Will someone please mod this Troll to hell? We don't need to see this kind of BS here. He has nothing new to say, and what's worse is, he's got a sheer assaholic way of saying it, and the putdowns are infuriating. It's not censorship, it's called, "we all want to be able to ignore you, but you've got a big mouth, so shut up."
It takes time to build factories, hire workers, and whatnot. This is not an item that can just be thrown together at your local "Multi-Purpose Factory(tm)" It requires coordination with a slu of 2nd and 3rd tier businesses, who all have to figure out ways of increasing their output, and then new assembly facilities and equipment, and train new workers.
Computer companies run into these sorts of things all the time. Unlike huge auto makers, who can quickly change over one plant to do another kind of car, if one line takes off, Nintendo is essentially a "two product" company, they have infrastructure in place for making DSs, and another for producing Wiis. Since the two are entirely different in architecture, they can't just change over their DS plants to make Wiis (not that they'd be able to anyway, since DSs are selling just as well). Microsoft's in the same boat, they're a two product company: the Zune and the XBox, but their sales started off slow and ramped up, giving them time to build on their infrastructure. Sony has the luxury of being a massive hardware manufacturer, with literally hundreds of lines of products. They have a lot more resources they can swap out if things get tight in one area.
That's because you're basing value off of horsepower, alone. The whole point of this generation, and the point that Nintendo is trying to make, is that horsepower is a shitty thing to base value off of. You could "duct tape" two gamecubes together, and it wouldn't be able to play a Wii game, you could duct tape two PS3s together, and it wouldn't be able to play a Wii game. The value of the system, itself, is in its design philosophy... a much more valuable commodity than horsepower.
Even if the Wii used the same hardware as the GameCube, but used the same design philosophy as it does now, it would still sell about the same amount. Creative design is worth a lot more than clock cycles.
Got one here in Fairbanks, Alaska, on launch day. It was -30F the night of the launch. I got in line (outside), at about 1h30m before hand, got 46th out of 100. 45m before launch, they opened the doors and let everyone inside so they wouldn't freeze to death, by that time, all 100 spots were taken. Strangely, we didn't expect them to open the doors, we all came prepared to wait out in the cold.
So, if ANYONE was able to walk in and buy one at launch, their town was a fucking fluke. Fairbanks doesn't even have a big gaming population.
Yeah, actually I didn't personally like Mairo Sunshine much either... I just throught I'd throw it in there because many people did seem to enjoy it.
On the other hand, Skies of Arcadia is one of my top 5 favorite RPGs, and Tales is up there as well. In fact, until the last year, (Dragon Quest VIII, Suikoden V, Okami, FF12, Tales of the Abyss, Valkarie Profile 2, and Ar Tonelico) they've been, far and away, my favorite RPGs of the generation. Most of the PS2 RPG library really pissed me off up until last summer. I found the games to either be incredibly pretentious (Xenosaga series, Star Ocean 3, Grandia 3, etc.) or incredibly shallow. All flash, terrible dialog, lifeless characters, painfully cliche plotlines, and rehashed gameplay.
This past year has proven me VERY wrong about the PS2, but up until that, I was about to write it off as not having any RPG library worth a damn. I this past year, however, it has shot up to possibly even surpassing the original PlayStation RPG library.
Still, Skies is an incredible RPG that I will always hold dear. Sure, I first played it back on the DreamCast, but the GameCube port fixes so many aggregious errors that it made it a much better game. And even though Tales of the Abyss may get my vote for RPG of the past year, its graphics are painful after having played Symphonia on the 'cube.
Again, I disagree. We already have lots of "seriously sophisticated shit". Does Shadow of the Colossus suffice? And we certainly have more than enough shooters and action games to get past the "childish toy" mentality.
No, Shadow of the Colossus does not suffice. Shadow of the Colossus may seem sophisticated when compared to the average game, but it's still the video game equivelent of a geeky fantasy film. When something comes across that has the "fine wine" feel of Good Night & Good Luck, or something along those lines, we'll talk.
One last thing... if I may ask, how old are you? How many friends do you have that are not gamers? I find that can drastically influence one's opinion of the game industry at large. I find that most hardcore and younger gamers (and admittedly myself included at times), have such a hard time of "thinking outside the box" that they fall into some very common traps.
