I couldn't have put it better myself. Do we want our game worlds to suck as much as the real world? I mean, outside of the opportunity to correct the bad things going on (kill bad guys).
You really don't prefer realism. You may think you do, and on the spectrum of things, you may prefer games that are MORE realistic than most people, but everyone always has a line drawn somewhere. First and formost, you don't want the game to be actually real, so that YOU actually die when the character gets shot. You don't want to have to worry about the character's bladder being full in the middle of a combat and having to go take the time to urinate. There are ALWAYS limits on reality. There's no such thing as wanting pure realism. If you wanted pure realism you wouldn't even be playing a game, you'd walk outside and do whatever you wanted to do. At some level you're playing a game to escape reality, most likely the mundane world that most people's lives revolve around.
I see real ads as the equivalent of character urination. Maybe there's 0.01% of the population who would actually like to add a "bladder gauge" to their game (and no, not goofy stuff like Postal) so that they had to worry about their character going to the bathroom. But for the vast majority of us, we don't want to have to deal with that. It's one of those mundane tasks that we'd like to escape from when playing a video game. Even if we were to be given the option to pee, we'd like to be able to do something interesting with it, like pee in people's faces (Postal again). So, why not the equivalent with ads? Make it interesting, like, spoof real ads with fake ones. Be creative so we have something to be entertained by if we're interested.
No, real ads are a cop out. The only positive to real ads is $$$$ made by game makers. 99.9% of the time, there could have been a more interesting way of approaching the problem of in-game billboards, and one that doesn't destroy the precious realism.
It's great to have real life spinoffs, but it's always better when they're not ACTUALLY the real thing, but some kind of takeoff. Okay, so "Pizza Butt" is rediculously immature (it fit with the style of game), but avoid using actual products. The problem is, people don't want to know that the company is actually getting paid for product placement, that's the whole issue in the first place. Don't sell out. Whatever you do beyond that, is fine with me.
Sorry, but I gotta say, my favorite video game ads are fake ones. Excite Truck (Nintendo) did a great job having ads that immitated real-life ones, but actually weren't, and they were interesting to look at because it sorta exposed just how insanely ad-heavy race track circuits are. Other games like Fallout and BioShock have taken ads and run wild, plastering landscapes with fake ads that mimick real ones, but sacrastically mock the whole industry. I know it might not be a great boon for ClearChannel, but it's fun as hell for the gamer!
Fact is, we play video games to escape from mundane reality. Sure, we (sometimes) want it to be realistic enough to really immerse ourselves in a similar world, but we also want to bypass all the tedious and boring aspects of normal everyday life, and advertising is one of them. Gamers want to jump 10 feet in the air, take 10 bullets to the chest, and pull off massive damage that would make Rambo look like a sissy. So, to me, this is hypocracy. There's no more fun in looking at "real" ads than having break every couple hours for your character to have to go urinate.
Here's my advice. Have FUN with the ads, and make them fun for the player. Virtual Times Square? GREAT! Create goofy ads that I can chuckle at if I choose to look at them. Real ads have the unfortunate side-effect of possibly cheapening the experience in the mind of the gamer. Some people are perfectly fine with in-movie or in-game advertising, but some of us are turned off by it. It's just one more thing that could eventually hurt a gamer's experience. Noone's going to be offended by fake ads, the most that could happen is that people don't find them interesting, but then they'll just not look at them, but at least you won't look to some people like you've sold out.
But that's not REALLY the reason why this guy is writing this article, now, is he? He's simply justifying the use of product placement in games because it'll probably make him money somehow. Excuses, excuses. There are better things to do in place of real ads. My take is that this guy is just a shill.
Though I disagree with the parent's premise, and you're technically right about his "missapostrophiation", the noun in question was both plural and implying ownership. Thus the correct punctuation would be "kids'".
Eh, actually I have to agree with the parent. Even as a gamer, I admit that I could probably do with a bit morereading in my life again. I kind of miss it, I used to cruise through books, and they used to have a big daily influence over my life. I remember eating up Cryptonomicon last spring, it will always mark the period of time where I got together with my girlfriend, one of the happiest times in my life, yet. I think some video games can do similar, especially long epic RPGs with lots of storytelling (Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Final Fantasy, etc) but it's been a while since I saw anything like that, sine the current fad seems to be shorter more action oriented games. I dunno, I still have to admit that reading is probably more fullfilling.
Compare reading Shakespeare to seeing on stage, both highly respected forms of entertainment/art. I think your mind is much more expanded by reading it because you're performing the extra step of creating the imagery in your head instead of it being fed to you. There is some reality that non-graphic oriented story telling is very good for the brain.
