No, there is no official relationship between the two companies, but the similarities, especially in business philosophy are uncanny. Share no interests? Think again, they seem to share almost identical innovation philosophies: KISS (keep it simple, stupid), when in doubt, go back and try something completely different (iPod wheel, Nintendo DS & Wii), make one gadget that does one thing very well, the list goes on and on. This all at a time when the word on the street is "features, features, features!", complexity is better than elligance, and innovation is risky business. I don't know any companies who share more similar business philosophies than Apple and Nintendo. Now, that doesn't mean that next year they won't turn around and become huge competitors, but I think they share an almost identical ideology. It does mean that if there is any interest in doing any joint business venture, there is a deffinite compatability there to do so. So, if both of their livelihoods are threatend by the same company in one swoop, if it's worth their while, from a business standpoint, I could easilly see them doing a joint project. I don't think there's any need for one for the time being. Although, it's become fairly clear that Nintendo has taken some cues from Apple: the footprint for the iPod Mini and the GameBoy Micro is identical (even their naming convensions suggest some looking over eachother's shoulders), and the Nintendo DS Lite's styling is way too close to the iPod to be mear cohincidence. But these are not really unexpected, and don't really have anything to do with the business's overall mission statement. Now, their makeup might be quite different, I don't know, but having such an uncannilly similar ideology makes up for some interesting speculation, don't you think?
Someone's not a big fan of the Metroid Prime series, I take it? They did just that, and, as you can see, many of us are using those games as an example of the pinnicle of successful game progression. Now, granted, they didn't give you EVERYTHING in the beginning, they just gave you the basic powerups: morph ball, bombs, missiles, and grapple beam (about 1/4 of the actual powerups in the game). Now, that little intro wasn't what made the game great, but I think it was an interesting idea, and done well. I don't think they have to do it again, but I wouldn't mind.
Ironically, Prime Hunters didn't do it, though, and that game BLEW, progression-wise. The only powerups you got were new beams, which were basically just keys to open new doors. No movement upgrades, no suit upgrades, the only device they used in the entire game to let you go on to new regions was the good old "locked door". Metroid was one of the first series to do away with this convension, and used other, more interesting, and less obvious tactics, such as higher ledges that require higher jumping or double jumping, half-pipes you can "ride up" by using the morph ball boost (this was a great idea, btw), suits that allow you to not die in heat-filled regions, scopes that let you see things outside the normal visual spectrum. And sure, throw in weapons that are basically keys to unlock doors, for good measure... which is fine along with all of this other stuff. But Metroid Prime Hunters? Nooooo, just weapons to unlock doors. Fuck that.
I'm a big anime fan, myself. And I, like you, tend to prefer my anime and foreign films in their original language. BUT, the cold hard truth is that many times, subtitles are better in anime because you DON'T understand what the person is saying, and in actuality, the writing is just really really bad. Having a show in a different language with subtitles can start to mask bad writing, of which there is a lot of, everywhere, and anime isn't ammune to it. I tell this to some anime fans, and they get really defensive, as if you've just insulted their entire being, but it is true. I don't have as much of an issue with anime and video games being dubbed in english, as I do with film. NEWSFLASH: Animation (including video games) is dubbed to begin with, it's not like your denying the "actor's" creative interpretation of a character... there is no actor. Some higher-budget anime and games go as far as to re-animate the mouth movements for english localizations; and then we're basically back to the same exact process it took to make the Japanese original.
Film, on the other hand, is a disgrace when dubbed. In that case, you are denying the actor's original interpretation, for what, so people don't have to read the text? Please. The only film I ever saw in which I thought did a great job of dubbing was Das Boot, which took me about 10 minutes before I realized it was dubbed anyway.
Oh, sorry to respond twice, but I wanted to comment about the sci-fi / fantasy thing. To be honest, I've never seen a full "sci-fi" RPG. I guess Fallout could be considered this, but I can't really get myself interested in that series. There are a lot of halfways, like Xenosaga,.Hack (though I can't vouch for them, personally), FF8 is sorta light on the fantasy elements (and one of my personal favs, if you haven't played it already). But every American or Japanese style RPG I can think of has a lot of fantasy elements. Although I'm hearing great things about Pheonix Wright, which doesn't even have battles, or magic in it!
Oh, though, if you want one that doesn't FEEL fantasy, in the slightest, make sure you play Earthbound, one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Sure, it's got magic, but how fun is it that you're playing the Japanese vision of a stereotypical american boy in a stereotypical american land? One of the quirkiest games I've ever played. Too bad only one of the games in the series saw the light of day in the US.
Have you ever played SO2? It's even more a fantasy RPG than SO3. In fact, SO3 would have been better off had it NOT done so much sci-fi. Basically, for the first half of SO2, the main character is stuck on a planet that's pretty much like old-school Final Fantasy or Suikoden, in terms of technology and civilization, at the mid point, you leave planet 1, and end up on planet 2, which is much more contemporary in nature. All the sci-fi elements are VERY secondary (you end up on a ship for a total of 4 minutes... litterally). All-in-all, though, it's a pretty fun little game, it doesn't take itself too seriously, and it's quite enjoyable. SO3 falls flat on its face because it turns into Star Trek (some extremely bad ST references) + magic, the worst part being its constant habit of trying to explain away sci-fi science, which is just a really terrible idea unless you really have some decent grasp of current scienfic ideas.
I must admit to being a long time fan of Japanese RPGs, and I do think that some of them are quite good. But the one thing that will kill a game for me is if it tries to be more than it really is. Any game that is given a fake facade of intellectualism really makes me cringe. Same with Anime... don't give me a bunch of random SHIT to make me think, "wow, that's so deep that I don't even know what it's about!" because, most of the time, it's exactly that, just a bunch of random stuff thrown together, with little thought, just to make kids feel like they're watching something intelligent (I'm looking at you, "Eva"!). This is why even though my absolute favorite games are probably more on the serious side of things, I think that lighter games are more likely to succeed. I love ChronoTrigger, because it's just a fun romp, there's a serious side to it, but that simply is played out with the reactions of characters to the events. I hated Chrono Cross because it tried so desperately NOT to be a fun romp, and tried to be really "deep" and "emotional", and it came off as complete schmaltz.
That's where I'm liking Suikoden V, it's one of the few games that actually is MORE than it acts like it is. With things like talking beavers, cutsy little characters, things like that, you'd expect something not too heavy. But it also serves to paint a fairly intriquite picture of national politics, and the nature of power struggles in a way far more advanced than most games do. It does this in a fairly unpretentious way, as well. The fantasy elements are VERY secondary, the basic premise does not require any fantasy plot devices. Replace "Sun Rune" with "Atomic Bomb", and you pretty much have the same thing, unlike SO3, in which you have genetically engineered super-kids who have the ability to interact with other dimensions. One minute it's trying to be Eva, the next, it's The Matrix... grrrr, I have so many problems with that game.