I'm 25, and yes, most of my friends are gamers... some are musicians. But, I also work in advertising... it's my job to try and evaluate what peoples' interests are, what peaks those interests, what they'll be captivated by. I understand that RIGHT NOW, gaming is still sort of a niche hobby, but that's changing quickly. Like any new genre, gaming has a "geek" stigma (this was true of film, photography, and probably many other older forms of entertainment), which is the primary reason why its appeal isn't as massive as it could be. Look at where film is, today. There are very few people anyone who can't find a two hour feature film that they deem interesting enough to sit down and watch.
It's most quickly being accepted by the blue-collar community, since it's heidonistic principals do not really offend them. To a degree, games have conquered the "geek" stigma by appealing to commonly blue-collar interests: sports, pop-culture, military, etc. But it's the white-collar and accademic communites, including the press, that has been the most resistant to gaming as a legitimate form of entertainment, because all they see is a valueless, mindless, heidonistic practice that offends their sensibilities. In this community (of which I admit to being a part of) they've made it into an ethical dillema. Now, you and I know that there is much value in video games... above and beyond what most people are seeing, but the game industry has made little effort to appeal themselves to that crowd.
While accademia may not make up a huge part of the population, it is probably the most powerful and influential psychographic. If the game industry were to win them over, it would be an incredible boon.
I was also interested in seeing if FPS controls mapped better to the nunchuck+Wiimote combo, but I have also heard that it's a similarly troubled scenario.:(
That's because developers have a problem with their brains being missing. They believe that "bounding box" turning, is "the only way"... and they've thrown up their hands. Everyone knows bounding box turning is crap, but that's because they're too stupid to realize that they've got a lot of other, much better options available to them, like using the nuncuck's motion sensor for turning, and freeing up the goddamn Wiimote to fucking shoot!
GRRRRR! This pisses me off so much. People are idiots.
Hell, I have yet to see it used in any way anywhere close to the one I've suggested. It's almost as if most game developers have forgotten that it existed.
Holding z-trigger for strafing is a killer for most people who play FPSs. It worked great in Metroid because, again, Metroid isn't an FPS. But for serious FPS people who are used to Quake and Halo, you have to be able to strafe, aim, and move at the same time. I'm not an FPS player, myself, but most of my friends are, and every single one I've talked with said they would not play a series FPS, as an FPS, if it had the controls like Metroid Prime. This is why Metroid Prime did not appeal to the FPS crowd at all.
What I'm suggesting is that the nuncuck's motion sensors be used for turning, not for movement. The analog control is great for movement, and should still be used... although side to side on the a-stick would strafe side to side, the way left/right arrow keys (or A/D keys, more likely) are used on a keyboard. Tilting the nuncuck to the left would turn you to the left, tilting it to the right would turn you right. Tiliting it downward would look down, tilting it up would look up. This way, all movement and positioning are controlled with the left hand, and then the Wiimote is used exclusively for aiming, shooting, and switching weapons (via the d-pad, which would work wonderfully).
Parrying is the hard part, but I imagine that if your thrust is parried, your 'on-screen' sword would be held up until you pull your sword back to the spot it was blocked.
That's exactly what I've been thinking. People quote this as a major problem for a swordplay game, but I think the onscreen sword being stopped until you move the Wiimote back, or down, would be relitively seemless, in-game.
Not to mention that there hasn't been a day, since the launch of the GameBoy, where a Nintendo handheld hasn't outsold all the other systems on the market. The fact that the DS is outselling the Wii is nothing new... the fact that its outselling everything by so much is what's really impressive.
Handhelds outsell consoles... always have, probably always will... we get it. Let's move on.
No, I don't think you get it... Super Mario Bros. 3 is THE BEST SELLING GAME, EVER, and that includes Tetris (not solitare, since that comes preloaded on every Windows computer). People may follow football because of their connections with the teams, but sports games don't sell as well as the average Nintendo franchise.
You're insisting that short, pick-up/put-down games are the only answer to mass appeal, but that is not really historically accurate, now, is it? You have to take into consideration that the moment that you get new people onboard, sooner or later they're going to want more, and suddenly, you've got a lot of people playing more involved games. Short games are short lived... either the person playing them gets bored of gaming and stops buying them, or they move on to more, bigger things.
Remember, there's a large portion of the population who won't play games because they think of them as dinky, childish toys... the game industry is going to have to come with some seriously sophisticated shit to be able to satisfy those people.
