Nintendo is Smarter than I am

Let me first say that this entire atricle was written while a little drunk, so its possible that it may read rather disjointedly. Perhaps when I am once again able to think for myself I will try to rewrite this (assuming that when I do reread it, it sounds like a drunk person trying to make intelligent thoughts)



Ok it’s not that often that I admit that I’m wrong…that is because I am rarely wrong. However, when I am wrong, I will admit it. About 6 months ago…hell…about 1 month ago (wow was E-3 really one month ago) I was wrong. You might be wondering what I was wrong about. Well I was wrong about the need for a strong Wii launch lineup. It was my belief that in order to gain popularity in this next-gen market (even though Nintendo does not consider Wii to be next-gen) Nintendo would have to line up a KILLER launch, full of games that span every genre, so as to grab as many different types of buyers as possible. This line of thinking went along very nicely with everything Nintendo was touting. Nintendo has said from the beginning that the Wii would be for everyone. Mom. Dad. Boy.Girl. Young. Old. Doesn’t matter.

However, I do believe, that I was wrong. I realized this after hearing Nintendo’s latest press conference that stated that Nintendo would be releasing their three biggest hitters (Zelda, Mario and Metroid) all within the first 6 months of Wii being released. Last month I would have said, that is too long of a wait, Nintendo can’t afford to wait that long to release at least 2 of their heavy hitters. But it is my belief that they do not need to do this.

Unfortunately, I can’t see Wii being an over night success. People are afraid of change. As such, they are going to be more reluctant to purchase it without any indication of its utility. Xbox and PS3 did not/will not have this problem. Those two are offering the EXACT same thing as before, but with better graphics. There aren’t really any new features that jump out as being blindingly different. Xbox 360 is a better Xbox. PS3 is going to just be a better PS2 just like PS 2 was just a better PS1. Wii, however, is not just a better Gamecube. Granted, after having played it, I do believe it is indeed better THAN the gamecube, it is not a replica.

That said, Nintendo needs to have a Muhammad Ali approach to this new market, NOT a Mike Tyson approach. The difference here is that Mike Tyson came out guns blazing would try to cripple your from the moment the first bell rings. Whereas Muhammad Ali could hit hard, but he spread his hits out over the course of an entire match, never letting you really get too much of a break. I think that with this new controller, Nintendo needs to introduce it to the industry with their heavy hitters spread out.

If Nintendo were to release Mario, Zelda and Metroid very close to one another, they would be just fighting against themselves. Sure the Wii would be more than sold out everywhere, but eventually the Wii would start to lose steam as people finish up with these three games and find there is not much else on deck for the next few months. This is exactly what Nintendo does NOT need. It is my belief that success of the Wii will come from gradual bludgeoning of the competition.

Every system has some. Nintendo has the most. You know them as games that WILL outsell everything else out on the market. Playstation has mainly Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto (soon to have God of War as a franchise). Xbox has well…Halo. Nintendo has Mario, Link and Metroid. All of these are games that are not only powerhouses but they are strong enough franchises to push sales of consoles alone. Zelda will be released with the Wii. This, alone, will lead to a sell out of Wii systems. Unfortunately for the Wii it is also being released for Gamecube, which means that the ‘need for a system to play Zelda on’ will die rather quickly. Only the true fans of Zelda will demand to play it on the Wii (who would be so picky?....). So although Zelda is a great way to start, it just won’t have enough gas to keep the Wii engine moving by itself. Sure other games will come out for it, but most of those games will be the games that are bought secondary to Zelda or because the person who has the Wii just wants to play different types of games with the new controller (which is completely understandable).

Thus, in order to keep Wii sales high, early in its life, they must continue to drop bombs. That is where Mario (the platform version and Smash Bros) and Metroid come into play. Both of those series are strong enough to warrant a new flood of Wii purchases. My guess is that one of those games will drop right after Christmas (maybe mid January). This will give the next wave of people a ‘reason’ to try to get a Wii. After the two Mario games come out and Metroid, the system should have enough hype to warrant a cool down from 1st party games.

