Contrary to popular belief, you can make a game within the same world and context without treading the same ground.
This isn't Team Ninja where they keep rereleasing Ninja Gaiden in new, prettier forms. The differences between Diablo 1 and 2, between WarCraft 2 and 3, and between WoW and anything else Blizzard has done are huge.
Most companies would have taken Diablo and stuck exactly to the formula. Diablo 2 would have had the same three classes, the same book system with a few new skills, some reason to revisit tristram and kill Diablo again, and maybe prettier graphics. Instead we got 5 new classes (and none of the old ones, unless you count killing them), a completely different skill system, socketed items, an expansive world across multiple acts, waypoints, and even more in the expansion. The only thing that remained the same was the clickfest.
While Lord of the Clans died, and StarCraft: Ghost may never see the light, Blizzard is known to tread new ground in familiar worlds. Simply listing off game titles without the context of how different each was is disingenuous.
Being the PR department, their job description probably involves maintaining a positive PR image for the company. A fiasco such as this is them failing at their job. This is "doing their job" in the same way Uwe Boll makes movies.
Yes.
I honestly can't make a call here. I'd like to assume that all marketers are terrible people lacking ethics, moral restraint, and any worth. However, not knowing any marketers personally I can't claim they are swampy morasses of evil.
That's their job.
This is true, although in this case they didn't perform well.
My personal preference would have been an interesting public press release regarding factual errors in the wikipedia articles, suggesting editors could check the facts for themselves and amend the issues. That way MS couldn't be said to have interfered with the objectivity of wikipedia while at the same time allowing it to be more accurate.
Not a perfect solution to be sure, but one that might show much more respect, tact and tolerance than ninja editing wikis.
That would be the anti-thesis of marketing.
While this is perhaps the case with much of marketing now, it needn't be.
For example, Nintendo. I would say that their marketing is honest. Their advertisements show a wide variety of people playing games with the new controller. Whether or not we agree that this is fun, Nintendo has worked hard at making their system fun in this way and believes strongly that this has been accomplished. The very successful sales of the system back this up.
If the system failed to sell well because Nintendo had failed in their goal to make such a system, they wouldn't be dishonest for having tried, felt they succeeded, and then attempted to share their success with everyone. However, they would be dishonest if they began/continued to make claims about their system that were divorced from reality.
Flamebait is not necessarily intentional. Whatever your intent, claiming that people who play single player are inherently inferior (going as far to say that they outright suck) to those who play multiplayer was a shortcut to a -1.
There are certainly many people, such as your roommate, who are really bad at the game. However, not all of them play single player.
Your point about the potential superfluousness of skill is interesting, and will probably be what makes or breaks the game.
Honestly, I could care less about PCs and their overly complicated games.
Column A: Spore is exciting because it's being made in such a way that anyone can play around with it. It'll be a simple game, but a one with great depth.
Column B: Supreme Commander disappointed me because the last time I tried the beta the emphasis remained on the same micromanagement I saw in WarCraft II, StarCraft, WarCraft III, any C&C etc. SupCom was supposed to be about macromanagement and moving away from needless complications. Unless things have dramatically changed I haven't seen that.
To boot, the consoles have their fair share of both Column A and Column B. Unless RTS games are all you play, I don't see where you're coming from calling all console games "simple".
There are exclusives for all the systems, but they aren't iconic in the ways they used to be.
15 years ago the average gamer age was much younger than it is now. Gamers were kids, and kids identified with icons. Whether it was TMNT or ghostbusters on the television, Nerf or Super Soakers in the back yard, or Mario and Nintendo we were young and brand loyal.
In short, things felt a lot more black and white then. There were a lot of excellent and appealing iconic games. Sonic was arguably at the best he ever would be. In fact, many people feel the same way about Mario, Link, Samus and more. Something was lost between the SNES/Genesis days and the polygonal era that followed.
To some extent, it was the exclusive games. In those days most games of note were on one system or another, with key differences notable between the ports when they weren't. The difference between the systems was much more palpable.
