Best and Worst of 2005 54
Next Generation is running a piece looking into the five biggest mistakes made in the gaming industry this year. On the other side of the coin, via GameSetWatch, an MTV News look at the finest moments in gaming in 2005. From the NextGen article: "And what did it turn out to be, this so-called Revolution? A GameCube in overdrive with a controller than can tell where you are and what you're doing with your hands. That was worth it, wasn't it? Not only that, but Nintendo has stated up front that they will not be competing with the likes of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Rather, they'll focus on gameplay. Graphics won't matter if you just focus on gameplay. If you believe in Nintendo, clap your hands! C'mon everybody! Clap louder!" I link to em'. I don't say I agree with them.
Hype (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hype (Score:2)
Re:Hype (Score:2)
Re:Hype (Score:1)
Other than that: silence, coyness, then more silence.
Whether Nintendo's gamble with work with the general public or not is yet to be seen, but one thing we're sure of now is that Revolution is a distant third when it comes to self promotion.
Maybe what you're thinking is "hype" is all the f
Re:Hype (Score:2)
I'll reserve judgement until I have one in my hand, but personally I think the concept is more interesting than some way out there crap like a VR head set.
Re:seriously. (Score:1)
Re:seriously. (Score:1)
Re:seriously. (Score:2)
Re:The revolution IS a revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Mario party 7? People keep buying them, and each one is better than the last (not worth the upgrade, but if you don't own one, they are fun).
Mario Soccer? That is supposed to be one of the best arcade soccer games out. There aren't many arcade soccer games.
Mario Golf? An amazingly fun and accessable game. It got me into video game golf.
Mario DDR? Arguable, but there wasn't much in the DDR family on the 'Cube. And since places are having trouble keeping it in stock, so people obviously like it.
Ice Climbers 3D? Doesn't exists (except perhaps in rumors). And the last game was like 15+ years ago, so how is that "yet another of the same old thing"?
The closest thing to a complaint you have is that Nintendo tends to put Mario and friends in all their games instead of random new characters? If all the games were bad, that would be one thing. But they tend to be the best (Mario Kart) or one of the best (Mario Golf) in the genre.
And if you want to yell at people for "pointless" sequels, why not yell at the rest of the industry first (especially any sports game). The last true Mario game came out 4 years ago in 2001 or 2002. The last Zelda was 2 or 3 years ago on a home console (there was Minish Cap, but that's a bit of a different beast). How many Need For Speed games have come out in the last few years?
Re:The revolution IS a revolution (Score:2)
The point is, EA doesn't take chances until it has to compete. Nintendo tries to do something genuinely different with most of their sequels. One of the only sequel machines that Nintendo hasn't really changed fundamentally is their Mario Party lineup, but even then it's hard to say that they just do more of the same. Often times, the
Anybody? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anybody? (Score:1)
I know! (Score:2)
Re:Anybody? (Score:2)
Hot Coffee (Score:3, Funny)
Nintendo and Graphics (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you HONESTLY tell me that is true? Are you saying that Resident Evil 4 on the 'Cube is too ugly to look at? Is it so full of graphics flaws? If that game didn't come out on the 'Cube but came out on the 360 I think everyone would be talking about howt he "age of next-gen was here". God of War looked amazing on the PS2. I saw no graphical faults there. Yet that platform is almost 5 years old. Psychonauts looked amazing on the XBox an created a great virtual world. It, too, looked amazing on current hardware. If you look at Project Gotham 2, GT4, and many other games that are currently out, the current consoles look amazing. How about Burnout: Revenge on the XBox? Is that too ugly for you?
Can you honestly tell me that those graphics aren't good enough for you? Sure they could be a touch better (and thanks to that additional power, the Revolution can give you more polygons, higher resolution, and antialiasing), but they are about good enough.
Previous generations have given us huge leaps in graphics. NES->SNES->PS->PS2. But now the leap isn't that big. Things look better, don't get me wrong, but they looked about "good enough" already. We'll get a small improvement, and that is all we need. And let's not forget, that graphics are not the end-all-be-all of games (Katamari, anyone?).
The revolution is important for the games, and the new controller. They are taking a risk (as opposed to everyone else who is basically making the SNES with better graphics for the 30th time). People talk about how it is "just a controller" and a gimmick, but they said that about the DS too and look how that has turned out (outselling the PSP 3:1). Nintendo has even said they have been holding something back that will make things even better. I want to know.