This is one of the reasons I'm a bottom-feeder; somehow, blowing $50 feel much more than 2.5 times worse than blowing $20.
Yeah, but that pales in comparison to the TIME you put into it. $50 is nothing when you start thinking "I just wasted 50 hours of my life on this piece of crap!" For that reason, I'm much more likely to do a bit of research, and maybe even spend a little more $$$$ if I have to, to get a GOOD game that I won't feel like shit for haven't played.
Well, that was your first mistake. I was warned about SO3 before I got it (I loved SO2, btw), unfortunately, I didn't take heed, and picked it up anyway. The game takes itself WAY too seriously, the story blows, and gets worse and worse as the game progresses. The gameplay is extremely unbalanced and thus unfairly difficult. For a game that's supposed to be about real-time action, it leaves way too much to chance, and not enough to actual skill. The item creation system, which seems to be a central part of being able to ubber enough not to have the game insanely difficult, is extremely poorly done. Oh, did I mention that the story was rediculusly bad?
And yes, I HATE mindless leveling up. Don't make me have to go back through a dungeon 5 times just to get good enough to go onto the next one, I thought we were past that by now! A good game should have a nice momentum forward, alternating between different types of gameplay (battles, puzzles, exploration, etc.), so one doesn't get particularly old. So many times, in SO3, was I ready for a dungeon to end after I'd only played through the first 1/4 of it. After I went through half the "sphere company" dungeon, and being bombarded by way too many instant kill normal enemies, and was then faced with two bosses, each of which could have easilly taken down my whole party, I just said "fuck it", and haven't played the game since.
I've played some difficult RPGs in my time, a lot of them were extremely fun and exciting games. SO3 wasn't fun, it was a painful experience that I can't believe I wasted 3 months of my time on. Oh, and the camera and map systems were unbelievably bad. The camera was placed too high to not have to use the full screen map all the time, which just made all of the environmental graphics completely useless, I felt like I was practically playing an ASCII based 2D RPG.
One I'm enjoying a lot right now is Suikoden V, which isn't very difficult, but it's enough of a challange to still be fun. The game moves along quite quickly, but is still extremely long (in a good way). Instead of collecting items, you end up collecting characters, and some of them include interesting backstories which make it all worthwhile. The only flaw I can see with the Suikoden system (and I've played III as well), is that getting new characters doesn't really change the gameplay all that much: I can't go anywhere that I couldn't go before, I can't really do anything that I couldn't previously (with some excpetions), and most of the characters are neigh worthless. Still, it's a fun packrat game with a lot of pay-offs, a strong and intelligent story (that feels disturbingly close to current US politics, at times), good characters, and well-designed dungeons that are just about the right length. It's not a perfect game, but it really seems to be on the right track.
When MS started talking about creating simpler infrastructure, and more ellegent solutions, I got a little worried that maybe they were really in the right headspace to compete with the iPod. But now I see that those original ideals were just words, and this thing is going to be just another PSP: "It's a game device, it's a PDA, it's a video player, it's a music player, WOW!" You'd think that MS would have learned its lesson from Sony on this one, but it seems like they haven't. Their decision to make a handheld gaming system will be their biggest downfall, now they're not only competing with Apple (and Yahoo, and Creative Labs, and iRiver), but with Nintendo and Sony as well. At this point, if you manage to piss off Nintendo and Apple in the same punch, you're likely to just strengthen their unspoken alliance to the point of them officially joining forces against you, and I wouldn't want to be on the other side of that battle.
What's so difficult to understand? The two most successfull handheld entertainment devices, in their respective fields, are the iPod and the Nintendo DS. Both of these devices succeded because they were aimed at only one market, were designed to do one thing, and they did it extremely well. And because of it, they slaughtered every other competative device that tried to throw in the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, the PSP, N-Gage, and all those other little "3 in 1" type gadgets are foundering.
The first thing this device is going to kill (if anything at all), is all the iPod's competitors, which are trying to do exactly the same thing as MS is here. The irony is that these are MSs biggest allies, many of them use WMA as their primary file type, and thus have contracts with MS worked out. But there's no way that MS is going to be able to compete with the iPod, head-to-head from the get-go, these other devices stand like a helpless rank of unarmed soldiers standing just in front of the huge army that is the iPod.
I would agree with you to a certain degree, but who's to say that a particular scene is or isn't essential to the artistic vision of the film? I'm a huge believer that movies these days are way too quick to promote aggression and violence, but I can recall quite a few instances where violence was ultimately ESSENTIAL to the aesthetic and philosophical values behind the film. Can you imagine getting across the nuanced ideas of Fight Club or Natural Born Killers without any aggression or violence? Both, I believe to be grade A films that use violence as a tool in which to understand aspects of human nature and society. These are only two examples, but there are many others. Now, for every one of these films, I will agree that there are 50 others that are totally out of line, but it's really not my decision to make, or yours, or anyone elses, for that matter, which scenes are essential to the overall vision or not.
Remember that hollywood is, for the most part, simply a reflection of the current societal trends. If movies that portray graphic violence become more popular and lucrative for producers to make, then that really says something about the direction our society is taking, and I do worry about that. But there are much better ways of countering these societal trends then banning movies... if anything, that just makes it worse. It's a slippery slope, just like banning litterature, best not to start at all. Good education and the teaching of using ones own good judgement will allow consumers to make those decisions for themselves.
Have a little pride, man! Blame the person, not the country!
Why should I have pride in a country that:
has been ranked (by many international watchdog organizations) as having a more rigged voting system then all other developed nations, and MOST developing nations.
hasn't ratified Kyoto
has become newly revitalized in the ideals of imperialism and fascism, "in the name of the common good"
whose anti-elitiest fears have served to devalue education, while promoting ignorance, aggression, and violence.
preaches "taking care of your own" (as a way of justifying screwing your neighbor), while at the same time leaving your own to drown (litterally) when the going gets tough.
So excuse me if I have little sympathy for this country. I plan to leave as soon as the opportunity arrives.
Yet many people, includig myself, will do so. I'll probably ALSO get a Wii. Doesn't that just blow your mind?
Yes, actually, it does. Who has $800 to blow on game consoles, before buying games and controllers, plus the 32" HDMI TV to JUSTIFY buying a 1080p HDMI console? I'll tell you: a very small subset of the richest people in the world. You're not middle class if you can justify all this. I'm sorry, but you no longer belong in this catagory. There's nothing wrong with being an upper-class citizen, but you're not where most of the market is. I was born in a village where people had to hunt and fish just to get enough food to eat. Excuse me if I don't share your misery at not having an HDMI compatable console.
*waiting for a response trying to explain just how poor he really is, and for everyone to feel sorry for him*
For people that want a 108OP HDMI game machine then a $600 dollar PS3 is a bargain, as an XBox 360 won't do this at any price as an add on option.
