Nintendo

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.21.07

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PSP outsells DS in Japan
Square’s Final Fantasy VII spin off for the PSP, Crisis Core, sold half a million copies last week. It also sold PSPs. Possibly not all of the 95 thousand Sony sold in the week, but likely around 80 thousand, which is how many more units were sold than the previous week. Sony’s business strategy should be clear – simply release a spinoff of one of the most beloved games of all time once a week and the PSP will handily outsell the DS in Japan 1.2 to 1.

Or, to quote someone from a forum I read:
“If DS stopped selling and PSP continued at this rate, it would catch up in 139.7 weeks (May 21, 2010).”

Does anyone else feel nauseous?

Home delayed till Spring
Good for Sony. I’d rather they take the extra time to polish Home than release it early. Nintendo’s Reggie recently mocked Home by saying something glib like, “I think that exists already, it’s called Second Life.” →  Read, I am your father!

Discs based gaming and you – Luddites and grognards

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I have something to admit. It will sound strange in this day and age, but I still get a bit weirded out playing games on optical media.

It really makes no sense, considering just how long I have been popping discs into trays to get my game on. My reasons are a combination of upbringing and perception, and if you’re bored or curious, I’d like to share them with you.

Reason One – Music

Very early on, when CD’s were becoming mainstream, I was young enough to make the false assumption that they were like cassettes and vinyl before them, intended only for playing music. Of course, young Christian had never played with a computer using a tape drive, so I was wrong on two accounts. In any case, thinking of a CD as a storage medium rather than as a vessel for music took a little while, but I came around eventually.

Reason Two – I’m a computer guy

The one place that I have never felt weird about using CD’s for non musical purposes was the PC. →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

Review – Metroid Prime 3

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The moment I saw it at E3 I knew it would be one of the Wii’s killer apps. If you read any of those lesser video game sites around you know that their reviews have borne my predictions out. This review then is not meant to tell you whether or not you should buy this game.

I can tell you that right off the bat: if you have any interest in FPS or adventure games, or, to use the portmanteau generated by the ever clever gaming forum communities, first person adventure games, you need to play this game. Buy it, rent it, whatever your wallet allows, it deserves a play-through because it is one of the best games currently on the Wii and it has a lot of innovation to offer.

The purpose, then, of this review is more to focus on a list of do’s and dont’s for videogames, a list of what we ought to expect out of developers as we proceed in this new generation of consoles. →  Fear the old posts.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.7.07

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Molyneux takes a shocking stand – his company is more influential than its competitor
In a recent interview, designer Peter Molyneux said that Microsoft’s Live will be more impactful than the Wii remote. Molyneux was clearly kidding – would anyone use the non-word “impactful” in a serious statement?

Pretend he was serious. Is Live more influential than motion sensing controls? This is not easy to answer, partly because it’s comparing apples to gypsies, partly because the Wii is very young and partly because in some form, both things being compared have already existed for years. At its base level, Live is the internet. Should we thank Al Gore for being more impactful on games than Microsoft? If that’s too far a leap, what about X-Band on the Genesis or SNES? Surely Seganet was impactful as all get out.
OMG Nintendo copied Hasbro!

The motion controlled Star Wars Lightsaber Battle game Hasbro released in 2005 is more fun than most Wii games. →  Holy crap, show me more!

Sony sends IGN a Reviewing Guide for Lair, IGN realizes the folly of its ways

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Wow, how arrogant can someone be? Completely ignoring the fact that every single review for Factor 5’s monumental disaster says the same exact thing (god-awful motion controls with the SIXAXIS), Sony has issued a Lair Reviewer’s Guide for IGN, stating, in cold-hard PR-speak, that they are not playing the game properly, and that they need to open their minds and “hands for something very different!”.

Now, I could understand if Nintendo was the one doing this, as there have been many times where a Wii game would get the lowest scores possible on one site, while it had higher than average scores on another, depending on if the reviewer understood how to use the game’s motion controls. That I could understand. But because Sony is doing it, I can’t help but think this is more of a publicity stunt than anything.

Sony didn’t make this to teach the reviewer how to play the game, they did it to make them look like asses. →  Hey, hey, hey, it’s time to make some crazy reading!

