Is it really doing well? It seems that depends on who's presenting the facts. If you google, "mario galaxy sales", you get links that have different interpretations of the facts. But most of them are using words like, "lackluster", "unimpressive" and "flies low".
To each his/her own. That wasn't the point of my question. My question is: What expected big hits does nintendo have in the pipeline? If Smash/Kart/Wii Fit/VC games is all the system has to look forward to, that's not very promising compared to the other two.
Fighters- been there, done that, never need to play one again. Should-have-stopped-at-6 Fantasy 13. Yet another racing game. At least the Nintendo games, while possibly fewer, have original aspects to them due to the controller.
Well like I said, to each his/her own. Personally I find these comments a little hypocritical considering they've got 13 Zelda games, at least 9 Mario games I can think of, 7 Mario Karts, at least 7 metroids. Not to mention that the VC is literally a rehash of old games. Personally, I don't care if there are 50 Zelda games, I'll still play #51 if it's fun. But overall, this comment is the pot calling the kettle black.
I'd mod you up if i had points. I think that we'll see the next Nintendo console before we see the next PS/XBOX.
On a side note, can anyone tell me what's in the pipeline for the Wii when it comes to great games to look forward to? I know there's going to be mario galaxy, smash bros, and probably another mario cart in the works, but other than that, I really don't know what there is to look forward to on this system.
For XBOX and/or PS3, this is what I have to look forward to: Resident Evil 5, Final Fantasy 13, Devil May Cry, Grand Theft Auto, Grand Turismo (sp?), Assassin's Creed, Uncharted (I'm iffy on this one, it may be monotonous), Soul Calibur 4, Tekken 6, Street Fighter 4 (there's no info on this, but based on the controls of the previous games, i figure it can't even work on the Wii), Metal Gear Solid 4, and the list goes on and on.
I am not trying to flame/troll here, I'm just trying to get information (and FWIW, I only own a Wii). I remember reading an article about game companies scrambling to make games for the Wii when they realized how well it was selling. What ever happened with that? What games are they going to make?
Perhaps EA caved because they foresaw the result would be more damaging to their competitor than themselves. Good press for EA, bad press for Rockstar. No lengthy trial... And all they had to do was change the title of a level!
correct me if I'm wrong, but every time a review to video game uses a screenshot it's legal because of fair use. Isn't that just as public as her youtube video?
as much as you want to say the live services are going into new realms, when you get down to it, its only changing the way you interact with the other players.
That's not all true. For a hardcore "fighting game" player like myself, one of the most appealing aspects to consoles going online is the ability to patch mistakes of initial releases. There are a lot of fighting games out there that would be fun except this one character has this extremely cheap attack. If the company sees a problem after release, they can actually fix it now!
I consider this bad advice and I don't know why it's modded as insightful. At work, I needed a Java survey/questionnaire engine that satisfied these requirements: 1) embeddable, 2) configurable, 3) Swing (desktop app as opposed to web-based).
I did a little search on sourceforge and found one called JSurveyLib that satisfied all those requirements. The original 2 creators hadn't made a commit to the SVN repository in 2 years but they still read their emails and eventually made me an admin of the project. Since then, I've made 2 new releases, added a powerful scripting language to it, refactored a ton of code, added 3 new question types, wrote comprehensive documentation, and probably doubled the code base. Now I'm even working on it in my free time because I enjoy it so much. If this project hadn't been uploaded, I would have started from scratch and probably couldn't convince my boss to open source it.
So my advice is that even if you're completely done with the project, upload it anyway and pay attention to your emails. Someone like me may come along and offer to improve on it for you.
Good Article. I'd like to see one per genre
on
Gaming Usability 101
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I like the idea of this article. I think it would be a good idea to make more that are specific to genres. I'm a hardcore fighting game player and here is a list of things that are really annoying when not followed:
#1 If you want your game to have longevity, make sure you get the best players to spend a lot of time beta testing it. Soul Calibur 3 is a good example of what goes wrong when you don't have good players test your game. There is a character in that game with a move that can instantaneously reverse almost all attacks without risk and leads to a followup that does >50% damage. Most other characters can do a max of 25% after doing a RISKY juggle. Any mediocre player would notice this as a problem immediately. Soul Calibur 3 was popular for about 4 months and then totally died. Soul Calibur 2, which did not have any obvious problems like this, was popular for over 2 years.
#2 Have a great practice mode for the console version. The Soul Calibur 2 practice mode is seriously lacking and there are tons of basics that require another person to help you test. It should be possible to do every basic system feature (rolling, 'tech rolling', laying on the ground and getting up as soon as possible, etc.) without needing a friend to come over. The Japanese console version of Tekken 5: DR doesn't even have a practice mode. When the normal version of Tekken 5 does, this looks like a step backwards and pisses off the hardcore gamers.
