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Games Entertainment

Nintendo, Square - Embarrassing? 59

Posted by simoniker from the controversial-but-entertaining dept.
Thanks to EvilAvatar for pointing to a recent update at the sadly semi-retired ToastyFrog site, in which Nintendo and Square are added to the list of The 20 Most Embarrassing Game Companies. A gentle roasting is applied to Nintendo for being "..called the gaming equivalent of Walt Disney. Partly because their work is innovative, polished and marketable, but also because a pervasive stench of evil hovers over the company", and a similar treatment is applied to Square, of which ToastyFrog posits: "Which is worse, the company, its fanboys or its ex-fanboys? The world may never know." However, this tongue-in-cheek cynicism produces plenty of good points, most notably Square's Tom Sawyer RPG as a "terrible cultural hiccup."
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Nintendo, Square - Embarrassing? More

Nintendo, Square - Embarrassing?

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  • Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @11:08AM (#6484214)
    Nintendo=Walt Disney?

    I don't think so.

    Nintendo has constant high quality for all of their games. Not only that, there is little that comes across as rushed.

    The Walt Disney of game companies? Edios. Enough said.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 )
        Toy Story is Pixar, IMO, not Disney. Lion King and Aladdin are overrated. (But still good, just not great).

        Mario Sunshine was great, just never really found its audience. (I think the game may have been too tricky compared to 64). Zelda WW is much better than the N64 games. Better camera and controls.

        Yoshis Story was weird. It was an artistic gamble, which they mostly lost with IMO. Very similar to Wario Ware Inc, They tried to change/create a genre. What was there was good, but not up to standards of Yos
      • do you know what consistancy is?
      • You can easily say that Disney have consistantly put out high quality movies - Lion King, Aladdin,*snip*

        Yes, but they are also whoring out their franchises like there is no tomorrow (they know something we don't? :p) With all thoe awful straight to video "sequels" they churn out their quality to crap ratio is getting way skewed

  • Not sure about article's take on Kingdom Hearts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Maserati ( 8679 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @01:18PM (#6485025) Homepage Journal
    The article referred to Kingdom Hearts as "flawed at best" and implied that it was due to the FF characters that just show up and 'act pretty". It's true, in KH the FF characters don't do *much* but they do point you in the right direction and provide some good opposition in the arena. However, I haven't played any FF games in any depth at all, so I'm not attached to (or familiar with) the characters. I recognized some of the names, but didn't have any emotional connection or sense of how the should be used in the story.

    However I do take exception to characterizing Kingdom Hearts as "flawed at best" on every other point. The game looks good, controls well, provides a lot of challenges and side missions. The real star is how well they tie in the Disney properties. The worlds and characters all *work*. I didn't expect that adventuring with Donald and, of all people, Goofy would be cool. But they are. In marvelous level design they squeezed Wonderland into four levels, and kept rotating one room to create different situations and open up different paths. Visiting familiar places and meeting characters was also cool. It all helped drive the urgency of the plotline, since you're charged with protecting all of this familiar territory.

    Even without the licensed properties the game would still be worth playing for its enormous bosses and flagrantly beutiful scenery. The Tarzan world has several stunning vistas - go up to the very top of Tarzan's house and you can see for miles, and the fight up the waterfall is just gorgeous. All of the art direction and level design is stellar.

    The real-time combat system does an excellent job of combining 3d fighting action (some basic combos to chain up) with platforming intensity and RPG decision making. The sidekicks (Donald, Goofy and/or Tarzan, the Beast, Jack Skellington, Ariel etc) actually help in combat. The game alternates between swarms of small fry, mixed up with smaller numbers of big monsters. Sometimes you have to just button mash and pound your way clear before you're overrun with bad guys, other times you have the opportunity to set up combos and plan your attacks. It keeps the intensity up. And the aerial battle against Captain Hook rocks.

    Bosses are big. Sometimes really big. Uggy Wuggy or whatever is name is from Halloweentown turns into a veritable mountain of a monster. You have to climb and jump over him to attack weak points. And he's at least 100 yeards high. Fighting Cerberus in the arena requires jumping on his back to escape the jaws, and fireballs and dark magic and... The human-scaled bosses are still dangerous for all the fact that you can cross blades with them.

    KH is also a 3d platformer. Jumping puzzles abound, some of them intricate and requiring precision to pull off. And sometimes you're faced with a jump you just can't make yet and will have to come back to. But they're rarely game killers. I did have to take breaks and come back to execute some sequences, but I felt *good* after the accomplishment. Even the tricky ones rarely felt 'cheap'. At least you never take falling damage, so you usually just have to retrace your steps if you miss a jump (there are a couple of bottomless pits to get lost in though). And you have some chocie in which world to tackle next.