Beyond that, it was quite simply easier to play. That's not to say it was easier to win, I'd be shot by many gamers if I claimed the old games were easy. What I'm suggesting is that it was much easier for anyone to simply pick up a game, a controller, and have fun.
This is something that up until recently the market had forgotten. Regardless of whether I like playing games for 15 minutes or 15 hours (ah, college) it's nice to have fun the moment I start playing. The longer it takes to get the ball of fun rolling, the less likely I am to maintain interest.
In conclusion, games should live by the Othello motto. "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master". Complicated and confusing controls/gameplay do not a deep game make anymore than confusing and disjointed plot/dialogue makes a good movie.
Satoru Iwata is an excellent English speaker. It may not be perfect, but it's extremely good for anyone who isn't a native speaker. However, I haven't had the opportunity to hear any public speaking of significant duration from Shigeru Miyamoto that was in English. Small amounts here and there, but not entire keynotes.
I suspect that while his English is good, he just isn't comfortable speaking much of it in front of a large audience.
Before I comment, if the parent is Flamebait there isn't a post on/. that isn't. That said...
It's hard to make out but it sounds like both the station and the contestants were not fully aware of the danger of water poisening. It may be that there was a clause in the waiver concerning it, but it really doesn't appear that it was taken seriously.
Any event where there is potential for a predictable health risk should have medical aid on-site in case of emergency.
The past week has seen a rash of harsh moderation. Anything that doesn't wholely, completely, and directly deal with the topic at hand is Off-Topic. Any reaction or joke 20 others might have had or told is Redundant, regardless of whether or not it has already been said. Anything that might provoke dialogue is Flamebait. Everything else is a Troll.
I initially had attributed this to random chance, some inexperienced moderators being overly liberal in their application of -1s. However, as this has persisted across the board for some time now I am at a loss as to its cause.
Actually, I believe Nintendo aimed to have 4 million Wiis worldwide. A quick search of "wii 4 million" shows this to have been the target, but with no official news as to whether it has been made.
The confusion is in where all the Wiis went. A lot of people assumed a 2, 1, 1 spread of those 4 million, with 2 being USA. It may be that Nintendo more evenly divided the systems, giving each region 1.3 million.
Unless someone can comeback here with sales figures from the EU and Japan, we'll be well in the dark.
1) Two sentences is hardly "spewing". 2) I want a PS3. 3) I have a Wii and a 360. 4) I never said anything about the system's popularity, only that I knew people who wanted it and could not find it. You assumed that these searches were frantic (they aren't), that the console is their favorite (hardly) and that I was attempting to illustrate the system was popular("fucking hilarious").
All I was illustrating was the anecdotal nature of your statement. A review of other Wii related anecdotes will tend to favor the Wii as being sold out, and the PS3 as sitting on shelves.
Ultimately, there are far better arguments for the PS3 than you are presenting. Use them and people may listen. Argue like this and you're only giving people another reason to dislike PS3s.
The article itself mentions the NPD only covers around 60% of retailers. Lets do some simple math, working under the assumption of evenly distributed Wiis.
1.1 million / 6 =.183 million (10% of retailers).183 million * 10 = 1.83 million
Also, the NPD does not cover online stores. I find it easy to believe that, given the large number of exclusive online events at websites such as Amazon and Gamestop, 170k consoles could easily have been sold online.
In short, to claim this as evidence of Nintendo lying is dubious at best. The article itself only notes there is a discrepancy, but does not pass judgement on whether it is the NPD underestimating figures or Nintendo stretching them.
I have to laugh that an article about potential censorship of Google is coupled with the emerging trend of liberal application of "Troll", "Flamebait" and "Off-Topic" moderations.
Cisco is registered for the trademark, that much is certain.
The issue here is whether or not their registration can be revoked due to failure to use the trademark. The article mentions that a registered trademark should be in continual use throughout the registration. As Cisco had no "iPhone" product until late in the grace period there seems to be a good case for the registration to be revoked.
