You're very wrong about that. Here are the list of good games for the Wii (that I have played, there may be more, but I don't play sports games, so I can't speak for any of those):
Rayman Raving Rabbids
Metal Slug Anthology (also available for PS2...eventually)
Super Swing Golf (totally awesome game)
Trauma Centre: Second Opinion (still good even if you played the DS original)
Excite Truck (opinions on this are mixed, but I enjoy it)
And of course, Zelda:TP & Wii Sports.
I beg to differ. I believe it is superior to the controllers on other consoles. It is considerably better designed. It is more comfortable, it is separated into two parts, giving each hand a distinct function, and altogether it only lacks 2 buttons (4 if you count the rarely used buttons on the analog sticks). What this means is that it can do everything a 'standard' controller can do, and also has motion sensing (x2) and direct pointing, and is easier to understand. What part of that is not superior?
I did. You said that Sony or Microsoft introducing a Wiimote type controller for their system will remove the Wii's advantage. It will do exactly the opposite, it will give the Wii a stronger advantage, unless the Sony/Microsoft solution is clearly better. If it is the same, or worse, the general market will see it as a knock-off, assume it is inferior even if it isn't, and choose the Wii, when they might normally have chosen an Xbox 360 or PS3 based on it's features.
This is why, when and if we see motion based controllers on the 360 & PS3, they will be very clearly different from the Wiimote in appearance and function. From a marketing standpoint, you run the risk of hamstringing yourself if you appear too much like your competition.
Both Sony & Nintendo offer one year warranties on the PS3 & Wii respectively. The Wii (at least for now) comes with a 3 month extension out of the box if you register it on www.nintedo.com (not sure if the PS3 has something similar or not).
They still tried to sell me an extended warranty at Best Buy. Even after I told them it had a one year warranty. It said so on the back of the box! I don't blame the cashier, I know he was required to ask, but companies have making profit off of other's gullibility down to a science.
No, tentacle monsters are not always male, but yes, they are predominately male. Some of the female ones do go around attacking men, but most of them still attack women, some even attack women and men at the same time.
Hemaphroditic tentacle monsters are actually pretty common, too, but I have to say I've never seen, or heard about, a boy tentacle monster and girl tentacle monster getting together. Poor, poor unrequited tentacle love:(
As to your 3rd point, the most accurate counts have 360 at about 6.3 million units sold worldwide at the end of November. Even assuming they manage to ship 10 million units (which is their actual goal), they're unlikely to surpass 8.5 or so million sold by the end of the year, and sales in January and February are always abyssmal for game systems.
And while yes, the Wii is based on the gamecube architecture, that does not mean it should cost $199. Do you think if Nintendo could have gotten the price below $200 they wouldn't have? The fact of the matter is, they couldn't produce, ship & retail the console for $199.99, so they threw in Wii Sports & upped the price to $250. Sure they're making a profit, but it's probably more on the order of $12 per system than $50 (not to mention the $10+ profit that retailers make on the console). The Wii just flat out has more hardware in it than the GC had, and is still about half the size, and miniaturization is a world of additional cost.
I'm not trying to say that $250 is a reasonable price, or that it can really compare to the bargain you're being offered in the 360 & PS3, but the majority of people don't think, "Whoa, I get all this for just $500!" The $500 bit throws them right off, and no amount of adds is going to make that price reasonable.
No, actually, no, that is not how the market works.
If Sony or Microsoft create a controller that works just as well as the Wiimote, they still lose. The winner is always the first to market with a functional concept. To stand a chance, Microsoft or Sony have to create something that is clearly better than the Wiimote.
Maybe if the Wii had launched with a whisper and no one knew about it, the competitors could have gotten away with introducting something similar and taking the market. But that's not what happened, Wii is a phenomenon. Sure, a lot of it is because it's new and different, and this is Christmas, but that means that everyone already knows what the Wii is and what the Wii does. A similar product just doesn't cut it, it has to be something that is so very clearly better that it doesn't look like just a knock-off to the average consumer.
Not at all. I'm saying that it's interesting that Nintendo isn't willing to adapt F/OSS software to this task and include it as part of their platform, given the potential for additional sales/interest. I have a browser on my computer, so why would I want one on a videogame console?
Perhaps because Nintendo does not make web browsers? Nintendo has never made a web browswer. Even in their previous offerings of internet service, they partnered with others to provide non-gaming content, because what they specialize in, more than anything, is games.
Even if they had decided to go with a F/OSS solution, they would have then needed to pay someone to modify it to A) work with the Wii and b) be readable and viable at a 480i/p resolution. Which, when you think about it, is exactly what they did. They went to Opera, a company that has experience porting a browser to multiple platforms with all sorts of restrictions on memory, viewable area and input, and had them make a browser specialized for the Wii. Which, all things told is a good thing since you're now buying a browser backed up by Opera's reputation, rather than a F/OSS solution which probably would have ended up being more expensive, since Opera at least has a major codebase already built to draw from, whereas any other developer would have had to do all the work from scratch.