Of course, this entire theory is based on the fact that the games produced for the Wii receive rave reviews because that is what I believe Nintendo is banking on by not releasing a lot of their heavy hitters all at once.

E-3 2006

Ok this will have to be semi brief as I am only doing this to kill time. I am in line right now for Zelda and the guy next to me happened to have his computer (with internet connection) and let me use it…I think I'll hang around this guy so I was able to check my email real quick as well as let you all know what is going on…

So here is what I have seen thus far.

DS

Final Fantasy III – Plays incredibly well. Battle system similar to FFI. The graphics are gorgeous. The game has been completely rehashed as it is no longer in NES graphics, its fully 3D Look forward to finally playing this game. Rob…this game is the REAL Final Fantasy III not VI…sorry to ruin your dreams of masturbating to a 3D Terra.

Mobile

Final Fantasy I – God fucking bless Squenix. They are porting FFI to cell phones. It’s what you expect to be. If it comes out for Verizon, I’ll get it.

All right…enough bullshiting around…lets to get to what matters.

Wii

Metroid Prime 3 –When I first picked up the wii-mote for the game, I was less than impressed. This was the first Wii game I played. At first it felt nice in my hand. But then I tried to move Samus around and immediately got dizzy. Nintendo did a VERY good job of making sure the sensors on the controller were (literally) pixel perfect. I spent the first 2 min. trying to catch my bearings as the smallest movement of my hand would send the screen into a fit of movement. Ok, so there is a learning curve, hopefully it isn’t too large.

Amazingly, I caught on pretty quickly…I learned how the targeting vs. rotating system works. It was kind of like having a strike zone on the screen. As long as you were in the strike zone you could just aim, but if you go out side the strike zone, you start rotating your view. This sounds bad, but it is actually INCREDIBLY intuitive, especially for those of us who have played a FPS on the computer. Ok…4 min. or so have gone by, and I realize that I was wrong with what I said in the past, Keyboard + Mouse is not always going to be the best way to play shooters. You can do things with this Wii-mote that could never be attained on a standard computer.

Ok on to the cool stuff…what can this thing do…well obviously…you point and shoot, simple as that…the nice thing is they allow lock targeting or free shooting. When you have an enemy in sight you can either shoot at him pointing your remote at him, or you can target him (as in previous games) and Samus will center on him and you can just shoot away while locked on.

On of the coolest things I encountered was a door that didn’t open when I shot it…this at first infuriated me. Metroid = open doors via shooting it. Upon further inspection, I saw a small hole but couldn’t figure out what to do with it…at this time one of the Nintendo booth babes came over and mentioned to me “remember the remote controls where you shoot which means it controls her right arm.” I can feel the joy building inside me as I figure out what to do. I, slowly, point the wii-mote at the hole and literally push the controller forward. Samus then pushes her right arm in to the hole. Fucking cool. But still nothing? What the fuck…so I start fiddling with the wii-mote and think about the situation a bit. A simple rotation of the wrist (as if I were turning a key) rotated her arm in the hole. Still nothing? Ok. So I pull the wii mote back and Samus pulls the lever she grabbed in the hole and the door opens…This is made my trip to E-3 worth it. Another cool feature is the ‘nunchuck’ adapter is also motion sensitive. This is how you use Samus’ grappling hook. Ok cool feature, but in past games you don’t use it THAT much. Well in this game, with a flick of the wrist you grapple on to the shield of an enemy and pull back to pull the shield away then blast the shit out of them.

Only one word can describe this game…Amazing. Retro studio really out did itself this time. My 10 minutes at MP3 went by SOOO fast. I refuse to believe that anything else will be as impressive at this show.

