Nintendo

An even more Smashingly little amount of information to Brawl about: Music

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Recently, the Smash Bros Dojo has opened its doors officially. Though much of the information is not new, updates are guaranteed to be coming every weekday from Masahiro Sakurai himself!
Unlikely to be the last surprise waiting for us inside a box.

Most of the information is stuff any fan of the games would know by now – such as how to play or information about the one stage that has been revealed.

However… if you look at “Music” there is a list of composers that is nothing short of formidable. Absolutely amazing.

The list itself gives examples of games the composers worked on, which is helpful for several names I didn’t recognize. Let’s take a look.

The usual suspects:

  • Koji Kondo
  • Masaaki Iwasaki
  • Minako Hamano
  • Shogo Sakai
  • Toru Minegishi
  • Yuka Tsujiyoko
  • Hajime Wakai

These are all composers who worked on several Nintendo games in the past or recently worked on big-name Nintendo games. →  Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 5: Golden Post

Best Buy needs a better selection

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Tonight I scoured the earth for a copy of Etrian Odyssey. A painfully difficult game with music by Yuzo Koshiro sounds like heaven to me. Apparently, Best Buy thinks it sounds like a nerdy Japanese RPG doomed to rot on the shelves. I was hurt that the store didn’t carry the game, but what they do carry is infinitely more infuriating.

Cars…OK, maybe the movie was cute.

Cake mania…I guess it’s some flash game, whatever.

Bratz: Diamondz…No, there is never a reason to stock this game. If you buy your children Bratz merchandise do the world a favor and smother them while they sleep.

Dogz…Nintendogs ripoff meant to take advantage of stupid children and ignorant parents, fine.

Horsez…Nintendogs ripoff meant to take advantage of stupid children and ignorant parents who cannot tell the difference between a dog and a horse, fine. →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

Paranoid Identity Crisis!

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Fanboys unite! Constant squabbles echo among Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox loyalists, but the real battle is elsewhere. It’s a battle between the different ways people choose to spend their free time and their extra dollars. Games are a big and growing part of this battle and they have taken a bite out of that tasty aged 18-34 male demographic. Can games hold onto it? Do they even want to?

Nintendo has set itself the challenge of trying to hold onto some of gaming’s biggest loyalists while making appeals to nontraditional audiences like retirees. And it’s well known that Sony and Microsoft have had their eyes on a bigger prize ever since they stepped in the ring. They both want to eventually establish their brands and platforms for the mythical must-have TV set-top box. →  We have nothing to lose but our games.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.14.07

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Starcraft 2 is coming
Golden Jew was wrong. He is hereby stripped of one hundredth of his massive pile of gold coins, crowns, and swords. I’ll give it back when the Starcraft MMO comes out in two years.

Rare to broaden 360s audience with all age friendly games
But also don’t rule out that they will make mature games, says Microsoft’s Peter Moore. They will or they won’t. They may and they may not. I’m glad Moore cleared that up.

Rare is fascinating because Microsoft seems to think Rare can change the Xbox brand image and because I have a theory that Nintendo makes their second parties what they are. On the first point, Rare will fail. Microsoft is taking the same attitude towards appealing to the mass market as they took when attempting to appeal to the Japanese — “one or two games should do it, now let’s sit back and wait for the money.” →  Monster Reader 4

Rumor Factory: Music Downloads on Wii?

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If you’ve been keeping up to date with your voting on the Everybody Votes Channel on the Wii (which you should be, btw), then you have seen a particularly interesting question that Nintendo is asking all of its American users:

“How do you prefer to buy music?”

The possible choices Nintendo has supplied are a) download or b) CD. Now, this can just be labeled as a seemingly innocuous question that tries to get more users to vote on the channel, but what if this were the first indication that Nintendo might be in the planning phases for a Music Download Channel, something akin to Apple’s iTunes store?

The Everybody Votes Channel is the perfect venue for Nintendo to better understand its customers, as well as to test out any ideas it has up its sleeve for the future. →  You think about everything.