Well, that's going too far. And I'm a huge Nintendo fan, but I hate stupidity. First of all, even I'm not going to claim that the GameCube was superior to the XBox. Sure, it had superior lighting effects, but it had less shaders and was slower, overall. I'd say that Nintendo's instance on clean design made up for it, though. But the console itself wasn't more powerful. The GameCube is a hell of a lot more powerful than the PS2, however. It's absolutely PAINFUL playing Tales of the Abyss on the PS2 after Tales of Symphonia (even though Abyss is the better game, overall).
For one thing, IMO, Cartridges are the one thing that Nintendo did RIGHT with the N64. They made load time an ISSUE, and a generation later, they were able to develop an optical based system with practically NO load times. They may have fallen behind for 2 generations, as a result, but it's going to pay off in the long run. Oh, carts weren't more expensive to develop for, they just didn't allow for as much data, and FMVs were becoming the big "new thing", that's why they lost FF7.
But let's be honest, I hate the XBox, but it has the superior hardware, okay? Let's just admit that Microsoft's lack of infrastructure, and their instance at marketting toward jar-headed jock-gaming, made for a lot of crappy material, and leave it at that.
Even in dorms... no... especially in dorms... the biggest thing is still, by far, single-player games. Most college students play games as an extension of literature or film. People come in and watch the other person play. Of course, there'll always those hours here and there of Smash Bros, but if they want to real in college students, they need to lay down the single-player games.
Single player games will ALWAYS be the heart of the gaming industry. Never forget that.
Any FPS that uses the bounding box system for movement (like Metroid Prime 3), isn't getting things close to right. It's not going to be a big issue for MP3 because it's not an FPS, it's an action adventure game. But until companies wake up and start realizing that they can use the nuncuck's accellerometer to turn and look, FPSs are going to be weak.
Actually, it's going to be VERY difficult to get the Wiimote to accurately map motion of sword play. Accellerometers are only accurate if they have some kind of opposing force to calculate off of, that being gravity. This means that all tilting or rocking motions can be correctly interpreted, but declination, position, and swivel are impossible to detect correctly. If you had the person point the Wiimote at the screen (with the IR pointer) before each fight, that would work well enough, though.
Mario is the best selling series in the world, to date, according to Game Informer last month. Zelda is something like 7th. WiiPlay is not. THAT'S your mass appeal for you. Anyone who says that Mario, Metroid, and Zelda don't have mass appeal hasn't done their research.
Did you have a GameCube? If not, you have an entire library of amazing single-player titles to check in on. The GameCube's library might be small, but it's pound for pound, probably the best console library in existance. Some of the finest action games, finest RPGs, and finest platformers out there.
Skies of Arcadia: Legends Smash Bros. Melee Metroid Prime 1 & 2 Zelda: Wind Waker Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Tales of Symphonia Mario Sunshine
Just to name a few A+ titles. (I know I'm forgetting some big ones, but whatever)
As for the Wii itself? Yeah, there's not a whole lot out right now. Mine's sitting on the shelf, too. But that's to be expected, we're only 5 months in, and just beginning Q2 of the fiscal year. It's the inevitable post-launch game draught. The PS3 is doing just as bad, if not worse. The 360 didn't get rolling until almost a year after its launch. All the PS3 is getting is ports right now while we're getting minigame collections. Definitely not my thing, sounds like its not your thing either, but that'll change.
BTW: that's absolute SUCK about Super Paper Mario not coming out in the UK until November. The game industry really screws you guys, doesn't it? Super Paper Mario basically ends the draught, as far as I'm concerned... all the reviews are pretty amazing. If I remember correctly, first party titles aren't region coded, so you should be able to order SPM overseas.
Agreed. The industry has needed a major shakeup in design philosophy for YEARS coming, but noone had the guts to do it until now. Nintendo basically took the lid off of the boiling proverbial kettle. If the DS weren't evidence enough, simply the reaction from E3 should have clued everyone in.
Now, the degree of success is up for grabs, not even *I* thought that it would be THIS big, but my suspicions are not really that far off. The teeny-bopper XBox and PlayStation crowd didn't want to agknowledge the Wii's possible success, because of its threateningly, "family oriented" stance. A lot of the game press is teeny-bopper centric, so a lot of people were blinded by their own personal bias.
Yeah, forbidding a kid from getting a game system is not really that good. If you want to make him work for it, fine, makes sense... but in the long term, "forbid" is almost never a good thing, especially when it's something as benign as video game playing.