From what I heard, it promised A LOT more than it delivered. I remember friends raiving about it for months like it was going to be the second coming of Jesus. The trailers even had me peaked. But I hear that the control system was messy, the game was repeatitive, and short. Marketting hype can often backfire on you if you're not careful. That's a big problem. It seems that it sorta deserved its tank.
I would argue that the SNES was the only example of the most powerful system winning a generation. Yes, the Genesis had a CD Drive, yes it had 32bit graphics... but not out of the box, and only later. What matters to the large majority of game sales is what comes right out of the box at launch. Probably the only exception I can think of was the PlayStation's analog controllers, which became so universal that people often forget that the PS originally didn't launch with A-sticks. Controllers are cheep... addon CD drives and 32bit accellerators are expensive and scarry.
From a technical standpoint, the N64 was pretty much supperior to the PS in every way, except for it's media system (which is arguable to a point because of loading times, but it's clear now that the CD-Drive was a great marketting boon). Even though the N64 had a low texture cache, it's handing and display of 3D graphics was far superior to the PS1, employing dithering techniques and lighting effects that the PS1 could only dream of, and the PS2 even only partially matched (the PS3 still lacks many onboard dithering processes), no I'm not suggesting that the N64 is anyway better than the PS2, but that Sony has decided to go down a specific route in their attention to 3D graphics, mainly polygon count and texture detail, where as Nintendo and Microsoft have concentrated more on lighting/shadowing and post-processing (dithering/anti-aliasing).
That's nice and good, until you realize that the best selling game system out there is essentially single player: the Nintendo DS. Yes the DS has multiplayer capability, though it is very basic and heavily locked down. Add to it that about 95% of DS games are essentially single player, with multiplayer functionality just tacked on, I think it sort of brings down the idea that multiplayer functionality is somehow central to a game's success. Two of the most played games ever: Solitare and Tetris. These are not lonely examples either. GTA:IV was the top selling console game for a year, and practically every handheld game, are all single player and very successful. I don't know what their study is concentrating on, but the actual sales data doesn't match up.
I disagree that Microsoft has a larger range of products than Apple. They may have larger install bases, they may come in more flavors, but for every product that Microsoft has, there is almost always virtually an Apple product that matches up. A website is about marketing and support, of which both companies have to do with all their products. iWork has to have just as good support as Office does. XServe has to have just as good marketing and support as Microsoft's server software. It's the ability of a company to be able to hierarchically subdivide and arrange content that allows for a smooth website. What the hell does cellular phone connectivity (iPhone) have to do with professional audio production software (Logic)... virtually nothing, although Apple is very good about being able to juggle them both, and still keep a cohesive feel to their brand.
What you say might be true if Microsoft was good at juggling their top level of content, but less so in the depths of their website. But simply move from high profile sections like Windows to Office, and you get totally different branding, down to even different versions of the Microsoft logo, and different Microsoft website headers and banners. The PM at Microsoft even said it himself, which means I expect that to improve. So I don't think there's a valid argument here about having to juggle too many different balls.
Also, everyone's a consumer, be it a business or home user. When it really comes down to it, there's no clear marketting dilleniation between the two, maybe demographics, but both companies have to cover ALL of those, so it's kind of a moot point.
Apple's website is often considered one of the most consitant and well constructed sites on the internet. Microsoft has done a pretty good job, but considering what they're up against, they should be proud to even be in the same sentance (as far as websites are concerned). Apple's unifomity and consistancy in their webdesign is nothing except extroardinary. It's so consistant that sometimes it takes me a second to realize which part of the website I'm at. This is not really a bad thing in an age where with most websites, you have to spend 30 seconds relearning the navigation system for every page. Apple really's design really breathes, with no clutters of information, and everything segrigated to very intuitive regions. In the end, grayscale color schemes ALMOST always win out. After months of use, colors always eventually get irritating, high contrasts lose their "cool" factor, and you're left feeling like your looking at a candy wrapper. OSs and websites should almost always revolve around neutral colors, because you're never sure what's going to clash horribly, or become illegible with the design. That said, I don't think Microsoft has really broken those rules, their low contrast blue is quite appealing... very MacOS Aqua-like, actually... but once again, they're not very consistant with it. Just one page in, "Windows 7" and you're faced with an ugly green stripe across the center of the page that looks horribly out of place next to the wispy blue. Microsoft REALLY needs to work on their color scheme consistancy. They have virtually no universal branding.
Skies got a great port to the GameCube... better in every way except for sound quality (weird).
