It depends on what you call an 'unlockable', is the next level of a FPS an 'unlockable' because you have to kill the bad guys to get there? I don't feel it as so, and yet a good FPS (Like HL2) give hours of gameplay without resorting to 'collect all the map pieces on this level'.
That's because it's an FPS. Now, if it was an adventure game, and all I was supposed to do was kill all the bad guys on the map to continue, and NOT have any opportunity for puzzle solving, I would ask for my money back.
I guess it all comes down to what you find to be enjoyable. For me, the journey is the fun of it, not the reward. Similarly, I LOVE PROBLEM SOLVING!!! Sure I do it at work, and do you know what? I love my job (I'm a TV commercial producer, btw). Conversely, I don't find "shoot all the baddies" to be enjoyable in the slightest, it's just the same repetative crap over and over again. Give me a good epic journey with lots of variety in landscape and area design, and give me some brain twisters along the way so I feel a sense of accomplishment in my gameplay. This is heaven for me... I take it that that's not your cup of tea, though?
Actually, I'd much prefer B. Easy access to an item, but choosing NOT to use it just to challenge yourself, always feel TERRIBLE to me. Not that I don't have the willpower, but for me, when I'm faced with a trial in a game, the point of the game is to get through the trial by any means that I have access to. Not to mention, where's that satisfaction at the end of GETTING said "über-weapon"? Hell, I'd do a certain amount of tedious puzzle work for that feeling alone!
But, even so, I'd be happiest with "C"
C) You start with a pistol, which is very difficult to kill anything with. In order to get the über-weapon, you have to go through a long and hard, but fun, original puzzle that is ultimagely very satisfying to complete. When you get the über-weapon, you are much more powerful, and thus can move on to the next stage, of which there is another, harder, but even more fun puzzle waiting for you!
For me, the enjoyment of the game is in the trials, not the rewards themselves.
To quote a lyric from one of my favorite Rush songs: "The point of a journey is not to arrive."
Well, that's why longer, epic forms of entertainment/art/narrative are broken up into a hierarchical tree, in terms of tension and release. A 40 hour game may have it's one, central, climax around the 30 hour mark, but then may have smaller climactic moments staggered every 4-5 hours, with even smaller climactic points then scattered around every half hour or so. With a form like this, you can play for 20 minutes and usually get some enjoyment out of it, you can play for 3 hours, get even more involved, and get even more enjoyment out of it, or you can just mark off a long weekend, and play the game straight through... and lose any remaining chance you had of ever getting a date.
SNES games seem to have stood the test of time, probably more than any other system, they really were the height of 2D gaming practices. Of course, there continue to be great 2D games (Smash Bros, New Super Mario, Viewtiful Joe), but the concentration of 2D gaming was so great, and so refined at the time, while still being concidered "cutting edge" (let's face it, New Super Mario is a great game, though a lot of it's appeal is nostolgia, not just quality).
I think one of the main things that SNES games really improved was STRUCTURE. Too many games previous to the SNES had very little structure... and really, all games are is structured entertainment. Sure it's great to THINK about having "freedom" in games, but in practice, I (and many gamers) find freedom to be stifling, since you end up spending more time trying to think about what you SHOULD do next then actually having the fun of doing it. This is why "A Link to the Past" has aged so much better than "Legend of Zelda".
Also, structure allows for surprise. Structure creates a path in which you start to second guess what will happen next... which makes it so much more rewarding when things DON'T happen the way you expect them to. "Forge your own story" can be fun, but then you know everything that's going to happen, and therefor completely sacrifice the element of surprise.
Only a handful of N64 games will stand the test of time the way the SNES games will, because as soon as the GameCube came along, it was able to improve on a LOT of the ideas that the N64 first explored. Ocarina of Time will probably stand as the soul masterpiece of that console. Goldeneye/Perfect Dark have already faded into the distance (overshaddoed by Halo and Doom 3 and all the other modern FPSs), Majora's Mask didn't really gain the huge popularity that OoT did (I prefer Majora, myself, but I realize that most people think of it as OoTs bastard child), Mario 64 was a milestone, but when you think back on Mario 3 or Super Mario World, it's fairly uncomparable in terms of lasting value.
Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, FF6, Secret of Mana, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: all huge games that will be still popular in their respective genres for years to come.
Parham and Ford Prefect are addressing hardware power. Numbers.
How could they? Those numbers don't exist, noone knows the actual specs of the Wii... at least, I have yet to see any REAL data on it. Ford Prefect and Parham are speculating just as much as I am. The fact is, WE DON'T KNOW!!! We're using symantics to twist data in one direction or another: one person uses the term "power" as a synonym for clockspeed/processing power, while another person uses it as a synonym for percieved increase in performance. Both are accurate representations of the word, and have been used in talking about computer performance since its invention. One party speculates that Nintendo was refering to processing power, the other (me) suspects that Nintendo was using it to described percieved increase in performance. These yield TOTALLY different results, as processing power must be increased exponentially to yield a linear increase in percieved performance.
Nintendo have released no detailed hardware specs, and have never, in the history of the Wii/Revolution marketting strategy, used any kind of specs to sell the product, so when they said "power", I jumped to the obvious conclusion that they were talking percieved perception, of which I still have no reason to doubt, though I could very well be mistaken (we all could).
My comment about Sony and MS's "power" announcements was worded that way because that is the way THEY worded it, not me. This is the whole problem: Nintendo gives an arbitrary number corrisponding to what they THINK the perception will be of the increase in power, while Sony uses "power" to deliniate processing speed. The ambiguous nature of these figures is why we're all arguing in the first place.
To me and probably those who modded me up, you sound like you are disputing the hardware performance increase of the 360 vs. the xbox. It sounds like you are guessing the actual hardware performance increases.
Let me give you a piece of advice, as someone who's been around the block a few times here: NEVER... EVER... use your "mod points" as a reason for people to listen to you, it just comes across extremely childish.
Then take a look at the SSBB trailer (which is an in-game trailer). The one thing that popped into my mind while watching it (and while playing Kingdom Hearts 2/Dragon Quest VIII this week) is this: graphically, if we want to reproduce cartoons, we're done. They're essentially perfect - the limiting feature at this point is the desire of the programmer to put in the details, not the console to output the graphics and the artist to take the time in making them.
Wow, this is quite possibly one of the most insightful comments I've seen since the Next Gen battles began, I'd mod you up, but it looks like you don't need it. We're practically at the point that if you put a disney cartoon next to a Wii game, or even most GameCube games, the quality is there now. I too am playing Dragon Quest, however, and though the game is absolutely wonderful, it would have been SO MUCH BETTER had it been on the gamecube. I'm starting to feel that, for the styles of graphics the GCs design was centered around, it did them practically perfectly, yet every PS2 game I've ever played felt like it had room for graphical improvement. Just compare Tales of Symphonia to Dragon Quest VIII, and while I won't argue that DQ8 is probably a better game (both are great, however), Symphonia feels complete, where-as the lack of polygon smoothing in the PS2 makes even simple cell shaded graphics look a bit grainy. Now, I don't care if polygon smoothing has anything to do with pure power output or not, but its one thing that makes an instantly noticable difference in the percieved quality of the graphics of the two systems, therefor, the GC feels substantially superior, graphically.