    The story is good, deliberately cheesy in places but not overly so. It has lighthearted moments and some very dark ones. The inevitable setup for a sequel is tastefully done. The wholly original world design (the final levels) was very well executed. As a real bonus there iare remarkably few graphical glitches. I found a rendering error under Tarzan's house, and you get slowdowns during big fights in the hold of the pirate ship because there's an environmental fog effect that competes with spell efefcts for rendering time. Other than that, and one or two jumps that we're trickier than they had to be, the game was just about pefect.

    "Flawed at beast" my hat. This would have been great without a single licensed property. And they used at least t
    • Is great. That's why I bought my PS2.

    • Kingdom hearts was one of the few games I've ever regretted buying. I didn't mind the FF-Disney connection, nor the graphics, which were pretty good. However, the terrible camera (way worse than Sonic Adventure IMO), lack of a cohesive story, low quailty music, all time low AI, crappy level design and pretty repetitive game structures made the game simply not fun for me.

      I think Square missed what makes both Action games and RPGs good, and just relied on people liking both franchises to sell the game. Once

  • Niche Player? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by M3wThr33 ( 310489 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @01:25PM (#6485068) Homepage
    Hardly a niche Player when the GameCube is #2 worldwide, and of top 100 games in Japan, Nintendo published more than anyone else.

    • Re:Niche Player? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Scyber ( 539694 )
      Actually GC and XBox are pretty much neck and neck worldwide. at least accoring to the latest figures:

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/31836.ht ml

      GC is a dominate #2 in Japan, and XBox is a Dominate #2 in North America.
      • GC is a dominate #2 in Japan, and XBox is a Dominate #2 in North America.

        "Dominate" being a very relative term of course, considering the extent to which Sony dwarfs them both in either location :)

        • Sony wouldnt have as high numbers if they could make any electronics last. I've seen VCR, Tape, CD units all die far earlyer then other big name brands.
          The PSX and PSX are horribly flawed (I own them) in design, MY PSX only works at a thirty eight degree angle, and the PS2 sucks dust into the DVD/CD laser lense assembly, because they didnt think when they designed it.
          It's shit hardware contstruction.
          I've seen people who seem to have to buy a new psx yearly from it stopping reading. PS2 nearly as much of a f
          • My PSX is the original model from North America, and it still works great. I even have it modded for playing import games. It probably is just your bad luck, man, that you end up with so many failures. I'm pretty sure that Sony reliability is about on par with most other companies (that is to say, about 10-20% failure over a year or two past the warranty date :P)
            • He's right about the PS2 pulling dust into the laser assembly, though. A friend of mine plays his for very long stretches at a time, and when he pulls a disc out that went in clean and stayed in there for a couple days of heavy playing, it comes out coated (on the bottom) with dust. Eventually he rigged up a filter system to cover the intake vents on the PS2 and hasn't had a problem since.

  • Stupid List (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... since there are only about 20 major game publishers left. AFA "embarrassing" my top 3 would be:

    1. Lucas Arts - No explanation needed
    2. EA - Most guilty of trying to take advantage of their customers by rehashing games, selling bogus expansion packs and of course charging on-line fees.
    3. Capcom - A tragedy more than embarrassing, they were once one of the greatest, most innovative game companies in the world, but are now reduced to making fanboy wet-dreams. (Viewtiful Joe being the exception)

    3DO and A

  • FF3 (USA) and Chronotrigger (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jpsowin ( 325530 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @01:54PM (#6485267) Homepage
    Those games rock (FF3 and Chronotrigger). I still play them today on my SNES emulator, and loved them when I was a kid. The story lines are well thought out, and the multiple endings for Chronotrigger was a great idea to get people to keep playing. In fact, I think it's about time I fired SNES9x up again :)

    Square may have made alot of mistakes, but what company doesn't? Overall, I think they've done a pretty good job over the years.
    • Actually, I'm playing through Chrono Cross (yes, for the first time), and I'm finding it a much better story line than Chrono Trigger had. Doesn't have all the time hopping, but the alternate worlds is a difference.

      Chrono Trigger was good, in its respect. FF6 still rocks, though.
      • Mmm, Chrono Cross starts out really well, but I'm not so sure you will feel the same after playing everything through. It's seriously twisted in the end, and it seems like they feel like they had to make some connections to Chrono Trigger, even if the game *really* would be best as a stand-alone.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Biased writing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Metroid72 ( 654017 )
    "1995 The Super NES, revitalized in sales by Donkey Kong Country, realizes its swan song year, offering a huge variety of top-tier games like Chrono Trigger, Earthbound and Yoshi's Island. No one cares, as Sony launches the PlayStation and new mascot Polygon Man wins the hearts of millions."

    Talk about biased writing. I wish there was a better mechanism to control the quality of article submissions- unless... the intention was to create controversy.

