Actually, it seems to me that Nintendo and Sony were trying to top Microsoft who briliantly named their new console the Xbox 360. Nintendo said, "We need a horrid name as well. How about Wii!" And then Sony was all like, "But we've already said we're making a PS3. We need to give something a silly name. What do we have left that hasn't been named? The controller? Sure, we'll call it Sixaxis. That'll win us this competition."
A) You can point the controller at a tv from a comfortable position, it does not have to be held out in front of you. I have done it with a laser pointer and my arm sitting on the arm of a recliner.
B) The farther away you are from the target, the more play you get from smaller gestures. From my standard sitting position away from my tv, I can make a complete line from side to side or from top to bottom on my (32") tv without ever taking my arm off the side of the recliner.
C) None of this means anything, since, if a game is really good, you will probably find yourself unconsciously making exagerrated gestures and possibly moving your entire body instead of just your arm, or even just your wrist. However, if the game is that good, most people aren't going to care if it tires them out after an hour or two. They'll just remember how much fun they had.
I had both a PS1 and an n64. The n64 clearly had more rally good games than the PS1 did. The PS1 just had more games, and, specifically, it hard RPGs and Racing games, something the n64 significantly lacked. I don't actually like racing sim type games (I prefer arcade style racers), so half of that issue never bothered me.
To this date, I think the n64 is probably the console I had the most fun with. The quality of the games was superb. PS1 was great fora single player experience, but I was still in university at the time, in a house full of roommates, so the n64 got at least 20x the play time of the PS1.
There were genres that were invented on the n64, as well as techniques that redefined existing genre's. There still has not be an FPS on any console that compares to Goldeneye or Perfect Dark, either one. This is not nostalgia speaking, I still play these games occasionally. For all the framerate issues and decreased graphics, they are just that good.
In some ways, I think GC was more disappointing. It hasn't produced nearly as much that has invigorated console gaming. All the innovation and newness has been on the PS2, with GC and Xbox presenting a lot of the same old, same old. Of course, I suppose that's to be expected, the PS philosophy is to keep throwing rice at the wall, and eventually something will stick.
And now, in handhelds, the DS is doing what the n64 and PS2 did before it, it remains to be seen which of the 3 upcoming (or 2 upcoming +1 existing) consoles will actually move videogaming forward.
That's completely wrong. They decided to use the PS1 for several reasons, not the least of which was that the president of Nintendo (Hiroshi Yamauchi) antagonised some people at Squaresoft.
But the overriding factors were cheaper licensing fees (more money in their pockets), larger media (less compression needed, so their programmers could be lazy and still release games quickly), and the ability to include prerendered FMV (just for fun I assume). It was all these things combined that led to the switchover, and I doubt there are many people who could accurately say which was the more important.
Nintendo didn't have to bend over backwards, no. I don't think Yamauchi even had to apologize, but they did have to be willing to play fair with each other. Nintendo didn't bend over backwards for FF:CC, but they did give Square a very nice deal to get it, and in exchange, Square got access to a very lucrative GBA market. Which is especially good for them, since the GBA (and now the DS) appear to have higher attach rates than home consoles, likely for obvious reasons.
Better than Archon? I fail to see how any racing game, no matter its qualities, can be better than Archon. Most strategy games aren't better than Archon.
CoX is more grindy than WoW, but it is nothing for grind. You never played Everquest, DAoC, or Lineage, did you? Actually, any of the Korean developed MMO's are lousy grindfests, but that's because that's what their target market (Korean players) enjoy.
I personally prefer CoX to WoW, WoW got boring quick, whereas CoX didn't get boring until around level 45. But even then, it had compensation in the major task forces and Archvillain hunting in the later levels. Nothing gives you more of a sense of accomplishment than taking down a character who normally could two-shot you even at level 50.
Wrong and wrong. I suspect Marvel Universe Online is targetted more at the City of Heroes/Villains crowd than the WoW crowd.
And if you've ever played FFXI for PC, you would know that it was specifically designed around console controls. So much so that it was painful to play up until the 2nd expansion that allowed you to reassign movement controls.