1080p HDMI is the graphical equivalent to an audiophile sound system. Okay now, imagine that Apple had released the iPod with digital headphone outputs, included earphones worth $300, and priced the thing at $1000, just because it had audiophile quality sound! That's just great, so now you've just won over 2% of your market, and alienated the other 98%, makes great business sense to me. You've gotta target the sweet spot: what are the majority of people going to be looking for, and then give them just a little bit more than that. NEWSFLASH: the majority of people in Sony's target market have SDTV CRTs at 23"-27". Sure, that's going to chage a bit over the lifetime of the PS3, but not by THAT MUCH. If the price of a 23" HDTVs were to fall below the $500 mark, then you'll start to get more people on board... after their old sets die. Unfortunately, in the 3 years since I bought my last TV (a 20" CRT, btw), the price of TVs has dropped maybe 5%, which seems unusually slow, and a bad sign for any company trying to push higher-end technology.
"For people that WANT an 1080p HDMI game system..." How many people is that? Yeah, an audiophile-like subset of the market, around 2%. You may be in that subset, but that vast majority of people even on slashdot aren't with you on that, and you have to understand,/. represents the technological elite.
I'll second that. How the hell do you get "sentry" from "centre"? When I first saw that, I had to go back and scan the original post for the phrase "Media Sentry", when I didn't find it, I suddenly realized what they were talking about, and it just pissed me off! Sometimes I purposefully use english spellings like that just to make people wake up. Sometimes I fucking hate Americans.
Kuddos to the person who originally called them on it. If I had, my post would have been a lot longer, and a lot more flagrant.
Oh, and I must agree on the music...there's a time for short pop songs, and then there's that hour you set aside on Sunday afternoon to LISTEN to Close to the Edge, or Mahler's Symphony No. 2, or whatever you fancy. There's something unique about getting lost in creations of that magnitude.
Definitely. I take long bike rides, or car rides and put on whole albums: Tales from Topographic Oceans, Lamb Lies Down, Flower Kings - Unfold The Future, John Adams - Harmonhielere, Bartok - Music for Strings Perc & Celeste. And yes, sometimes I just want a short pick-me-up tune ("Babba O'Reily" has become one of my big ones as of late), but so many people scoff at epic music, as if you have to be part of some musical elite to enjoy it. Epic stories are some of the oldest and most basic forms of storytelling. Some of the biggest hit shows are things like Dangerous Housewives, Lost, and Alias, games like Oblivion, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and GTA thrive in our culture. The Star Wars trilogies and Lord of the Rings break records at the box office. In all forms of entertainment, the epic dominates, EXCEPT for music, where it's somehow looked down apon. The album is going the way of the dinosaur with new internet downloading systems. As much as I like Apple's iTMS system, it really peanelizes epic music. If iTMS had been the main distrobution method back in 1972, Yes would have gone broke with Close to the Edge at $3 an album.
My question is, what is it about music in today's world, that separates it from different entertainment forms such that people favor the short song over the epic? After all, you don't see 5 minute short films dominate at the box office.
Chrono Trigger IS a hardcore game, very hardcore. Pretty much any single-player RPG is almost exclusively made for hardcore gamers, as they require many many hours to complete. Even Final Fantasy I takes a good 10 hours+ to beat, and in half-hour dosages at the very least. If I remember correctly, the first time I played through Chrono Trigger, it took me about 28 hours... that's on the short end for an RPG in its day in age (FF6 is a good 35 hour game).
In its day, Chrono Trigger was a huge game that took a lot of people working for thousands of hours. Porting it, today, would probably be a cinch, since the material is already written, but think of all the hours it took to write all the dialog. But there ARE games like that coming out, there's been a great resurgence of them since the GBA and DS took full stride. Golden Sun is a wonderful games (yes, you read that correctly) on the scale and relitave caliber of Chrono Trigger. I've also heard great things about Riviera and Pheonix Wright. I'll also be interested to see how Children of Mana comes out. The 2D RPG genre never died, though it did go into hiding there for a bit during the Playstation era. I am worried, however, as to what will happen when the GBA takes its final bow. So far, I've been comforted by the balance of 2D to 3D games on the DS, but as people begin to see it as more than just an upgraded GBA, I do wonder how long this will last.
But I digress. Playing any Japanese RPG is a real time commitment, in the truest sence. It's like picking up a long novel, or starting to watch LOST. Casual gamers do not make commitments, that's what MAKES them casual gamers, they don't want to have to commit to anything.
Me, I love long-form entertainment, so I'm happy to commit to playing a 40 hour game, as are many gamers. I also listen to (and write) 20 minute progrock epics, I write hour long slashdot (essays) posts, I watch various on-going TV series (usually on video), I even actually enjoyed Magnolia. So, I'm kind of at the extreme end of the spectrum. I just choose to take my entertainment in larger segments, but in less frequent intervals. And yes, I have a job, I'm a TV producer. It will usually take me months to complete an RPG, but I don't mind. But I also realize that many people my age do not want to budget their time in the way I do.
BTW: Come october, I'm going to be dieing... Between FF12, Valkarie Profile 2, two Zeldas, and a Metroid, I'm going to be set for a good 8 months. I was actually relieved to hear that Smash Bros. Brawl won't be coming out this year... I wouldn't have had any time to play it anyway.
The trick to snagging more regularly playing gamers (I'm getting sick of the "hardcore" label, it's meaningless), is to make a game that is both easy to flip on and off for a few minutes at a time, but also be interesting to play for long periods of time. Now, I know that there were some people who used to play games of Tetris over and over again for hours on end, but that subset of gamers is extremely few, most people played Tetris for an average of about 10 minutes at a time (yes, I know there are exceptions, and those exceptions probably ALL frequent/.) That's not really the kind of game that more frequent players are looking for. While you may very well log hundreds of hours on it, you're not going to block out 2-3 hours a day for it. Now, a frequent player may very well take to a longer, more epic game broken into bite-sized chunks. Say what you will about the New Super Mario Bros. but it did take me a good 4 hours to beat, minimum, and I've been chewing on collecting all those bonus coins now for over a month. It's much more concievable that people will sit down to play 3 hours of Mario than Tetris or Brain Age. This is why games like Mario and a Metroid do so well, they can be played by someone looking to burn a few minutes a day, or by someone looking to knock off a few hours each day. And on top of that, they have engaging playability and a nice gentle learning curve.
Similarly, no one who is looking to burn a few minutes a day is going to take to Metal Gear Solid; hell, it can take a good half-hour just to get through ONE ROOM! But it's great for someone who wants to kill a lot of time.
Columnists commonly group gamers into two wildly generalized stereotypes: the "casual gamer" and the "hardcore gamer". Now, for a second, let's forget about the extreme ambiguity of the label "hardcore", and the wide variety of demographics within the "casual gamer" catagory, and ask ourselves, "just really, what are we talking about?"