#3 Update your game to fix problems. Virtua Fighter 4, the most popular fighting game of its time in Japan, updated its game more than once and fixed a lot of balance problems each time. In the original Tekken 4, the biggest balance issue was a single attack by a character named Jin. Tekken 4 was updated at least 3 times and this attack's properties were never modified. This pissed off the fanbase each time. Tekken 4 is currently ridiculed as one of the worst in the series.
Also, anything that was hard to learn will be even harder to forget.
I totally disagree with this statement. I was going to give you an analogy but then I realized I learned how to use Blender about 6 months ago and now I can't remember how to do a single thing in it. If I wanted to pick it up again, I'd have to start from scratch. Being a developer, I learn and forget things constantly: It's always the complicated stuff that I forget first.
I think most of America is like you but there are some gamers, like me, that want to be the best at a specific game. Take the fighting game, marvel vs capcom 2. This game is extremely popular in America today, and it came out 7 years ago. If you want to become one of the best at this game, watching a match between two of the best players is not only extremely entertaining, but also educational.
But, I don't play this game and I barely understand it myself (even though I'm very good at some other fighting games). To me it's a bunch of seizure inducing attacks and 75% of the time I can't figure out which character belongs to who. So I totally agree with you, there's just too high of a barrier of entry to even understand what you're looking at. Then once you have that, you have to also want to become one of the best at the game to even be interested in watching someone else play. I think the demographic is too small to be very successful.
On the other hand, I hear that Evo http://www.evo2k.com/ is profitable every year (the biggest fighting game tournament in America), and they only have one sponsor: Toyota.
Nothing wrong with asking for the opinions of others, especially when you don't have time to try all the choices you're asking about. After years of programming, I've learned there are some details you don't consider as factors until you've used the language for a long time.
Besides, if the comments on this article are good enough, it will become a great reference for people who ask this question in the future.
Instead of passing around abstract id numbers, it would be nice if we had reference objects that abstracted programmers away from the temptation of manually managing identifiers. (By developers, I'm assuming you're talking about developers that USE databases) This is not the only way to do things: If you read the stuff by Joe Celko, you'll realize that using arbitrary numbers for primary keys is the subject of a religious debate in the database community. Joe Celko takes the side that using them is a bad thing. One of the many reasons he gives is that it simply makes everything in your database harder to understand.
I don't see why a store that also sells toys and teen clothes would want to carry "50 cents" in the next isle.
That makes about as much sense as carrying "Busta Rhymeses", "Wu-Tang Clanses", "Fabolouses", and "Notoriouses Bs.Is.Gs."?
Some American call centers suck too. I called Dell because my work computer kept on getting BSODs after about 20 minutes of installing the OS (right about the time you'd try to install windows updates). It turned out to be a faulty power unit that was frying the hardware. We payed for the highest quality technical support for businesses and called right before we attempted to replace the power unit. Instead of even considering a hardware problem, he tried to claim that it was the windows upgrade process itself that was causing these problems.
Him: "Besides, you shouldn't even be doing Windows Upgrade. I never install windows updates unless I absolutely know I need them." Me: "You don't install security updates unless you KNOW you need them?" Him: "Nope, you shouldn't."
I wonder how many businessmen he told that to before me.
Finally, someone that knows how to use VS.NET. I asked on freenode's C# channel and got responses that suggested most people there were ignorant of answers (as opposed to me be being an annoying n00b). I come from IDEA and that has some features that are very nice to me. One that I find essential in an IDE is that it gives you immediate feedback on your errors. For example, the instant I type a newline I'll be told that I forgot a semicolon the line above. VS.NET seems to either be EXTREMELY slow with this feedback or only tells you errors when you compile.
My second favorite feature is I can find my files in a brain-dead way without using the mouse. If I type ctrl-n, it pops up a tiny text box that has focus and I can type the name of a file I want to use to immediately start working in it. I don't have to check if there's already a tab open for it. I don't need to find it in a little explorer. The text box does pattern matching and camel casing (ie: I can type in IOU and it'll suggest the file InputOutputUtil if it exists in my project). Does VS.NET have anything like this?
A dangerous lack of warnings: It seemed to me that VS.NET doesn't warn you of some stupid things you're doing. Now my memory is hazy, but I believe it doesn't tell you about unused variables for example.
Lack of useful highlighting: If I recall, VS.NET does not highlight local and instance variables differently. Is there any way to turn this on in VS.NET?