Wow, that was totally not where I was expecting you to go with that. I know I, for one, wouldn't pay $200 for the souls of the damned. Guess we all have to stick to our budgets.
More importantly, without Square publicly announcing they were moving their franchies from Nintendo to the PSX, most Japanese developers would not have followed suit, and most of the games they released for the PSX would have headed to the n64, so the "incredible variety" of the Playstation brand would have been non-existant (as it was for a long period before FFVII came out), and Nintendo would still be on top. Square has, and has had, a lot of mindshare, among both gamers and publishers. If a company like Square says they don't have faith in a console, even people who don't play Square games will take notice.
That's a very uninformed statement your began with. Nintendo censored games because, at the time, there was no ratings system. They believed, as a company, that as many children played video games regularly, it was up to them to provide some measure of protection for said children. They took a lot of flak for censoring Mortal Kombat, and shortly afterwards were instrumental in the creation of the ESRB, ESA and other software ratings boards across the globe. Since the creation of the ESRB there has never been a single game censored on a Nintendo console. Hell, BMX XXX was more censored on the PS2 & Xbox than it was on the GC. As long as ratings exist, Nintendo has plausible deniability, so they place no limits on software they don't personally develop.
I think you underestimate the Japanese people and Mistwalker both.
First of all, if the games are good, the Japanese will take notice.
Second of all, Lost Odyssey looks pretty damn interesting. If I don't already have a 360 by then, it will likely be the game I purchase a 360 for (although I'm American, so I can't really speak for the Japanese).
Lastly, Blue Dragon will be out by the end of this year. Sony isn't going to have anything available to counter it that quickly out of the gate. And Nintendo only has a Dragon Quest spinoff series to counter it. Both DQ Swords & Blue Dragon are fairly untested, so it seems to be a fairly level playing field between the two of them.
Yes, they sold a lot of copies, but were it not for FF7, all of those games except Gran Turismo would exist differently than they are today. It was Square dropping support for the n64 which A) Drove a lot of sales to the PS1 away from the n64, singlehandedly giving Sony a lead in marketshare for the first time that generation (before that, the n64 was still beating the PS1 in sales) and B) Encouraging other developers to move away from the Nintendo platform. Some of the smaller developers had already switched for money issues, but the large publishers and big names followed Square's lead, and that is what boosted Sony over Nintendo. Had Square backed Nintendo, many other developers would have followed suit, and a lot of the great PS2 games you enjoy today very likely would have been GC games instead.
You don't have to sale the most games to have the most influence. Don't forget that the first 2 installments of GTA sold almost nothing, and it wasn't until GTA3 that Rockstar even became relevant as a developer. Just because their game sold more copies doesn't mean anyone gave two shits about them for most of their existence.
Which is why it pretty much has guaranteed sales. Everyone knows there was a Final Fantasy 3, they just never got to play it. So they'll buy it out of curiosity if nothing else.
That presupposes that this was meant to show that the Wii is "better" than the PS3, when I took the thrust of the parody to be making fun of both options relatively equally. So the PS3 is shown as a "large", "ugly" system with a "bad" attitude, while the Wii is shown as "fun", but ultimately "cheap". Nobody wins!
I understand what you're saying, but have you considered that the number 1 competition the PS3 has to face is not the Xbox 360 or the Wii, but the PS2? There's a very real possibility that the PS2 could end up being the dominant platform of the next generation as well, if developers continue to support it with new games.
Re:Did Sony buy this article?
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's not entirely correct.
The release day allocation for the PS3 is 500,000. 400k will go to the US, 100k will go to Japan. The full year allocation (for 2006) for the PS3 is 2,000,000.
The full year allocation for Wii is 4,000,000. They have not given specific release day numbers, but they are releasing in all 3 regions (+ Australia) within 4 weeks.
Conclusion: Wii will only be slightly less scarce than PS3 by the end of the year. Both will sell out beyond a doubt. 360 will benefit from this with a sales increase from people who could't find either of the other options available.
Nintendo has won the first battle. Both sides learned from this battle (well, we assume Sony learned something). This is still anybody's war. Nintendo has a fighting chance, but they're not guaranteed a victory. And 40m vs. 70m is much closer odds than 100m vs 20m.