Are we comparing the amount of time put into video games? Are we looking at how people define themselves, socially, in terms of video games (ie: "I consider myself a gamer")? Are we talking about the TYPES of video games that different groups of people play (ie: Elektroplankton vs. Suikoden V vs. Half Life 2)? Even, possibly, are we looking at how a person views video games as an entertainment genre (is it a ligitimate form of entertainment equal to that of litterature and cinema)?
From a marketting perspective, it's not quite as simple as casual/hardcore. There are many gamers who will never leave the PC world, because of the additional hardware required. There are many people who consider themselves "hardcore gamers" (myself included), that will constantly be drawn to handheld systems because they seem to be more devoted to the roots of video gaming. There are some "hardcore gamers" (like a friend of mine) who are still struggling to embrace gaming as ligitimate, mature, entertainment form, and therefor only play early games, feeling that games are only relivent for nestolgic value.
I find this concentration on "casual gamers" to be very silly and a bit shortsided. There's a good chance that the Wii is going to be a hit all the way across the board, but my suspicions is that its biggest supporters are going to be life-long gamers, the emulator crowd (and the would-be emulator crowd): those that feel that the original ideals of gaming got a bit lost somewhere along the way, and thus the direction of gaming should back up a bit, and then branch out from there. Similarly with handhelds, some of the people I consider to be the "hardest-core" gamers I know are huge GBA and DS fans.
What happens is that the game preloads all adjacent rooms as you enter. You'll notice that enemies appear on your radar that are in adjacent rooms, but not two rooms away. Which can make for some interesting gameplay quirks (you won't have to fight those nasty Chozo ghosts again if you happen to exit through the wrong door in the room). I wonder whether the game does some preloading of the adjacent rooms when you first shoot the door, and then opens the door after a specific amount of time, while it finishes loading the adjacent rooms. You'll notice that some rooms take almost no time at all to load, where-as others may take a second or two. But yes, Metroid Prime does a GREAT job of killing and hiding load times.
On the flipside, I'm currently playing Suikoden V, which is a great game, but the load times are attrocious. They put a little animated graphic of the hero running in the corner of the screen to look at while you wait, but after about 3 times, it's not entertaining anymore! The damn thing does a 5 second load every time you go into a house or even open up the menu screen. It's like the game can't display ANYTHING without doing at least a 3 second load. Even PS1 games didn't have load times for opening up menus. Same with Dragon Quest VIII; great game, but it takes about 4 seconds just to open the menu! I mean, how hard its it to load up an entire town WITH all five enterable houses and a measilly little text-based menu into memory? It's as if the game doesn't load anything into memory that isn't actually on the screen at that moment... seems like terrible programming to me. Reminds me of old NES games in which enemies ceased to exist once they walked out of the frame. I thought we were past that stuff.
The Cell is supposed to be more future proof. Offcourse wether that will work is anybodies guess. It seems unlikely but Sony probably hopes that by making a huge investment now it won't have to do so again in a couple of years. Developing a new console is risky and costly, if you can somehow afford to skip a generation you may very well trash the competition.
Sony hopes that when MS and Nintendo announce their next generation console their PS3 will still be able to compete. It is not that unreasonable an idea. The PS2 still competes with the 360 in some areas.
It doesn't work like that, though. You HAVE to release something new, it doesn't matter what it is, but eventually gamers expect something different to come out, and get a little tired of the old systems. The only reason why the PS2 competes with the 360 is because the next generation, as a whole, really hasn't started yet. There are a lot of fence sitters that are waiting for Nintendo and Sony to come out with their next systems before buying into the next gen. In the meantime, our old PS2s are dieing on us, so we're forced to either sit it out for the next 6 months, or buy a new one. The moment the Wii comes out, I'll bet you that 360 sales also skyrocket, and PS2 sales fall off the face of the earth, when two of the three consoles are out, the next gen will officially begin.
This is another place that Nintendo really has the right idea. By jumping off the powerhouse wagon, they set themselves up for being able to release systems in smaller technological leaps. See, it doesn't matter all that much if a next-gen console can compete with other same-gen consoles in terms of power, as long as it's new, and offers something different from the old. The way you should think about it is, Sony will HAVE to wait a while before being able to cash in on the sales of a new console (probably the PS4, unless their game department goes bankrupt on this go-around), and they've set themselves up to have to make another huge graphical leap, and lose a lot of money in the process. At the same time, about 3/4ths the way through this gen, Nintendo can release their next console, have it be only the same price as the other "last-gen" systems, maybe only as powerful, but suddenly have sales up the wazoo.
The SNES also had a much better synthesizer and sound generator. While not as immediately noticable as graphics, audio quality has a huge effect on the subconcious feel of games, something not to be overlooked. Seeing that a large number of very prominant games in that generation relied heavily on building a particular ambiance (Super Metroid and Final Fantasy VI, just to name a few), this gave the SNES a huge advantage.
Also, the graphical command set was much more sophisticated in the SNES. You had psuedo-3D, "mode 7", graphics right out of the docket, where-as the Genesis, while having its own little graphical tricks, was not nearly as flushed out. Also Nintendo's decision to allow game developers to add additional graphics and processing hardware inside the cartridge (as apposed to Sega's model of having the consumer buy an additional hardware addon, the 32X) was probably a lot better route to take, even though it made for some overpriced games.
I'll buy that, except for the third item. If "Action" belongs to MS and Sony, then what do you call Zelda and Metroid? Aren't they "action adventure games?" This is the genre that Nintendo practically built its name off of.
And RPG/Story, no doubt the last two rounds have gone to Sony, but we shall see about the next. The few RPGs that made it to the GCN were VERY strong (Skies of Arcadia & Tales of Symphonia being quite possibly some of the best of the generation), and MSs future is looking very strong in the RPG department. With Hironobu Sakaguchi, Akira Toriyama, and Nobuo Uematsu at the helm of a few new projects, we could very well see the 360 pulling together a very strong RPG turnout, especially towards the latter half of its lifespan. I do hope that more RPGs go through Nintendo's hands this generation, as I said, the few that came out for the GCN were very strong, and it's always nice to have the added variation in style that different consoles tend to offer game developers. But there's no question that this last generation of RPGs was completely owned by Sony (though not quite as much as during the N64/PSOne era)
Yeah, I've noticed that. I recently talked with a family friend who got around to watching the official US release of Azumanga Daioh. I watched a fan sub about 2 years ago, and when I started talking with him, I realized that my fan sub had put in all these neat little tidbits about Japanese language (so you could understand the context of the dialog) at the top of the screen, and the official release hadn't done anything like that. Because of this, he said that even though he loved the anime, there were some references that he just didn't understand, where-as I was able to understand a lot more of what was being said. WTF??? I think more anime localization houses should hire fan-subbers, or use fan sub material as the basis of the official release. Not that all fan subs are great, and not that all official releases are terrible, but it sure doesn't make sense when they are.