I was forbidden to have a game console when I was a kid. I made it through my childhood just fine, but when I went off to college, a few years in, I bought a PS2, then a GameCube, then a DS, and now a Wii. Now I'm a gamer, at age 25. I don't think growing up without a console did anything bad or good for me. In fact, in some ways, gaming got me through college... it gave me something to wind down with at the end of my day, my grades actually shot up once I started playing. It has nothing to do with what I learned in the game, but it relaxed and focused me, and gave me an outlet. I have fairly severe ADD, so it might be different with me, but all I know is that I was almost perminantly kicked out of school, but around the time I started gaming, I was able to turn my life around. I don't think it was JUST gaming, but that was one of many things that helped me.
I'm a chronic over-thinker, though. I could imagine that someone who underthinks things constantly, wouldn't benefit from gaming.
I really don't think things are much different now than they were with Doom and Wolfenstien. Sure, the characters don't look very human NOW, but they did to us back then. The fact is, the mind fills in the gaps, that's why you can get a stiffy from looking at a hot comic book chick. A comic artist friend of mine and I used to talk about this kinda stuff at length, back in college. Whether or not the character you're seeing, who's getting killed, looks real or not, doesn't really have much psychological difference. What does make a difference is how their death is treated.
Let's take the most far-fetched, abstractions, and do some sick experiments on it: our old friend the Goomba, from the original Super Mario Bros. When stomped on, the goomba in a Mario game simply goes flat as a pancake and disappears. Our mind doesn't really equate that as "death" per say, but more along the lines of "getting knocked to the ground, and then suddenly dissappearing out of view." Now, if the same goomba were to start bleeding out of it's stomach, clutch its internal organs in agony, and scream as it choked on its own vomit (I can just see the Penny Arcade sketch now)... we would interpret that in pretty much the same way we would seeing the same thing happen to a human. We've mentally equated the goomba to a human, since its actions are relatively understandable to us as being "human". The thing that disturbs us about death is the thought of dieing, and specifically, the thought of dieing in such a horrific manner. We witness the Goomba going through this agony, and we're forced to follow its thoughts as it spirals into inexistance.
In GTA games, we're privolage to the screams, no matter how fast an actual death would be (most of the deaths that would happen from a headon collision would be so fast there would be no screams), and we gain some kind of sick satisfaction from playing God with someone's existance... that we have the power of making them face their own mortality. We're not content to just see them keal over, one moment alive, and then dead the next moment. We relish that split second where we can see the person realizing that they're dying in a horrific fashion... communicated with a scream or tearful look in their eyes. It's Schedenfrueda taken to the ultimate extreme.
If its short lived, and direct, we take a kind of primal pleasure from watching the scene. But if taken too far and too personal, we begin to pitty the poor soul, we begin to feel what they're feeling, we start asking ourselves about how we would think in that same situation. Suddenly, we're no longer taking pleasure from it, but having to come to grips with our own mortality.
This last bit is healthy. It's the thing that ultimately keeps us from doing these horrible things, it brings violence down to a personal level. Ultimately, we despise it, and want to stop it from happening... to us, to them, to anyone.
So violent games and movies are trying to push that envilope, to the point where you feel the most control over the character's death, yet feel no grief for them going through their pain.
Well, the difference between progressive and interlaced video also brings up a host of other issues too. Interlace flicker on non-moving, horizontal lines, for one. The difference in cleanliness between interlaced video and progressive has little to do with the framerate, but in the issues that occur from interlace video.
I'd take 720p over 1080i any day, For those reasons alone.
As someone who works day after day with NTSC video (I'm a TV Producer), you don't know how much hate in my heart I have for interlacing.
What are you talking about? Human persitance of vision (the fastest that the human brain can detect distinct change in movement), is about 1/18th of a second. Anything above that is going to look the same: sports, movies, slow paced dramas, whatever. All stanard framerates are well above that threshold. The only reason that there are different framerates (24fps for film, 25fps for PAL, 30fps for NTSC) is because of the various physical limiations and historical usages of various types of media.
Currently, pretty much all digital devices (including the Apple TV) can output video at practically any framerate, up to and including 60fps. The only time you're going to have some problems is with NTSC CRT displays, which are perminantly locked at 30fps and 480i.