D) This is totally hearsay, but as I understand it, the SPE's don't have access to main memory anyway, they have to go through the PPE for it. Secondly, they're not complex enough to run AI on their own, so you'd have to run AI on the PPE, and offload physics, sound and transformations to the SPE's if you want to have decent AI at all. Luckily, it has a completely separate GPU for video output, so that's something it doesn't have to deal with.
I suspect most people would agree that "Green Eggs and Ham" is the better book. Not that "Pride & Prejudice" is bad, mind you, but Dr. Seuss is clearly a better writer from a technical standpoint than Jane Austen. "Green Eggs and Ham" is also more enjoyable. The fact that the book is for 'all ages' is completely unrelated to that.
Take Zelda: Wind Waker for example. The main hero is a pre-teen kid who is supposedly fighting monsters left and right (while adults stand around talking to this kid like he must save them). The base story is actually interesting, but it's interrupted by gimmicky things like a talking dragon boat. To top it off I'm watching this whole thing unfold via graphics that look like a Saturday morning cartoon.
That doesn't scan with history. In every Legend of Zelda game except Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link and Zelda: Ocarina of time, the main hero is a pre-teen kid who is supposedly fighting monsters left and right (while adults stand around talking to this kid like he must save them).
In AoL the story is, you were the hero who finally killed Ganon, and now Ganon's minions are hunting you down to drain your blood to revive their dead overlord. Oh, and a Princess from a couple thousand years ago needs to be awoken from a magic sleep. These events are concurrent and the subject matter could be considered very mature. I mean, Link could have just said, "Screw this princess, I'm gonna stay in Hyrule Castle where people aren't trying to kill me." But he's a hero, so he can't get away with that. And yet, somehow, it is generally regarded as one of the worst games in the series.
As for your point about the graphical style, I suppose I can understand it, but the more I played, the more I enjoyed the graphics. The simple fact of the matter is, they were chosen to set the mood. The characters are much more expressive than is possible with a more realistic style, and the mood is set much more clearly. The graphical style is not kiddy at all, nor was it child oriented, it was a purely artistic decision.
I can't, and won't try to defend the gimmicks in that game though. They should have delayed the game and completed it, like they're doing with Twilight Princess.
Re:The Pros and Cons of the Mii Channel
on
The Wii Takes NYC
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· Score: 1
Create-a-player features are only just now starting to become popular in Fighting games. I have yet to see a console FPS that allowed similar functionality, and even with PC FPS, you have to build a mod to create a unique avatar.
Across the board functionality is what works in Xbox Live's favor, and it will work the same for the Wii. Being able to have multiple avatars per profile, each with different stats and rank may prove to be breakout functionality. Sure, there's always the possibility that it won't amount to much, but I predict that it will.
Nintendo has already started changing that with the DS. Most recent polls show that the number one demographic buying DS' in Japan is women between the ages of 45-60. That's hardly the younger target market handhelds generally sell to, and would be one of the main reason the DS is spanking the PSP so hard. The PSP sells to everyone who would normally buy a handheld, the DS sells to..well, everyone.
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Actually, it seems to me that Nintendo and Sony were trying to top Microsoft who briliantly named their new console the Xbox 360. Nintendo said, "We need a horrid name as well. How about Wii!" And then Sony was all like, "But we've already said we're making a PS3. We need to give something a silly name. What do we have left that hasn't been named? The controller? Sure, we'll call it Sixaxis. That'll win us this competition."
http://blog.wired.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=15 64091
B) The farther away you are from the target, the more play you get from smaller gestures. From my standard sitting position away from my tv, I can make a complete line from side to side or from top to bottom on my (32") tv without ever taking my arm off the side of the recliner.
C) None of this means anything, since, if a game is really good, you will probably find yourself unconsciously making exagerrated gestures and possibly moving your entire body instead of just your arm, or even just your wrist. However, if the game is that good, most people aren't going to care if it tires them out after an hour or two. They'll just remember how much fun they had.