Bright blocks of color, smooth "hand drawn" looking outlines and cells, with just enough detail to not be distracting: SSBM was practically perfect. Even if you look at Brawl, it doesn't look like anything that couldn't be done with a GameCube... because it doesn't require much more power. So they added a bit of texture to Mario's overalls... they totally could have done it on the GCN, but at the time, it was probably more that they really didn't think to do it than anything else.
Bottom line is:
Zelda: Twilight Princess and SSBB are going to look like the greatest Disney-styled animation ever, I don't think people are going to disapointed
Metroid Prime 3 is going to blow the crap out of sci-fi comic book style.
Red Steel may have a bit of a disadvantage, in attempting realism, but from what I've seen, I'm still awed by it.
Where in my post did I EVER say anything about polygon performance? I was specifically NOT talking about polygon count. I was talking about percieved performance increase. And, btw, the quote from Nintendo was not an objective statement about processing power, it WAS talking about percieved power, as in "it will feel 2 to 3 times more powerful than the GameCube". So many people seem to think Nintendo was making some kind of benchmark comparison, but they never have even come close to doing so.
Re-read my post. I really hate it when people keep putting words in my mouth. I thought I made it quite clear that I was talking about the perception of performance. My whole point was that actual performance increase doesn't mean crap if the perception of a performance increase isn't there.
Here's a possible psychological response to performance increase:
Sony: Actual performance increase of 30x = percieved performance increase of about 3 - 4 times
Nintendo: Actual performance increase of ???? = percieved performance increase of about 2 - 3 times
That puts the Wii in the ballbark of about 20x more powerful than the GameCube. Of course, this is all completely speculation, based on a bias perception BY the manufacturer. But still, this notion that the Wii is actually only 2-3x more powerful is simply stupid, and has never once been Nintendo's claim. The whole reason they threw out the "will feel 2 to 3 times more powerful" claim was because Nintendo wants to shake itself (and hopes that others will follow) free of this reliance on completely un-aesthetically based benchmarking, which produces claims that are no where near the actual percieved performance increases of the systems. People need to stop putting words into their mouth about what the actual performance increase will be until the specs come out (which they have not). I fully expect that this generation will see a comparable performance difference to the current generation, with the Wii being like the PS2, and the 360 and PS3 being close together, a bit noticably better, like last generation's GameCube and XBox. At most, the Wii will be this generation's DreamCast (in performance), but it's not going to be an NES sitting next to a PS2, as many comments seem to suggest.
These "2 or 2.5 times more powerful" figures are pretty arbitrary, don't you think? I mean, what does that actually mean? To be honest, I'd define the PS2's graphics as being about "2 to 3 times as powerful" as the PS1s. I'd put the XBox 360s as being about twice the power of the original XBox. The N64 seemed a little more, more like 4 or 5 times as powerful as the SNES (probably mostly due to it's adoption of 3D graphics processing). I was rolling my eyes when Sony and MS were claiming things like 25 - 30 X more powerful! Nintendo's estimate seems to strike me more in line with what I've thought of previous generation leaps. Hell, the Gamecube feels about twice as powerful as the PS2 to me. The bottom line is, a system's "power" is just as much defined in its ease of expansion, from a programming standpoint, then the actual clock speeds and size of instruction sets.
I expect that the Wii will be the least powerful system of this generation, but I'm not sure it's going to be the "ancient relic" that everyone makes it out to be. I think most games will be comparible in quality, with the PS3 and 360 having some titles that go a bit above it. Remember, that the cost of a graphics processor goes up exponentially as the actual output quality increases. So the PS3's graphics processing may be twice as expensive as the Wii's, I would expect it, then, to be around 1.5x more powerful, or thereabouts. THEN you have the whole HD conondrum. If I remember correctly, PS3 games will be REQUIRED to be, at a minimum, 720i, that takes a LOT MORE processing than 480i, which most Wii games will be set at. So all of that lovely graphical power that you get from that super expensive graphic hardware goes bye-bye right there. On normal TVs, I expect the Wii's graphics will be practically IDENTICAL to the 360 or PS3, possibly even slightly superior, due to the games being created specifically for viewing on 480i.
PS2 is noticable inferior to the GCN and XBox, yet it dominates both in the US and worldwide. I don't think the Wii will be noticably inferior, on standard TV sets, from the 360 and PS3.
Now, also, to be fair, airport security was and still is, purely superficial, and some of the worst of developed nations in the world. Even now, if you research the ammount of procautions, it wouldn't be all that difficult to hijack a plane with a bit of planning. The fact is, these guys were intelligent and good at improvising stategically, very good, and we were caught totally off-gaurd. There may have been other mistakes made, but it wouldn't take many mistakes with the simple lack of security at the time and now (which is not much better, no matter what some politicians may lead you to believe). Just because there "should be procautions" doesn't mean there were any effective ones in place, due to underfunding.
Let's face it, America was totally one-upped by these guys, they had a really good strategy, and very good execution. I'm not condoning what they did in any way, but all these conspiricy theories about the US government being involved in 9/11 make me sick. The US government is too inept to pull a stunt like that. Conspiricies, these days, don't get covered up, they get spun, because politicians are too lazy to cover their tracks well. Nothing about the US government is proactive anymore, and to form an air-tight conspiricy, you have to be proactive.
Well, fortunately, being unpopular is not grounds for impeachment. Now, I think Bush is an evil fuck even more than the next guy, and can point to plenty of ligitimate reasons why we should investigate him, convict the fucker, and impeach him (ties to Enron's activity, intelligence issues, helping cover up the CIA leak, Abu Grabe, the list goes on and on), but "polls in the low 30s" is not one of them. There may come a time where a president's best course of action is something that will, at least temporarily, make him extremely unfavorable, appearing... this is NOT one of those times, but at least we have 4 year terms so that politicians can at least do a LITTLE proactive politics (though many don't take advantage of it).
Well, for me, WiFi is much more practical, since I do have a wireless hub (802.11g), on a DSL line, where the only internet in the house is 2 rooms away from the tele. I dunno how people these days make a "wired house", but isn't that a pain in the ass to do, with wires running everywhere? It took me a couple of hours just to figure out how to run an eithernet cable from the office (where the DSL line is) to my bedroom, and that includes a messy, external eithernet cable that runs up around door frames and along the edge of the floor. I think the convenience of WiFi greatly outweighs it's inconveniences. Unfortunately, the other problem is, I can't imagine that the adoption rate of WiFi hubs is very high. I'm a techy, and I only got one because back in college, I had multipul computers in my dorm room, and I needed a multi-port switch to be able to run them online. How many households, upon spending the few hundred dollars to innitially get broadband access, go out and spend another $70 on a wireless router, then $30-$60 on a wireless card or wireless dongle? Probably many laptop users have a wireless router, with wireless built-in, but I'm guessing the amount of households with laptops is still only around 20% at the highest. So maybe 15% of households have wireless. Wii is aimed at EVERYONE (on all other accounts, they've done a damn good job doing this), and WiFi seems like the most convienent way to go, but how many people will be able to take advantage of it?