Seeing as though the Wiis game discs are DVDs, and they use the same audio and video codecs, I don't see why not. The reason, I heard, that they didn't allow DVD playback at launch was because licensing fees would have required that they jack up the price of the console by about $20, which they thought was kinda unncessary. I would agree with their decission, if I had the option of paying that fee on my own, as an upgradable addon.
Unfortunately, the rumors coming out of Nintendo have been conflicting. From the way they are talking, it sounds like they are launching a Wii2.0 system in Japan this summer, which includes DVD playback, yet the company that they've been dealing with, exclusively, on this front is a software company, suggesting that there is no hardware update at all.
It makes no sense that they would leave their early adopters in the dust so quickly, it's not like Nintendo to do so. I have a feeling that they have a strategy, and won't just ignore those of us who were eager enough to jump on board, it just doesn't fit with their style of operation, up until now. It's simply a bit disconcerting that they have let on that their will be a Wii DVD version, but no news of an upgrade. It may just be that licensing agreements prohibit them from saying anything until the deal is finalized.
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Will someone please mod this Troll to hell? We don't need to see this kind of BS here. He has nothing new to say, and what's worse is, he's got a sheer assaholic way of saying it, and the putdowns are infuriating. It's not censorship, it's called, "we all want to be able to ignore you, but you've got a big mouth, so shut up."
It takes time to build factories, hire workers, and whatnot. This is not an item that can just be thrown together at your local "Multi-Purpose Factory(tm)" It requires coordination with a slu of 2nd and 3rd tier businesses, who all have to figure out ways of increasing their output, and then new assembly facilities and equipment, and train new workers.
Computer companies run into these sorts of things all the time. Unlike huge auto makers, who can quickly change over one plant to do another kind of car, if one line takes off, Nintendo is essentially a "two product" company, they have infrastructure in place for making DSs, and another for producing Wiis. Since the two are entirely different in architecture, they can't just change over their DS plants to make Wiis (not that they'd be able to anyway, since DSs are selling just as well). Microsoft's in the same boat, they're a two product company: the Zune and the XBox, but their sales started off slow and ramped up, giving them time to build on their infrastructure. Sony has the luxury of being a massive hardware manufacturer, with literally hundreds of lines of products. They have a lot more resources they can swap out if things get tight in one area.
That's because you're basing value off of horsepower, alone. The whole point of this generation, and the point that Nintendo is trying to make, is that horsepower is a shitty thing to base value off of. You could "duct tape" two gamecubes together, and it wouldn't be able to play a Wii game, you could duct tape two PS3s together, and it wouldn't be able to play a Wii game. The value of the system, itself, is in its design philosophy... a much more valuable commodity than horsepower.
Even if the Wii used the same hardware as the GameCube, but used the same design philosophy as it does now, it would still sell about the same amount. Creative design is worth a lot more than clock cycles.
Got one here in Fairbanks, Alaska, on launch day. It was -30F the night of the launch. I got in line (outside), at about 1h30m before hand, got 46th out of 100. 45m before launch, they opened the doors and let everyone inside so they wouldn't freeze to death, by that time, all 100 spots were taken. Strangely, we didn't expect them to open the doors, we all came prepared to wait out in the cold.
So, if ANYONE was able to walk in and buy one at launch, their town was a fucking fluke. Fairbanks doesn't even have a big gaming population.
Yeah, actually I didn't personally like Mairo Sunshine much either... I just throught I'd throw it in there because many people did seem to enjoy it.
On the other hand, Skies of Arcadia is one of my top 5 favorite RPGs, and Tales is up there as well. In fact, until the last year, (Dragon Quest VIII, Suikoden V, Okami, FF12, Tales of the Abyss, Valkarie Profile 2, and Ar Tonelico) they've been, far and away, my favorite RPGs of the generation. Most of the PS2 RPG library really pissed me off up until last summer. I found the games to either be incredibly pretentious (Xenosaga series, Star Ocean 3, Grandia 3, etc.) or incredibly shallow. All flash, terrible dialog, lifeless characters, painfully cliche plotlines, and rehashed gameplay.
This past year has proven me VERY wrong about the PS2, but up until that, I was about to write it off as not having any RPG library worth a damn. I this past year, however, it has shot up to possibly even surpassing the original PlayStation RPG library.