To this date, I think the n64 is probably the console I had the most fun with. The quality of the games was superb. PS1 was great fora single player experience, but I was still in university at the time, in a house full of roommates, so the n64 got at least 20x the play time of the PS1.
There were genres that were invented on the n64, as well as techniques that redefined existing genre's. There still has not be an FPS on any console that compares to Goldeneye or Perfect Dark, either one. This is not nostalgia speaking, I still play these games occasionally. For all the framerate issues and decreased graphics, they are just that good.
In some ways, I think GC was more disappointing. It hasn't produced nearly as much that has invigorated console gaming. All the innovation and newness has been on the PS2, with GC and Xbox presenting a lot of the same old, same old. Of course, I suppose that's to be expected, the PS philosophy is to keep throwing rice at the wall, and eventually something will stick.
And now, in handhelds, the DS is doing what the n64 and PS2 did before it, it remains to be seen which of the 3 upcoming (or 2 upcoming +1 existing) consoles will actually move videogaming forward.
But the overriding factors were cheaper licensing fees (more money in their pockets), larger media (less compression needed, so their programmers could be lazy and still release games quickly), and the ability to include prerendered FMV (just for fun I assume). It was all these things combined that led to the switchover, and I doubt there are many people who could accurately say which was the more important.
Nintendo didn't have to bend over backwards, no. I don't think Yamauchi even had to apologize, but they did have to be willing to play fair with each other. Nintendo didn't bend over backwards for FF:CC, but they did give Square a very nice deal to get it, and in exchange, Square got access to a very lucrative GBA market. Which is especially good for them, since the GBA (and now the DS) appear to have higher attach rates than home consoles, likely for obvious reasons.
Better than Archon? I fail to see how any racing game, no matter its qualities, can be better than Archon. Most strategy games aren't better than Archon.
I personally prefer CoX to WoW, WoW got boring quick, whereas CoX didn't get boring until around level 45. But even then, it had compensation in the major task forces and Archvillain hunting in the later levels. Nothing gives you more of a sense of accomplishment than taking down a character who normally could two-shot you even at level 50.
And if you've ever played FFXI for PC, you would know that it was specifically designed around console controls. So much so that it was painful to play up until the 2nd expansion that allowed you to reassign movement controls.
Wow, that was totally not where I was expecting you to go with that. I know I, for one, wouldn't pay $200 for the souls of the damned. Guess we all have to stick to our budgets.
More importantly, without Square publicly announcing they were moving their franchies from Nintendo to the PSX, most Japanese developers would not have followed suit, and most of the games they released for the PSX would have headed to the n64, so the "incredible variety" of the Playstation brand would have been non-existant (as it was for a long period before FFVII came out), and Nintendo would still be on top. Square has, and has had, a lot of mindshare, among both gamers and publishers. If a company like Square says they don't have faith in a console, even people who don't play Square games will take notice.
That's a very uninformed statement your began with. Nintendo censored games because, at the time, there was no ratings system. They believed, as a company, that as many children played video games regularly, it was up to them to provide some measure of protection for said children. They took a lot of flak for censoring Mortal Kombat, and shortly afterwards were instrumental in the creation of the ESRB, ESA and other software ratings boards across the globe. Since the creation of the ESRB there has never been a single game censored on a Nintendo console. Hell, BMX XXX was more censored on the PS2 & Xbox than it was on the GC. As long as ratings exist, Nintendo has plausible deniability, so they place no limits on software they don't personally develop.
First of all, if the games are good, the Japanese will take notice.
Second of all, Lost Odyssey looks pretty damn interesting. If I don't already have a 360 by then, it will likely be the game I purchase a 360 for (although I'm American, so I can't really speak for the Japanese).
Lastly, Blue Dragon will be out by the end of this year. Sony isn't going to have anything available to counter it that quickly out of the gate. And Nintendo only has a Dragon Quest spinoff series to counter it. Both DQ Swords & Blue Dragon are fairly untested, so it seems to be a fairly level playing field between the two of them.
You don't have to sale the most games to have the most influence. Don't forget that the first 2 installments of GTA sold almost nothing, and it wasn't until GTA3 that Rockstar even became relevant as a developer. Just because their game sold more copies doesn't mean anyone gave two shits about them for most of their existence.