If it helps, you can look at it this way. There are still people who pay for Red Hat Linux. They pay for the support. In this case, you're paying for Opera for Wii, a browsing experience fully supported by both Opera & Nintendo, something you don't get with Opera for PC.
Can you explain to me why a Genesis game like Gunstar Heroes takes up 98 blocks? I haven't been able to figure out why VC games are so big. I'm beginning to suspect that they do not simply have VC emulators for each system, but that when you download the game, you're also downloading the emulator for that system, cause there is no way that an old Genesis game is 98 Mb.
I think his point was he would be informing Nintendo that TRU is doing this. The BBB might have no teeth, but if Nintendo threatens to stop shipping products to TRU, they might decide it's more profitable to change their behavior.
You do realize that there is a significant population of the US that owns PS2s, Xboxs and even Gamecubes specifically as Madden machines. They buy sports games and that's, and maybe something for their kid now and then, and that's it. PS2's main success was capturing this casual market of people who wouldn't go near an adventure game like Zelda or Okami. Just because it's not board games they're buying doesn't mean the US doesn't have an equivalent (and all things considered, probably proportionally larger) market that would never consider Zelda or any game like it.
What is conservative in America is not the same as what is conservative in Germany. They've been around a lot longer, they have whole lists of different things to conserve we haven't even gotten to yet.
I'll reply to you, since you bothered to do the calculations. Now, go back, and use the console hardware sales and redo those calculations. You'll discover that more units of Nintendo consoles are sold per person in Japan than in the US. So, compare the number of units sold, and then the percentage of copies of each Zelda sold for the number of units that were available in that area.
Who knows, the ratio may end up being the same, but population is rather a silly thing to base it on, since population doesn't really dictate how many consoles are sold (IE almost twice as many DS' have been sold in Japan than have in the US, and more PS2's were sold in EU than in the US...although now that I think on it, EU is probably more populous than the US, since they have a much higher population density).
It's great that Blue Dragon made it into the top ten in it's launch week.
The bad news is, even with the Blue Dragon/360 Core bundle, it still didn't manage to outsell the PS3, and didn't even come close to matching sales of the Wii for the same week. There are still more Wii's and PS3's in Japan than 360's, and it remains to be seen whether Blue Dragon will have the legs necessary to give 360 a real sales boost, or whether it will fade out after this.
It's a significant accomplishment (although not quite as much as the summary tries to make out), but it's still pretty underwhelming.
They are thinking, "We are making this for the Japanese market where the DS is outselling all other consoles combined by 2:1 every week, and the reason DQ outsells FF every single time certainly isn't because of the graphics."
No, Mistwalker is a separate company formed by Hironobu Sakaguchi after he left Squaresoft (or Square-Enix as it was at the time). Blue Dragon was made with the help of Akira Toriyama and Nobuo Uematsu who always worked with Square (and Enix for that matter), but are free agents, not permanently employed by either company. Blue Dragon was released in Japan last week, and from early reports sold more Xbox 360's there than have been sold in a single week since launch.
But basically, at this point, Mistwalker & Square-Enix are in direct competition. Mistwalker has 2 360 projects (Blue Dragon & Lost Odyssey), both partially funded by Microsoft, but they've already announced at least one other game (although I don't remember which system it was for. Probably DS or PS3, it wasn't Xbox 360).
This article doesn't mention it, but Microsoft's stated goal is, and has always been, 10 million units shipped worldwide by the end of the calendar year.
So far, after 4 weeks of availability, the PS3 has sold ~187,000 units in Japan. That's less than the total number of units they sold at launch in the US. More importantly, each week since launch, they have sold increasingly fewer units. Assuming that they are still selling every unit they produce, I think the gp can be forgiven for not realizing the PS3 has launched in Japan.
No. Does interlink claim to have patented wireless technology? If not, wireless would be a logical extension to an existing idea over time. They created the NES zapper. They created a wireless controller for the GC. At some point they decided to converge the two technologies, and therefore that is not a valid argument.
Technically, the Gamecube had triggers as well, 2 of them, they just weren't on the bottom of the controller. They are referred to in the documentation as trigger buttons, as are the ones on the SNES controller, and in fact on the Xbox, Dreamcast & Saturn controllers as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You're very wrong about that. Here are the list of good games for the Wii (that I have played, there may be more, but I don't play sports games, so I can't speak for any of those):
Rayman Raving Rabbids
Metal Slug Anthology (also available for PS2...eventually)
Super Swing Golf (totally awesome game)
Trauma Centre: Second Opinion (still good even if you played the DS original)
Excite Truck (opinions on this are mixed, but I enjoy it)
And of course, Zelda:TP & Wii Sports.