But without that, what is the revolution? It is a console by Nitendo (the company who's consoles I always end up playing the most due to the most great games). It has better graphics than current consoles (which are already bordering on good-enough land), will play a HUGE backed library (NES, SNES, N64, Cube; plus it looks like Sega will be putting their library up too), will have an innovative controller for new kinds of games (you can apparently play Twilight Princess for the Cube with it, they built that into the game), in a small box (the XBox 360 is still rather big) which I expect to be quite (remember when consoles were nearly silent? I'm looking at you XBoxes and PS2). It will have a reasonable price point ($400? Too much. And how much does Sony want? I think that $200 to $250 is good, with rumors as low as $150). It is everything I want/need in a console.
Nintendo's strategy? Graphics look good enough now, keep innovating gameplay. They aren't competing with Nvidia and ATI anymore (PS, XBox).
Good for them. Someone remembers its about the games.
Really, aren't graphics good enough? We have the memory and storage to make 2D games where every object is a 100dpi hand-drawn animation in millions of colors. We can make amazingly realistic worlds (GT4, etc) or cool fantasy scapes that look great (Psychonauts, Mario Sunshine, etc). And if the Revolution really has the displacement mapping, it will only look better.
Good for Nitnedo.
PS: PLEASE reply with how graphics aren't good enough. Sure there are some ugly games out there, but I think we have ample proof that isn't a hardware limitation in most cases.
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1)
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1)
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1, Troll)
"Do we judge a movie by how good the soundtrack is? Hell no, that doesn't make sense since it's the VISUAL PERFORMANCE that matters."
Yeah, right. Soundtrack doesn't matter? Tell that to anyone who listens to Also Sprach Zarathustra and *immediately* thinks of 2001. What part of "visual performance" includes the dialogue in a film?
Words fail me with just how wrong-headed that view is.
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1)
Where do you get that idea. The article at NO point says that the soundtrack doesn't matter. But it does say that a stunning soundtrack won't make your movie great or that a crappy one won't make your movie the crapfest of the year. Yes, a good soundtrack can enhance a movie. A bad soundtrack can detract from a movie. But a soundtrack alone does not make a movie.
And a quote now comes to mind. It's about television, I believe, but the concept holds the same fo
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:2)
(You) Where do you get that idea. The article at NO point says that the soundtrack doesn't matter. But it does say that a stunning soundtrack won't make your movie great or that a crappy one won't make your movie the crapfest of the year. Yes, a good soundtrack can enhance a movie. A bad soundtrack can detract from a movie. But a soundtrack alone does not make a movie.
No, but "visual performance" alone does not make a movie either, which was what was suggested. Lo
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1)
Well, nobody is suggesting in the least to have a visual performance alone, neglecting all else. Nobody is saying that removing all of the dialogue and sound, leaving a purely visual performance, would make a decent movie (I'd still watch it, but that's beside the point). What is being said is that the visual performance is the biggest and most important part.
You don't believe that movies are judged by visual
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:2)
That's what the article seemed to indicate to me. It said that film was judged on visual performance - it didn't mention judging a film on anything else. This is appropriate for saying that an album isn't judged on its video, but just doesn't work when considering film.
It was clearly relegating sound to a distinct second place, which I don't believe it deserves. The two need to work together. If Citizen Kane had
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1)
Herein I think we see where our disagreement is. We agree in pr
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:2)
Yes, I've seen Fantasia, and it's g
Re: (Score:2)
Graphics are important. (Score:4, Informative)
So, I want you to understand that I am not a complete and total pixel whore. If the game is good enough, I'll play it, no matter how old the graphics are. I've even had some fun with text games, occasionally.
First of all, and this is the obvious one: Graphics are easier than gameplay. I applaud Nintendo for trying to innovate the gameplay, but remember -- if I learned to play Half-Life back in 1995, I know almost all the gameplay elements I need for any FPS today. If I played Halo, I know just about all the gameplay I need to know for any console FPS today. When Halo 3 comes out for the 360, I'll be able to sit down and play with a minimum of memorizing new controls and honing new skills, because I played Halo 2 on the Xbox -- but Halo 3 will look incredible.
I have no doubt that it'll look incredible. Remember the Halo 2 cutscenes? The ones that showed you what they wanted the rest of the game to look like? The ones that still lagged quite a bit on the original xbox? Now we'll get those, only more so, and with no lag at all, and during actual gameplay.
But let's look at Half-Life 2. No cutscenes at all. Twice in the game they cheat by having rather long sequences completely devoid of content, which involve a lot of talking, so that it's pretty much a cutscene you can walk around in.
So, this is a game that values gameplay, where most of your time in the game, no matter how pretty it is, will be spent actually playing.