Case in point, the entire Torian music from the original Metroid (and Zero Mission), is found, note for note, in the middle section of "Gnomus", the second movement of Muzzorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", a Russian piece written in the 1860s. 12 notes, in exactly the same configuration, in exactly the same rhythm (haven't checked the key, but I'd argue that that is much less important). Do I think it's plaigarism? No, not really, I'm guessing it was probably entirely an accident. If you're ANY student of composition, you are going to know Pictures at an Exhibition... probably even better than you are going to know Beethoven's 5th, but there are millions of motifs out there, and when you hear one in your head to compose it, you PROBABLY most likely heard it before.
An inexperienced composer mopes about, doing everything to avoid the possibility of copying other work. His output is stifled and sacrificed. A good composer comes to term with the realities of composition (that 95% of the material isn't unique), and moves on. What's really important is what the WHOLE of a piece is, not whether one individual motif, or even a short melody is borrowed, it's how it influences the context of the whole.
I've even come to the point where I KNOW that I'm directly "borrowing" a few notes here, or a progression there, or a "feel" from there, but that doesn't bother me, because in the context of the 10min+ pieces that I tend to write, it serves a very different purpose than it did in the original. I take concepts and ideas from other work all the time, it's called "learning from other's experiences", and it's how music grows and gets more refined over time. Whether the casual listener, who has happened to have heard the original source, can recognize it, is of no concern to me.
A piece can be completely made up of pre-existing ideas (actually, most are, they just don't realize it), and still be original, if the ideas are arranged in a new way that changes their context.
I see a lot of people trying to compare the backwards compatibility issues with the XBox to previous systems in previous generations, good thought, but it really isn't a practical comparison. Who cares if the SNES didn't have BC, yet was a huge success; at the time the SNES came out, there was no standard of backwards compatibility. Heck, there wasn't any standard as to what a "next generation system" was supposed to be, as it was the first HUGE second generation of any particular line of consoles. We only started applying this "console generation" nametag when the SNES came out. Few people, even now, realize that there were more than one generation of Atari, and the Sega MasterSystem was by no means a household name in its day, at least not to the scale of the NES and major consoles since. Remember, gaming that penetrated more than just a small elite demographic was still in it's infancy. The SNES really set the gold standard, amongst mainstream culture, as to what a "next generation" was supposed to be: more buttons on the controller, doubled bit-rate (though few people actually knew what that meant), and a certain level of improvement in all around performance. No, I haven't forgotten the Genesis, and it might be accurate to say that it set the "next generation" standard first.
But now we come to the present. Two of the biggest consoles of our day, the PS2 and the GBA, thrust into the minds of millions of gamers, the concept that backwards compatibility is both possible and practical in a generation leap. Before these systems, people excepted that, as a toy, each console played its own games, and that was it. That's all changed, though. People let slide Nintendos failiour in backwards compatability on the GameCube due to its substantial change in media format, and the XBox was the first system in its line. But after the PS2, people EXPECT it, and the DS just helped to reenforce this. Nintendo has made clear, for quite some time, that its next console would be backwards compatable with the GameCube (only later did it add the rest of their systems to the list of playable content); and people have never even stopped to ask Sony whether the PS3 would play PS1 and PS2 games, they just assume that it will continue the trend. Before the name "360" was coined, everyone refered to the next MS system as the "XBox 2" for this very reason, and most were litterally shocked when MS announed that their second system would only be partially backwards compatable.
What I'm trying to say is that, similar to the "doubled bit-rate" expectation in the generation leaps of yesteryear, backwards compatability has become a standard, and is expected in the generation leaps of today. Maybe people shouldn't think this way—who's to say? But never the less, that is the current state of the market, and Microsoft failed to realize this. While this may not be killing blow against them, it's a noticable blemish in, what seems to be, a fairly smooth generational transition.
I agree, not so much with the "not having killer apps", my friends with XBoxen are quite happy with them, and say that there are quite a few great games for the system. But what's going to be a problem is that MS never had experience with "simple games", in fact, any developers who seem to be working on any kind of simple games (ie: 2D) are usually put out to pasture. Nintendo had years of experience with the NES and SNES. They have a huge back catalog to grab onto to support a portable system. While a few epic games have been successfull on a handheld (Golden Sun series, or Final Fantasy IV advance), the mainstay of handhelds are going to be the quirky, simple games that you can pick up and put down at any time. Basically, this is the complete opposite of what you want to market a fullsized console for, these days. Sony really blew it with the PSP, and MS are not usually very good at learning stuff like this. People are just starting to wake up and realize that full sized consoles are all about fun, but that's been a common concensus throughout the life of portable systems. Features that make handhelds 'little full-sized consoles', or bundling them as movie layers or media players never work. The simpler, the more concentrated on gaming, the better, and MS, frankly, sucks at this. I could imagine MS putting out a gaming system that's also a PDA, mp3 player, and cell phone, and it will sell like sand sells in the desert. I think they sorta realize this, though, from watching Sony, which is probably why they haven't attempted it. NOONE is more entrenched in the portable market than Nintendo, in fact, noone else has ever succeeded with a handheld. The closest thing was the Sega GameGear, but even that couldn't touch the GameBoy. Nintendo was never so entrenched, on a multi-generational level, in the full-sized console market. They were the only game in town during the NESs time, but Sega was hot on their heals during the time of the SNES. Compare this to the GameBoy line (now becoming the DS line), which has managed to outsell any of its competitors by two fold, for almost 20 years!
I was not aware of their involvement in Blue Dragon, partially because I know so little about Blue Dragon. BTW: Uematsu WAS involved in writing some of the music for Chrono Trigger... 13 tracks, if I remember correctly, most notably, of which, is probably the boss battle theme. But yes, the bulk was done by Mitsuda, who was just getting his composing legs at the time (sadly, I feel that it's by far his best score, I have not been impressed with his work since.)
And yes, the 360 may very well be mine by Christmas if this title lives up to it's rep... and it just means that others will follow. Japanese RPGs are quickly becoming more and more of a niche market in the US, so the 360 will never be lead by them, but it's international appeal will grow significantly if it can add some good ones to its repatoire
I've always been an XBox naysayer, but as for the Japanese market, there are two titles that very well may be the 360s Halo of Japan: Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon. I can't stress the importance of these titles enough. Lost Odyssey is a project headed up by the former Final Fantasy mastermind, and at his side is the world's most famous video game composer, Nobuo Uematsu (saying that he has "rock star" status in Japan is a very large understatement). From the looks of it, it's going to be a HUGE game, with a focus on a lot of things that Japanese gamers want, it may very well be the spiritual "equal" to FF13. Blue Dragon, while not having the star status of the former, still is going to be a huge release. Many people, myself possibly included, might very well buy a 360 for these games alone. MS could put itself on the Japanese map virtually overnight. Currently, I see about a 3-way split in titles aimed at the Japanese market... and seeing the PS3s price point, that is not good news for Sony. If these two titles are as big as I think they might be, Sony can kiss it's local market dominance goodbye, and we'll soon see Square jump ship completely (remember, they're not a Sony exclusive). Whether developers jump ship for the Wii or the 360 is another issue entirely, and I think we'll see some really interesting developement in the "rivalry" between those two systems.
