Henroid

The Business Side of Video (Space) Games EXCLUSIVELY ON IDLE THUMBS

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All this Nintendo news is kind of giving me indigestion. I hope they have some additional super secret awesome plans because the only thing of any substance that they announced was putting DS games on the WiiU. It's great that they are aware of the situation with the WiiU but the other steps they are taking to make it more appealing seem pretty inconsequential and pretty much sounds like the same stuff they've been saying for the last year. And the other stuff they announced just further cements the notion in my head that they are moving in a direction I have no interest in.

 

I really want the WiiU to pull a 3DS but my skepticism is at an all time high right now. 

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They want to have a platform where the platform is not the device, but rather the user

 

I don't see this happening considering that everything is still licensed to devices, not users, but whatever. It would be nice.

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I don't see this happening considering that everything is still licensed to devices, not users, but whatever. It would be nice.

 

Put your Peter Molyneux hat on and it will all start to make sense. 

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I note that every time they've released health and lifestyle stuff - Wii Fit, the Pokéwalker, Play Coins - they've been pretty well received (the vitality sensor is an exception, but it wasn't released so nyeah). Much has been made of their engineering philosophy of withered technology, which is a great fit for that market segment.

 

I mean, I like Nintendo and want them to do well, but I have to admit that what I want from them I'm not really ever going to get from them, and these days indies are filling in the gaps, if not quite as well.

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Are play coins well received? I still don't know what they're really used for. It's also bothered me that while devices like the Wii Fit and Pokewalker work quite well, they seem to be gadgets more than utilities. Why did the Pokewalker only have to work with one game? I guess I'm happy that the Wii Fit got a revival on the Wii U, but it's a shame that it doesn't seem to be utilized by any 3rd party fitness apps (that I'm aware of at least, let me know if I'm wrong).

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Play coins are for doing all that Streetpass stuff primarily. And Nintendo hates for you to be active to gain play coins, because they think people can't make it to 1,000 steps a day! God, I hate that cap.

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Are play coins well received? I still don't know what they're really used for.

I don't think anybody really thinks about them anymore, few enough games use them that i always have more than enough. I think they were there just as a small incentive to get people to take their 3DS's with them when they head out for their day, so that there might be people out there hopefully streetpassing with their 3DS's.

 

Also, i don't know if this is really the right thread for it, but i enjoyed this Jeff Minter retrospective.

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Also, i don't know if this is really the right thread for it, but i enjoyed this Jeff Minter retrospective.

Good read. My first Jeff Minter game was Space Giraffe back in 2007, which I've always wanted to devote a decent chunk of time to, though I haven't managed it yet. I was vaguely aware of his prior games, but it's fascinating to hear the full history described in his own words. From interviews I always got an impression of him as someone with a somewhat unyielding personality, but right now he seems very aware of and philosophical about the way his previous games were variously received.

Minter's choice of Vita for the next game, in part because of the quality of the screen, is interesting in the context of most of his games riffing on vector display classics. Has physical screen quality, rather than graphical potential, ever been a real factor in choosing a platform for a game before, at least post-arcade era? Home consoles and PCs are totally dependent on the TV or monitor they're connected to, while Nintendo handhelds haven't really pushed screen quality for a long time. I suppose the 3DS is the only platform with a native 3D display, but since the release of the 2DS even that's no longer guaranteed. Given the uniqueness of the original Vita's OLED screen it seems a real shame it's been dropped from the Vita 2000, especially when just about everything else has been improved.

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Minter's always seemed like a super interesting dude. He also sums up Space Giraffe in an impressively self-aware manner, i'm not sure i could say too much about the game beyond what he wrote out in that retrospective, but i definitely fell on the side that thought the game was kind of brilliant. When it clicked with me after a couple hours of being kind of baffled by it, i began finding it intriguing how the aggressively obfuscative visual light show made you rely on all the amusingly discordant sound effects as important survival cues, and after making it past that hurdle it was then that it sort of revealed itself as a really complex and interesting deconstruction of Tempest. Space Giraffe is a game that broke a lot of the rules of old-school arcade shooters. It's super counter-intuitive and full of mechanisms that encourage risk-taking instead of careful situation control, it's kind of amazing.

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I'm not surprised by that at all. Amazon's been building a gaming division behind the scenes for a while.

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pmxvmck.jpg

 

 

 

 

HE TAPED HIS SHOES TO HIS FUCKING FEET

 

AND THEN PUT LEG WARMERS OVER THEM

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Sonic has always looked stupid so I guess I don't really see the problem!

 

Though I am confused as to why they felt the need to rebrand Sonic again. Haven't the last few games been surprisingly generally well-received?

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Ooooh. I hope they have an unlockable Sonic skin where the only difference is that he has a thin moustache.

I say this completely without cynicism! Mostly.

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How about Knuckle's new Crash Bandicoot proportions? (Speaking of which, the team making this game seems to have been founded by former Naughty Dog members.)

God, that trailer though.

Skrillex... Ugh.

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