Nintendo Sports Tennis – Graphically this game is awful. I’ve seen better graphics on SNES. However, it plays pretty well…not perfect but well. The game is by no means an OMG game. But it is a shit ton of fun to play with other people. I got to play with one other guy (we played doubles, either with a computer partner) and actually had a lot of fun batting that stupid tennis ball. One of the coolest things about the game is you can either get into it or relax and the game play is the same…if you are playing with 4 of your friends and you want to make big exaggerated moved as if you were really playing tennis, you can with no penalty to game play, or you can sit back and make small flicks with your wrist….Fortunately, this game is going to be part of the ‘sports pack’ because it would not be worth buying by itself.


Ok…I need to end this as I’m almost in the door for Zelda…Yes…I already have a hard on.

Nintendo to Bow out of Next Generation War

One of the first reactions upon emerging from Nintendo's conference in Hollywood just prior to E3 this year, where the Revolution console was unveiled for the first time, was that the company had effectively just conceded the next-generation battle to Sony and Microsoft. It was the most triumphant, optimistic concession the industry had ever seen, but reading between the lines, it was a concession nonetheless. Nintendo had just told the world that it didn't want to play with the bigger boys any more. The specification battle, the endless bickering over media functionality and parallel processing and teraflops and supercomputing, were of no interest to the Kyoto-based company that had played such a vital role in defining what videogames mean in our culture. Nintendo wanted out.

Last week, our first really solid look at the hardware that developers are working on for Revolution proved that our assumption about the company's intentions was correct. Nintendo is building a system somewhere between two and three times as powerful as GameCube - no parallel processing, no troublesome cutting-edge chips with their inherent manufacturing problems, no next-generation storage devices, no high definition output. It's got a bit more memory, some internal Flash RAM storage, an attractive, slimline case and built in wireless networking. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that it could launch for as little as $150.

Is this next-generation gaming? Not the way that Microsoft and Sony see it, no. Where's the HD Era? The Zen of Gaming? The Blu-Ray? The Cell? The gigaflops, the teraflops? All of the watchwords which Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have made into core parts of their next-generation offering are missing from Nintendo's vocabulary. Fed up of the headlong rush towards huge, expensive, loss-leading systems that pack more punch than supercomputers did a few years ago, the firm that managed to make a fat plumber with dubious dress sense and a Ron Jeremy moustache into an icon for a generation of style-conscious children has stopped the car in the middle of the freeway, Falling Down-style, and gone off for a walk far off the beaten track.

Instead of dazzling graphics and massive processing power, Nintendo is offering innovation that's more in the realm of gadgets than pure computing. Their console is loaded with clever features, from the unobvious - the clever way that the company has built a slot-loading DVD drive that accepts both full-size DVDs and the micro-size discs from the GameCube - to the glaringly apparent - an amazing control mechanism that feels genuinely, radically different to any other method of controlling a videogame. For developers, the challenge is creative, not technical - how to get to grips with these unique features, not to work out how to multi-thread their game code or build assets for games on super-powered consoles using PCs which can't yet hope to match their performance.

All very laudable, but at the end of the day, Nintendo is still offering a system which will fall far behind its rivals in terms of raw power. There will be no direct ports to Revolution as there were to GameCube; there will be no talk of the system boasting the most technically accomplished games of the next-generation, as there was with the Cube and Resident Evil 4. Whatever about the debate that still rages about the relative merits of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware, there's no doubt which console will be in third place in terms of performance.
Is Nintendo mad? That depends on whether you consider it insane for a company to launch a product with low manufacturing costs, easy software development, high margins and strong brands and franchises backing it, at a price significantly lower than its rivals can compete with. If that's considered to be mad, then how do you describe the business of launching a vastly expensive, cutting-edge box, after the investment of billions of dollars in research and development and developer acquisitions, each hardware unit subsidised to the hilt in the hope of clawing back your investment on future software licences? In our insane industry, Nintendo may even be a pillar of sanity.