PS2 will likely be Sony's "Next-Gen" console
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How the PS3 Hit $600
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Sony is really heading into a direction that may land them back in the current generation. The PS2 is still going strong, the only reason that next gen systems are so quickly adopted is because their predicessors are so quickly dropped. It wouldn't surprise me if, after an extremely terrible launch, Sony's only option is to continue with the PS2 for another couple of years. I think that the PS2 could easilly take on the 360 in the next generation, not in power, of course, but in how entrenched the software framework is. Many developers will, obviously, jump ship and opt for the most powerful system. But depending upon the success of the Wii (which, unless the big N makes any huge mistakes, is looking pretty positive), this next generation may turn out to not be about horsepower at all, but about innovative game design. As much as I love the concept of the Wii, it doesn't require having a new gadget to be innovative, Katamari taught us that pretty directly. Sony doesn't make any money on their consoles, they'd probably be more than happy if they could continue selling current-gen games at the same rate as they have been, since licensing is where the money comes from. The dirth of so many great last minute PS2 games may insure the success of the PS2 for a while yet to come. It may be that Sony is planning on a slow adoption rate, and a slow drop in price until the system can really take off in 2 or 3 years.
I'm sorry, I'm still diggin Dragon Quest 8 so much, I'm not sure I really see the need for a generational change in horsepower. Nintendo "gets it", the Wii is only about twice as powerful as the XBox, yet is looking to sell like hotcakes.
Thing is, I'm 25, I have a decent professional job (as a TV commercial producer), and I love the games the Playstation line has given us, yet even I can't justify $600 for a next gen console. If people in my position aren't going to buy it, who will? I think the writing is already on the wall for the PS3, at least for the moment.
For one, it's only a very recent issue, so it doesn't go anywhere towards explaining anything about the history of lack of interest in writing mac games (marketshare issues do). Also, most reports I've heard say that Rosetta runs programs about as fast (on Mactels) as their PPC counterparts, so you approach your marketting strategy from the same place every other game developer has done: either develop for only the most current, up-to-date system (the Mactel) and screw everyone else, or take a performance hit and code for machines going back a few years (PPCs & Mactels). This is the reason I don't play Computer games, because most developers I've had the misfortune of wanting to buy from, choose to take the first route, alienating 90% of the population just to get a needless graphical boost. Secondly, Universal Binaries currently are the standard for apple coding, and compiling for the two chipsets, while probably a little more work, pales in comparison to the time spent in development and doing the majority of the code
(the work that goes into games is now about only 5%-10% coding anyway, and 90% art/graphic design/sound/conceptualization).
-- My consoles for the next generation: Wii and PS2
Thats funny, I only remember him being in 2 out of the announced 25 titles for the Wii, neither of them launch titles, and only one being close to launch: Super Mario Galaxy. Smash Bros. Brawl is coming out in spring 2007, and Super Mario 128 hasn't even been officially announced yet. If anything, this is looking to be one of the most Mario-free launches ever (except for maybe the GameCube, which was practically Mario-less). If anything, around the time of the SNES, Mario was out front with no other series coming anywhere close to its popularity, but now Link and Samus have become practically his equals as maskots for the big N. About 2 years ago, it seemed that Nintendo was looking to make Metroid its new lauch series, although the lukewarm reception of both Echoes and Hunters probably stifled that a bit. Corruption looks like it's shaping up to be another Prime, however, so I'm still excited.
A few months back, in some obscure post, someone talked about the "Uncanny Valley", the place wherein trying to achieve realism, you get something that's ALMOST realistic, but because of its slight differences, is actually very disconcerting. It may be that games in this next generation may be approaching this area, which would be a total disaster for gaming companies. From what it looks like, Sony and MS have staked their systems livelihoods on graphics that fall right in the middle of the Uncanny Valley. Nintendo, on the other hand, with it's attention on things other than UltraRealism(tm), may be sitting safely on the other side. As realistic as the graphics look like they may be on the PS3, I would never mistake them for motion picture footage. Even with massive render farms, computer graphics have only just begun to fool the brain into thinking their looking at movie footage in the last 4 years or so, it will take real-time rendering quite a while to do that and safely climb out of the valley, MAYBE by the next generation, but I'm not even betting on it. Two generations from now, we'll see.
Nintendo has done something very intelligent over the years, by staking the bulk of their titles on purposefully unrealisticly styled graphics: no matter how good the graphics of a game get, the game next year will make the current game look "old" and somewhat less playable. Other entertainment and art forms aren't so starkly "now" and "then". When I go down to the local movie rental house, I'm probably just as likely to pick out a movie from the 1960s as I am to pick out one that came out last year, and the same goes for music: Beatles albums still sell. There may come a time when a great game will sell, steadily, for many decades. When I look back, I'm probably just as likely to replay Zelda: Ocarina of Time as Wind Waker, in fact, I still haven't decided which game APPEARS more contemporary, they're just different. However, the choice between Quake 2 and Halo 2 becomes much more apparent. In a year and a half, Halo 3 and the next generation of FPSs will obscure Halo 2, and Halo 2s sales will immediately cease. Gameplay, dialog, storyline, these things are practically ageless, and thus have much longer market value.
Well, it seems to me that is precisely the game industry's major faux pas.
Everybody's just trying to copy bloody Hollywood instead of doing what they should: games.
Won't anybody think of the games??
Partly true. I don't think the main problem is an art vs. coding issue, but more of a design vs. development issue. So much of gaming is based off of very "safe" and tried and true conceptual designs, and then most of the time and effort is put into the development, be it visuals/sound or code. Gameplay elements are standardized, artistic theme and style is virtually pulled out of a grab bag of prefabricated concepts, etc. What's needed is a bit more risk taking in the design department, something that many large companies are afraid to do. Many times, smaller developers have the capabilities, by nature of being small and agile, and with less to lose, to be able to take more design risks... though their developement is usually sub-par, and their marketting is non-existant. Then it's up to the larger company to recognize a good idea, swoop down and put those ideas to good use (call it stealing if you want, intellectual propery rights are beside the point), give the game a budget where the development and marketting can be flushed out. With such a low premium on dev kits for the Wii, there will be a lot more small developers, a lot more undeveloped games with no marketting, but a much larger pool of designers for the larger companies to survey.
Hear me out, the Wii will probably have an incredibly huge number of crappy games, much more than any system to date, but out of that may come a lot better high-end games. A console is always judged by it's highest escellon of games, after all, how many people judged the NES by "E.T" or the slu of Barbie games that were released for it?
Bullshit... Microsoft once again rejected w3 standards, especially in the CSS department. The web design community is just as pissed at Microsoft now as they were before. Sure the security might be better (though I've heard evidence to the contrary), and I have no doubt the interface will be more sexy (will it be more functional though?) but they still aren't anywhere close to being w3 compliant. If I write a page, it currently renders identically on Firefox, Safari, and Opera, about 99% of the time, IE is still down in the low 20%s. From what I hear about IE7, it might reach a nice mid 30%, somewhere just above Bush's aproval rating, which still doesn't make me feel very good.
While I would agree with you that Mario Kart is probably the most static of the series you just cited, I would like to point out that it's probably the least static series in a genre of extremely static games (racing). Seriously, how much do you expect a racing game to change?
That said, all the other games change more between two games then any other two games in their respective genre's (and I would include MarioKart in that statement as well). Just because a game is a sequal doesn't make it any more or less innovative. For the most part, if anything, it just places the game in a particular genre (Zelda is Nintendo's adventure games, Mario is their platformers and family games, Metroid is their sci-fi horror).