Grandia II however was a porting DESASTER. The PS2 port is sometimes considered one of the worst ports in the history of games, and the PC port (which I bought), didn't support Windows2000/XP even though it came out AFTER XP WAS RELEASED!!!! They even released updates to the Win98 version and made a statement refusing to update it. I actually got it to work on WinXP, but the shadows were all screwed up. So Grandia II (which I consider far-and-away the best in the series) never saw a decent release on a surviving console/OS. Grandia III was GameArts' own damn fault though.
Anyone else get the feeling that the good ol' "classic" (which I still think of as the default iPod) is on its way out? They've been adding feature after feature to the Nano and Touch line, and really haven't done anything with the classic except for increasing the hard drive size to utterly useless quantities. That said, it's the one reason that I will ONLY buy a classic... with over 350 albums on my iPod 5G, no Nano or Touch has the capacity to contain my library. My HD-based 5G has lasted me 3 and a half years, my FlashROM based iPhone 3G died in one year... I don't trust FlashROM based things quite fully yet, and they're far more expensive. My 5G is getting very beat up (even with it's case, which has fallen apart), and eventually will probably kick the bucket. I'm just hoping there will be an HD-based iPod left on the market when it does. Or that the Nano will have a 60GB version available. I also prefer the size of the classic to the Nano, it just feels better.
Yes, it will. I can speak from personal experience. My iPhone 3G died a few weeks ago, I purchased a new 3Gs and when I sync'ed it with my computer, everything popped back in... right down to the home screen layout, my email account settings, everything. So the answer to your question is an absolute and unequivicable "yes".
On top of that, your iTMS account stores all information about everything you've purchased. When you purchase anything on iTMS, be it a song, an app, or whatever, you effectively own the license to download that file as many times as you need. If you delete an app off your phone, and then decided to redownload it, the download is free.
On the other hand, noone had been entirely successfull with an optical-based console yet, either. The TurboDuo suffered greatly because of poor hardware and marketing, and even though the SegaCD did alright, things were already looking a little bit dubious for Sega because of bad business practices (hardware tack-on requirements). Add to that the disgracefull 3DO, and you have a string of bad console designs with optical media. Granted, none of these failours had much to do with the adoption of optical media, but it didn't exactly make a company want to rush out and follow their lead, either. The first truely powerful argument in favor of optical media was the PlayStation, and that saw it's first successes well after the N64's design was underway.
Put yourself back in 1993. Up until that point, cartridge space had been limited, but there really hadn't been any size problems thus far. If anything, there had been more concern about games starting up quickly and running smoothly. Now, if you're a console manufacturer back then, and you're faced with the choice of adopting a new media which offers much more storage capacity, when you had faced very little storage problems... but that media would probably increase load times considerably? What choice would you make? Not exactly an easy one.
Look, the PlayStation turned out to be a much more successfull system, and probably more great games were released for it, so in hindsight, Nintendo dropped the ball. However, it opened up a serious new problem that has never been properly dealt with (and Sony has been the worst to deal with it): loadtimes. Nintendo waited to go to optical until they had seriously figured out how to get past loadtimes, the GameCube had some serious hardware and software solutions built in, as well as requirements for developers, to reduce load times. Microsoft has done a half-decent job with this, but Sony still seems to consider loadtimes to be a non-issue, and this bothers me.
It's very obvious that there is a fairly deep schism in whether or not players care about graphis. This stems from the two fundimental reasons why we play video games. The first is to "play" the game, the second is to "experience" the game. Many people are a mixture of these two things, but you'll find a lot of people (especially geeks on slashdot) that don't care or even WANT to experience, they just want to play. Playing is challenging one's mental and physical abilities. SHMuP space shooters are a good example of a game with a high level of play with low level of experience. The purpose of a SHMuP is to challenge oneself through rediculously difficult trials. There is no attempt to experience the feeling of actually being in a spaceship, as most of the action is highly stylized and simply an excuse for the gameplay. On the flipside, you have the experiencial side of gaming, which stems from a pure entertainment/artistic side of us which wants to experience an interactive environment. RPGs and adventure games tend to appeal to the experiencial side of gaming more than most genres. Often, the gameplay is actually secondary to the experience: the gameplay being simply a reason to be in the environment, and to give direction in order to move a player one experience to another.
Every player has a certain balance between play and experience that they wish to have, though this also can change depending upon mood or state of mind. Most gamers tend to want their games to have a mixture of both. However, there are a few gamers who play games for ONE reason alone: the challenge. They have no interest in the gaming experience, in fact, many of them feel that the experiencial side gets in the way of their ability to achieve mastery over the gameplay.
Even within these reasons for playing, there are different stylistic differences: some experiencial players wish to have a high level of control over their experience, while others want to let go and be taken on a dramatic journey. Some experiencial players emphasize realism, others wish to be immersed in stylized environments that are drastically different from the world we normally experience.