Now, as you say they may still be protected, but this opens the door still for Apple to register the trademark. I can hardly think that Cisco will be able to defend a trademark that was revoked against someone else who holds the registration.
If Apple can prove in federal court that the Declaration of Use contained misstatements of fact, i.e. that there was no continuous use, then Cisco's registration can be canceled. This could clear the way for the next company in line for the iPhone trademark, Ocean Telecom Services LLC (widely regarded as a front company for Apple). It could also explain why Apple decided not to sign the agreement Cisco proposed.
I've made the mistake of assuming a sibling post of mine in this thread was a part of this particular discussion, and that's a cause of some of the confusion here.
What I was attempting to do was illustrate and expand upon the points I made here. I'll attempt to add some clarity to my position.
I never meant to imply that absolutely nothing was added between Madden games, but that in my opinion the changes were small and trivial because I'm a technical type who doesn't value the changes.
This highlights another point to be made. There is no universal metric by which game features can be measured, there is only each person's individual, unique metric by which they measure. Many of these metrics fall along similar lines, but ultimately deciding whether the additions in a new installment of a game are numerous or pithy is a decision each gamer makes for themselves.
It's easy to list new features for any game, the boxes themselves do that for us. However, we then give weights to each of the features we read and come to a conclusion on whether the new installment is worth buying for its price.
From where I stand, the new rosters, control scheme, weekly talk radio... those things strike me as worth very little. However, that's how I value those features and that's how I come to the conclusion that there's very little new to be found every year for Madden. Someone else, a big sports fan, will read those and be amazed at what's new and buy the game.
The reason why so many people slam Madden for "only updating the roster" is because for all of those people the new features are trivial and nearly worthless. Obviously these people aren't everyone, because the games still sell.
The whole thing isn't entirely relativistic, because to an extent there is some way to measure things (although it still is somewhat subjective). The amount of impact a particular feature has upon the game is a key factor. A completely new set of weapons, for example, is a big feature because of its impact on the game. A new control style usually isn't a big deal unless there was something horribly wrong with the old one, but can be quite nice regardless.
In short, because what people like me find impactful in video games rarely shows up significantly in Madden's new feature set each year there is criticism of it and the people who buy it. It is not without warrant, because we don't want to see the proliferation of feature sets we are wholly uninterested in. Perhaps it is rather unfair and not an understanding position to take, but it is not without reason.
1.1 million is the NPD's number, which a lot of industry analysts are looking at funny. Nintendo has officially announced 4 million successfully shipped, 2 million of which went to North America. With no Wiis in stores, it's hard to imagine that.9 million Wiis are hidden in warehouses somewhere.
The thing about the NPD, beyond only covering North America, is that it only covers 60% of retailers and doesn't cover online sales at all. If we assume that the 40% of remaining retailers had a Wii alotment proportional to the rest, that's 730k systems the NPD would miss. I don't think it's impossible the internet could account for the remaining 170k systems.
WarCraft. The differences between each installation of the series, even factoring in StarCraft, are large.
Mario. Whether it's Kart or a game with him running around squashing goombas the upgrades between these games were numerous.
Metroid. Prime and Prime 2 had completely new worlds, weapons, puzzles, and plot.
Final Fantasy. As much as we might have liked Square-Enix to stick with a particular gameplay system, they continually changed everything about their games with each new # (except the long and constant CG sequences).
Those are just a few high profile ones. There are other games spread across the spectrum, including shareware, that offer a large number of new features.
You have to go down 15 titles before you find one for a non-Nintendo system. Many of those games in the Top 10 have been out for months! Animal Crossing has been out over a year and it hit #7! Brain Training is halfway into its second year and still hit #15!
I'm simply stunned. From the get go I thought Nintendo knew what they were doing. I was certain they would do well, but I don't think I ever imagined this kind of success.
Slashdot Mirror
The screenshot was from an april fool's day joke by Gamespot, it has nothing to do with any projects Blizzard may actually be working on.