Code navigation: If I'm looking at some code that says "foo.bar();" and I want to know the implementation of bar(), I can ctrl-click on it or ctrl-b with the cursor over it and it instantly jumps not only to the file where bar() is defined, but the bar() method. Does VS.NET have any capability like this?
Now, I'm going to answer my own questions here by saying VS.NET can do this with a plugin made by the same guys that make IDEA. It's called resharper and you can get it here: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/index. html But the thing that confuses me is that most VS.NET users think it's the best IDE ever without using this plug-in so I want to know if VS.NET can already do this stuff out-of-the-box.
let me ask another GPL question. Lets say you make your own app under the GPL license. You're the only person that has worked on it and a bunch of people have downloaded it. It uses no other libraries but your own. You decide you want to make your next version closed source. Do you have a right to do that?
Next question is the same except in this scenario other people have contributed but signed a waver giving you ownership of copyright (I'm not sure if that makes any difference)?
I'm not entirely convinced that open source is less expensive than closed source. I'm especially skeptical about your implication that close source software requires MORE developers than open source developers. Has anyone ever done an in depth study about this claim? You may reply, "It's obviously cheaper" but there are service costs, costs associated with understanding how to use the software, etc.
But regardless, I think that the biggest benefit to open source software is that you can change it. If you discover a bug in Windows that stops you dead in your tracks but only effects.000001% of Windows users, MS may never fix the bug and you're screwed. With OSS, you can go in there yourself and fix it when you absolutely need to. I think that's the MOST comforting thing about OSS. Problem is, that's a very technical benefit that the MBAs may not understand.
Wow, are we not even reading the summaries anymore? "It's essentially the 'kiss of death' for a title at retail; a number of popular videogame outlets refuse to carry titles with that rating." No one's arguing about this because they think kids should be able to buy it.
Something interesting about Halo 2 was that they took the game Halo, which was not that innovative, and BARELY barely added to it. I think Halo 2 should have been an expansion pack to Halo. It had like 2 new weapons and 2 new enemies. Sheesh.
Reality is Nintendo is going after NON gamers, and people who just want to have fun.
Oh, you mean the ones that don't buy games? How exactly is this good for Nintendo in the long term? I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that these are the gamers any console maker should care about. And, IMO, no console has come out with their flagship blockbuster game yet. I don't even feel like the console war has started yet.
I think you'll be saying "it looks promising" for as long as.NET is around..NET will on come out with its next cool feature and it'll take mono a year to catch up to it. Either mono will always be behind, Microsoft will stop improving.NET so mono can catch up, or Microsoft will give Mono real support and bring it up to date. I see the first option as being much more likely than the other two.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really doing well? It seems that depends on who's presenting the facts. If you google, "mario galaxy sales", you get links that have different interpretations of the facts. But most of them are using words like, "lackluster", "unimpressive" and "flies low".
thanks for the info. That's great that spore is coming out for the Wii. Obviously, I hadn't heard of those other ones but now I can look into it.
Fighters- been there, done that, never need to play one again. Should-have-stopped-at-6 Fantasy 13. Yet another racing game. At least the Nintendo games, while possibly fewer, have original aspects to them due to the controller.
Well like I said, to each his/her own. Personally I find these comments a little hypocritical considering they've got 13 Zelda games, at least 9 Mario games I can think of, 7 Mario Karts, at least 7 metroids. Not to mention that the VC is literally a rehash of old games. Personally, I don't care if there are 50 Zelda games, I'll still play #51 if it's fun. But overall, this comment is the pot calling the kettle black.
I'd mod you up if i had points. I think that we'll see the next Nintendo console before we see the next PS/XBOX.
On a side note, can anyone tell me what's in the pipeline for the Wii when it comes to great games to look forward to? I know there's going to be mario galaxy, smash bros, and probably another mario cart in the works, but other than that, I really don't know what there is to look forward to on this system.
For XBOX and/or PS3, this is what I have to look forward to:
Resident Evil 5, Final Fantasy 13, Devil May Cry, Grand Theft Auto, Grand Turismo (sp?), Assassin's Creed, Uncharted (I'm iffy on this one, it may be monotonous), Soul Calibur 4, Tekken 6, Street Fighter 4 (there's no info on this, but based on the controls of the previous games, i figure it can't even work on the Wii), Metal Gear Solid 4, and the list goes on and on.
I am not trying to flame/troll here, I'm just trying to get information (and FWIW, I only own a Wii). I remember reading an article about game companies scrambling to make games for the Wii when they realized how well it was selling. What ever happened with that? What games are they going to make?