There are no real right and wrongs in all of this. The Video Game genre spans an incredibly wide area of interests and philosphies. It's more a meta-genre, incorporating elements of both arts/entertainment as well as skill challenges. Some people subscribe to the notion that one aspect of these is wrong. If someone suggests that experience has no place in games and the genres of cinema and literature being fully capable of sustaining a person's experiencial desire, then I ask them, "but what if I wish to be an interactive part in exploring and controlling a fantasy world?" they're usually at loss for an answer, because games is the only place in which that is possible. So games provide an outlet for certain aspects of experience and challenge that no other genre can. Therefor, both are reasonable and both are here to stay. Both are worthwhile endevours to both create and play.
Thats about how long it took to make a wolf look like a chihuahua. I'd say that's plenty of time.
Ahhh, but through careful selective breeding. Breeding can increase evolutionary speed by about 1000 fold. It's not fair to compare the selective breeding of a species to natural selection.
You can make a wolf into a chihuahua in probably less than 20 generations (20-40 years), if you have a big enough starting pool and know what to look for.
I have to agree with you, the GameCube button configuration is wonderful. Having different shapes for every button was a wonderful idea, it makes things much more immediate and intuitive than simply having identical buttons in different places. The big "A" was always primary functionality, the smaller "B" was secondary funcionality, and the X and Y were different auxillery functionality, but even they had their own unique feel. The Shoulder buttons were wonderful too. Sure the "Z" was kinda junky, but it was hardly ever used, and it was mostly used like a menu button or something.
However, different controllers excel in different areas. The GameCube has my favorite button configuration because of its tactile differentiation. However, the Playstation controller has the most precise D-pad. The XBox has the smoothest analog sticks (though I wish they were differentiated like on the GameCube), and their shoulder button setup is quite nice (though their naming is TERRIBLE... so often I think LT stands for "left top").
My perfect controller would have tactile differentiation (no matter how people bitch that it looks "kiddy"), would have a split "+" D-pad. The left analog stick would be concave (like an XBox 360 controller), and the right would be convex like a GameCube/PS controller. I think I would opt for an asymettrical shoulder button setup like the GameCube, except the "Z" button would be a lot more robust, probably similar to the RB button on the XBox 360. Asymmetry leads to faster tactile recall time, button 2 shoulder buttons on one side, and 1 on the other greatly speeds up your ability to remember which button does what. On modern day controllers under tight situations, that can be quite difficult. I see myself and see other people make a high percentage of button errors with modern controllers, because their brains can't dilliniate between similarly feeling or positioned buttons.
And how does being "establishment" disqualify one from being a Nerd? I'd argue that nerd-dom is incredibly "establishment" oriented. The stereotypical nerd comes out of one institution (academics), and right into another (mega corps). How is being the head of Microsoft and the head of the free world any different?
If anyone tries to tell me that nerds are, by nature, anti-establishment, I'll laugh. Slashvertarians excluded.
Wow, that's a game that went way too far under the radar. Probably my favorite game for the NES, or tied with SMB3. Zelda meets Metroid meets a SHMUP... who could ask for better?
A game that would work incredibly in 3D, but will probably never see the light of day.
I agree, the article was crap. However, I think Nintendo won E3 still the same, but because it actually paid attention to hardcore gamers this time around, instead of just ignoring them and appologizing for it later. Honestly, I haven't seen any attention given to WiiSports Resort, and everyone I've talked to thought Project Natal was a complete joke. Metroid, Golden Sun DS, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 did it for me. Sony had "Trico" (unfortunately leaked early), and Microsoft had just about nothing (save a possibly awesome new Not Castlevania). The guy reviewing this seemed only interested in the non-gamer crowd. Terrible article, he just randomly happened to be correct in his opening statement.
That's a little overly simplistic. There's more to the market than just cost and hardware. Hardware is really the easy part, and it's not really what made Apple so popular (although they are good at it). What Apple are, bar none, the best at in this area is infrastructure. Screw their software development, screw their phenominal design philosophies... Apple's biggest asset is their ability to put together massively complex networks of various media types, make them work together, and appear completely seemless to the user. Secure infrastructure builds trust, and it builds relationships with customers that things like "features" and "cost" really can't always compete with. Us techies too often look at specs, features and the actual hardware design, and we often ignore the less quantifiable assets that a product may have: it's infrastructure being one of them. Quantifiable or not, usability and infrastruture (which go hand in hand), sell products.
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I couldn't have put it better myself. Do we want our game worlds to suck as much as the real world? I mean, outside of the opportunity to correct the bad things going on (kill bad guys).