Contrary to popular belief, you can make a game within the same world and context without treading the same ground.
This isn't Team Ninja where they keep rereleasing Ninja Gaiden in new, prettier forms. The differences between Diablo 1 and 2, between WarCraft 2 and 3, and between WoW and anything else Blizzard has done are huge.
Most companies would have taken Diablo and stuck exactly to the formula. Diablo 2 would have had the same three classes, the same book system with a few new skills, some reason to revisit tristram and kill Diablo again, and maybe prettier graphics. Instead we got 5 new classes (and none of the old ones, unless you count killing them), a completely different skill system, socketed items, an expansive world across multiple acts, waypoints, and even more in the expansion. The only thing that remained the same was the clickfest.
While Lord of the Clans died, and StarCraft: Ghost may never see the light, Blizzard is known to tread new ground in familiar worlds. Simply listing off game titles without the context of how different each was is disingenuous.
How does Microsoft win if its actions damage Wikipedia? I'm not sure I understand the second win of your proposed win-win for MS.
Being the PR department, their job description probably involves maintaining a positive PR image for the company. A fiasco such as this is them failing at their job. This is "doing their job" in the same way Uwe Boll makes movies.
I honestly can't make a call here. I'd like to assume that all marketers are terrible people lacking ethics, moral restraint, and any worth. However, not knowing any marketers personally I can't claim they are swampy morasses of evil.
This is true, although in this case they didn't perform well.
My personal preference would have been an interesting public press release regarding factual errors in the wikipedia articles, suggesting editors could check the facts for themselves and amend the issues. That way MS couldn't be said to have interfered with the objectivity of wikipedia while at the same time allowing it to be more accurate.
Not a perfect solution to be sure, but one that might show much more respect, tact and tolerance than ninja editing wikis.
While this is perhaps the case with much of marketing now, it needn't be.
For example, Nintendo. I would say that their marketing is honest. Their advertisements show a wide variety of people playing games with the new controller. Whether or not we agree that this is fun, Nintendo has worked hard at making their system fun in this way and believes strongly that this has been accomplished. The very successful sales of the system back this up.
If the system failed to sell well because Nintendo had failed in their goal to make such a system, they wouldn't be dishonest for having tried, felt they succeeded, and then attempted to share their success with everyone. However, they would be dishonest if they began/continued to make claims about their system that were divorced from reality.
Flamebait is not necessarily intentional. Whatever your intent, claiming that people who play single player are inherently inferior (going as far to say that they outright suck) to those who play multiplayer was a shortcut to a -1.
There are certainly many people, such as your roommate, who are really bad at the game. However, not all of them play single player.
Your point about the potential superfluousness of skill is interesting, and will probably be what makes or breaks the game.
Honestly, I could care less about PCs and their overly complicated games.
Column A: Spore is exciting because it's being made in such a way that anyone can play around with it. It'll be a simple game, but a one with great depth.
Column B: Supreme Commander disappointed me because the last time I tried the beta the emphasis remained on the same micromanagement I saw in WarCraft II, StarCraft, WarCraft III, any C&C etc. SupCom was supposed to be about macromanagement and moving away from needless complications. Unless things have dramatically changed I haven't seen that.
To boot, the consoles have their fair share of both Column A and Column B. Unless RTS games are all you play, I don't see where you're coming from calling all console games "simple".
Replying to your own post with "First post" didn't win you any fans methinks.
There are exclusives for all the systems, but they aren't iconic in the ways they used to be.
15 years ago the average gamer age was much younger than it is now. Gamers were kids, and kids identified with icons. Whether it was TMNT or ghostbusters on the television, Nerf or Super Soakers in the back yard, or Mario and Nintendo we were young and brand loyal.
In short, things felt a lot more black and white then. There were a lot of excellent and appealing iconic games. Sonic was arguably at the best he ever would be. In fact, many people feel the same way about Mario, Link, Samus and more. Something was lost between the SNES/Genesis days and the polygonal era that followed.