As to who to hate, I used to be a big PlayStation fan because of its plethora of RPGs, but now I'm seeing so many companies jumping ship on the PS3, I have to wonder what's really going to happen. Still, it's hard for me to imagine not having the system that Metal Gear Solid 4 and FF13 will be on. MGS4 looks... well... solid. And FF13 is bound to be good (every game in the series I've at least enjoyed, I don't think Square has produced a dog in their main line so far), and from what I've heard about FF12, they're back on their feet again. That said, I won't pay $600 to be able to play two games, so if there isn't a massive catalog to go with the system, it might be time to jump ship. I hate what Microsoft has done to gaming: gone and brought American developers's into the console market, but I have to admit, they have a solid product this time around, although if the Wii is as good as I think it might be, it may be the only system I'll need this generation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because it's an FPS. Now, if it was an adventure game, and all I was supposed to do was kill all the bad guys on the map to continue, and NOT have any opportunity for puzzle solving, I would ask for my money back.
I guess it all comes down to what you find to be enjoyable. For me, the journey is the fun of it, not the reward. Similarly, I LOVE PROBLEM SOLVING!!! Sure I do it at work, and do you know what? I love my job (I'm a TV commercial producer, btw). Conversely, I don't find "shoot all the baddies" to be enjoyable in the slightest, it's just the same repetative crap over and over again. Give me a good epic journey with lots of variety in landscape and area design, and give me some brain twisters along the way so I feel a sense of accomplishment in my gameplay. This is heaven for me... I take it that that's not your cup of tea, though?
Actually, I'd much prefer B. Easy access to an item, but choosing NOT to use it just to challenge yourself, always feel TERRIBLE to me. Not that I don't have the willpower, but for me, when I'm faced with a trial in a game, the point of the game is to get through the trial by any means that I have access to. Not to mention, where's that satisfaction at the end of GETTING said "über-weapon"? Hell, I'd do a certain amount of tedious puzzle work for that feeling alone!
But, even so, I'd be happiest with "C"
C) You start with a pistol, which is very difficult to kill anything with. In order to get the über-weapon, you have to go through a long and hard, but fun, original puzzle that is ultimagely very satisfying to complete. When you get the über-weapon, you are much more powerful, and thus can move on to the next stage, of which there is another, harder, but even more fun puzzle waiting for you!
For me, the enjoyment of the game is in the trials, not the rewards themselves.
To quote a lyric from one of my favorite Rush songs: "The point of a journey is not to arrive."
Well, that's why longer, epic forms of entertainment/art/narrative are broken up into a hierarchical tree, in terms of tension and release. A 40 hour game may have it's one, central, climax around the 30 hour mark, but then may have smaller climactic moments staggered every 4-5 hours, with even smaller climactic points then scattered around every half hour or so. With a form like this, you can play for 20 minutes and usually get some enjoyment out of it, you can play for 3 hours, get even more involved, and get even more enjoyment out of it, or you can just mark off a long weekend, and play the game straight through... and lose any remaining chance you had of ever getting a date.
SNES games seem to have stood the test of time, probably more than any other system, they really were the height of 2D gaming practices. Of course, there continue to be great 2D games (Smash Bros, New Super Mario, Viewtiful Joe), but the concentration of 2D gaming was so great, and so refined at the time, while still being concidered "cutting edge" (let's face it, New Super Mario is a great game, though a lot of it's appeal is nostolgia, not just quality).
I think one of the main things that SNES games really improved was STRUCTURE. Too many games previous to the SNES had very little structure... and really, all games are is structured entertainment. Sure it's great to THINK about having "freedom" in games, but in practice, I (and many gamers) find freedom to be stifling, since you end up spending more time trying to think about what you SHOULD do next then actually having the fun of doing it. This is why "A Link to the Past" has aged so much better than "Legend of Zelda".
Also, structure allows for surprise. Structure creates a path in which you start to second guess what will happen next... which makes it so much more rewarding when things DON'T happen the way you expect them to. "Forge your own story" can be fun, but then you know everything that's going to happen, and therefor completely sacrifice the element of surprise.
Only a handful of N64 games will stand the test of time the way the SNES games will, because as soon as the GameCube came along, it was able to improve on a LOT of the ideas that the N64 first explored. Ocarina of Time will probably stand as the soul masterpiece of that console. Goldeneye/Perfect Dark have already faded into the distance (overshaddoed by Halo and Doom 3 and all the other modern FPSs), Majora's Mask didn't really gain the huge popularity that OoT did (I prefer Majora, myself, but I realize that most people think of it as OoTs bastard child), Mario 64 was a milestone, but when you think back on Mario 3 or Super Mario World, it's fairly uncomparable in terms of lasting value.
Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, FF6, Secret of Mana, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: all huge games that will be still popular in their respective genres for years to come.
How could they? Those numbers don't exist, noone knows the actual specs of the Wii... at least, I have yet to see any REAL data on it. Ford Prefect and Parham are speculating just as much as I am. The fact is, WE DON'T KNOW!!! We're using symantics to twist data in one direction or another: one person uses the term "power" as a synonym for clockspeed/processing power, while another person uses it as a synonym for percieved increase in performance. Both are accurate representations of the word, and have been used in talking about computer performance since its invention. One party speculates that Nintendo was refering to processing power, the other (me) suspects that Nintendo was using it to described percieved increase in performance. These yield TOTALLY different results, as processing power must be increased exponentially to yield a linear increase in percieved performance.
Nintendo have released no detailed hardware specs, and have never, in the history of the Wii/Revolution marketting strategy, used any kind of specs to sell the product, so when they said "power", I jumped to the obvious conclusion that they were talking percieved perception, of which I still have no reason to doubt, though I could very well be mistaken (we all could).
My comment about Sony and MS's "power" announcements was worded that way because that is the way THEY worded it, not me. This is the whole problem: Nintendo gives an arbitrary number corrisponding to what they THINK the perception will be of the increase in power, while Sony uses "power" to deliniate processing speed. The ambiguous nature of these figures is why we're all arguing in the first place.
Let me give you a piece of advice, as someone who's been around the block a few times here: NEVER... EVER... use your "mod points" as a reason for people to listen to you, it just comes across extremely childish.
Wow, this is quite possibly one of the most insightful comments I've seen since the Next Gen battles began, I'd mod you up, but it looks like you don't need it. We're practically at the point that if you put a disney cartoon next to a Wii game, or even most GameCube games, the quality is there now. I too am playing Dragon Quest, however, and though the game is absolutely wonderful, it would have been SO MUCH BETTER had it been on the gamecube. I'm starting to feel that, for the styles of graphics the GCs design was centered around, it did them practically perfectly, yet every PS2 game I've ever played felt like it had room for graphical improvement. Just compare Tales of Symphonia to Dragon Quest VIII, and while I won't argue that DQ8 is probably a better game (both are great, however), Symphonia feels complete, where-as the lack of polygon smoothing in the PS2 makes even simple cell shaded graphics look a bit grainy. Now, I don't care if polygon smoothing has anything to do with pure power output or not, but its one thing that makes an instantly noticable difference in the percieved quality of the graphics of the two systems, therefor, the GC feels substantially superior, graphically.