You really don't prefer realism. You may think you do, and on the spectrum of things, you may prefer games that are MORE realistic than most people, but everyone always has a line drawn somewhere. First and formost, you don't want the game to be actually real, so that YOU actually die when the character gets shot. You don't want to have to worry about the character's bladder being full in the middle of a combat and having to go take the time to urinate. There are ALWAYS limits on reality. There's no such thing as wanting pure realism. If you wanted pure realism you wouldn't even be playing a game, you'd walk outside and do whatever you wanted to do. At some level you're playing a game to escape reality, most likely the mundane world that most people's lives revolve around.
I see real ads as the equivalent of character urination. Maybe there's 0.01% of the population who would actually like to add a "bladder gauge" to their game (and no, not goofy stuff like Postal) so that they had to worry about their character going to the bathroom. But for the vast majority of us, we don't want to have to deal with that. It's one of those mundane tasks that we'd like to escape from when playing a video game. Even if we were to be given the option to pee, we'd like to be able to do something interesting with it, like pee in people's faces (Postal again). So, why not the equivalent with ads? Make it interesting, like, spoof real ads with fake ones. Be creative so we have something to be entertained by if we're interested.
No, real ads are a cop out. The only positive to real ads is $$$$ made by game makers. 99.9% of the time, there could have been a more interesting way of approaching the problem of in-game billboards, and one that doesn't destroy the precious realism.
Sure:
NukaCola - Fallout 3
Pizza Butt - No More Heros
It's great to have real life spinoffs, but it's always better when they're not ACTUALLY the real thing, but some kind of takeoff. Okay, so "Pizza Butt" is rediculously immature (it fit with the style of game), but avoid using actual products. The problem is, people don't want to know that the company is actually getting paid for product placement, that's the whole issue in the first place. Don't sell out. Whatever you do beyond that, is fine with me.
Sorry, but I gotta say, my favorite video game ads are fake ones. Excite Truck (Nintendo) did a great job having ads that immitated real-life ones, but actually weren't, and they were interesting to look at because it sorta exposed just how insanely ad-heavy race track circuits are. Other games like Fallout and BioShock have taken ads and run wild, plastering landscapes with fake ads that mimick real ones, but sacrastically mock the whole industry. I know it might not be a great boon for ClearChannel, but it's fun as hell for the gamer!
Fact is, we play video games to escape from mundane reality. Sure, we (sometimes) want it to be realistic enough to really immerse ourselves in a similar world, but we also want to bypass all the tedious and boring aspects of normal everyday life, and advertising is one of them. Gamers want to jump 10 feet in the air, take 10 bullets to the chest, and pull off massive damage that would make Rambo look like a sissy. So, to me, this is hypocracy. There's no more fun in looking at "real" ads than having break every couple hours for your character to have to go urinate.
Here's my advice. Have FUN with the ads, and make them fun for the player. Virtual Times Square? GREAT! Create goofy ads that I can chuckle at if I choose to look at them. Real ads have the unfortunate side-effect of possibly cheapening the experience in the mind of the gamer. Some people are perfectly fine with in-movie or in-game advertising, but some of us are turned off by it. It's just one more thing that could eventually hurt a gamer's experience. Noone's going to be offended by fake ads, the most that could happen is that people don't find them interesting, but then they'll just not look at them, but at least you won't look to some people like you've sold out.
But that's not REALLY the reason why this guy is writing this article, now, is he? He's simply justifying the use of product placement in games because it'll probably make him money somehow. Excuses, excuses. There are better things to do in place of real ads. My take is that this guy is just a shill.
Though I disagree with the parent's premise, and you're technically right about his "missapostrophiation", the noun in question was both plural and implying ownership. Thus the correct punctuation would be "kids'".
Eh, actually I have to agree with the parent. Even as a gamer, I admit that I could probably do with a bit morereading in my life again. I kind of miss it, I used to cruise through books, and they used to have a big daily influence over my life. I remember eating up Cryptonomicon last spring, it will always mark the period of time where I got together with my girlfriend, one of the happiest times in my life, yet. I think some video games can do similar, especially long epic RPGs with lots of storytelling (Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Final Fantasy, etc) but it's been a while since I saw anything like that, sine the current fad seems to be shorter more action oriented games. I dunno, I still have to admit that reading is probably more fullfilling.
Compare reading Shakespeare to seeing on stage, both highly respected forms of entertainment/art. I think your mind is much more expanded by reading it because you're performing the extra step of creating the imagery in your head instead of it being fed to you. There is some reality that non-graphic oriented story telling is very good for the brain.