And there are gameplay innovations, like the way the physics are used. And Valve did something right when they refused to add eye candy to a level until it had been thoroughly playtested, although it does give much of the game a feel of a Half-Life environment with better textures, much better models, and occcasionally a bit of personality in the environment itself.
But, much of the experience of the game is inseperable from the graphics and the physics, both of which require a MUCH more powerful machine than you needed for Half-Life. You wander around the beach area, and because of the detail of the antlions, because of the design of the highway and how you feel you can see to the horizon, you're practically shaking sand out of your ears even by the time you reach the bridge. And at the bridge, the steel girders you're walking on feel real and tangible, and you look down at the ocean, stretching out to the horizon, and you're going to get a bit of vertigo. If the bridge didn't shake when a train went over it, if you were walking on solid brown sticks over a big blue polygon, and if you could count the polygons on the gunship chasing you, would you still be as careful about falling? It's not as if you don't have a quicksave function...
Yes, much of that is not a hardware limitation -- not anymore. Much of it is due to the artistic geniuses working at Valve. In fact, if you look at Doom 3, where, despite the environments feeling more flawed and real and less purely geometrical than in Half-Life 2, if you have a machine which can handle the dynamic lighting, there isn't a huge difference in experience and gameplay between Low quality and Ultra quality, especially considering id focuses their detail where it counts, so if you whip out your flashlight and actually examine the maps, you'll find a stunning lack of quality. You'll find pixels (texels, to be precise) the size of your hand, that they get away with because you usually won't see them, because the maps are so dark.
My point is, there are thresholds in the technology, any technology, graphics included, where before you hit that point, everyone agrees that current
Re:Graphics are important. (Score:2)
Previous enhancements served a major purpose. Going from the NES to the SNES gave us tons more pixels and millions of colors. Going to the PS gave us 3D, and the PS2 gave us muc
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:1)
Gameplay is essential and something that is lacking these days. Innovation will be key to developing better gameplay. But at the same time, Nintendo shouldn't just develop new gameplay at the cost of forgetting who made Nintendo who they were.
I don't have a lot of money to spend on all the consoles (plus my PC) and every game that comes out on all of them. I have to pick and choose what I think is the best option for me. I picked up the Gamecube i
Re:Nintendo and Graphics (Score:2)
Take one quick example: Remember the "Emotion Chip"? Remember how Sony said that games developed on the PS2 would be so powerful that developers could make life-like characters to bring emotion to games? Yeah, right. You can go throw in jus
Revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the revolution can actually be praised or condemned while it's a bunch of
This is just as silly as people on forums arguing over whether UT2007 is better than Team Fortress 2. Except somebody got paid to write this.
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:5, Insightful)
From where I stand, it looks like Nintendo took a step back, looked at the playing field and recognized that they have no chance to seriously compete with Sony and Microsoft in the high end console market. Really, what the hell would be the point? The 360 and the PS3 already have the bases covered and already have the developer support. What in the holy fuck would be the point of that?
Instead, they are going to offer a cheap as hell console that nearly anyone can afford, give it a unique controller and make it accessible. Are they going to impress the life-long, pimple faced virgins at Next Generation with endless Madden 200X, racing simulators and Movie franchise, shit-quality games? No... and I doubt they really give a flying fuck.
I'm buying a PS3 and I think the Revolution sounds interesting. For the $150 price point, if there are even one or two interesting launch titles, it will be worth checking out.
At least we won't have to sit in long lines to get one like the morons who were camping to get the 360. *snigger*
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:1)
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:2, Funny)
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:2)
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:5, Informative)
God damn it. Nintendo is a company that keeps billions of dollars in cash. They are famous for it. The last figure I read, they had over $7 billion completely liquid. [contracostatimes.com] That is nearly twice as much than Microsoft lost on the XBOX. They have enough money to play the same game as Microsoft and Sony; they choose not to.
Why? Profit.
The arms race between Sony and MS may yield no net profit for either company. Nintendo is a well run company. They will not invest billions in a venture that is so high risk.
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:2)
Bill Gates PERSONALLY is worth in the billions of dollars. $7 billion for Microsoft is pennies, the only reason they don't outright buy Nintendo is because they're resist to the death or every major/important/notable developer/musician/designer/artist would outright leave.