To some extent, it was the exclusive games. In those days most games of note were on one system or another, with key differences notable between the ports when they weren't. The difference between the systems was much more palpable.
Beyond that, it was quite simply easier to play. That's not to say it was easier to win, I'd be shot by many gamers if I claimed the old games were easy. What I'm suggesting is that it was much easier for anyone to simply pick up a game, a controller, and have fun.
This is something that up until recently the market had forgotten. Regardless of whether I like playing games for 15 minutes or 15 hours (ah, college) it's nice to have fun the moment I start playing. The longer it takes to get the ball of fun rolling, the less likely I am to maintain interest.
In conclusion, games should live by the Othello motto. "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master". Complicated and confusing controls/gameplay do not a deep game make anymore than confusing and disjointed plot/dialogue makes a good movie.
Satoru Iwata is an excellent English speaker. It may not be perfect, but it's extremely good for anyone who isn't a native speaker. However, I haven't had the opportunity to hear any public speaking of significant duration from Shigeru Miyamoto that was in English. Small amounts here and there, but not entire keynotes.
I suspect that while his English is good, he just isn't comfortable speaking much of it in front of a large audience.
Before I comment, if the parent is Flamebait there isn't a post on /. that isn't. That said...
It's hard to make out but it sounds like both the station and the contestants were not fully aware of the danger of water poisening. It may be that there was a clause in the waiver concerning it, but it really doesn't appear that it was taken seriously.
Any event where there is potential for a predictable health risk should have medical aid on-site in case of emergency.
The same ones who signed the petition to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide I assume.
The past week has seen a rash of harsh moderation. Anything that doesn't wholely, completely, and directly deal with the topic at hand is Off-Topic. Any reaction or joke 20 others might have had or told is Redundant, regardless of whether or not it has already been said. Anything that might provoke dialogue is Flamebait. Everything else is a Troll.
I initially had attributed this to random chance, some inexperienced moderators being overly liberal in their application of -1s. However, as this has persisted across the board for some time now I am at a loss as to its cause.
Actually, I believe Nintendo aimed to have 4 million Wiis worldwide. A quick search of "wii 4 million" shows this to have been the target, but with no official news as to whether it has been made.
The confusion is in where all the Wiis went. A lot of people assumed a 2, 1, 1 spread of those 4 million, with 2 being USA. It may be that Nintendo more evenly divided the systems, giving each region 1.3 million.
Unless someone can comeback here with sales figures from the EU and Japan, we'll be well in the dark.
1) Two sentences is hardly "spewing".
2) I want a PS3.
3) I have a Wii and a 360.
4) I never said anything about the system's popularity, only that I knew people who wanted it and could not find it. You assumed that these searches were frantic (they aren't), that the console is their favorite (hardly) and that I was attempting to illustrate the system was popular("fucking hilarious").
All I was illustrating was the anecdotal nature of your statement. A review of other Wii related anecdotes will tend to favor the Wii as being sold out, and the PS3 as sitting on shelves.
Ultimately, there are far better arguments for the PS3 than you are presenting. Use them and people may listen. Argue like this and you're only giving people another reason to dislike PS3s.
I hate to break it to you, but ALL console sales drop from December to January.
Please tell us where these unsold Wiis are. I can think of people I know who've been trying to get one since launch, but have come up empty so far.
The article itself mentions the NPD only covers around 60% of retailers. Lets do some simple math, working under the assumption of evenly distributed Wiis.
.183 million (10% of retailers) .183 million * 10 = 1.83 million
1.1 million / 6 =
Also, the NPD does not cover online stores. I find it easy to believe that, given the large number of exclusive online events at websites such as Amazon and Gamestop, 170k consoles could easily have been sold online.
In short, to claim this as evidence of Nintendo lying is dubious at best. The article itself only notes there is a discrepancy, but does not pass judgement on whether it is the NPD underestimating figures or Nintendo stretching them.
I have to laugh that an article about potential censorship of Google is coupled with the emerging trend of liberal application of "Troll", "Flamebait" and "Off-Topic" moderations.