    • Re:Biased writing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alaric42 ( 50725 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @03:32PM (#6485878)
      I'd recommend you look at some of Parish's other work to get an idea of when to take him seriously and when not to. This would be an instance of sarcasm, a concept you may have run into in other comments here at Slashdot. For instance, he doesn't actually think that Pac-Man is jingoist, xenophobic anti-Christian propaganda (at least, it's never come up in conversation...). And if you really think Xenogears' protagonist was originally named Fei Ben Jesus, you're beyond help.
      • Although the recommendation is valid point. We all can't just go back and read more of this writer's articles just so we can find out if he is being sarcastic in this article or not. This has come up in other posts I have responded to before. How am I supposed to tell every time someone is being sarcastic? How am I supposed to tell every time someone one is joking? A disclaimer would be nice, though I don't think he should have to cater to those of us who are slow to read into the mannerisms and real a
    • These are editorial articles, they are supposed to represent the author's biases. It's just like when you go to a newspaper's editorial page and the editors are writing, "Vote No on Proposition 33." Remember, this is the Internet, if you don't like an article you can reply with what you think is wrong with it and why... in your Slashdot Journal, one of the many free Webpage services that still exist, or a comment to this article.

      He's not reporting on the latest E3... Though frankly, I've never seen any

  • Presentation in General (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrWho520 ( 655973 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @05:13PM (#6486491) Journal
    The articles for Ninetendo and Sqare-Enix may be toungue and cheek, but I think its more important to look at the entire section as a whole. Too put Capcom, Nintendo and Square-Enix in the same context [toastyfrog.com] as 3DO and Acclaim...now that's just wrong. I find 3DO and Acclaim seriously embarassing as a gameplayer. They put out some real steaming piles, and lets not talk about tombstones. I just think its bad journalism in a way, to put those companies in the same context.

    He deffinately has a pair for critcizing Capcom, Nintendo and Spuare-Enix in this way, though. I just think he might have had a blood flow problem at the time.
    • Even the 3DO article was pretty harsh, even for it. I admit I hate the Army Men series as much as the next guy, but HOMM (up until they went astray with IV) was a good series. Sure it wasn't the be-all-end-all turn-based fantasy wargame franchise, but it was still fun. Might and Magic (with the notable exception of IX) was not THAT terrible either, and it had its moments as a series.

      Square is for the most part like all all the companies on this list. Get a good idea and beat it into the ground until
    • The only reason I will tolerate Capcom's mention next to 3D0 is one game. A strange, mutant creation; dare I say, worse then most Army Men games, Mega Man Soccer. That game should not have been made. Play it sometime, there is no good thing in it. I cringe at the thought of MegaMan, once a respectable platformer, forced into a sports game, a bad one at that, it must be said that Capcom once was as low as 3D0.

  • Goond journalism (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am truly amazed at the journalistic integrity in this article :

    1943.
    An ancient, slumbering Lovecraftian deity is resurrected in a pagan rite by Nazi scientists. He slaughters them and escapes to Japan, where he assumes the name Hiroshi Yamauchi and violently takes over Nintendo. Soon afterward, "Yamauchi" forges a pact with the American Walt Disney Corporation [4] allowing Nintendo to borrow Disney's characters for cards.

  • Some people just don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having owned a myriad of consoles from sega,atari,nintendo,microsoft,sony,amstrad etc I can honestly say that Nintendo have always had cornered a very clear niche part of the market.

    They have always had the consoles that have many original, approachable, FUN games, by fun I mean that the games aren't complex, they aren't necessarily easy and they generally have bright, fun graphics and are simple to play - especially for novices (there is almost always a novice in a group of 4 players playing at the same t
    • The "console war" propaganda has been mostly fed by gamer news sites, and propagated by sites like news.com who don't really know better. The Great Console War is frankly a figment of the gaming rags wanting something to make noise about to sell ads. It's the perfect excuse for it.

      Yes, there is competition. Yes, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are fiercely competing for all the console sales they can get. However, the kind of vitriol that ordinary gamers throw about on the whole thing just doesn't come u
    • Actually, I'm not aware of much Sony propaganda towards Nintendo. I'll admit I'm not exactly an industry insider, but I keep my eyes open, and I've not seem them say much about it. The propaganda, I would say, comes from the fanboys themselves, most of whom are teenage boys desperately trying to not seem like babies in front of their friends. It's peer pressure working on a massive scale, and it's also one of the big reasons we have such a sad motion picture industry in the States. That, and many develo
  • i haven't seen something that racist in a long time... thanks Square
  • About Nintendo from this article...

    Partly because their work is innovative, polished and marketable, but also because a pervasive stench of evil hovers over the company

    Pervasive stench of evil? If anyone has a pervasive stench of evil in the games and software industry, that would be Microsoft.

    However, admittedly, releasing a GBA without a light is vicious, just not full-blown evil.

  • Given their flaws, both Nintendo and Square have both given great contributions to video games. I mean, one could go on forever about the number of games Nintendo has developed (originally) that have gone on to become some of the most memorable games of our time. Just a couple months ago, IGN [ign.com] ranked Super Mario Brothers at the top of the 100 greatest games of all time. I won't even go into how many other Nintendo and *gasp* Square games are on that list. Even though there have been indications of the Ga
  • Someone with mod points mod this article down, -1 troll.

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