Perhaps EA caved because they foresaw the result would be more damaging to their competitor than themselves. Good press for EA, bad press for Rockstar. No lengthy trial... And all they had to do was change the title of a level!
correct me if I'm wrong, but every time a review to video game uses a screenshot it's legal because of fair use. Isn't that just as public as her youtube video?
That's not all true. For a hardcore "fighting game" player like myself, one of the most appealing aspects to consoles going online is the ability to patch mistakes of initial releases. There are a lot of fighting games out there that would be fun except this one character has this extremely cheap attack. If the company sees a problem after release, they can actually fix it now!
there's a small screenshot on the first link. Although that could be a screenshot of FMV.
> Don't bother uploading it.
I consider this bad advice and I don't know why it's modded as insightful. At work, I needed a Java survey/questionnaire engine that satisfied these requirements: 1) embeddable, 2) configurable, 3) Swing (desktop app as opposed to web-based).
I did a little search on sourceforge and found one called JSurveyLib that satisfied all those requirements. The original 2 creators hadn't made a commit to the SVN repository in 2 years but they still read their emails and eventually made me an admin of the project. Since then, I've made 2 new releases, added a powerful scripting language to it, refactored a ton of code, added 3 new question types, wrote comprehensive documentation, and probably doubled the code base. Now I'm even working on it in my free time because I enjoy it so much. If this project hadn't been uploaded, I would have started from scratch and probably couldn't convince my boss to open source it.
So my advice is that even if you're completely done with the project, upload it anyway and pay attention to your emails. Someone like me may come along and offer to improve on it for you.
BTW, shameful self promotion: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsurveylib/
I like the idea of this article. I think it would be a good idea to make more that are specific to genres. I'm a hardcore fighting game player and here is a list of things that are really annoying when not followed:
#1 If you want your game to have longevity, make sure you get the best players to spend a lot of time beta testing it. Soul Calibur 3 is a good example of what goes wrong when you don't have good players test your game. There is a character in that game with a move that can instantaneously reverse almost all attacks without risk and leads to a followup that does >50% damage. Most other characters can do a max of 25% after doing a RISKY juggle. Any mediocre player would notice this as a problem immediately. Soul Calibur 3 was popular for about 4 months and then totally died. Soul Calibur 2, which did not have any obvious problems like this, was popular for over 2 years.
#2 Have a great practice mode for the console version. The Soul Calibur 2 practice mode is seriously lacking and there are tons of basics that require another person to help you test. It should be possible to do every basic system feature (rolling, 'tech rolling', laying on the ground and getting up as soon as possible, etc.) without needing a friend to come over. The Japanese console version of Tekken 5: DR doesn't even have a practice mode. When the normal version of Tekken 5 does, this looks like a step backwards and pisses off the hardcore gamers.
#3 Update your game to fix problems. Virtua Fighter 4, the most popular fighting game of its time in Japan, updated its game more than once and fixed a lot of balance problems each time. In the original Tekken 4, the biggest balance issue was a single attack by a character named Jin. Tekken 4 was updated at least 3 times and this attack's properties were never modified. This pissed off the fanbase each time. Tekken 4 is currently ridiculed as one of the worst in the series.
I totally disagree with this statement. I was going to give you an analogy but then I realized I learned how to use Blender about 6 months ago and now I can't remember how to do a single thing in it. If I wanted to pick it up again, I'd have to start from scratch. Being a developer, I learn and forget things constantly: It's always the complicated stuff that I forget first.
I think most of America is like you but there are some gamers, like me, that want to be the best at a specific game. Take the fighting game, marvel vs capcom 2. This game is extremely popular in America today, and it came out 7 years ago. If you want to become one of the best at this game, watching a match between two of the best players is not only extremely entertaining, but also educational.
But, I don't play this game and I barely understand it myself (even though I'm very good at some other fighting games). To me it's a bunch of seizure inducing attacks and 75% of the time I can't figure out which character belongs to who. So I totally agree with you, there's just too high of a barrier of entry to even understand what you're looking at. Then once you have that, you have to also want to become one of the best at the game to even be interested in watching someone else play. I think the demographic is too small to be very successful.
On the other hand, I hear that Evo http://www.evo2k.com/ is profitable every year (the biggest fighting game tournament in America), and they only have one sponsor: Toyota.
Besides, if the comments on this article are good enough, it will become a great reference for people who ask this question in the future.
Joe Celko's book: http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties-Pro
i wish i had mod points to mod you up interesting
There, I fixed that for ya.
That makes about as much sense as carrying "Busta Rhymeses", "Wu-Tang Clanses", "Fabolouses", and "Notoriouses Bs.Is.Gs."?