Which is why it pretty much has guaranteed sales. Everyone knows there was a Final Fantasy 3, they just never got to play it. So they'll buy it out of curiosity if nothing else.
That presupposes that this was meant to show that the Wii is "better" than the PS3, when I took the thrust of the parody to be making fun of both options relatively equally. So the PS3 is shown as a "large", "ugly" system with a "bad" attitude, while the Wii is shown as "fun", but ultimately "cheap". Nobody wins!
That might be true in the US, but a lot of people in Europe are going to buy the system that is out this year.
I understand what you're saying, but have you considered that the number 1 competition the PS3 has to face is not the Xbox 360 or the Wii, but the PS2? There's a very real possibility that the PS2 could end up being the dominant platform of the next generation as well, if developers continue to support it with new games.
The release day allocation for the PS3 is 500,000. 400k will go to the US, 100k will go to Japan. The full year allocation (for 2006) for the PS3 is 2,000,000.
The full year allocation for Wii is 4,000,000. They have not given specific release day numbers, but they are releasing in all 3 regions (+ Australia) within 4 weeks.
Conclusion: Wii will only be slightly less scarce than PS3 by the end of the year. Both will sell out beyond a doubt. 360 will benefit from this with a sales increase from people who could't find either of the other options available.
Nintendo has won the first battle. Both sides learned from this battle (well, we assume Sony learned something). This is still anybody's war. Nintendo has a fighting chance, but they're not guaranteed a victory. And 40m vs. 70m is much closer odds than 100m vs 20m.
How do you know Euphoria won't work on the Wii? What, specifically, are the actual requirements of the Euphoria engine?
D) This is totally hearsay, but as I understand it, the SPE's don't have access to main memory anyway, they have to go through the PPE for it. Secondly, they're not complex enough to run AI on their own, so you'd have to run AI on the PPE, and offload physics, sound and transformations to the SPE's if you want to have decent AI at all. Luckily, it has a completely separate GPU for video output, so that's something it doesn't have to deal with.
Take Zelda: Wind Waker for example. The main hero is a pre-teen kid who is supposedly fighting monsters left and right (while adults stand around talking to this kid like he must save them). The base story is actually interesting, but it's interrupted by gimmicky things like a talking dragon boat. To top it off I'm watching this whole thing unfold via graphics that look like a Saturday morning cartoon.
That doesn't scan with history. In every Legend of Zelda game except Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link and Zelda: Ocarina of time, the main hero is a pre-teen kid who is supposedly fighting monsters left and right (while adults stand around talking to this kid like he must save them).
In AoL the story is, you were the hero who finally killed Ganon, and now Ganon's minions are hunting you down to drain your blood to revive their dead overlord. Oh, and a Princess from a couple thousand years ago needs to be awoken from a magic sleep. These events are concurrent and the subject matter could be considered very mature. I mean, Link could have just said, "Screw this princess, I'm gonna stay in Hyrule Castle where people aren't trying to kill me." But he's a hero, so he can't get away with that. And yet, somehow, it is generally regarded as one of the worst games in the series.
As for your point about the graphical style, I suppose I can understand it, but the more I played, the more I enjoyed the graphics. The simple fact of the matter is, they were chosen to set the mood. The characters are much more expressive than is possible with a more realistic style, and the mood is set much more clearly. The graphical style is not kiddy at all, nor was it child oriented, it was a purely artistic decision.
I can't, and won't try to defend the gimmicks in that game though. They should have delayed the game and completed it, like they're doing with Twilight Princess.
Across the board functionality is what works in Xbox Live's favor, and it will work the same for the Wii. Being able to have multiple avatars per profile, each with different stats and rank may prove to be breakout functionality. Sure, there's always the possibility that it won't amount to much, but I predict that it will.
Nintendo has already started changing that with the DS. Most recent polls show that the number one demographic buying DS' in Japan is women between the ages of 45-60. That's hardly the younger target market handhelds generally sell to, and would be one of the main reason the DS is spanking the PSP so hard. The PSP sells to everyone who would normally buy a handheld, the DS sells to..well, everyone.