Come on, though, is fighting aliens any less "mature" than fighting ninjas or or crime bosses with huge guns? Seriously, most games that are considered "mature" have just as many "kiddie" aspects to them, they're usually just a whole lot bloodier (which, IMO, just makes them even more immature). But yeah, in terms of genre, Metroid Prime and Windwaker are in the same ballpark, and I imagine that there's a huge overlap in the userbass. I'd really like to see the actual figures on the ages of these games, as compared to, say, GTA: San Andraes. I would predict that GTAs peak is around 14-18 year olds, where as Zelda has two peaks, one at around 11 and one at around 25, with a hole in the middle, because of teens who believe that it's kiddy. Come one, the first Zelda came out in, what, 1986? I was 5 back then, it's part of my childhood. I'm guessing that my age group consists of a huge chunk of the install base.
There's an RPG that came out not too long ago called "Drag-On Dragoon". I had to read the name a few times to believe it, myself. So, what is the game about? Knights that drag giant fire-breathing lizards behind them?
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No, there is no official relationship between the two companies, but the similarities, especially in business philosophy are uncanny. Share no interests? Think again, they seem to share almost identical innovation philosophies: KISS (keep it simple, stupid), when in doubt, go back and try something completely different (iPod wheel, Nintendo DS & Wii), make one gadget that does one thing very well, the list goes on and on. This all at a time when the word on the street is "features, features, features!", complexity is better than elligance, and innovation is risky business. I don't know any companies who share more similar business philosophies than Apple and Nintendo. Now, that doesn't mean that next year they won't turn around and become huge competitors, but I think they share an almost identical ideology. It does mean that if there is any interest in doing any joint business venture, there is a deffinite compatability there to do so. So, if both of their livelihoods are threatend by the same company in one swoop, if it's worth their while, from a business standpoint, I could easilly see them doing a joint project. I don't think there's any need for one for the time being. Although, it's become fairly clear that Nintendo has taken some cues from Apple: the footprint for the iPod Mini and the GameBoy Micro is identical (even their naming convensions suggest some looking over eachother's shoulders), and the Nintendo DS Lite's styling is way too close to the iPod to be mear cohincidence. But these are not really unexpected, and don't really have anything to do with the business's overall mission statement. Now, their makeup might be quite different, I don't know, but having such an uncannilly similar ideology makes up for some interesting speculation, don't you think?
Someone's not a big fan of the Metroid Prime series, I take it? They did just that, and, as you can see, many of us are using those games as an example of the pinnicle of successful game progression. Now, granted, they didn't give you EVERYTHING in the beginning, they just gave you the basic powerups: morph ball, bombs, missiles, and grapple beam (about 1/4 of the actual powerups in the game). Now, that little intro wasn't what made the game great, but I think it was an interesting idea, and done well. I don't think they have to do it again, but I wouldn't mind.
Ironically, Prime Hunters didn't do it, though, and that game BLEW, progression-wise. The only powerups you got were new beams, which were basically just keys to open new doors. No movement upgrades, no suit upgrades, the only device they used in the entire game to let you go on to new regions was the good old "locked door". Metroid was one of the first series to do away with this convension, and used other, more interesting, and less obvious tactics, such as higher ledges that require higher jumping or double jumping, half-pipes you can "ride up" by using the morph ball boost (this was a great idea, btw), suits that allow you to not die in heat-filled regions, scopes that let you see things outside the normal visual spectrum. And sure, throw in weapons that are basically keys to unlock doors, for good measure... which is fine along with all of this other stuff. But Metroid Prime Hunters? Nooooo, just weapons to unlock doors. Fuck that.
I'm a big anime fan, myself. And I, like you, tend to prefer my anime and foreign films in their original language. BUT, the cold hard truth is that many times, subtitles are better in anime because you DON'T understand what the person is saying, and in actuality, the writing is just really really bad. Having a show in a different language with subtitles can start to mask bad writing, of which there is a lot of, everywhere, and anime isn't ammune to it. I tell this to some anime fans, and they get really defensive, as if you've just insulted their entire being, but it is true. I don't have as much of an issue with anime and video games being dubbed in english, as I do with film. NEWSFLASH: Animation (including video games) is dubbed to begin with, it's not like your denying the "actor's" creative interpretation of a character... there is no actor. Some higher-budget anime and games go as far as to re-animate the mouth movements for english localizations; and then we're basically back to the same exact process it took to make the Japanese original.
Film, on the other hand, is a disgrace when dubbed. In that case, you are denying the actor's original interpretation, for what, so people don't have to read the text? Please. The only film I ever saw in which I thought did a great job of dubbing was Das Boot, which took me about 10 minutes before I realized it was dubbed anyway.
Oh, sorry to respond twice, but I wanted to comment about the sci-fi / fantasy thing. To be honest, I've never seen a full "sci-fi" RPG. I guess Fallout could be considered this, but I can't really get myself interested in that series. There are a lot of halfways, like Xenosaga, .Hack (though I can't vouch for them, personally), FF8 is sorta light on the fantasy elements (and one of my personal favs, if you haven't played it already). But every American or Japanese style RPG I can think of has a lot of fantasy elements. Although I'm hearing great things about Pheonix Wright, which doesn't even have battles, or magic in it!
Oh, though, if you want one that doesn't FEEL fantasy, in the slightest, make sure you play Earthbound, one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Sure, it's got magic, but how fun is it that you're playing the Japanese vision of a stereotypical american boy in a stereotypical american land? One of the quirkiest games I've ever played. Too bad only one of the games in the series saw the light of day in the US.
Have you ever played SO2? It's even more a fantasy RPG than SO3. In fact, SO3 would have been better off had it NOT done so much sci-fi. Basically, for the first half of SO2, the main character is stuck on a planet that's pretty much like old-school Final Fantasy or Suikoden, in terms of technology and civilization, at the mid point, you leave planet 1, and end up on planet 2, which is much more contemporary in nature. All the sci-fi elements are VERY secondary (you end up on a ship for a total of 4 minutes... litterally). All-in-all, though, it's a pretty fun little game, it doesn't take itself too seriously, and it's quite enjoyable. SO3 falls flat on its face because it turns into Star Trek (some extremely bad ST references) + magic, the worst part being its constant habit of trying to explain away sci-fi science, which is just a really terrible idea unless you really have some decent grasp of current scienfic ideas.
I must admit to being a long time fan of Japanese RPGs, and I do think that some of them are quite good. But the one thing that will kill a game for me is if it tries to be more than it really is. Any game that is given a fake facade of intellectualism really makes me cringe. Same with Anime... don't give me a bunch of random SHIT to make me think, "wow, that's so deep that I don't even know what it's about!" because, most of the time, it's exactly that, just a bunch of random stuff thrown together, with little thought, just to make kids feel like they're watching something intelligent (I'm looking at you, "Eva"!). This is why even though my absolute favorite games are probably more on the serious side of things, I think that lighter games are more likely to succeed. I love ChronoTrigger, because it's just a fun romp, there's a serious side to it, but that simply is played out with the reactions of characters to the events. I hated Chrono Cross because it tried so desperately NOT to be a fun romp, and tried to be really "deep" and "emotional", and it came off as complete schmaltz.