From what I heard, it promised A LOT more than it delivered. I remember friends raiving about it for months like it was going to be the second coming of Jesus. The trailers even had me peaked. But I hear that the control system was messy, the game was repeatitive, and short. Marketting hype can often backfire on you if you're not careful. That's a big problem. It seems that it sorta deserved its tank.
I would argue that the SNES was the only example of the most powerful system winning a generation. Yes, the Genesis had a CD Drive, yes it had 32bit graphics... but not out of the box, and only later. What matters to the large majority of game sales is what comes right out of the box at launch. Probably the only exception I can think of was the PlayStation's analog controllers, which became so universal that people often forget that the PS originally didn't launch with A-sticks. Controllers are cheep... addon CD drives and 32bit accellerators are expensive and scarry.
From a technical standpoint, the N64 was pretty much supperior to the PS in every way, except for it's media system (which is arguable to a point because of loading times, but it's clear now that the CD-Drive was a great marketting boon). Even though the N64 had a low texture cache, it's handing and display of 3D graphics was far superior to the PS1, employing dithering techniques and lighting effects that the PS1 could only dream of, and the PS2 even only partially matched (the PS3 still lacks many onboard dithering processes), no I'm not suggesting that the N64 is anyway better than the PS2, but that Sony has decided to go down a specific route in their attention to 3D graphics, mainly polygon count and texture detail, where as Nintendo and Microsoft have concentrated more on lighting/shadowing and post-processing (dithering/anti-aliasing).
That's nice and good, until you realize that the best selling game system out there is essentially single player: the Nintendo DS. Yes the DS has multiplayer capability, though it is very basic and heavily locked down. Add to it that about 95% of DS games are essentially single player, with multiplayer functionality just tacked on, I think it sort of brings down the idea that multiplayer functionality is somehow central to a game's success. Two of the most played games ever: Solitare and Tetris. These are not lonely examples either. GTA:IV was the top selling console game for a year, and practically every handheld game, are all single player and very successful. I don't know what their study is concentrating on, but the actual sales data doesn't match up.
I disagree that Microsoft has a larger range of products than Apple. They may have larger install bases, they may come in more flavors, but for every product that Microsoft has, there is almost always virtually an Apple product that matches up. A website is about marketing and support, of which both companies have to do with all their products. iWork has to have just as good support as Office does. XServe has to have just as good marketing and support as Microsoft's server software. It's the ability of a company to be able to hierarchically subdivide and arrange content that allows for a smooth website. What the hell does cellular phone connectivity (iPhone) have to do with professional audio production software (Logic)... virtually nothing, although Apple is very good about being able to juggle them both, and still keep a cohesive feel to their brand.
What you say might be true if Microsoft was good at juggling their top level of content, but less so in the depths of their website. But simply move from high profile sections like Windows to Office, and you get totally different branding, down to even different versions of the Microsoft logo, and different Microsoft website headers and banners. The PM at Microsoft even said it himself, which means I expect that to improve. So I don't think there's a valid argument here about having to juggle too many different balls.
Also, everyone's a consumer, be it a business or home user. When it really comes down to it, there's no clear marketting dilleniation between the two, maybe demographics, but both companies have to cover ALL of those, so it's kind of a moot point.
Apple's website is often considered one of the most consitant and well constructed sites on the internet. Microsoft has done a pretty good job, but considering what they're up against, they should be proud to even be in the same sentance (as far as websites are concerned). Apple's unifomity and consistancy in their webdesign is nothing except extroardinary. It's so consistant that sometimes it takes me a second to realize which part of the website I'm at. This is not really a bad thing in an age where with most websites, you have to spend 30 seconds relearning the navigation system for every page. Apple really's design really breathes, with no clutters of information, and everything segrigated to very intuitive regions. In the end, grayscale color schemes ALMOST always win out. After months of use, colors always eventually get irritating, high contrasts lose their "cool" factor, and you're left feeling like your looking at a candy wrapper. OSs and websites should almost always revolve around neutral colors, because you're never sure what's going to clash horribly, or become illegible with the design. That said, I don't think Microsoft has really broken those rules, their low contrast blue is quite appealing... very MacOS Aqua-like, actually... but once again, they're not very consistant with it. Just one page in, "Windows 7" and you're faced with an ugly green stripe across the center of the page that looks horribly out of place next to the wispy blue. Microsoft REALLY needs to work on their color scheme consistancy. They have virtually no universal branding.
Skies got a great port to the GameCube... better in every way except for sound quality (weird).