After all, the last time anyone called Nintendo insane was when the DS was unveiled. Now it's been outselling the PlayStation Portable every week for around nine months in Japan, and you can't buy one for love nor money in the UK, one of Sony's strongest global markets. The most expensive packages on eBay? Pink DS units with copies of Nintendogs. In hindsight, if you can make teenagers think a fat plumber is cool, getting girls to demand games consoles for Christmas probably isn't that tough, but nobody would have believed you if you'd told them this time last year that Nintendo consoles would be facing supply shortages because the female market was tearing them off the shelves faster than they could resupply, leaving the boys scrounging for the odd well-hidden silver unit on which to play the year's top online console game, Mario Kart.

Can Nintendo win the next-generation war without even taking part? Instinct says no. The hardcore will still gravitate to the powerful consoles, and the PlayStation brand - in no small part due to Sony's incredible work on expanding its appeal in recent years - is as strong as it's ever been. However, can Nintendo make billions of dollars, sell tens of millions of low-priced consoles, hundreds of millions of games, and reinvigorate the entire industry with an influx of new customers? They can, and they just might.

Death of Nintendo?

I find it funny when I read an article or discussion board on videogames to hear people talk of Nintendo as already one foot in the grave? As if the buzzards & vultures are circling overhead already? To hear people actually say that Nintendo should become 3rd party & get out of the hardware business boggles the mind.

Nintendo fuels most of the innovation that's been going on in games (hardware & applications) SINCE the 1980's. If it weren't for them we may not have HAD a gaming industry, seeing as the NES is what revived it after the 1982 crash.

It's a pride thing. You will never see a Mario or a Zelda or any other Nintendo trademark on another system besides a Nintendo one ever again.

Why?

Because Nintendo's designs its hardware to match the software it develops. Always has from day one. And if they don't have the freedom to develop an interface & control setup the way they want then they simply won't do it.

Not just that. It's more of company mindset. Their uniqueness has set them apart for all of these years. It's like any artist who creates something and wants his creation to receive the proper respect and admiration. Protective of his works trusting them only who are deemed worthy.

Nintendo isn't going anywhere ANYTIME soon. You can bet on that. The one who innovates, sustentates.

The only reason Sega is no longer a hardware company is because of the mistakes they made in the 16-bit/32-bit era (Sega CD/32X/Saturn). The Dreamcast was a damned fine system. Full of, that true game maker, innovation in the titles and the presentation. If it were not for the mistakes of the past we would still be talking about Dreamcast right now.

Nintendo & Sega always had 1st party power. The company name on the system also made the games.

Sony & X-Box just don't have that. Never did. Sony survives off of the mass-market appeal due to the plethora of available titles. The glut if you will. You can find Playstation games in Dollar General stores & pharmacies now along with 2-liter bottles of RC cola. Franchises who've left Nintendo went to Playstation and largely keep that ship floating. That may not be forever and if it ever goes what will Sony have to fall back on?

X-Box captures the disaffected market (many ex-Sega loyalists) that won't join Nintendo, some computer gamers, those who like room to customize (only reason I bought an Xbox) due to the hard drive and online gaming fans.

Both of those capture the deluded contingent of people who think of themselves as "adult gamers."

Yet innovation always has resided on Nintendo's side. They keep the industry moving forward even if they don't dominate it like they did in the 1980's. Nintendo has never been out of the fight. And over the past 10 years they've been fortifying a loyal customer base that will give them bedrock they need when they recapture their 3rd party power.

This was the same company that censored the blood out of Mortal Kombat I on the SNES. They will always keep the young market, which is quite smart.

To think that the concerned parent market is a trifle is just foolish thinking. Also over the years they've also become the most economical gaming system. Double whammy. Which system will a concerned parent in this economy buy more readily?

•Sony & Dead or Alive: the Bouncing Chronicles/Grand Theft Auto: Jacker's Revenge for $350?
•X-Box 360 & Halo: Grunts for Heaven/Half-Life: DIE!!! for $400
•Nintendo & Super Mario: Where's My Princess?/Animal Crossing: Look Both Ways for $200

Sure you have to think of all markets/consumers but Nintendo has fortified the family position better than any company. The only reason they've lost market dominance is purely volume issues. Those franchises that filled in the gaps between Nintendo 1st party/2nd party releases largely have jumped ship to the other two systems. Their 3rd party power isn't what it used to be. That's all. And that's not a permanent condition. All it takes is one thing to reverse that.