Still, Skies is an incredible RPG that I will always hold dear. Sure, I first played it back on the DreamCast, but the GameCube port fixes so many aggregious errors that it made it a much better game. And even though Tales of the Abyss may get my vote for RPG of the past year, its graphics are painful after having played Symphonia on the 'cube.
It's most quickly being accepted by the blue-collar community, since it's heidonistic principals do not really offend them. To a degree, games have conquered the "geek" stigma by appealing to commonly blue-collar interests: sports, pop-culture, military, etc. But it's the white-collar and accademic communites, including the press, that has been the most resistant to gaming as a legitimate form of entertainment, because all they see is a valueless, mindless, heidonistic practice that offends their sensibilities. In this community (of which I admit to being a part of) they've made it into an ethical dillema. Now, you and I know that there is much value in video games... above and beyond what most people are seeing, but the game industry has made little effort to appeal themselves to that crowd.
While accademia may not make up a huge part of the population, it is probably the most powerful and influential psychographic. If the game industry were to win them over, it would be an incredible boon.
GRRRRR! This pisses me off so much. People are idiots.
Hell, I have yet to see it used in any way anywhere close to the one I've suggested. It's almost as if most game developers have forgotten that it existed.
Holding z-trigger for strafing is a killer for most people who play FPSs. It worked great in Metroid because, again, Metroid isn't an FPS. But for serious FPS people who are used to Quake and Halo, you have to be able to strafe, aim, and move at the same time. I'm not an FPS player, myself, but most of my friends are, and every single one I've talked with said they would not play a series FPS, as an FPS, if it had the controls like Metroid Prime. This is why Metroid Prime did not appeal to the FPS crowd at all.
What I'm suggesting is that the nuncuck's motion sensors be used for turning, not for movement. The analog control is great for movement, and should still be used... although side to side on the a-stick would strafe side to side, the way left/right arrow keys (or A/D keys, more likely) are used on a keyboard. Tilting the nuncuck to the left would turn you to the left, tilting it to the right would turn you right. Tiliting it downward would look down, tilting it up would look up. This way, all movement and positioning are controlled with the left hand, and then the Wiimote is used exclusively for aiming, shooting, and switching weapons (via the d-pad, which would work wonderfully).
Not to mention that there hasn't been a day, since the launch of the GameBoy, where a Nintendo handheld hasn't outsold all the other systems on the market. The fact that the DS is outselling the Wii is nothing new... the fact that its outselling everything by so much is what's really impressive.
Handhelds outsell consoles... always have, probably always will... we get it. Let's move on.
No, I don't think you get it... Super Mario Bros. 3 is THE BEST SELLING GAME, EVER, and that includes Tetris (not solitare, since that comes preloaded on every Windows computer). People may follow football because of their connections with the teams, but sports games don't sell as well as the average Nintendo franchise.
You're insisting that short, pick-up/put-down games are the only answer to mass appeal, but that is not really historically accurate, now, is it? You have to take into consideration that the moment that you get new people onboard, sooner or later they're going to want more, and suddenly, you've got a lot of people playing more involved games. Short games are short lived... either the person playing them gets bored of gaming and stops buying them, or they move on to more, bigger things.
Remember, there's a large portion of the population who won't play games because they think of them as dinky, childish toys... the game industry is going to have to come with some seriously sophisticated shit to be able to satisfy those people.
Well, that's going too far. And I'm a huge Nintendo fan, but I hate stupidity. First of all, even I'm not going to claim that the GameCube was superior to the XBox. Sure, it had superior lighting effects, but it had less shaders and was slower, overall. I'd say that Nintendo's instance on clean design made up for it, though. But the console itself wasn't more powerful. The GameCube is a hell of a lot more powerful than the PS2, however. It's absolutely PAINFUL playing Tales of the Abyss on the PS2 after Tales of Symphonia (even though Abyss is the better game, overall).
For one thing, IMO, Cartridges are the one thing that Nintendo did RIGHT with the N64. They made load time an ISSUE, and a generation later, they were able to develop an optical based system with practically NO load times. They may have fallen behind for 2 generations, as a result, but it's going to pay off in the long run. Oh, carts weren't more expensive to develop for, they just didn't allow for as much data, and FMVs were becoming the big "new thing", that's why they lost FF7.
But let's be honest, I hate the XBox, but it has the superior hardware, okay? Let's just admit that Microsoft's lack of infrastructure, and their instance at marketting toward jar-headed jock-gaming, made for a lot of crappy material, and leave it at that.