Bright blocks of color, smooth "hand drawn" looking outlines and cells, with just enough detail to not be distracting: SSBM was practically perfect. Even if you look at Brawl, it doesn't look like anything that couldn't be done with a GameCube... because it doesn't require much more power. So they added a bit of texture to Mario's overalls... they totally could have done it on the GCN, but at the time, it was probably more that they really didn't think to do it than anything else.
Bottom line is:
Zelda: Twilight Princess and SSBB are going to look like the greatest Disney-styled animation ever, I don't think people are going to disapointed
Metroid Prime 3 is going to blow the crap out of sci-fi comic book style.
Red Steel may have a bit of a disadvantage, in attempting realism, but from what I've seen, I'm still awed by it.
No no no.
Where in my post did I EVER say anything about polygon performance? I was specifically NOT talking about polygon count. I was talking about percieved performance increase. And, btw, the quote from Nintendo was not an objective statement about processing power, it WAS talking about percieved power, as in "it will feel 2 to 3 times more powerful than the GameCube". So many people seem to think Nintendo was making some kind of benchmark comparison, but they never have even come close to doing so.
Re-read my post. I really hate it when people keep putting words in my mouth. I thought I made it quite clear that I was talking about the perception of performance. My whole point was that actual performance increase doesn't mean crap if the perception of a performance increase isn't there.
Here's a possible psychological response to performance increase:
Sony: Actual performance increase of 30x = percieved performance increase of about 3 - 4 times
Nintendo: Actual performance increase of ???? = percieved performance increase of about 2 - 3 times
That puts the Wii in the ballbark of about 20x more powerful than the GameCube. Of course, this is all completely speculation, based on a bias perception BY the manufacturer. But still, this notion that the Wii is actually only 2-3x more powerful is simply stupid, and has never once been Nintendo's claim. The whole reason they threw out the "will feel 2 to 3 times more powerful" claim was because Nintendo wants to shake itself (and hopes that others will follow) free of this reliance on completely un-aesthetically based benchmarking, which produces claims that are no where near the actual percieved performance increases of the systems. People need to stop putting words into their mouth about what the actual performance increase will be until the specs come out (which they have not). I fully expect that this generation will see a comparable performance difference to the current generation, with the Wii being like the PS2, and the 360 and PS3 being close together, a bit noticably better, like last generation's GameCube and XBox. At most, the Wii will be this generation's DreamCast (in performance), but it's not going to be an NES sitting next to a PS2, as many comments seem to suggest.
These "2 or 2.5 times more powerful" figures are pretty arbitrary, don't you think? I mean, what does that actually mean? To be honest, I'd define the PS2's graphics as being about "2 to 3 times as powerful" as the PS1s. I'd put the XBox 360s as being about twice the power of the original XBox. The N64 seemed a little more, more like 4 or 5 times as powerful as the SNES (probably mostly due to it's adoption of 3D graphics processing). I was rolling my eyes when Sony and MS were claiming things like 25 - 30 X more powerful! Nintendo's estimate seems to strike me more in line with what I've thought of previous generation leaps. Hell, the Gamecube feels about twice as powerful as the PS2 to me. The bottom line is, a system's "power" is just as much defined in its ease of expansion, from a programming standpoint, then the actual clock speeds and size of instruction sets.
I expect that the Wii will be the least powerful system of this generation, but I'm not sure it's going to be the "ancient relic" that everyone makes it out to be. I think most games will be comparible in quality, with the PS3 and 360 having some titles that go a bit above it. Remember, that the cost of a graphics processor goes up exponentially as the actual output quality increases. So the PS3's graphics processing may be twice as expensive as the Wii's, I would expect it, then, to be around 1.5x more powerful, or thereabouts. THEN you have the whole HD conondrum. If I remember correctly, PS3 games will be REQUIRED to be, at a minimum, 720i, that takes a LOT MORE processing than 480i, which most Wii games will be set at. So all of that lovely graphical power that you get from that super expensive graphic hardware goes bye-bye right there. On normal TVs, I expect the Wii's graphics will be practically IDENTICAL to the 360 or PS3, possibly even slightly superior, due to the games being created specifically for viewing on 480i.
PS2 is noticable inferior to the GCN and XBox, yet it dominates both in the US and worldwide. I don't think the Wii will be noticably inferior, on standard TV sets, from the 360 and PS3.
Now, also, to be fair, airport security was and still is, purely superficial, and some of the worst of developed nations in the world. Even now, if you research the ammount of procautions, it wouldn't be all that difficult to hijack a plane with a bit of planning. The fact is, these guys were intelligent and good at improvising stategically, very good, and we were caught totally off-gaurd. There may have been other mistakes made, but it wouldn't take many mistakes with the simple lack of security at the time and now (which is not much better, no matter what some politicians may lead you to believe). Just because there "should be procautions" doesn't mean there were any effective ones in place, due to underfunding.
Let's face it, America was totally one-upped by these guys, they had a really good strategy, and very good execution. I'm not condoning what they did in any way, but all these conspiricy theories about the US government being involved in 9/11 make me sick. The US government is too inept to pull a stunt like that. Conspiricies, these days, don't get covered up, they get spun, because politicians are too lazy to cover their tracks well. Nothing about the US government is proactive anymore, and to form an air-tight conspiricy, you have to be proactive.
Well, fortunately, being unpopular is not grounds for impeachment. Now, I think Bush is an evil fuck even more than the next guy, and can point to plenty of ligitimate reasons why we should investigate him, convict the fucker, and impeach him (ties to Enron's activity, intelligence issues, helping cover up the CIA leak, Abu Grabe, the list goes on and on), but "polls in the low 30s" is not one of them. There may come a time where a president's best course of action is something that will, at least temporarily, make him extremely unfavorable, appearing... this is NOT one of those times, but at least we have 4 year terms so that politicians can at least do a LITTLE proactive politics (though many don't take advantage of it).
Well, for me, WiFi is much more practical, since I do have a wireless hub (802.11g), on a DSL line, where the only internet in the house is 2 rooms away from the tele. I dunno how people these days make a "wired house", but isn't that a pain in the ass to do, with wires running everywhere? It took me a couple of hours just to figure out how to run an eithernet cable from the office (where the DSL line is) to my bedroom, and that includes a messy, external eithernet cable that runs up around door frames and along the edge of the floor. I think the convenience of WiFi greatly outweighs it's inconveniences. Unfortunately, the other problem is, I can't imagine that the adoption rate of WiFi hubs is very high. I'm a techy, and I only got one because back in college, I had multipul computers in my dorm room, and I needed a multi-port switch to be able to run them online. How many households, upon spending the few hundred dollars to innitially get broadband access, go out and spend another $70 on a wireless router, then $30-$60 on a wireless card or wireless dongle? Probably many laptop users have a wireless router, with wireless built-in, but I'm guessing the amount of households with laptops is still only around 20% at the highest. So maybe 15% of households have wireless. Wii is aimed at EVERYONE (on all other accounts, they've done a damn good job doing this), and WiFi seems like the most convienent way to go, but how many people will be able to take advantage of it?