That's where I'm liking Suikoden V, it's one of the few games that actually is MORE than it acts like it is. With things like talking beavers, cutsy little characters, things like that, you'd expect something not too heavy. But it also serves to paint a fairly intriquite picture of national politics, and the nature of power struggles in a way far more advanced than most games do. It does this in a fairly unpretentious way, as well. The fantasy elements are VERY secondary, the basic premise does not require any fantasy plot devices. Replace "Sun Rune" with "Atomic Bomb", and you pretty much have the same thing, unlike SO3, in which you have genetically engineered super-kids who have the ability to interact with other dimensions. One minute it's trying to be Eva, the next, it's The Matrix... grrrr, I have so many problems with that game.
Yeah, but that pales in comparison to the TIME you put into it. $50 is nothing when you start thinking "I just wasted 50 hours of my life on this piece of crap!" For that reason, I'm much more likely to do a bit of research, and maybe even spend a little more $$$$ if I have to, to get a GOOD game that I won't feel like shit for haven't played.
Well, that was your first mistake. I was warned about SO3 before I got it (I loved SO2, btw), unfortunately, I didn't take heed, and picked it up anyway. The game takes itself WAY too seriously, the story blows, and gets worse and worse as the game progresses. The gameplay is extremely unbalanced and thus unfairly difficult. For a game that's supposed to be about real-time action, it leaves way too much to chance, and not enough to actual skill. The item creation system, which seems to be a central part of being able to ubber enough not to have the game insanely difficult, is extremely poorly done. Oh, did I mention that the story was rediculusly bad?
And yes, I HATE mindless leveling up. Don't make me have to go back through a dungeon 5 times just to get good enough to go onto the next one, I thought we were past that by now! A good game should have a nice momentum forward, alternating between different types of gameplay (battles, puzzles, exploration, etc.), so one doesn't get particularly old. So many times, in SO3, was I ready for a dungeon to end after I'd only played through the first 1/4 of it. After I went through half the "sphere company" dungeon, and being bombarded by way too many instant kill normal enemies, and was then faced with two bosses, each of which could have easilly taken down my whole party, I just said "fuck it", and haven't played the game since.
I've played some difficult RPGs in my time, a lot of them were extremely fun and exciting games. SO3 wasn't fun, it was a painful experience that I can't believe I wasted 3 months of my time on. Oh, and the camera and map systems were unbelievably bad. The camera was placed too high to not have to use the full screen map all the time, which just made all of the environmental graphics completely useless, I felt like I was practically playing an ASCII based 2D RPG.
One I'm enjoying a lot right now is Suikoden V, which isn't very difficult, but it's enough of a challange to still be fun. The game moves along quite quickly, but is still extremely long (in a good way). Instead of collecting items, you end up collecting characters, and some of them include interesting backstories which make it all worthwhile. The only flaw I can see with the Suikoden system (and I've played III as well), is that getting new characters doesn't really change the gameplay all that much: I can't go anywhere that I couldn't go before, I can't really do anything that I couldn't previously (with some excpetions), and most of the characters are neigh worthless. Still, it's a fun packrat game with a lot of pay-offs, a strong and intelligent story (that feels disturbingly close to current US politics, at times), good characters, and well-designed dungeons that are just about the right length. It's not a perfect game, but it really seems to be on the right track.
When MS started talking about creating simpler infrastructure, and more ellegent solutions, I got a little worried that maybe they were really in the right headspace to compete with the iPod. But now I see that those original ideals were just words, and this thing is going to be just another PSP: "It's a game device, it's a PDA, it's a video player, it's a music player, WOW!" You'd think that MS would have learned its lesson from Sony on this one, but it seems like they haven't. Their decision to make a handheld gaming system will be their biggest downfall, now they're not only competing with Apple (and Yahoo, and Creative Labs, and iRiver), but with Nintendo and Sony as well. At this point, if you manage to piss off Nintendo and Apple in the same punch, you're likely to just strengthen their unspoken alliance to the point of them officially joining forces against you, and I wouldn't want to be on the other side of that battle.
What's so difficult to understand? The two most successfull handheld entertainment devices, in their respective fields, are the iPod and the Nintendo DS. Both of these devices succeded because they were aimed at only one market, were designed to do one thing, and they did it extremely well. And because of it, they slaughtered every other competative device that tried to throw in the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, the PSP, N-Gage, and all those other little "3 in 1" type gadgets are foundering.
The first thing this device is going to kill (if anything at all), is all the iPod's competitors, which are trying to do exactly the same thing as MS is here. The irony is that these are MSs biggest allies, many of them use WMA as their primary file type, and thus have contracts with MS worked out. But there's no way that MS is going to be able to compete with the iPod, head-to-head from the get-go, these other devices stand like a helpless rank of unarmed soldiers standing just in front of the huge army that is the iPod.
I would agree with you to a certain degree, but who's to say that a particular scene is or isn't essential to the artistic vision of the film? I'm a huge believer that movies these days are way too quick to promote aggression and violence, but I can recall quite a few instances where violence was ultimately ESSENTIAL to the aesthetic and philosophical values behind the film. Can you imagine getting across the nuanced ideas of Fight Club or Natural Born Killers without any aggression or violence? Both, I believe to be grade A films that use violence as a tool in which to understand aspects of human nature and society. These are only two examples, but there are many others. Now, for every one of these films, I will agree that there are 50 others that are totally out of line, but it's really not my decision to make, or yours, or anyone elses, for that matter, which scenes are essential to the overall vision or not.
Remember that hollywood is, for the most part, simply a reflection of the current societal trends. If movies that portray graphic violence become more popular and lucrative for producers to make, then that really says something about the direction our society is taking, and I do worry about that. But there are much better ways of countering these societal trends then banning movies... if anything, that just makes it worse. It's a slippery slope, just like banning litterature, best not to start at all. Good education and the teaching of using ones own good judgement will allow consumers to make those decisions for themselves.
So excuse me if I have little sympathy for this country. I plan to leave as soon as the opportunity arrives.
Yes, actually, it does. Who has $800 to blow on game consoles, before buying games and controllers, plus the 32" HDMI TV to JUSTIFY buying a 1080p HDMI console? I'll tell you: a very small subset of the richest people in the world. You're not middle class if you can justify all this. I'm sorry, but you no longer belong in this catagory. There's nothing wrong with being an upper-class citizen, but you're not where most of the market is. I was born in a village where people had to hunt and fish just to get enough food to eat. Excuse me if I don't share your misery at not having an HDMI compatable console.