Even in dorms... no... especially in dorms... the biggest thing is still, by far, single-player games. Most college students play games as an extension of literature or film. People come in and watch the other person play. Of course, there'll always those hours here and there of Smash Bros, but if they want to real in college students, they need to lay down the single-player games.
Single player games will ALWAYS be the heart of the gaming industry. Never forget that.
Any FPS that uses the bounding box system for movement (like Metroid Prime 3), isn't getting things close to right. It's not going to be a big issue for MP3 because it's not an FPS, it's an action adventure game. But until companies wake up and start realizing that they can use the nuncuck's accellerometer to turn and look, FPSs are going to be weak.
Actually, it's going to be VERY difficult to get the Wiimote to accurately map motion of sword play. Accellerometers are only accurate if they have some kind of opposing force to calculate off of, that being gravity. This means that all tilting or rocking motions can be correctly interpreted, but declination, position, and swivel are impossible to detect correctly. If you had the person point the Wiimote at the screen (with the IR pointer) before each fight, that would work well enough, though.
Mario is the best selling series in the world, to date, according to Game Informer last month. Zelda is something like 7th. WiiPlay is not. THAT'S your mass appeal for you. Anyone who says that Mario, Metroid, and Zelda don't have mass appeal hasn't done their research.
Did you have a GameCube? If not, you have an entire library of amazing single-player titles to check in on. The GameCube's library might be small, but it's pound for pound, probably the best console library in existance. Some of the finest action games, finest RPGs, and finest platformers out there.
Skies of Arcadia: Legends
Smash Bros. Melee
Metroid Prime 1 & 2
Zelda: Wind Waker
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes
Tales of Symphonia
Mario Sunshine
Just to name a few A+ titles. (I know I'm forgetting some big ones, but whatever)
As for the Wii itself? Yeah, there's not a whole lot out right now. Mine's sitting on the shelf, too. But that's to be expected, we're only 5 months in, and just beginning Q2 of the fiscal year. It's the inevitable post-launch game draught. The PS3 is doing just as bad, if not worse. The 360 didn't get rolling until almost a year after its launch. All the PS3 is getting is ports right now while we're getting minigame collections. Definitely not my thing, sounds like its not your thing either, but that'll change.
BTW: that's absolute SUCK about Super Paper Mario not coming out in the UK until November. The game industry really screws you guys, doesn't it? Super Paper Mario basically ends the draught, as far as I'm concerned... all the reviews are pretty amazing. If I remember correctly, first party titles aren't region coded, so you should be able to order SPM overseas.
Agreed. The industry has needed a major shakeup in design philosophy for YEARS coming, but noone had the guts to do it until now. Nintendo basically took the lid off of the boiling proverbial kettle. If the DS weren't evidence enough, simply the reaction from E3 should have clued everyone in.
Now, the degree of success is up for grabs, not even *I* thought that it would be THIS big, but my suspicions are not really that far off. The teeny-bopper XBox and PlayStation crowd didn't want to agknowledge the Wii's possible success, because of its threateningly, "family oriented" stance. A lot of the game press is teeny-bopper centric, so a lot of people were blinded by their own personal bias.
Yeah, forbidding a kid from getting a game system is not really that good. If you want to make him work for it, fine, makes sense... but in the long term, "forbid" is almost never a good thing, especially when it's something as benign as video game playing.
I was forbidden to have a game console when I was a kid. I made it through my childhood just fine, but when I went off to college, a few years in, I bought a PS2, then a GameCube, then a DS, and now a Wii. Now I'm a gamer, at age 25. I don't think growing up without a console did anything bad or good for me. In fact, in some ways, gaming got me through college... it gave me something to wind down with at the end of my day, my grades actually shot up once I started playing. It has nothing to do with what I learned in the game, but it relaxed and focused me, and gave me an outlet. I have fairly severe ADD, so it might be different with me, but all I know is that I was almost perminantly kicked out of school, but around the time I started gaming, I was able to turn my life around. I don't think it was JUST gaming, but that was one of many things that helped me.
I'm a chronic over-thinker, though. I could imagine that someone who underthinks things constantly, wouldn't benefit from gaming.