Grandia II however was a porting DESASTER. The PS2 port is sometimes considered one of the worst ports in the history of games, and the PC port (which I bought), didn't support Windows2000/XP even though it came out AFTER XP WAS RELEASED!!!! They even released updates to the Win98 version and made a statement refusing to update it. I actually got it to work on WinXP, but the shadows were all screwed up. So Grandia II (which I consider far-and-away the best in the series) never saw a decent release on a surviving console/OS. Grandia III was GameArts' own damn fault though.
Anyone else get the feeling that the good ol' "classic" (which I still think of as the default iPod) is on its way out? They've been adding feature after feature to the Nano and Touch line, and really haven't done anything with the classic except for increasing the hard drive size to utterly useless quantities. That said, it's the one reason that I will ONLY buy a classic... with over 350 albums on my iPod 5G, no Nano or Touch has the capacity to contain my library. My HD-based 5G has lasted me 3 and a half years, my FlashROM based iPhone 3G died in one year... I don't trust FlashROM based things quite fully yet, and they're far more expensive. My 5G is getting very beat up (even with it's case, which has fallen apart), and eventually will probably kick the bucket. I'm just hoping there will be an HD-based iPod left on the market when it does. Or that the Nano will have a 60GB version available. I also prefer the size of the classic to the Nano, it just feels better.
Yes, it will. I can speak from personal experience. My iPhone 3G died a few weeks ago, I purchased a new 3Gs and when I sync'ed it with my computer, everything popped back in... right down to the home screen layout, my email account settings, everything. So the answer to your question is an absolute and unequivicable "yes".
On top of that, your iTMS account stores all information about everything you've purchased. When you purchase anything on iTMS, be it a song, an app, or whatever, you effectively own the license to download that file as many times as you need. If you delete an app off your phone, and then decided to redownload it, the download is free.
On the other hand, noone had been entirely successfull with an optical-based console yet, either. The TurboDuo suffered greatly because of poor hardware and marketing, and even though the SegaCD did alright, things were already looking a little bit dubious for Sega because of bad business practices (hardware tack-on requirements). Add to that the disgracefull 3DO, and you have a string of bad console designs with optical media. Granted, none of these failours had much to do with the adoption of optical media, but it didn't exactly make a company want to rush out and follow their lead, either. The first truely powerful argument in favor of optical media was the PlayStation, and that saw it's first successes well after the N64's design was underway.
Put yourself back in 1993. Up until that point, cartridge space had been limited, but there really hadn't been any size problems thus far. If anything, there had been more concern about games starting up quickly and running smoothly. Now, if you're a console manufacturer back then, and you're faced with the choice of adopting a new media which offers much more storage capacity, when you had faced very little storage problems... but that media would probably increase load times considerably? What choice would you make? Not exactly an easy one.
Look, the PlayStation turned out to be a much more successfull system, and probably more great games were released for it, so in hindsight, Nintendo dropped the ball. However, it opened up a serious new problem that has never been properly dealt with (and Sony has been the worst to deal with it): loadtimes. Nintendo waited to go to optical until they had seriously figured out how to get past loadtimes, the GameCube had some serious hardware and software solutions built in, as well as requirements for developers, to reduce load times. Microsoft has done a half-decent job with this, but Sony still seems to consider loadtimes to be a non-issue, and this bothers me.
Ummm, unfortunately, that only works for a few miles. Think about it for a second... why do we not send balloons into geosynchronous orbit?
Might work on Venus though.
It's very obvious that there is a fairly deep schism in whether or not players care about graphis. This stems from the two fundimental reasons why we play video games. The first is to "play" the game, the second is to "experience" the game. Many people are a mixture of these two things, but you'll find a lot of people (especially geeks on slashdot) that don't care or even WANT to experience, they just want to play. Playing is challenging one's mental and physical abilities. SHMuP space shooters are a good example of a game with a high level of play with low level of experience. The purpose of a SHMuP is to challenge oneself through rediculously difficult trials. There is no attempt to experience the feeling of actually being in a spaceship, as most of the action is highly stylized and simply an excuse for the gameplay. On the flipside, you have the experiencial side of gaming, which stems from a pure entertainment/artistic side of us which wants to experience an interactive environment. RPGs and adventure games tend to appeal to the experiencial side of gaming more than most genres. Often, the gameplay is actually secondary to the experience: the gameplay being simply a reason to be in the environment, and to give direction in order to move a player one experience to another.
Every player has a certain balance between play and experience that they wish to have, though this also can change depending upon mood or state of mind. Most gamers tend to want their games to have a mixture of both. However, there are a few gamers who play games for ONE reason alone: the challenge. They have no interest in the gaming experience, in fact, many of them feel that the experiencial side gets in the way of their ability to achieve mastery over the gameplay.