Some American call centers suck too. I called Dell because my work computer kept on getting BSODs after about 20 minutes of installing the OS (right about the time you'd try to install windows updates). It turned out to be a faulty power unit that was frying the hardware. We payed for the highest quality technical support for businesses and called right before we attempted to replace the power unit. Instead of even considering a hardware problem, he tried to claim that it was the windows upgrade process itself that was causing these problems.
Him: "Besides, you shouldn't even be doing Windows Upgrade. I never install windows updates unless I absolutely know I need them."
Me: "You don't install security updates unless you KNOW you need them?"
Him: "Nope, you shouldn't."
I wonder how many businessmen he told that to before me.
Finally, someone that knows how to use VS.NET. I asked on freenode's C# channel and got responses that suggested most people there were ignorant of answers (as opposed to me be being an annoying n00b). I come from IDEA and that has some features that are very nice to me. One that I find essential in an IDE is that it gives you immediate feedback on your errors. For example, the instant I type a newline I'll be told that I forgot a semicolon the line above. VS.NET seems to either be EXTREMELY slow with this feedback or only tells you errors when you compile.
. html But the thing that confuses me is that most VS.NET users think it's the best IDE ever without using this plug-in so I want to know if VS.NET can already do this stuff out-of-the-box.
My second favorite feature is I can find my files in a brain-dead way without using the mouse. If I type ctrl-n, it pops up a tiny text box that has focus and I can type the name of a file I want to use to immediately start working in it. I don't have to check if there's already a tab open for it. I don't need to find it in a little explorer. The text box does pattern matching and camel casing (ie: I can type in IOU and it'll suggest the file InputOutputUtil if it exists in my project). Does VS.NET have anything like this?
A dangerous lack of warnings: It seemed to me that VS.NET doesn't warn you of some stupid things you're doing. Now my memory is hazy, but I believe it doesn't tell you about unused variables for example.
Lack of useful highlighting: If I recall, VS.NET does not highlight local and instance variables differently. Is there any way to turn this on in VS.NET?
Code navigation: If I'm looking at some code that says "foo.bar();" and I want to know the implementation of bar(), I can ctrl-click on it or ctrl-b with the cursor over it and it instantly jumps not only to the file where bar() is defined, but the bar() method. Does VS.NET have any capability like this?
Now, I'm going to answer my own questions here by saying VS.NET can do this with a plugin made by the same guys that make IDEA. It's called resharper and you can get it here: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/index
let me ask another GPL question. Lets say you make your own app under the GPL license. You're the only person that has worked on it and a bunch of people have downloaded it. It uses no other libraries but your own. You decide you want to make your next version closed source. Do you have a right to do that?
Next question is the same except in this scenario other people have contributed but signed a waver giving you ownership of copyright (I'm not sure if that makes any difference)?
I'm not entirely convinced that open source is less expensive than closed source. I'm especially skeptical about your implication that close source software requires MORE developers than open source developers. Has anyone ever done an in depth study about this claim? You may reply, "It's obviously cheaper" but there are service costs, costs associated with understanding how to use the software, etc.
.000001% of Windows users, MS may never fix the bug and you're screwed. With OSS, you can go in there yourself and fix it when you absolutely need to. I think that's the MOST comforting thing about OSS. Problem is, that's a very technical benefit that the MBAs may not understand.
But regardless, I think that the biggest benefit to open source software is that you can change it. If you discover a bug in Windows that stops you dead in your tracks but only effects
Wow, are we not even reading the summaries anymore? "It's essentially the 'kiss of death' for a title at retail; a number of popular videogame outlets refuse to carry titles with that rating." No one's arguing about this because they think kids should be able to buy it.
I heard Halo 2 wasn't that great
Something interesting about Halo 2 was that they took the game Halo, which was not that innovative, and BARELY barely added to it. I think Halo 2 should have been an expansion pack to Halo. It had like 2 new weapons and 2 new enemies. Sheesh.
Reality is Nintendo is going after NON gamers, and people who just want to have fun.
Oh, you mean the ones that don't buy games? How exactly is this good for Nintendo in the long term? I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that these are the gamers any console maker should care about. And, IMO, no console has come out with their flagship blockbuster game yet. I don't even feel like the console war has started yet.
I think you'll be saying "it looks promising" for as long as .NET is around. .NET will on come out with its next cool feature and it'll take mono a year to catch up to it. Either mono will always be behind, Microsoft will stop improving .NET so mono can catch up, or Microsoft will give Mono real support and bring it up to date. I see the first option as being much more likely than the other two.