Case in point, the entire Torian music from the original Metroid (and Zero Mission), is found, note for note, in the middle section of "Gnomus", the second movement of Muzzorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", a Russian piece written in the 1860s. 12 notes, in exactly the same configuration, in exactly the same rhythm (haven't checked the key, but I'd argue that that is much less important). Do I think it's plaigarism? No, not really, I'm guessing it was probably entirely an accident. If you're ANY student of composition, you are going to know Pictures at an Exhibition... probably even better than you are going to know Beethoven's 5th, but there are millions of motifs out there, and when you hear one in your head to compose it, you PROBABLY most likely heard it before.
An inexperienced composer mopes about, doing everything to avoid the possibility of copying other work. His output is stifled and sacrificed. A good composer comes to term with the realities of composition (that 95% of the material isn't unique), and moves on. What's really important is what the WHOLE of a piece is, not whether one individual motif, or even a short melody is borrowed, it's how it influences the context of the whole.
I've even come to the point where I KNOW that I'm directly "borrowing" a few notes here, or a progression there, or a "feel" from there, but that doesn't bother me, because in the context of the 10min+ pieces that I tend to write, it serves a very different purpose than it did in the original. I take concepts and ideas from other work all the time, it's called "learning from other's experiences", and it's how music grows and gets more refined over time. Whether the casual listener, who has happened to have heard the original source, can recognize it, is of no concern to me.
A piece can be completely made up of pre-existing ideas (actually, most are, they just don't realize it), and still be original, if the ideas are arranged in a new way that changes their context.
I see a lot of people trying to compare the backwards compatibility issues with the XBox to previous systems in previous generations, good thought, but it really isn't a practical comparison. Who cares if the SNES didn't have BC, yet was a huge success; at the time the SNES came out, there was no standard of backwards compatibility. Heck, there wasn't any standard as to what a "next generation system" was supposed to be, as it was the first HUGE second generation of any particular line of consoles. We only started applying this "console generation" nametag when the SNES came out. Few people, even now, realize that there were more than one generation of Atari, and the Sega MasterSystem was by no means a household name in its day, at least not to the scale of the NES and major consoles since. Remember, gaming that penetrated more than just a small elite demographic was still in it's infancy. The SNES really set the gold standard, amongst mainstream culture, as to what a "next generation" was supposed to be: more buttons on the controller, doubled bit-rate (though few people actually knew what that meant), and a certain level of improvement in all around performance. No, I haven't forgotten the Genesis, and it might be accurate to say that it set the "next generation" standard first.
But now we come to the present. Two of the biggest consoles of our day, the PS2 and the GBA, thrust into the minds of millions of gamers, the concept that backwards compatibility is both possible and practical in a generation leap. Before these systems, people excepted that, as a toy, each console played its own games, and that was it. That's all changed, though. People let slide Nintendos failiour in backwards compatability on the GameCube due to its substantial change in media format, and the XBox was the first system in its line. But after the PS2, people EXPECT it, and the DS just helped to reenforce this. Nintendo has made clear, for quite some time, that its next console would be backwards compatable with the GameCube (only later did it add the rest of their systems to the list of playable content); and people have never even stopped to ask Sony whether the PS3 would play PS1 and PS2 games, they just assume that it will continue the trend. Before the name "360" was coined, everyone refered to the next MS system as the "XBox 2" for this very reason, and most were litterally shocked when MS announed that their second system would only be partially backwards compatable.
What I'm trying to say is that, similar to the "doubled bit-rate" expectation in the generation leaps of yesteryear, backwards compatability has become a standard, and is expected in the generation leaps of today. Maybe people shouldn't think this way—who's to say? But never the less, that is the current state of the market, and Microsoft failed to realize this. While this may not be killing blow against them, it's a noticable blemish in, what seems to be, a fairly smooth generational transition.
I agree, not so much with the "not having killer apps", my friends with XBoxen are quite happy with them, and say that there are quite a few great games for the system. But what's going to be a problem is that MS never had experience with "simple games", in fact, any developers who seem to be working on any kind of simple games (ie: 2D) are usually put out to pasture. Nintendo had years of experience with the NES and SNES. They have a huge back catalog to grab onto to support a portable system. While a few epic games have been successfull on a handheld (Golden Sun series, or Final Fantasy IV advance), the mainstay of handhelds are going to be the quirky, simple games that you can pick up and put down at any time. Basically, this is the complete opposite of what you want to market a fullsized console for, these days. Sony really blew it with the PSP, and MS are not usually very good at learning stuff like this. People are just starting to wake up and realize that full sized consoles are all about fun, but that's been a common concensus throughout the life of portable systems. Features that make handhelds 'little full-sized consoles', or bundling them as movie layers or media players never work. The simpler, the more concentrated on gaming, the better, and MS, frankly, sucks at this. I could imagine MS putting out a gaming system that's also a PDA, mp3 player, and cell phone, and it will sell like sand sells in the desert. I think they sorta realize this, though, from watching Sony, which is probably why they haven't attempted it. NOONE is more entrenched in the portable market than Nintendo, in fact, noone else has ever succeeded with a handheld. The closest thing was the Sega GameGear, but even that couldn't touch the GameBoy. Nintendo was never so entrenched, on a multi-generational level, in the full-sized console market. They were the only game in town during the NESs time, but Sega was hot on their heals during the time of the SNES. Compare this to the GameBoy line (now becoming the DS line), which has managed to outsell any of its competitors by two fold, for almost 20 years!
I was not aware of their involvement in Blue Dragon, partially because I know so little about Blue Dragon. BTW: Uematsu WAS involved in writing some of the music for Chrono Trigger... 13 tracks, if I remember correctly, most notably, of which, is probably the boss battle theme. But yes, the bulk was done by Mitsuda, who was just getting his composing legs at the time (sadly, I feel that it's by far his best score, I have not been impressed with his work since.)
And yes, the 360 may very well be mine by Christmas if this title lives up to it's rep... and it just means that others will follow. Japanese RPGs are quickly becoming more and more of a niche market in the US, so the 360 will never be lead by them, but it's international appeal will grow significantly if it can add some good ones to its repatoire
I've always been an XBox naysayer, but as for the Japanese market, there are two titles that very well may be the 360s Halo of Japan: Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon. I can't stress the importance of these titles enough. Lost Odyssey is a project headed up by the former Final Fantasy mastermind, and at his side is the world's most famous video game composer, Nobuo Uematsu (saying that he has "rock star" status in Japan is a very large understatement). From the looks of it, it's going to be a HUGE game, with a focus on a lot of things that Japanese gamers want, it may very well be the spiritual "equal" to FF13. Blue Dragon, while not having the star status of the former, still is going to be a huge release. Many people, myself possibly included, might very well buy a 360 for these games alone. MS could put itself on the Japanese map virtually overnight. Currently, I see about a 3-way split in titles aimed at the Japanese market... and seeing the PS3s price point, that is not good news for Sony. If these two titles are as big as I think they might be, Sony can kiss it's local market dominance goodbye, and we'll soon see Square jump ship completely (remember, they're not a Sony exclusive). Whether developers jump ship for the Wii or the 360 is another issue entirely, and I think we'll see some really interesting developement in the "rivalry" between those two systems.
