focusing on casual gamers." Basically trying to justify their existing philosophy by pointing out they never said they were targetting children, people just interpreted it that way.
Want proof that Nintendo isn't ignoring hardcore gamers? What's the first thing Nintendo execs and spokespeople like to point out when someone asks them about the Revolution controller? "It'll be great for First Person Shooters!" Uh...yeah...okay. And, of course, casual gamers much prefer their FPS's to Bejeweled. I know when I give my mom a choice between Tetris and Metroid Prime, she goes for the Metroid everytime.
It's all a big show, with lights and flashes to confuse people. Nintendo isn't trying to change their philosophy, their philosophy is just fine. They have people from age 5 to age 85 playing their games. All this talk is just to change their image.
And since their image has been the primary reason for the failure of the GCN, it's a very good strategy on their part. Their games are still as good as always.
The phrase 'Star Wars: Adhesive Death Star' sent me into fits of laughter.
Never played PC games from Japan have you? There's an entire genre of sexually oriented story games. Sex can be found in a lot of games, and there are 2 or 3 sexually oriented MMORPGs in the works. But, I'll be honest, in general, games handle sex badly. Most games that focus on sex aren't actually good games, so I think they have a lot to talk about.
Or do you really think the original Pikmin, a totally new IP & game mechanic, took more work and money than Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine or the upcoming Twilight Princess? I'm pretty certain of those 4 games, Pikmin was the cheapest & easiest to make. If there's one thing Nintendo is known for, it's going all out on their core franchises. They even spent tons of money on Metroid Prime, a game that was guaranteed not to sell well in Japan, just because it's so popular in the US.
It isn't laziness on their part. It's the certain knowledge that Mario, Link & Samus sell games, no matter what they're actually doing in the game (see the entire breadth of Mario Sports titles).
I was simply expressing a pet peeve of mine.
It does not use the gyros the detect linear movement, it uses a sensor bar and triangulation. I don't have the exact equation to hand, but converting angular momentum into linear movement has a pretty hefty loss. If they want the controller to be precise in it's detection, it's probably more loss than they can afford.
And in my opinion, detecting that someone has tilted their controller is less of a big deal than detecting the x,y,z coordinates of an object in space as related only to an arbitrarily defined 0,0,0 position.
But yes, I can believe there are millions of PS2s in the sales channel. The number of retail stores currently extant worldwide, even with only 1 PS2 per storefront, would put the number of unsold PS2s right about in the million range. Assume a reasonable 3 PS2s per store front, and that's at least 3 million unsold. That's not an average, it takes into account no variables, that's giving the PS2 the benefit of the doubt and assuming no retail outlet could possibly keep more than 3 in stock without someone coming in to buy one.
This article tries a little too hard. It's great as a philosophical piece, but is wholly lacking in substance.
Oh yes. Microsoft has already manufactured the units. Not only that, but any profit they are going to make on the sale of those units they have already made! That's right, they sold the units to retailers. Once the units are out of their warehouse, they've made all the money on the hardware they're going to make. It matters not one whit to Microsoft, profit-wise, if you buy an Xbox360, at least, not directly. When you go to a shop and buy your 360, Microsoft neither gains nor loses money. Doesn't happen, doesn't matter.
Selling more units does not lose them more money than selling less units, unless they manufacture less units. The parent's point is, if they manufacture the units, but don't sell them, they lose more money than they do if they sell every unit they manufacture. Since the unit exists, they obviously manufactured it, and so buying it and giving them money will not somehow magically make them lose more money than they've already lost manufacturing it.
But again, they've already sold the unit. However, if it sits there unsold, then they can't tell 3rd party developers they've sold so many million units, developers lose faith in them, and less games are made. Less games are made, so less games are bought. The less games that are bought, the less they make on licensing fees (or whatever they're called), while still paying out money for marketing, running Xbox Live & whatnot. So, once again, buying a 360 only helps Microsoft. If, for some reason, you are bent on destroying Microsoft, stop people from buying the 360, don't encourage them to buy.
I so wish I could mod this "Practically Perfect in Every Way".
Sony has not sold 100 million PS2's. First off, the 100 million mark was meant for the PS1, not the PS2, second, it was the number of PS1's shipped not sold. The PS2 has shipped over 75 million consoles since it's release, there are no concrete statistics on how many it has sold.
Second, unfortunately, the video game market is pretty much reaching saturation. Nearly everyone who wants a PS2 has one. At this point, most people are simply replacing broken PS2's. While it's a crappy piece of hardware that breaks pretty easily, that's still unlikely to account for another 10 million sales this year.
As well as I'm certain the PS3 will sell, it will not manage to overtake the 360 in 3 months, especially not if it's delayed until 2008. With a 2006 or even early 2007 release, you have people who will save their money, not buy a 360 to wait for the PS3. But if PS3 releases later than first quarter 2007, people will just give up on it and get either a 360 or Rev, and then won't have the money to afford the PS3.
However, I agree that Sony should release the PS3 in the US first. The Japanese might not like it, but it would effectively cripple Microsoft's marketing hype, and with the 360 doing so badly in Japan, they can afford to wait there.
