Some stuff that caught my attention, from the 2001 IGN article
Yamauchi says that life would most certainly go on without the game industry, as it is not an essential part of anybody’s life
True. Entertainment, while desirable, isn’t essential. Besides, there’s entertainment to be had by socializing, something that would probably become easier with less “isolating” entertainment available.
The ironfisted leader believes that “games have nothing to do with graphics”
I agree, but graphics can help with sales, which is what matters for companies
The IGN article stops shortly after this, so onwards with what Metro lists:
‘If users can play the same game on every single system out there, then there’ll be no reason to buy one system over the other,’ he said. ‘It’ll be just like buying a TV; no matter which one you buy you’ll still have all the same channels.
For consumers, that’s great. For companies, not so much.
‘Up until now games have had nothing to do with movies, like I’ve kept on saying all this time, but now people are going on about how every game will be like a movie from now on,’ Yamauchi said.
This is interesting for various reasons. For the longest time (???BC ~1970s a.D.), storytelling and games were completely separate things. With the first RPG systems, storytelling became part of the game for the first time. Even then, it was something dynamic, full of unexpected things happening, no two games ever deliver the same story. A “table wide” theater play, if you will. Even with the same group of people doing the exact sequence of actions, it might look similar enough, but never “fully equal”.
Storytelling in general is linear. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. This is very noticeable in many digital games, as the players effectively play the middle and cutscenes to explain/advance the plot are bits where interaction is non existent. Even when the devs account for a variety of situations, such as Larian with Divinity and BG3, it’s still a limited selection of story branches.
It’s no wonder that some of the most popular and long lived games lack a “story”. DotA, League of Legends, Fortnite, Counter Strike, they’re not unlike boardgames that have a set dressing to “explain” why it is like it is, mechanically speaking. Skyrim and Diablo 2 also come to mind, both have a proper story, both have been around for ages, but neither is particularly remembered for “the story”.
I like their games but its such a weird company. like… people had been asking for bluetooth for wireless headphones on switch for years and it had just never been a feature. then one day… they like, just turned it on and said hey you can use wireless headphones now! like, that took 4 years! absolutely bizarre.
because sony and nintendo realised having ability to have user loaded content is a vector of security vulnerbilities, so they decided the best choice to fight of exploits is not give you the feature instead of having a competent cyber security team.
for instance, neither sony nor nintendo give you an internet browser thats not hidden. Microsoft does.
the followup question is which company has the most experience developing an OS.
Sony and Nintendo care more about preventing piracy than it does giving its userbase good features.
The Switch came out right around when people were bitching about phones getting rid of headphone jacks, which the Switch does have. I really don’t see the problem with including a headphone jack from the start, focusing on releasing a stable system first, and adding Bluetooth headphone support later.
Adding Bluetooth audio support is not as simple as slapping a bluetooth radio in your system, especially when you have a custom operating system like the Switch’s
It’s interesting to see the impact that Yamauchi had on Nintendo as a whole. Generally Nintendo games focus on gameplay, with graphics and story built towards servicing the gameplay first. Say what you want about exclusives (not a huge fan of them really) but from the ground up when you buy a Nintendo game it’s generally gonna be what you expect from the previews.
Now I hope they push for better specs in the future but that seems like a pipe dream. A game like Zelda BOTW/TOTK is completely held back by the Switch and that’s not good considering how fucking amazing it was to play them
I guess you had to grow up playing Zelda games after Link to the Past in order to enjoy the gameplay. Coming from other systems, it was very unintuitive, uncomfortable, and basically unplayable since we couldn’t remap the controls. Also, the world was just kind of dead?
I beat BotW, and started TotK but couldn’t bring myself to play it for more than 3 or so hours. TotK was mostly just more of the same from BotW, and I found BotW pretty dull.
Man, I must have picked up BotW at the exact right time, because I started playing it when Covid lockdowns started and the whole “solo in the face of a world altering event” aspect really got to me.
I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it before or after, even though I know many people did.
Twilight Princess slaps tho, and I’ll fight anyone that disrespects it.