Sony is also relatively large, they're in the TV business, laptops, media center industry, Walkman/CD players/mp3 players industry, di
Re: Revolution a Gaming Gaffe? (Score:2)
RE4 (Score:2)
Full List, so you don't need to read 6 pages (Score:1, Informative)
2) XBox360 Launch
3) PSP Launch
4) Madden Next Gen
5) Revolution
For reasons, RTFA, but it's pretty bland. #4 turns out to be about bullshots [penny-arcade.com] and how the XBox360 game is, apparently, worse than previous generation console versions. The Revolution was covered in the write-up, and the rest are basically self-explanatory.
Summary (Score:4, Funny)
Here's a summary of the article, for those of us who don't want to painfully click our way through what should have been no longer than twenty lines of text: "5 biggest game mistakes in 2005: the 5 game related things that happened. The end."
Re:Summary (Score:2)
They're no longer on my bookmark tab-set. If a company can't figure out how to serve ads without requiring one ad per paragraph, well, you don't get these glorious eyeballs!
Revolution disappointment (Score:3, Interesting)
Specifically, I agree on two points:
First, the word about Revolution's processor power. It is understood that, these days, graphics hardware tends to be a truer example of what a console's graphics look like than raw CPU speed -- look at the DS, it's got souped-up GBA chips in it, an ARM7 and an ARM9, but its graphics are arguably better than the N64. (Mario Kart DS uses actual models for the drivers instead of the N64 version's scaled sprites.) It's also understood that, since the Revolution isn't targeting HD sets, it needs much less power to produce the same quality of visuals.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible for developers to make use of extra processing power. To a sufficently ingenious team and designer, that's golden. To someone thinking about creating the next SimCity-like simulation-game, every spare cycle is useful, and in the future that style of game will become more and more important as advances in graphic quality progresses further into diminishing returns compared to the time, energy and money put into improving them.
Second, his gameplay comments. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that Gamecube was a *little* disappointing. It is true that we had a number of really cool games that didn't appear on other systems: Pikmin, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Animal Crossing, etc. But on the other hand, Luigi's Mansion was quite disappointing, Mario Sunshine, while great for what it was, was too similar to Mario 64, and Zelda Wind Waker, while it certainly possesses obvious strengths, is the seventh traditional Zelda game since the modern take on the formula was created in Link to the Past (1 SNES, 1 GB, 2 GBC, 1 GBA, 1 N64). Majora's Mask is the most interesting recent Zelda, in my mind, because it played around so much with the formula, and Four Swords Adventures, while not as interesting as the basic Zelda formula, at least did something clever and unexpected with it. Miyamoto himself said that Twilight Princess may be the last "traditional" Zelda game, and their developers have been heard in the past grumbling about how the Zelda dungeon system is showing its age.
Mind you, Nintendo still has the best designers in the industry. Sony may have Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, but both their designers have acknowledged their debt to Miyamoto. Design well and truly *is* king in gaming, but like everyone's an armchair movie critic these days, everyone has an opinion on video games, even those they've given a rightful chance. It's so easy for a game to get torn down by the, frankly, incredibly stupid gaming culture because its different (one word guys: Celda).
Lots of great games (and there are some on PS2 as well) never get the respect they deserve. Nintendo's in a bit of a privilaged position, in that if they make something truly different and special, that many people will actually give it a chance because of Nintendo's history and reputation. Don't forget that even the godly Katamari Damacy is not a huge seller for Namco and has sold better in the United States than in Japan, and that much of its success can be traced, directly, to those early reviews and web articles, Insert Credit's among them, that praised it so highly and caused Namco to take the chance on releasing it in the U.S. It is possible that more people would have played it if it had been on Gamecube, despite its substantially smaller user base, because Gamecube owners are more likely to expect that kind of game!
That's Revolution's biggest promise, that the people who really know and care about gaming will get a system to call their own. That, mixed with the interesting new play styles made possible by the controller, has a chance of sparking a new resurgance of gaming with players, first drawn in by the controller and the hype potential of actually being able to play pretend swordfight in a video game, then kept around by Nintendo's historically strong design ability.
Revolution To Reawaken Videogame Innovation (Score:2)
Re:Revolution disappointment (Score:1)
Story should be -1 Flaimbait (Score:3, Funny)
I mean, he even insulted Nintendo on a product he hasn't tried and isn't out yet. That's got to be reaching....
What's really going to be funny (Score:2)
What is that guy smoking? (Score:1)
Nintendo controller - a let down???
You gotta be kidding.
It is the only innovative thing that has come from a hardware company in years.
So while my XBox 360 sits there, playing the same ol' madden game and overheating, I can't help but thinking I'll be sitting there playing the revolution with the new controller trying out all these new and innovative games, and as usually is the case with nintendo, not being able to stop.
I wish these guys would stop measuring things in terms of 'chips'. I actually think tha