The Hardware Honeymoon Is Over, Bring On The Games!

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I just took a quick peek at the Japanese console sales charts and I think it is safe to say that the newness is starting to fade from this generation of consoles. This is by no means a doom and gloom statement, it just means that now some game developers need to step up to the plate and convince people to buy into all of the new hardware floating around.

Microsoft will again be the loser in the Japanese console market. The Xbox 360 just does not have titles that Japanese people are interested in. Halo 3 will most definitely boost sales in the United States and Europe but not many Japanese gamers play Halo. I am positive I will be able to walk into any store here on the day Halo 3 is released and walk out with a copy of the game if I so desired. It is a shame for MS that they can’t find some way to connect with the inhabitants of this little island country because the 360 is a very solid console. →  Read more? No, I’ll read it all.

Retrospective – Metroid Prime 2

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Continuing our look at the fabled Metroid Prime series, we now delve into Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. It’s a common occurrence in the video game medium that a franchise peaked early in its life time. When a game is as stellar as the first Metroid Prime, it’s going to be very hard to create something better. And this is an apt description of Echoes. It’s definitely a good game, but sadly, with nothing new to show, and a few problems introduced, Echoes doesn’t live up to expectations.

In this installment, Samus has accepted a request to find a missing Galactic Federation starship that was last heard from while hunting down a Space Pirate frigate above the planet Aether. All communications with the GF starship have been lost since then. Not one to pass up easy money, Samus accepts the mission and travels to Aether, but as she enters the atmosphere, a virulent electrical storm damages her gunship, leaving her stranded on Aether until her ship repairs itself. →  All your posts are belong to us.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 8.31.07

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Nintendo stops whoring out Metroid, or at least Retro stops
Please, let Retro make a game it wants to make. I know you own them and want to assign them to a franchise because franchises make all the bling, but it’s really not in your (my) best interest. You have no “mature” themed franchises left, unless you’re giving them the next console Zelda. An excellent developer like Retro also deserves to be rewarded – let them design a game from the ground up. It could be dark, with nudity and blood everywhere. Perhaps bloody nipples. You know, mature.

You would get what you need out of them – an awesome title for the older gamer who is too insecure to play something cute and candy colored. Retro would get what (I assume) they want – the chance to make a game without being assigned 75% of the design.

I know you aren’t Nintendo, reader. Addressing you as if you were was some sort of literary device, possibly onomatopoeia. →  Europa Universalis IV: Articles of War

Review – Mario Party 8

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Mario Party 8 is great for those who love board games, but don’t have a properly calibrated floor to play one on. I was so bored playing the required 80 hours of remedial shoots and ladders needed to unlock all of the party games that I started to appreciate Warhol’s “Sleep”. The party games combine the all the fun of watching real estate infomercials with the innovation of watching a marathon of real estate infomercials.

  No disrespect to Tom Vu, however. In his infomercial, this late 80’s real estate mogul turned seminar hawker/ pimp had a waterfall that he built using the leftover chicks from the playboy mansion. And best of all, he would act like he never saw them. He would give the original crib tour and walk by as if he just had a non-woman waterfall built of regular rocks and Waterfall-Mart bought supplies. He didn’t have a Wiimote, but Mario Party 8 is still many bikini waterfalls short of even having the radness of Tom Vu.
 →  Double your reading, double your fun.

Review – Madden 08

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The Madden Curse Comes to the Wii

For years we’ve seen each Madden cover supermodel fall to the “curse” of becoming overpaid, injured and irrelevant. And just as eerily, the infamous curse is plaguing the upper right corner of its cover as well.

I know I’m supposed to unconditionally lower my expectations for the Wii’s substandard graphics and love it because of it’s removable showerhead inspired controller, but this is just lazy. (And by the way, the joy of flailing a little white rod at my TV is neither new nor innovative.) Crowd shots, backgrounds, stadium flybys and even the loading screen still shots rely on heavy, let’s say, “artistic” blurring to compensate for these worse than average Wii graphics. Whereas the animations have finally improved on the other two consoles, the motion capture for the Wii looks like it was recorded in the Madden bus toilet using a breakfast burrito and some pork rinds.

Believe it or not, this other Madden endorsed product is less poop filled than Madden ’08 for the Nintendo Wii.

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