Valid complaints. As far as the world being dead, two points. Story wise, it was supposed to be a world somewhat in ruin due to the events 100 years prior to the game. Also, again, switch being underpowered meant they couldn’t necessarily just pack the world full of npc’s and unique monsters.
I feel you on that first statement a little bit, but my biggest gripe of the Switch was they went away from the linear dungeon design of the Zelda’s from Link to the Past and forward. It’s not gods gift to gaming, nowhere close.
I picked up BotW once the TotK started up. Everyone told me it was amazing and I had a few months between beating Elden Ring for the fifteenth time and when BG3 came out.
I’m glad people had such a good time playing the game and I’m very happy for them. However, it’s just not for me.
To be fair, I was an early Zelda fan. I played the hell out of every one of them up to Ocarina of Time when I was a kid (yes, even Adventures of Link) so I’ve probably got some bias at play.
you arent alone really there us a subset of zelda fans who dont really like the direction zelda has gone. and its not that i dont think botw/totk is a bad game, its just a bad zelda game if you were looking to play zelda.
its like playing Halo or something, and when Halo Wars was released, it became the main game(in an alternate universe). Halo Wars itself isnt a bad game, its just if you came in expecting Halo of previous past youd be slightly disappointed.
I don’t really get that argument.
We did get Breath of the Wild. It’s right there.
“How fucking amazing it was to play them” but… What? What part of the amazing experience was ruined, and by what? What would have been substantially better if the graphics had been slightly better?
the framerate is pretty all over the place, better hardware would allow for 60 fps a good amount of the time. games are amazing, just irks me that i have to watch a slideshow every camera pan
not exaggerating? i pan my camera in a field and i can see the framerate drop to sub 20, using explosive arrows and fire fx also tank it to sub 10 at points
i love botw, played 170 hours of it. but its no secret that it needs a more powerful device to at least maintain 30 fps
Nintendo’s hardware strategy has always been to use old, less expensive components to make a console that generates a profit. Something I haven’t seen mentioned too often is that Sony and Microsoft sell their consoles at a loss with the expectation that they will make money on software and services. Nintendo sells a console that makes a profit but they have the absolute worst services and their online store is not good for shopping, only buying.
Because of this focus on profitability for games and console, Nintendo will never make a console that keeps up with the performance of the other two. Nintendo is good at fudging the graphics, as long as you don’t look too hard at how the system renders stuff, such as the world detail in BotW or Mario games. But they will never be cutting edge.
I wouldn’t say always. The Super Nintendo, N64, and GameCube were more advanced in terms of graphical capabilities compared to many of their competitors.
Yup, the Wii is when they started the “withered technology” thing. One nice side effect is that their consoles are pretty easy to emulate because the hardware is so outdated.
Saying that you have to keep your games on your system because otherwise there would be no reason to choose one system over another is a strange admission. And not one that on its face benefits gamers.
Always assume that corporate decisions benefits the corporation. If decisions somehow align with customers needs and wants, it’s a positive side effect.
Well we’ll see how this “Switch Attach” system of theirs does. Tbh it just seems like they’re setting themselves up for another Wii U situation, marketing wise, but who knows…
I know what you mean, but Nintendo is a pretty bad example to illustrate that sentiment. I mean, they totally do corporate crap to benefit them and not the players obviously, but the Zelda series is literally built around the gimmicks of the console. They start thinking about a gimmick, either on the console and / or how to turn that into a gameplay gimmick, and then they make a Zelda game around that. OoT had the rumble pack and then tried to do Ura Zelda that was supposed to be the system seller for the DD64 - but that blew up and was salvaged between Master Mode and Majora’s Mask. The GameCube had Four Swords with the connection to the GBA and the multiplayer. The Wii had Skyward Sword with the motion thing, the Wii U had the separate tablet. The DS then the 3DS weren’t too relevant for Zelda but they tried, and other games did rely on it.