I beg to differ. I believe it is superior to the controllers on other consoles. It is considerably better designed. It is more comfortable, it is separated into two parts, giving each hand a distinct function, and altogether it only lacks 2 buttons (4 if you count the rarely used buttons on the analog sticks). What this means is that it can do everything a 'standard' controller can do, and also has motion sensing (x2) and direct pointing, and is easier to understand. What part of that is not superior?
I did. You said that Sony or Microsoft introducing a Wiimote type controller for their system will remove the Wii's advantage. It will do exactly the opposite, it will give the Wii a stronger advantage, unless the Sony/Microsoft solution is clearly better. If it is the same, or worse, the general market will see it as a knock-off, assume it is inferior even if it isn't, and choose the Wii, when they might normally have chosen an Xbox 360 or PS3 based on it's features.
This is why, when and if we see motion based controllers on the 360 & PS3, they will be very clearly different from the Wiimote in appearance and function. From a marketing standpoint, you run the risk of hamstringing yourself if you appear too much like your competition.
Both Sony & Nintendo offer one year warranties on the PS3 & Wii respectively. The Wii (at least for now) comes with a 3 month extension out of the box if you register it on www.nintedo.com (not sure if the PS3 has something similar or not).
They still tried to sell me an extended warranty at Best Buy. Even after I told them it had a one year warranty. It said so on the back of the box! I don't blame the cashier, I know he was required to ask, but companies have making profit off of other's gullibility down to a science.
No, tentacle monsters are not always male, but yes, they are predominately male. Some of the female ones do go around attacking men, but most of them still attack women, some even attack women and men at the same time.
:(
Hemaphroditic tentacle monsters are actually pretty common, too, but I have to say I've never seen, or heard about, a boy tentacle monster and girl tentacle monster getting together. Poor, poor unrequited tentacle love
We hate PDFs. We hate the misuse of Flash. Most flash heavy websites feel like watching someone torture a nice guy you kinda know.
My fix for this was to favorite my del.icio.us page, and that has all my bookmarks already imported.
Of course, my computer is literally 10' or less from my Wii, so I will never, ever actually use this feature for more than screwing around.
Youtube full screen works perfect though. I scanned through some of my favorite vids last night.
As to your 3rd point, the most accurate counts have 360 at about 6.3 million units sold worldwide at the end of November. Even assuming they manage to ship 10 million units (which is their actual goal), they're unlikely to surpass 8.5 or so million sold by the end of the year, and sales in January and February are always abyssmal for game systems.
And while yes, the Wii is based on the gamecube architecture, that does not mean it should cost $199. Do you think if Nintendo could have gotten the price below $200 they wouldn't have? The fact of the matter is, they couldn't produce, ship & retail the console for $199.99, so they threw in Wii Sports & upped the price to $250. Sure they're making a profit, but it's probably more on the order of $12 per system than $50 (not to mention the $10+ profit that retailers make on the console). The Wii just flat out has more hardware in it than the GC had, and is still about half the size, and miniaturization is a world of additional cost.
I'm not trying to say that $250 is a reasonable price, or that it can really compare to the bargain you're being offered in the 360 & PS3, but the majority of people don't think, "Whoa, I get all this for just $500!" The $500 bit throws them right off, and no amount of adds is going to make that price reasonable.
No, actually, no, that is not how the market works.
If Sony or Microsoft create a controller that works just as well as the Wiimote, they still lose. The winner is always the first to market with a functional concept. To stand a chance, Microsoft or Sony have to create something that is clearly better than the Wiimote.
Maybe if the Wii had launched with a whisper and no one knew about it, the competitors could have gotten away with introducting something similar and taking the market. But that's not what happened, Wii is a phenomenon. Sure, a lot of it is because it's new and different, and this is Christmas, but that means that everyone already knows what the Wii is and what the Wii does. A similar product just doesn't cut it, it has to be something that is so very clearly better that it doesn't look like just a knock-off to the average consumer.
So no, there is no achilles heel there.
Not at all. I'm saying that it's interesting that Nintendo isn't willing to adapt F/OSS software to this task and include it as part of their platform, given the potential for additional sales/interest. I have a browser on my computer, so why would I want one on a videogame console?
Perhaps because Nintendo does not make web browsers? Nintendo has never made a web browswer. Even in their previous offerings of internet service, they partnered with others to provide non-gaming content, because what they specialize in, more than anything, is games.