Even within these reasons for playing, there are different stylistic differences: some experiencial players wish to have a high level of control over their experience, while others want to let go and be taken on a dramatic journey. Some experiencial players emphasize realism, others wish to be immersed in stylized environments that are drastically different from the world we normally experience.
There are no real right and wrongs in all of this. The Video Game genre spans an incredibly wide area of interests and philosphies. It's more a meta-genre, incorporating elements of both arts/entertainment as well as skill challenges. Some people subscribe to the notion that one aspect of these is wrong. If someone suggests that experience has no place in games and the genres of cinema and literature being fully capable of sustaining a person's experiencial desire, then I ask them, "but what if I wish to be an interactive part in exploring and controlling a fantasy world?" they're usually at loss for an answer, because games is the only place in which that is possible. So games provide an outlet for certain aspects of experience and challenge that no other genre can. Therefor, both are reasonable and both are here to stay. Both are worthwhile endevours to both create and play.
Ahhh, but through careful selective breeding. Breeding can increase evolutionary speed by about 1000 fold. It's not fair to compare the selective breeding of a species to natural selection.
You can make a wolf into a chihuahua in probably less than 20 generations (20-40 years), if you have a big enough starting pool and know what to look for.
The same name as a proctology training film about treating patients with constipation.
I have to agree with you, the GameCube button configuration is wonderful. Having different shapes for every button was a wonderful idea, it makes things much more immediate and intuitive than simply having identical buttons in different places. The big "A" was always primary functionality, the smaller "B" was secondary funcionality, and the X and Y were different auxillery functionality, but even they had their own unique feel. The Shoulder buttons were wonderful too. Sure the "Z" was kinda junky, but it was hardly ever used, and it was mostly used like a menu button or something.
However, different controllers excel in different areas. The GameCube has my favorite button configuration because of its tactile differentiation. However, the Playstation controller has the most precise D-pad. The XBox has the smoothest analog sticks (though I wish they were differentiated like on the GameCube), and their shoulder button setup is quite nice (though their naming is TERRIBLE... so often I think LT stands for "left top").
My perfect controller would have tactile differentiation (no matter how people bitch that it looks "kiddy"), would have a split "+" D-pad. The left analog stick would be concave (like an XBox 360 controller), and the right would be convex like a GameCube/PS controller. I think I would opt for an asymettrical shoulder button setup like the GameCube, except the "Z" button would be a lot more robust, probably similar to the RB button on the XBox 360. Asymmetry leads to faster tactile recall time, button 2 shoulder buttons on one side, and 1 on the other greatly speeds up your ability to remember which button does what. On modern day controllers under tight situations, that can be quite difficult. I see myself and see other people make a high percentage of button errors with modern controllers, because their brains can't dilliniate between similarly feeling or positioned buttons.
And how does being "establishment" disqualify one from being a Nerd? I'd argue that nerd-dom is incredibly "establishment" oriented. The stereotypical nerd comes out of one institution (academics), and right into another (mega corps). How is being the head of Microsoft and the head of the free world any different?
If anyone tries to tell me that nerds are, by nature, anti-establishment, I'll laugh. Slashvertarians excluded.
Wow, that's a game that went way too far under the radar. Probably my favorite game for the NES, or tied with SMB3. Zelda meets Metroid meets a SHMUP... who could ask for better?
A game that would work incredibly in 3D, but will probably never see the light of day.
Remember that the DS actually came out BEFORE the PSP, and it's only on its third itteration. The PSP is now on its fourth.
I agree, the article was crap. However, I think Nintendo won E3 still the same, but because it actually paid attention to hardcore gamers this time around, instead of just ignoring them and appologizing for it later. Honestly, I haven't seen any attention given to WiiSports Resort, and everyone I've talked to thought Project Natal was a complete joke. Metroid, Golden Sun DS, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 did it for me. Sony had "Trico" (unfortunately leaked early), and Microsoft had just about nothing (save a possibly awesome new Not Castlevania). The guy reviewing this seemed only interested in the non-gamer crowd. Terrible article, he just randomly happened to be correct in his opening statement.
That's a little overly simplistic. There's more to the market than just cost and hardware. Hardware is really the easy part, and it's not really what made Apple so popular (although they are good at it). What Apple are, bar none, the best at in this area is infrastructure. Screw their software development, screw their phenominal design philosophies... Apple's biggest asset is their ability to put together massively complex networks of various media types, make them work together, and appear completely seemless to the user. Secure infrastructure builds trust, and it builds relationships with customers that things like "features" and "cost" really can't always compete with. Us techies too often look at specs, features and the actual hardware design, and we often ignore the less quantifiable assets that a product may have: it's infrastructure being one of them. Quantifiable or not, usability and infrastruture (which go hand in hand), sell products.