They made all three films simultaneously, it's not as though they got lazy at the end. Any changes were already made when "Fellowship" first came out.
Cisco is registered for the trademark, that much is certain.
The issue here is whether or not their registration can be revoked due to failure to use the trademark. The article mentions that a registered trademark should be in continual use throughout the registration. As Cisco had no "iPhone" product until late in the grace period there seems to be a good case for the registration to be revoked.
Now, as you say they may still be protected, but this opens the door still for Apple to register the trademark. I can hardly think that Cisco will be able to defend a trademark that was revoked against someone else who holds the registration.
I've made the mistake of assuming a sibling post of mine in this thread was a part of this particular discussion, and that's a cause of some of the confusion here.
What I was attempting to do was illustrate and expand upon the points I made here. I'll attempt to add some clarity to my position.
I never meant to imply that absolutely nothing was added between Madden games, but that in my opinion the changes were small and trivial because I'm a technical type who doesn't value the changes.
This highlights another point to be made. There is no universal metric by which game features can be measured, there is only each person's individual, unique metric by which they measure. Many of these metrics fall along similar lines, but ultimately deciding whether the additions in a new installment of a game are numerous or pithy is a decision each gamer makes for themselves.
It's easy to list new features for any game, the boxes themselves do that for us. However, we then give weights to each of the features we read and come to a conclusion on whether the new installment is worth buying for its price.
From where I stand, the new rosters, control scheme, weekly talk radio... those things strike me as worth very little. However, that's how I value those features and that's how I come to the conclusion that there's very little new to be found every year for Madden. Someone else, a big sports fan, will read those and be amazed at what's new and buy the game.
The reason why so many people slam Madden for "only updating the roster" is because for all of those people the new features are trivial and nearly worthless. Obviously these people aren't everyone, because the games still sell.
The whole thing isn't entirely relativistic, because to an extent there is some way to measure things (although it still is somewhat subjective). The amount of impact a particular feature has upon the game is a key factor. A completely new set of weapons, for example, is a big feature because of its impact on the game. A new control style usually isn't a big deal unless there was something horribly wrong with the old one, but can be quite nice regardless.
In short, because what people like me find impactful in video games rarely shows up significantly in Madden's new feature set each year there is criticism of it and the people who buy it. It is not without warrant, because we don't want to see the proliferation of feature sets we are wholly uninterested in. Perhaps it is rather unfair and not an understanding position to take, but it is not without reason.
1.1 million is the NPD's number, which a lot of industry analysts are looking at funny. Nintendo has officially announced 4 million successfully shipped, 2 million of which went to North America. With no Wiis in stores, it's hard to imagine that .9 million Wiis are hidden in warehouses somewhere.
The thing about the NPD, beyond only covering North America, is that it only covers 60% of retailers and doesn't cover online sales at all. If we assume that the 40% of remaining retailers had a Wii alotment proportional to the rest, that's 730k systems the NPD would miss. I don't think it's impossible the internet could account for the remaining 170k systems.
Some good examples:
WarCraft. The differences between each installation of the series, even factoring in StarCraft, are large.
Mario. Whether it's Kart or a game with him running around squashing goombas the upgrades between these games were numerous.
Metroid. Prime and Prime 2 had completely new worlds, weapons, puzzles, and plot.
Final Fantasy. As much as we might have liked Square-Enix to stick with a particular gameplay system, they continually changed everything about their games with each new # (except the long and constant CG sequences).
Those are just a few high profile ones. There are other games spread across the spectrum, including shareware, that offer a large number of new features.
That is really crazy.
You have to go down 15 titles before you find one for a non-Nintendo system. Many of those games in the Top 10 have been out for months! Animal Crossing has been out over a year and it hit #7! Brain Training is halfway into its second year and still hit #15!
I'm simply stunned. From the get go I thought Nintendo knew what they were doing. I was certain they would do well, but I don't think I ever imagined this kind of success.
Simply wow.