I would bet that most who think that Nintendo doesn't have a dog in this fight have only come along as a game player during the last 5 or 10 years. I suggest to those individuals who think that way that Nintendo is the oak that will see many comers & goers but will still be that tree standing when it's all said & done.

They're not an electronics company. They're not a computer company. They're a gaming company. Sega was a gaming company. And it is BECAUSE of that why you will NEVER have to worry about a day that games aren't associated with that iconic Japanese name any time soon.

Call it a day for Nintendo when they get rid of the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto & company.Until that happens enough of the premature Nintendo eulogies

Trivia Question of the day

OK enough with these easy ass questions...lets get to some questions that you can't blindly guess


ok ya'll know this game...you do...so now how well do you know THIS game

Question:
Name the four ghosts from this game

Bonus:
Although they do not have numbers the 4th ghost in the previous question is always the same, when stated in a list, what did the '4th ghosts' name get changed to?

Block can't answer this. =)

best of luck to ye

A God among grunts

OK for those of you who have not read this yet...Peep This!

Ok so the best game to come in 2004 was clearly Halo 2. Many gamers will agree. Some might say Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was the best game. As a whole GTA:SA has a better single player game. The game can be played over and over and over and you will rarely do the same thing. Where as in Halo, you do the same level over and over and you just move up in difficulty (read: enemies are harder to kill and you are easier to kill).

However, the Multiplayer mode in Halo makes the game epic. I mean don't get me wrong, I love playing all the halo levels, and I can play them over and over again cause they are VERY fun. But beginning able to play with or against your friends makes the game 10x more fun.

The thing that GTA:SA has on Halo is constant interaction in a fully developed world. Much like games such as Zelda, GTA created a world where you have the entire game open to your exploration (assuming your have the tools to get to that portion of the world). As you 'level up' or progress through the game you can always go back and reexplore that which you have done. With that comes being able to actually do something when you reexplore (often times new things open up). In Halo, you load up one level once you kill everything you move to the next part. You can go through an hour long level then walk back to the beginning and, if you killed everything, have absolutely nothing to do. In GTA/Zelda, you go back to where you started and there are people to kill, items to get, missions to complete, so you feel more part of a real world as opposed to just a small portion of it. Granted, the appeal of Halo is not supposed to be going back once you've finished a level, however it has to be compared to games that support that.

Halo has created a ridiculous following. Everyone from hardcore gamers, who spend weeks playing the same level over and over again trying to beat it as quickly as possible on Legendary mode, to casual gamers who just enjoy killing a few aliens on normal, love this saga. Books are written for it, to explain its very complex plot.

Now comes the ultimate question: should they risk a movie on it? Everyone knows video games don't make the best movie's. Although I enjoyed them, Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy and Mortal Kombat (1 & 2), were not good movies. Resident Evil 1 was not acknowledged as a very good movie but 2 was pretty well received (and it was very good). But now a days, making movies based on Video Games seems to be like signing your own death certificate. If this movie is made, I can pretty much guarantee it will sell out the first night, if not the first weekend. Simply based on the pure number of followers. But will it do the saga justice? Maybe. Hopefully. As long as the developers of Halo maintain control over the project, I think, they'll be fine. But we can only speculate, and hope for the best.

I tip my hat to the God...Master Chief

All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!!!

Welcome...If you found this place, it means you are either: friends with us, hit the "next blog" button and randomly came upon us or interested in video games. Hopefully it is the latter, of course, having 2 or 3 of said instances would be sweet.

Anywho, this will be a place for JP and myself to discuss anything we want pertaining to video games, including, not limited to: Quotes from games, rants on crappy games, reviews of new and old games and character discussion.

So with out further ado, let me reiterate the fact that...