Even if they had decided to go with a F/OSS solution, they would have then needed to pay someone to modify it to A) work with the Wii and b) be readable and viable at a 480i/p resolution. Which, when you think about it, is exactly what they did. They went to Opera, a company that has experience porting a browser to multiple platforms with all sorts of restrictions on memory, viewable area and input, and had them make a browser specialized for the Wii. Which, all things told is a good thing since you're now buying a browser backed up by Opera's reputation, rather than a F/OSS solution which probably would have ended up being more expensive, since Opera at least has a major codebase already built to draw from, whereas any other developer would have had to do all the work from scratch.
If it helps, you can look at it this way. There are still people who pay for Red Hat Linux. They pay for the support. In this case, you're paying for Opera for Wii, a browsing experience fully supported by both Opera & Nintendo, something you don't get with Opera for PC.
Can you explain to me why a Genesis game like Gunstar Heroes takes up 98 blocks? I haven't been able to figure out why VC games are so big. I'm beginning to suspect that they do not simply have VC emulators for each system, but that when you download the game, you're also downloading the emulator for that system, cause there is no way that an old Genesis game is 98 Mb.
I think his point was he would be informing Nintendo that TRU is doing this. The BBB might have no teeth, but if Nintendo threatens to stop shipping products to TRU, they might decide it's more profitable to change their behavior.
You do realize that there is a significant population of the US that owns PS2s, Xboxs and even Gamecubes specifically as Madden machines. They buy sports games and that's, and maybe something for their kid now and then, and that's it. PS2's main success was capturing this casual market of people who wouldn't go near an adventure game like Zelda or Okami. Just because it's not board games they're buying doesn't mean the US doesn't have an equivalent (and all things considered, probably proportionally larger) market that would never consider Zelda or any game like it.
What is conservative in America is not the same as what is conservative in Germany. They've been around a lot longer, they have whole lists of different things to conserve we haven't even gotten to yet.
I'll reply to you, since you bothered to do the calculations. Now, go back, and use the console hardware sales and redo those calculations. You'll discover that more units of Nintendo consoles are sold per person in Japan than in the US. So, compare the number of units sold, and then the percentage of copies of each Zelda sold for the number of units that were available in that area.
Who knows, the ratio may end up being the same, but population is rather a silly thing to base it on, since population doesn't really dictate how many consoles are sold (IE almost twice as many DS' have been sold in Japan than have in the US, and more PS2's were sold in EU than in the US...although now that I think on it, EU is probably more populous than the US, since they have a much higher population density).
It's great that Blue Dragon made it into the top ten in it's launch week.
The bad news is, even with the Blue Dragon/360 Core bundle, it still didn't manage to outsell the PS3, and didn't even come close to matching sales of the Wii for the same week. There are still more Wii's and PS3's in Japan than 360's, and it remains to be seen whether Blue Dragon will have the legs necessary to give 360 a real sales boost, or whether it will fade out after this.
It's a significant accomplishment (although not quite as much as the summary tries to make out), but it's still pretty underwhelming.
They are thinking, "We are making this for the Japanese market where the DS is outselling all other consoles combined by 2:1 every week, and the reason DQ outsells FF every single time certainly isn't because of the graphics."
No, Mistwalker is a separate company formed by Hironobu Sakaguchi after he left Squaresoft (or Square-Enix as it was at the time). Blue Dragon was made with the help of Akira Toriyama and Nobuo Uematsu who always worked with Square (and Enix for that matter), but are free agents, not permanently employed by either company. Blue Dragon was released in Japan last week, and from early reports sold more Xbox 360's there than have been sold in a single week since launch. But basically, at this point, Mistwalker & Square-Enix are in direct competition. Mistwalker has 2 360 projects (Blue Dragon & Lost Odyssey), both partially funded by Microsoft, but they've already announced at least one other game (although I don't remember which system it was for. Probably DS or PS3, it wasn't Xbox 360).
This article doesn't mention it, but Microsoft's stated goal is, and has always been, 10 million units shipped worldwide by the end of the calendar year.
So far, after 4 weeks of availability, the PS3 has sold ~187,000 units in Japan. That's less than the total number of units they sold at launch in the US. More importantly, each week since launch, they have sold increasingly fewer units. Assuming that they are still selling every unit they produce, I think the gp can be forgiven for not realizing the PS3 has launched in Japan.
Unfortunately, this is a US patent, and that was, I think, a UK court (or possibly EU court). The logic (whatever it might be) does not transfer.
No. Does interlink claim to have patented wireless technology? If not, wireless would be a logical extension to an existing idea over time. They created the NES zapper. They created a wireless controller for the GC. At some point they decided to converge the two technologies, and therefore that is not a valid argument.
Technically, the Gamecube had triggers as well, 2 of them, they just weren't on the bottom of the controller. They are referred to in the documentation as trigger buttons, as are the ones on the SNES controller, and in fact on the Xbox, Dreamcast & Saturn controllers as well.
I stand corrected. I didn't remember that.