*waiting for a response trying to explain just how poor he really is, and for everyone to feel sorry for him*
1080p HDMI is the graphical equivalent to an audiophile sound system. Okay now, imagine that Apple had released the iPod with digital headphone outputs, included earphones worth $300, and priced the thing at $1000, just because it had audiophile quality sound! That's just great, so now you've just won over 2% of your market, and alienated the other 98%, makes great business sense to me. You've gotta target the sweet spot: what are the majority of people going to be looking for, and then give them just a little bit more than that. NEWSFLASH: the majority of people in Sony's target market have SDTV CRTs at 23"-27". Sure, that's going to chage a bit over the lifetime of the PS3, but not by THAT MUCH. If the price of a 23" HDTVs were to fall below the $500 mark, then you'll start to get more people on board... after their old sets die. Unfortunately, in the 3 years since I bought my last TV (a 20" CRT, btw), the price of TVs has dropped maybe 5%, which seems unusually slow, and a bad sign for any company trying to push higher-end technology.
"For people that WANT an 1080p HDMI game system..." How many people is that? Yeah, an audiophile-like subset of the market, around 2%. You may be in that subset, but that vast majority of people even on slashdot aren't with you on that, and you have to understand, /. represents the technological elite.
I'll second that. How the hell do you get "sentry" from "centre"? When I first saw that, I had to go back and scan the original post for the phrase "Media Sentry", when I didn't find it, I suddenly realized what they were talking about, and it just pissed me off! Sometimes I purposefully use english spellings like that just to make people wake up. Sometimes I fucking hate Americans.
Kuddos to the person who originally called them on it. If I had, my post would have been a lot longer, and a lot more flagrant.
Definitely. I take long bike rides, or car rides and put on whole albums: Tales from Topographic Oceans, Lamb Lies Down, Flower Kings - Unfold The Future, John Adams - Harmonhielere, Bartok - Music for Strings Perc & Celeste. And yes, sometimes I just want a short pick-me-up tune ("Babba O'Reily" has become one of my big ones as of late), but so many people scoff at epic music, as if you have to be part of some musical elite to enjoy it. Epic stories are some of the oldest and most basic forms of storytelling. Some of the biggest hit shows are things like Dangerous Housewives, Lost, and Alias, games like Oblivion, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and GTA thrive in our culture. The Star Wars trilogies and Lord of the Rings break records at the box office. In all forms of entertainment, the epic dominates, EXCEPT for music, where it's somehow looked down apon. The album is going the way of the dinosaur with new internet downloading systems. As much as I like Apple's iTMS system, it really peanelizes epic music. If iTMS had been the main distrobution method back in 1972, Yes would have gone broke with Close to the Edge at $3 an album.
My question is, what is it about music in today's world, that separates it from different entertainment forms such that people favor the short song over the epic? After all, you don't see 5 minute short films dominate at the box office.
Chrono Trigger IS a hardcore game, very hardcore. Pretty much any single-player RPG is almost exclusively made for hardcore gamers, as they require many many hours to complete. Even Final Fantasy I takes a good 10 hours+ to beat, and in half-hour dosages at the very least. If I remember correctly, the first time I played through Chrono Trigger, it took me about 28 hours... that's on the short end for an RPG in its day in age (FF6 is a good 35 hour game).
In its day, Chrono Trigger was a huge game that took a lot of people working for thousands of hours. Porting it, today, would probably be a cinch, since the material is already written, but think of all the hours it took to write all the dialog. But there ARE games like that coming out, there's been a great resurgence of them since the GBA and DS took full stride. Golden Sun is a wonderful games (yes, you read that correctly) on the scale and relitave caliber of Chrono Trigger. I've also heard great things about Riviera and Pheonix Wright. I'll also be interested to see how Children of Mana comes out. The 2D RPG genre never died, though it did go into hiding there for a bit during the Playstation era. I am worried, however, as to what will happen when the GBA takes its final bow. So far, I've been comforted by the balance of 2D to 3D games on the DS, but as people begin to see it as more than just an upgraded GBA, I do wonder how long this will last.
But I digress. Playing any Japanese RPG is a real time commitment, in the truest sence. It's like picking up a long novel, or starting to watch LOST. Casual gamers do not make commitments, that's what MAKES them casual gamers, they don't want to have to commit to anything.
Me, I love long-form entertainment, so I'm happy to commit to playing a 40 hour game, as are many gamers. I also listen to (and write) 20 minute progrock epics, I write hour long slashdot (essays) posts, I watch various on-going TV series (usually on video), I even actually enjoyed Magnolia. So, I'm kind of at the extreme end of the spectrum. I just choose to take my entertainment in larger segments, but in less frequent intervals. And yes, I have a job, I'm a TV producer. It will usually take me months to complete an RPG, but I don't mind. But I also realize that many people my age do not want to budget their time in the way I do.
BTW: Come october, I'm going to be dieing... Between FF12, Valkarie Profile 2, two Zeldas, and a Metroid, I'm going to be set for a good 8 months. I was actually relieved to hear that Smash Bros. Brawl won't be coming out this year... I wouldn't have had any time to play it anyway.
The trick to snagging more regularly playing gamers (I'm getting sick of the "hardcore" label, it's meaningless), is to make a game that is both easy to flip on and off for a few minutes at a time, but also be interesting to play for long periods of time. Now, I know that there were some people who used to play games of Tetris over and over again for hours on end, but that subset of gamers is extremely few, most people played Tetris for an average of about 10 minutes at a time (yes, I know there are exceptions, and those exceptions probably ALL frequent /.) That's not really the kind of game that more frequent players are looking for. While you may very well log hundreds of hours on it, you're not going to block out 2-3 hours a day for it. Now, a frequent player may very well take to a longer, more epic game broken into bite-sized chunks. Say what you will about the New Super Mario Bros. but it did take me a good 4 hours to beat, minimum, and I've been chewing on collecting all those bonus coins now for over a month. It's much more concievable that people will sit down to play 3 hours of Mario than Tetris or Brain Age. This is why games like Mario and a Metroid do so well, they can be played by someone looking to burn a few minutes a day, or by someone looking to knock off a few hours each day. And on top of that, they have engaging playability and a nice gentle learning curve.
Similarly, no one who is looking to burn a few minutes a day is going to take to Metal Gear Solid; hell, it can take a good half-hour just to get through ONE ROOM! But it's great for someone who wants to kill a lot of time.
Columnists commonly group gamers into two wildly generalized stereotypes: the "casual gamer" and the "hardcore gamer". Now, for a second, let's forget about the extreme ambiguity of the label "hardcore", and the wide variety of demographics within the "casual gamer" catagory, and ask ourselves, "just really, what are we talking about?"
Are we comparing the amount of time put into video games? Are we looking at how people define themselves, socially, in terms of video games (ie: "I consider myself a gamer")? Are we talking about the TYPES of video games that different groups of people play (ie: Elektroplankton vs. Suikoden V vs. Half Life 2)? Even, possibly, are we looking at how a person views video games as an entertainment genre (is it a ligitimate form of entertainment equal to that of litterature and cinema)?