Miyamoto could make Halo, but doesn’t wanna

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In a pretty enlightening interview on EW.com, Shigeru Miyamoto openly says that he could design a game like Halo for the American market, but that it’s just not what he wants to do.

Miyamoto says he tries to bring something new to the end-user experience, something that fans didn’t even know they wanted. That may sound a bit egotistical, but it makes perfect sense. Most people want a game that they’ve played before because they know it was fun, like someone saying they want a sci-fi FPS. But if developers always followed what the consumer wants, we would never get something like Katamari Damacy or the Wii.

That’s what Miyamoto was trying to say. It’s not like he thinks Halo is a simple game that anyone can design. It’s just not his style to do something like that. →  Readbot Chronicles

Nintendo – Honest designers or Japanese super ninja thieves?

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Today I stumbled upon my bag of E3 2005 crap. I hadn’t remembered it was under the bed right next to the box of Chick Tracts (kids love them!) A quick look through the pamphlets and goodies made me recall how much of a bloated orgy E3 was. Just how many more Sony key chains, FFVII Before Crisis monitor wipers, paper Sly Cooper 3D glasses, and Phoenix Wright branded cans of coffee did they expect to give out before the whole thing collapsed under the weight of hastily thrown together demos, rabid consumerism (yes, I fought someone for that can of coffee, and no, coffee should not be in cans), thudding bass and barely dressed women?

The answer was “one years worth.” E3 as we knew it is over and the industry is better off, but this is all irrelevant. →  Readalations: Persona

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.4.07

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Sony markets to teens
Sony decided this was a smart business move after analyzing the figures:
Selling games to 10 year olds = totally lame (Nintendo sux LOL)
Selling games to 14 year olds = awesome to the max (we rulz)

The All I want for Christmas is a PSP, Sony’s first attempt to market to teens, went over slightly better than September 11th. Most failed ads don’t bring in more customers, this failed ad led to current customers donating their PSPs to their walls at 15 MPH.

EA noticing Wii and DS appeal to kids, plans bad mini-game game to cash in
EA Playground appeals to “the kid in everyone.” How exactly did EA deduce this? There are the obvious things that appeal to kids but not adults, like finding the opposite sex disgusting and eating chalk. →  Readout 3: Takedown

Xbox to make its first dollar in 2008

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Yeah, seven years after the original Xbox was released. If this was the plan all along, there would’ve been no way in Hell that the Xbox project would have been green-lit had it been anyone but Microsoft. It has cost the company billions already, which isn’t a very favorable position when dealing with shareholders.

From eWeek via Next-Gen.biz, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, states that through peripherals, software sales (1st and 3rd party titles), and Xbox Live, the Xbox platform will finally see a profit next year. Welcome, Microsoft, to the club that Nintendo has been a part of since, well, forever.

This fact just goes to show you how much money Microsoft can afford to waste on something like a gaming console. They’ve lost billions of dollars in the last seven years, but are still going into the console market with all guns blazing. →  The gamers have only interpreted the games, in various ways. The point, however, is to change them.

Creative writing, descriptive language and curse words do not automatically make a review good

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I apologize for linking to an old review of Twilight Princess. I only recently read it and feel compelled to comment. My first instinct was to write the entire review off as a cry for attention. While it may be, writing it off is the easy way out and allows the author the satisfaction of being dismissed, as opposed to critically assessed. So let’s discuss the merits of her positions.

Whether games are all ultimately very similar and it is only the façade of graphics, sound, and plot that differentiate them or whether the façade doesn’t matter because games are ultimately the game mechanics underneath is not a debate I am equipped to settle. I tend to come down on the side that the façade usually doesn’t matter and the mechanics are really what a game “is” at least 95% of the time (for example, Fumito Ueda titles may be in the remaining 5%). →  Phoenix Write: Just Posts for All

Wii VC Sales in Decline, But Not by Much

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Nintendo of Japan recently held a press conference where they detailed a whole mess of… crap. One of the bigger chunks of news to come out of the conference was the sales figures for the Wii’s Virtual Console service.