Sony is really heading into a direction that may land them back in the current generation. The PS2 is still going strong, the only reason that next gen systems are so quickly adopted is because their predicessors are so quickly dropped. It wouldn't surprise me if, after an extremely terrible launch, Sony's only option is to continue with the PS2 for another couple of years. I think that the PS2 could easilly take on the 360 in the next generation, not in power, of course, but in how entrenched the software framework is. Many developers will, obviously, jump ship and opt for the most powerful system. But depending upon the success of the Wii (which, unless the big N makes any huge mistakes, is looking pretty positive), this next generation may turn out to not be about horsepower at all, but about innovative game design. As much as I love the concept of the Wii, it doesn't require having a new gadget to be innovative, Katamari taught us that pretty directly. Sony doesn't make any money on their consoles, they'd probably be more than happy if they could continue selling current-gen games at the same rate as they have been, since licensing is where the money comes from. The dirth of so many great last minute PS2 games may insure the success of the PS2 for a while yet to come. It may be that Sony is planning on a slow adoption rate, and a slow drop in price until the system can really take off in 2 or 3 years.
I'm sorry, I'm still diggin Dragon Quest 8 so much, I'm not sure I really see the need for a generational change in horsepower. Nintendo "gets it", the Wii is only about twice as powerful as the XBox, yet is looking to sell like hotcakes.
Thing is, I'm 25, I have a decent professional job (as a TV commercial producer), and I love the games the Playstation line has given us, yet even I can't justify $600 for a next gen console. If people in my position aren't going to buy it, who will? I think the writing is already on the wall for the PS3, at least for the moment.
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My consoles for the next generation: Wii and PS2
Thats funny, I only remember him being in 2 out of the announced 25 titles for the Wii, neither of them launch titles, and only one being close to launch: Super Mario Galaxy. Smash Bros. Brawl is coming out in spring 2007, and Super Mario 128 hasn't even been officially announced yet. If anything, this is looking to be one of the most Mario-free launches ever (except for maybe the GameCube, which was practically Mario-less). If anything, around the time of the SNES, Mario was out front with no other series coming anywhere close to its popularity, but now Link and Samus have become practically his equals as maskots for the big N. About 2 years ago, it seemed that Nintendo was looking to make Metroid its new lauch series, although the lukewarm reception of both Echoes and Hunters probably stifled that a bit. Corruption looks like it's shaping up to be another Prime, however, so I'm still excited.
Is there a name for delusional slashdot techies?
Cuz I really think there should be.
A few months back, in some obscure post, someone talked about the "Uncanny Valley", the place wherein trying to achieve realism, you get something that's ALMOST realistic, but because of its slight differences, is actually very disconcerting. It may be that games in this next generation may be approaching this area, which would be a total disaster for gaming companies. From what it looks like, Sony and MS have staked their systems livelihoods on graphics that fall right in the middle of the Uncanny Valley. Nintendo, on the other hand, with it's attention on things other than UltraRealism(tm), may be sitting safely on the other side. As realistic as the graphics look like they may be on the PS3, I would never mistake them for motion picture footage. Even with massive render farms, computer graphics have only just begun to fool the brain into thinking their looking at movie footage in the last 4 years or so, it will take real-time rendering quite a while to do that and safely climb out of the valley, MAYBE by the next generation, but I'm not even betting on it. Two generations from now, we'll see.
Nintendo has done something very intelligent over the years, by staking the bulk of their titles on purposefully unrealisticly styled graphics: no matter how good the graphics of a game get, the game next year will make the current game look "old" and somewhat less playable. Other entertainment and art forms aren't so starkly "now" and "then". When I go down to the local movie rental house, I'm probably just as likely to pick out a movie from the 1960s as I am to pick out one that came out last year, and the same goes for music: Beatles albums still sell. There may come a time when a great game will sell, steadily, for many decades. When I look back, I'm probably just as likely to replay Zelda: Ocarina of Time as Wind Waker, in fact, I still haven't decided which game APPEARS more contemporary, they're just different. However, the choice between Quake 2 and Halo 2 becomes much more apparent. In a year and a half, Halo 3 and the next generation of FPSs will obscure Halo 2, and Halo 2s sales will immediately cease. Gameplay, dialog, storyline, these things are practically ageless, and thus have much longer market value.
Well, it seems to me that is precisely the game industry's major faux pas. Everybody's just trying to copy bloody Hollywood instead of doing what they should: games. Won't anybody think of the games??
Partly true. I don't think the main problem is an art vs. coding issue, but more of a design vs. development issue. So much of gaming is based off of very "safe" and tried and true conceptual designs, and then most of the time and effort is put into the development, be it visuals/sound or code. Gameplay elements are standardized, artistic theme and style is virtually pulled out of a grab bag of prefabricated concepts, etc. What's needed is a bit more risk taking in the design department, something that many large companies are afraid to do. Many times, smaller developers have the capabilities, by nature of being small and agile, and with less to lose, to be able to take more design risks... though their developement is usually sub-par, and their marketting is non-existant. Then it's up to the larger company to recognize a good idea, swoop down and put those ideas to good use (call it stealing if you want, intellectual propery rights are beside the point), give the game a budget where the development and marketting can be flushed out. With such a low premium on dev kits for the Wii, there will be a lot more small developers, a lot more undeveloped games with no marketting, but a much larger pool of designers for the larger companies to survey.
Hear me out, the Wii will probably have an incredibly huge number of crappy games, much more than any system to date, but out of that may come a lot better high-end games. A console is always judged by it's highest escellon of games, after all, how many people judged the NES by "E.T" or the slu of Barbie games that were released for it?
Damn it I hate zealots :P ....
Well, that's at least one thing we can both agree on :)
It's called IE7...
Bullshit... Microsoft once again rejected w3 standards, especially in the CSS department. The web design community is just as pissed at Microsoft now as they were before. Sure the security might be better (though I've heard evidence to the contrary), and I have no doubt the interface will be more sexy (will it be more functional though?) but they still aren't anywhere close to being w3 compliant. If I write a page, it currently renders identically on Firefox, Safari, and Opera, about 99% of the time, IE is still down in the low 20%s. From what I hear about IE7, it might reach a nice mid 30%, somewhere just above Bush's aproval rating, which still doesn't make me feel very good.
While I would agree with you that Mario Kart is probably the most static of the series you just cited, I would like to point out that it's probably the least static series in a genre of extremely static games (racing). Seriously, how much do you expect a racing game to change?
That said, all the other games change more between two games then any other two games in their respective genre's (and I would include MarioKart in that statement as well). Just because a game is a sequal doesn't make it any more or less innovative. For the most part, if anything, it just places the game in a particular genre (Zelda is Nintendo's adventure games, Mario is their platformers and family games, Metroid is their sci-fi horror).
As to who to hate, I used to be a big PlayStation fan because of its plethora of RPGs, but now I'm seeing so many companies jumping ship on the PS3, I have to wonder what's really going to happen. Still, it's hard for me to imagine not having the system that Metal Gear Solid 4 and FF13 will be on. MGS4 looks... well... solid. And FF13 is bound to be good (every game in the series I've at least enjoyed, I don't think Square has produced a dog in their main line so far), and from what I've heard about FF12, they're back on their feet again. That said, I won't pay $600 to be able to play two games, so if there isn't a massive catalog to go with the system, it might be time to jump ship. I hate what Microsoft has done to gaming: gone and brought American developers's into the console market, but I have to admit, they have a solid product this time around, although if the Wii is as good as I think it might be, it may be the only system I'll need this generation.