From a marketting perspective, it's not quite as simple as casual/hardcore. There are many gamers who will never leave the PC world, because of the additional hardware required. There are many people who consider themselves "hardcore gamers" (myself included), that will constantly be drawn to handheld systems because they seem to be more devoted to the roots of video gaming. There are some "hardcore gamers" (like a friend of mine) who are still struggling to embrace gaming as ligitimate, mature, entertainment form, and therefor only play early games, feeling that games are only relivent for nestolgic value.
I find this concentration on "casual gamers" to be very silly and a bit shortsided. There's a good chance that the Wii is going to be a hit all the way across the board, but my suspicions is that its biggest supporters are going to be life-long gamers, the emulator crowd (and the would-be emulator crowd): those that feel that the original ideals of gaming got a bit lost somewhere along the way, and thus the direction of gaming should back up a bit, and then branch out from there. Similarly with handhelds, some of the people I consider to be the "hardest-core" gamers I know are huge GBA and DS fans.
What happens is that the game preloads all adjacent rooms as you enter. You'll notice that enemies appear on your radar that are in adjacent rooms, but not two rooms away. Which can make for some interesting gameplay quirks (you won't have to fight those nasty Chozo ghosts again if you happen to exit through the wrong door in the room). I wonder whether the game does some preloading of the adjacent rooms when you first shoot the door, and then opens the door after a specific amount of time, while it finishes loading the adjacent rooms. You'll notice that some rooms take almost no time at all to load, where-as others may take a second or two. But yes, Metroid Prime does a GREAT job of killing and hiding load times.
On the flipside, I'm currently playing Suikoden V, which is a great game, but the load times are attrocious. They put a little animated graphic of the hero running in the corner of the screen to look at while you wait, but after about 3 times, it's not entertaining anymore! The damn thing does a 5 second load every time you go into a house or even open up the menu screen. It's like the game can't display ANYTHING without doing at least a 3 second load. Even PS1 games didn't have load times for opening up menus. Same with Dragon Quest VIII; great game, but it takes about 4 seconds just to open the menu! I mean, how hard its it to load up an entire town WITH all five enterable houses and a measilly little text-based menu into memory? It's as if the game doesn't load anything into memory that isn't actually on the screen at that moment... seems like terrible programming to me. Reminds me of old NES games in which enemies ceased to exist once they walked out of the frame. I thought we were past that stuff.
It doesn't work like that, though. You HAVE to release something new, it doesn't matter what it is, but eventually gamers expect something different to come out, and get a little tired of the old systems. The only reason why the PS2 competes with the 360 is because the next generation, as a whole, really hasn't started yet. There are a lot of fence sitters that are waiting for Nintendo and Sony to come out with their next systems before buying into the next gen. In the meantime, our old PS2s are dieing on us, so we're forced to either sit it out for the next 6 months, or buy a new one. The moment the Wii comes out, I'll bet you that 360 sales also skyrocket, and PS2 sales fall off the face of the earth, when two of the three consoles are out, the next gen will officially begin.
This is another place that Nintendo really has the right idea. By jumping off the powerhouse wagon, they set themselves up for being able to release systems in smaller technological leaps. See, it doesn't matter all that much if a next-gen console can compete with other same-gen consoles in terms of power, as long as it's new, and offers something different from the old. The way you should think about it is, Sony will HAVE to wait a while before being able to cash in on the sales of a new console (probably the PS4, unless their game department goes bankrupt on this go-around), and they've set themselves up to have to make another huge graphical leap, and lose a lot of money in the process. At the same time, about 3/4ths the way through this gen, Nintendo can release their next console, have it be only the same price as the other "last-gen" systems, maybe only as powerful, but suddenly have sales up the wazoo.
The SNES also had a much better synthesizer and sound generator. While not as immediately noticable as graphics, audio quality has a huge effect on the subconcious feel of games, something not to be overlooked. Seeing that a large number of very prominant games in that generation relied heavily on building a particular ambiance (Super Metroid and Final Fantasy VI, just to name a few), this gave the SNES a huge advantage.
Also, the graphical command set was much more sophisticated in the SNES. You had psuedo-3D, "mode 7", graphics right out of the docket, where-as the Genesis, while having its own little graphical tricks, was not nearly as flushed out. Also Nintendo's decision to allow game developers to add additional graphics and processing hardware inside the cartridge (as apposed to Sega's model of having the consumer buy an additional hardware addon, the 32X) was probably a lot better route to take, even though it made for some overpriced games.
I'll buy that, except for the third item. If "Action" belongs to MS and Sony, then what do you call Zelda and Metroid? Aren't they "action adventure games?" This is the genre that Nintendo practically built its name off of.
And RPG/Story, no doubt the last two rounds have gone to Sony, but we shall see about the next. The few RPGs that made it to the GCN were VERY strong (Skies of Arcadia & Tales of Symphonia being quite possibly some of the best of the generation), and MSs future is looking very strong in the RPG department. With Hironobu Sakaguchi, Akira Toriyama, and Nobuo Uematsu at the helm of a few new projects, we could very well see the 360 pulling together a very strong RPG turnout, especially towards the latter half of its lifespan. I do hope that more RPGs go through Nintendo's hands this generation, as I said, the few that came out for the GCN were very strong, and it's always nice to have the added variation in style that different consoles tend to offer game developers. But there's no question that this last generation of RPGs was completely owned by Sony (though not quite as much as during the N64/PSOne era)
Yeah, I've noticed that. I recently talked with a family friend who got around to watching the official US release of Azumanga Daioh. I watched a fan sub about 2 years ago, and when I started talking with him, I realized that my fan sub had put in all these neat little tidbits about Japanese language (so you could understand the context of the dialog) at the top of the screen, and the official release hadn't done anything like that. Because of this, he said that even though he loved the anime, there were some references that he just didn't understand, where-as I was able to understand a lot more of what was being said. WTF??? I think more anime localization houses should hire fan-subbers, or use fan sub material as the basis of the official release. Not that all fan subs are great, and not that all official releases are terrible, but it sure doesn't make sense when they are.
Come on, though, is fighting aliens any less "mature" than fighting ninjas or or crime bosses with huge guns? Seriously, most games that are considered "mature" have just as many "kiddie" aspects to them, they're usually just a whole lot bloodier (which, IMO, just makes them even more immature). But yeah, in terms of genre, Metroid Prime and Windwaker are in the same ballpark, and I imagine that there's a huge overlap in the userbass. I'd really like to see the actual figures on the ages of these games, as compared to, say, GTA: San Andraes. I would predict that GTAs peak is around 14-18 year olds, where as Zelda has two peaks, one at around 11 and one at around 25, with a hole in the middle, because of teens who believe that it's kiddy. Come one, the first Zelda came out in, what, 1986? I was 5 back then, it's part of my childhood. I'm guessing that my age group consists of a huge chunk of the install base.
There's an RPG that came out not too long ago called "Drag-On Dragoon". I had to read the name a few times to believe it, myself. So, what is the game about? Knights that drag giant fire-breathing lizards behind them?
Ronnie: "Thanks for saving me, Bad Dudes; let's go out for burgers."