In the first two months of the service’s life, 1.5 million games were downloaded. In the last three, only 1.8 million were downloaded. If we extrapolate this info, we can see that the VC’s sales are starting to decline. It’s not by a huge amount, but it is enough to warrant a dissection on the situation.

So why did it start to decline? Well, we have a few reasons why. First, the lucky gamers that had a Wii in the first two months were most likely hardcore gamers, and would gladly pay for a Nintendo game that they had already purchased nine times before, including myself. →  All this can be yours, if the read is right.

Console logos throughout the ages

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This year, 2007, marks the 30th anniversary of the Atari 2600 release, which is what many consider to be the very first commercial video game console. And since then, the gaming populace has been privy to 21 major home consoles. To celebrate this momentous year, I have painstakingly researched and categorized each of the 18 home consoles’ logos. Yes, I have nothing else better to do with my time. So, with that in mind, let’s take a quick stroll through history, shall we?

Atari 2600: Here we have the granddaddy of them all: the Atari 2600. I don’t really understand what this logo stands for, but it must mean something cool, as it can still be seen on t-shirts and stickers everywhere. If you’re trying to convey the fact that you’re a retro gamer, you probably have the Atari logo somewhere in your gaming bordello. →  SaGa Frontier Readmastered

Pokemon Sells a Lot. Noooooo, Really?

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In the most unsurprising bit of news to come along in some time, Nintendo has announced that their flagship DS titles, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, have accumulated over 1 million units sold in little less than a week’s time. Seriously, was there ever a doubt that this wouldn’t happen? Pokemon is the crack for gaming: everyone knows it isn’t good for you, but it’s so hard to quit.
Aww jeez, we doin’ this Pokemon thing again?

Not to say the games suck (the original GameBoy one was uber-good), but I’m not sure how many times Nintendo/Game Freak have to make the exact same game over and over before fans finally realize that the series needs a revamp. Personally, I’m still holding out for the console MMO that everyone seems to wish for. →  Ridge Reader V

ZOMG! Moment – Nintendo Acquires Monolith Soft

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In a stunning move, Nintendo has purchased Xenosaga developer, Monolith Soft, from its previous majority shareholders, Namco Bandai. Nintendo, now the majority shareholder, owns 80% of the company’s stock, while Namco Bandai still owns 16% of their previous 96% shareholdings.
Holy snap. Wii gets itself some RPG pron.

For Nintendo fans, this is a moment for much rejoicing. Previous Nintendo consoles (N64-era and up) have had very little RPG support, with many RPG fans jumping ship to Nintendo’s rival, the Playstation. By bringing on-board one of the premier Japanese RPG developers, Nintendo is poised to take back the RPG crown that it lost after the SNES days. Monolith Soft is currently working on Disaster: Day of Crisis for the Wii, but one has to think (and hope) that they will revisit their RPG-powerhouses, the Xenosaga or Baten Kaitos series at some point. →  Are anyone else’s nipples hard?

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 4.27.07

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Ken Kuraragi finally falls on his sword
I have called for Ken’s resignation many times, but like a president bombarded by calls to fire a cronie, end a war, step down, or learn to read Kutaragi has ignored me entirely. That is until yesterday. Ken has finally listened to my sharp criticism and based a life altering decision on it…or has he?

“And God said unto me, ‘Make thy console large, make it powerful, but above all else hold unto this truth: Make thy console expensive.'”

The Japanese, unlike Americans, have a thing they like to call sushi. This raw fish (California rolls don’t count, hippy) is symbolic of another concept we Americans lack – honor. For you see, in ancient Japan the sushi roller guy was thought to be the embodiment of the fisherman’s god, Zeus. →  It might come in handy if you, the master of reading, take it with you.