I’m not saying it’s a fact for the whole series, but Nintendo is particularly famous for developing a gimmick console and then building games around that, so yes, the physical console is actually relevant to the game you want to play it on, you’d be hard pressed to port that elsewhere and emulators are always weird and have a lot of work to adapt into something that makes sense on a single screen with a basic gamepad.
That’s been the motto of video game console makers basically since the beginning of time, they want vendor lock-in. We are starting to see things shift a little bit. Microsoft is becoming a software company over hardware wanting their games to be on every platform.(GamePass is amazing. I say this as a PS fan boy) Sony is starting to follow suit with PC release these days. Helldivers stands out as the only game I can think of they have released same day on PC and not 6 months to a year later.
Nintendo will always be eccentric it’s kind of been their thing since the release of the NES. No one thought the NES would sell and basically had to give retailed their games and be paid back later by the retail stores. Just accept Nintendo for being a little different than everyone else and that’s okay to be a little bit of a snowflake. We need something/one a little different
It proved it’s ass off because it thought maybe, just maybe, if It analyzed one more good rock, we’d let it come home since it’s original mission was only supposed to be 30 days.
Chill, it’s a handful of stuff on an entire freaking planet. Sure Mars isn’t as big as Earth, but it’s still huge. You would be hard pressed to even find a single trace of man if you’re on that planet.
It’s a clickbait title, look at how bad the humans are. In the grand scheme of things this is a nothingburger. The benefits vastly out way the potential downside of dropping some stuff on another planet. Even if there is some trace of life there, dropping a little bit of stuff doesn’t harm it in any way.
Also remember the scale here, it shows as dots on the map, so you think there is a lot. But in reality the size of the stuff compared to the size of the planet wouldn’t even show up on a picture. It’s not even big enough to be a single pixel. If the resolution was 10x greater, it still wouldn’t be a single pixel. It’s like those maps where they show the space debris around Earth to make it look like there is a lot. It’s tricky to spot anything man made on Mars with high powered optics in a low orbit and knowing exactly where to look. If you can see the whole hemisphere, you ain’t seeing shit.
I'm glad the article mentions that in this case, it really doesn't matter; like, there seems to be nothing to 'pollute' on Mars (also 7 tonnes is not much at all). Bit of a strange headline to me.
You’re not wrong with your sentiment but i think it’s pretty safe to say that if we find life on Mars it’s gonna be trapped in ice somehow or deep below the surface. Besides having next to no atmosphere, it also has no magnetosphere which means it takes the full blast from solar radiation. Nothing living on Earth could survive outside on the surface of Mars.
we have quite a bit of life that thrives just under the surface… within nooks and crannies of dust particles… inside Chernobyl… in ocean volcanic vents…
i think mycelia are the only thing that can live off of just raw rock though (the vanguards of life)
but, spores are pretty small and everywhere…
personally i think we should get over looking for life on mars and seed it with whatever has the best chances…
a deep valley has a thicker atmosphere and more shade from the sun, btw…
I suppose so, but I believe they always make sure not a single trace of Earth life is left on the equipement they sent to Mars, for obvious reasons. So they already control for that.
Besides looking pretty messy, I'm not sure this does any harm.
nasa sure puts a lot of effort into it… can’t say i feel confident about other countries that crash into it…
on top of that, nasa has recently found that they’ve been breeding bacteria that lives off of their disinfectant, and so no they don’t already control for that.
Sad news for the tardigrades that were on board Israel’s Beresheet mission, which crash-landed on the Moon in 2019. Researchers have learnt that the microscopic animals, which can survive the vacuum of space and heavy-duty doses of radiation, wouldn’t have lived through the crash.
Wrong country and wrong outcome, I really nailed it. Given how hardy they are, I can’t say I’m convinced they’re all dead. Not that they’d actually be active without air and water
I mean trials in absentia are super common, including in Western democracies. If you're confident you can prosecute but unable to detain the defendant, then you can still try them without them being physically present.
It’s so crazy how much I loved Onimusha, but among all the survival horror games that get talked about from that time period, it always seems to be forgotten. Even I forget it, and I still have the stupid katana controller! lol
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