Why does everyone just say the controller uses gyros as if that's the big deal. Sure, it has gyros, but that's fairly unimportant, since that's not how it senses 3 dimensional movement. That's what the sensors are for.
Now that's hardly a reasonable conclusion since even the best looking game for 360 isn't anywhere near being twice as good looking as the best game for gamecube. Not that it's fair to microsoft to make a judgement yet as the 360 is significantly different from the original Xbox to develop for.
What the parent was talking about, processing physics and especially AI, the PPC architecture used on the cores in the 360 are inferior to the Intel and AMD architecture's for branching predictions, so having 3 cores, with hyperthreading, does you no good if the cores themselves are inferior. Of course, the PPC architecture is also faster than the Intel/AMD architecture, so it's especially good for graphics hungry console systems.
It's interesting to note that the Revolution (which has been rumored to have 2 cores) is also using a PPC based architecture. It will get around the poor AI perfomance in the same way the GC did. Faster RAM, and increased cache. I believe the GC had about 4 times as much cache as a standard computer had at the time, which still puts it at have twice as much cache as your typical high-end gaming pc these days. I expect the Rev will have even more cache, so that's why the speculation is that Rev games will have better AI.
The second thing to consider is the graphics card. Whatever else the 360 may have, it doesn't have the graphics processor that the GC had. The Flipper GPU developed by ArtX (shortly before they were bought out by ATI) was so powerful that the CPU in the GC was incapable of handling even 50% of what it could do. The GPU is an improved version of Flipper with more RAM, and some of the advances ATI has put in their newer generation of graphics cards, like combined vertex/pixel shaders & whatnot. Since it will only be displaying at 480i/p resolutions, instead of the enforced 720p of 360 games, at 480 resolution, graphics quality will probably be indistinguishable between the two systems. Only someone with a high def tv running 360 games at a higher resolution would be able to tell the difference, which accounts for less than 10% of gamers. In 5 years everyone might have HDTV's, but in 5 years, Rev's successor will be debuting.
Personally, I've always preferred Nvidia cards to ATI cards, there are different advantages to each. I really cant' say what the ps3 will be capable of, since it's hard to say what the cell will be capable of since it's incomplete, and totally different from any CPU on the market today...even though it's also PPC based.
You're actually incorrect about that. Japanese people of recent generations, depending on what region of the country they were born in, are actually fairly fluent in English. There English is pretty bad to a native speaker, but it's more than enough for them to comprehend the text in games, movies, books and music with much more ease than your average American can comprehend the same things in Spanish. The Japanese know that English is the language of the business world, and business is very important in Japan. English classes are very prevalent in all schools in the major cities there.
Hey, now that sounds pretty sweet. I'd read reviews for Another Code which had said it was rather disappointing. No one I know picked it up, so I hadn't had a chance to try it out, but it sounds like a lot more fun than I'd heard. I may get that, since Phoenix Wright seems to have disappeared from every store in the city.
On the other hand, I still end up spending more time with my DS than with my PS2 lately, so I guess I'm not one to talk.
Not about the PSP thing. Part of the reason the DS is doing so well is definitely because the PSP was such a dissapointment. I don't know how many stories I've heard of people trading in their PSP and picking up a DS. A good strong game lineup would definitely have increased the PSP's marketshare.
That being said, you have played the games on the DS right? It took it a while, but it has a very strong game lineup, starting about June of 2005 (at least in the US, the strong lineup started in April 2005 for Japan). That means the PSP had a period of about 5-7 months to produce games of equal or greater quality to what the DS has to offer. This should not have been a difficult task, and yet it has not come to pass.
An important thing to note though, as far as the strength of the library is concerned, the majority of the system selling games available on the DS were developed by Nintendo 1st or 2nd parties (Nintendogs, Kirby Canvas Curse, Advance Wars, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing Wild World, Brain Training, Mario & Luigi). The rare exceptions being Phoenix Wright (Capcom), Trauma Center (Atlus), Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Konami), Feel the Magic (Sega) and Meteos (Q Entertainment). By no stretch of the imagination does Sony have the 1st party talent that Nintendo has, so that may explain some of it. Also, as to your other point, about developers being unwilling to downgrade their games to run on the Revolution. Remember the GC was a more powerful console than the PS2, and that never stopped anyone from downgrading games (most notably Resident Evil 4) to run on the PS2. Most developers don't care about how powerful the hardware is. What they care about is how many copies of the game they can sell. As long as the Revolution is capable of playing the games at all, developers will willingly do whatever they need to to put their games on Rev, so long as there are enough Revs in households to warrant it.
So they took out the extra 2 control schemes they offered in the demo you got if you bought one of the original release DSs? That seems kinda odd. Did they give any reason for it?
The only game I have a problem with is Mario Kart, specifically because it requires you to use the shoulder buttons regularly while at the same time using the face buttons. Using one or the other, or switching back and forth between them normally, causes no problems. But holding down A, and trying to press R at the same time makes all the muscles in my hand cramp.
You know, that's weird, cause, thinking back, I've not actually met anyone under the age of 20 who owns one. I'm sure there are people who have them, of various ages, but I've never seen them. I don't use public transportation though, so that might affect it.