I really don't think things are much different now than they were with Doom and Wolfenstien. Sure, the characters don't look very human NOW, but they did to us back then. The fact is, the mind fills in the gaps, that's why you can get a stiffy from looking at a hot comic book chick. A comic artist friend of mine and I used to talk about this kinda stuff at length, back in college. Whether or not the character you're seeing, who's getting killed, looks real or not, doesn't really have much psychological difference. What does make a difference is how their death is treated.
Let's take the most far-fetched, abstractions, and do some sick experiments on it: our old friend the Goomba, from the original Super Mario Bros. When stomped on, the goomba in a Mario game simply goes flat as a pancake and disappears. Our mind doesn't really equate that as "death" per say, but more along the lines of "getting knocked to the ground, and then suddenly dissappearing out of view." Now, if the same goomba were to start bleeding out of it's stomach, clutch its internal organs in agony, and scream as it choked on its own vomit (I can just see the Penny Arcade sketch now)... we would interpret that in pretty much the same way we would seeing the same thing happen to a human. We've mentally equated the goomba to a human, since its actions are relatively understandable to us as being "human". The thing that disturbs us about death is the thought of dieing, and specifically, the thought of dieing in such a horrific manner. We witness the Goomba going through this agony, and we're forced to follow its thoughts as it spirals into inexistance.
In GTA games, we're privolage to the screams, no matter how fast an actual death would be (most of the deaths that would happen from a headon collision would be so fast there would be no screams), and we gain some kind of sick satisfaction from playing God with someone's existance... that we have the power of making them face their own mortality. We're not content to just see them keal over, one moment alive, and then dead the next moment. We relish that split second where we can see the person realizing that they're dying in a horrific fashion... communicated with a scream or tearful look in their eyes. It's Schedenfrueda taken to the ultimate extreme.
If its short lived, and direct, we take a kind of primal pleasure from watching the scene. But if taken too far and too personal, we begin to pitty the poor soul, we begin to feel what they're feeling, we start asking ourselves about how we would think in that same situation. Suddenly, we're no longer taking pleasure from it, but having to come to grips with our own mortality.
This last bit is healthy. It's the thing that ultimately keeps us from doing these horrible things, it brings violence down to a personal level. Ultimately, we despise it, and want to stop it from happening... to us, to them, to anyone.
So violent games and movies are trying to push that envilope, to the point where you feel the most control over the character's death, yet feel no grief for them going through their pain.
Well, the difference between progressive and interlaced video also brings up a host of other issues too. Interlace flicker on non-moving, horizontal lines, for one. The difference in cleanliness between interlaced video and progressive has little to do with the framerate, but in the issues that occur from interlace video.
I'd take 720p over 1080i any day, For those reasons alone.
As someone who works day after day with NTSC video (I'm a TV Producer), you don't know how much hate in my heart I have for interlacing.
it came in 3rd place, behind SANDISK, for the Christmas season
Translation: It's really fucking rare!
What are you talking about? Human persitance of vision (the fastest that the human brain can detect distinct change in movement), is about 1/18th of a second. Anything above that is going to look the same: sports, movies, slow paced dramas, whatever. All stanard framerates are well above that threshold. The only reason that there are different framerates (24fps for film, 25fps for PAL, 30fps for NTSC) is because of the various physical limiations and historical usages of various types of media.
Currently, pretty much all digital devices (including the Apple TV) can output video at practically any framerate, up to and including 60fps. The only time you're going to have some problems is with NTSC CRT displays, which are perminantly locked at 30fps and 480i.
Seeing as though the Wiis game discs are DVDs, and they use the same audio and video codecs, I don't see why not. The reason, I heard, that they didn't allow DVD playback at launch was because licensing fees would have required that they jack up the price of the console by about $20, which they thought was kinda unncessary. I would agree with their decission, if I had the option of paying that fee on my own, as an upgradable addon.
Unfortunately, the rumors coming out of Nintendo have been conflicting. From the way they are talking, it sounds like they are launching a Wii2.0 system in Japan this summer, which includes DVD playback, yet the company that they've been dealing with, exclusively, on this front is a software company, suggesting that there is no hardware update at all.
It makes no sense that they would leave their early adopters in the dust so quickly, it's not like Nintendo to do so. I have a feeling that they have a strategy, and won't just ignore those of us who were eager enough to jump on board, it just doesn't fit with their style of operation, up until now. It's simply a bit disconcerting that they have let on that their will be a Wii DVD version, but no news of an upgrade. It may just be that licensing agreements prohibit them from saying anything until the deal is finalized.