Looking forward to a good Brawl

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Nintendo still hasn’t announced anything solid on Brawl, and the closest thing we have to release date is still “Later this year”. Regardless of the release date being pushed back, however, I’m still eagerly anticipating it.

Super Smash Bros Melee certainly isn’t my favorite game single-player, but in multi-player it is an experience to be reckoned with. It’s not perfectly balanced, but the game’s major hallmarks are being easy to pick up but difficult to master. Advanced techniques such as L-canceling and some engine side-effects such as wave-dashing lend the game more depth than most other fighting games, which is why SSBM is the only fighting game I still enjoy years after playing it for the first time.

If only narcolepsy were really this powerful.

Three years ago, there was a Gamecube in my college dorm’s lobby. →  Get lame or get out.

No KOF from SNK on the VC ASAP – WTF?

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As you can probably guess, I’m damn psyched to see some Neo Geo games on the Virtual Console. What I’m not so excited about is news like thisthat tells me that some of the premier Neo Geo games won’t be the first ones released. The reasoning is that you can find most of the King of Fighters games easily enough, and they’ve just released the Metal Slug Anthology on two consoles. Normally I would understand the logic, especially if it means the first games to hit the VC is stuff like World Heroes or Baseball Stars. Yet the more I thought about it, the less it makes sense. Here’s why.

– Technically it is possible to own of the KoF’s from 98-2003 via the PS2 and Dreamcast. But all of them are “enhanced ports” with the 2d backgrounds changed to ugly 3d, and lord knows what kind of changes to the original arcade balance. →  Your right post comes off?

Halo Prime 3

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No link for this blog post, but let’s just say that there are some videos of Halo 3 beta lurking around the internet, and a certain writer has seen the clips. This isn’t a discussion of my impressions, but instead a remark on one noticeable change I observed. The HUD has been changed to resemble Halo’s biggest “competitor” that’s not really its competitor: Metroid Prime.
Chief is running away from Samus.

This isn’t going to be the rant of a Nintendo fanboy complaining that Bungie ripped Retro Studios off. Quite frankly the best parts of both Halos came from previous games. What bothers me about it is that the HUD actually looks worse than before. It’s far too cluttered; what used to occupy three corners of the screen now fills up four corners and the top center. →  Read more, before it’s too late!

PS3 Gets Boatload of PS1 Titles…in Japan

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Through their newest 1.70 firmware update for the PS3, Sony has bestowed upon the Japanese buying public a cornucopia (25 to be exact) of PS1 titles for purchase through the Playstation Store. This will also mark the very first time that PS1 titles are playable on the PS3. Before today, they were only playable on the PSP, which makes absolutely no sense.
Blocky characters in 1080p: totally worth $600.

And sadly, not all of the titles that are being released tomorrow are playable on the PS3. You can check out the complete list at PSPFanboy.

Now, although this is only for Japan, it does seem that Sony is at least somewhat trying to do what Nintendo has been doing with their Virtual Console Mondays. Nintendo has been on the ball ever since the service started a week after the Wii’s launch, and after seeing how much profit they stand to gain from doing nothing releasing their old wares, Sony has decided it’s their turn to milk their customers of their hard-earned money. →  Jesus: Readful Bio Monster

Xbox 360 loses a few exclusives / PS3 gains Chopin

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Namco’s Chopin themed RPG Trusty Bell and SCi’s almost biblical Kain & Lynch, both once 360 exclusives, are now coming to the PS3 as well. Sony naysayers (me) are now faced with acknowledging neither console is safe from losing exclusive titles. Third party publishers seem unsatisfied with their platform choices. The 360 failed to dominate the market during its year lead and is currently being outsold by the GBA in Japan and the PS3 is catching on slower than most anticipated, likely due to it being positioned as a meal at a fine restaurant in the back of a Mercedes that is for everyone. Publishers could go to Nintendo, but then their triple A games look like shit and are stuck on one platform, whereas a game developed on either of the other two could be easily ported. →  The only thing we have to read is read itself.