Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

[Malacite]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

So what you're really saying is "I'm repeating my mistake, but you'll have LESS of my money. Haha!"

---------- Post added at 03:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:15 PM ----------

I am pretty happy to hear that Nintendo is working on a way to get people's games/game downloads, etc. from their Wii to the WiiU. I hope that turns out well. Only 2 games really caught my attention, and they were Watch Dogs and Project P-100. Hope they turn out as good as they seem :3

No. I bought my Wii day 1 and love the hell out of Twilight Princess. And then it was like 3 months until Prime 3. And then another few months until Mario Galaxy etc etc and then I just stopped buying games on it altogether. I'm not sorry I bought a Wii, I'm sorry I paid full price on Day 1 for what eventually became a glorified ivory paper weight. I'll buy it when the price comes down and if there's compelling software, I just won't pick up a console ever again like that on Day 1 unless there's a slew of good shit already available and on the horizon.


As for Devs being at fault, it's not entirely their fault either - Nintendo has been a real bitch to work with from day 1 and some devs are just tired of dealing with their shit I'd wager.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

Code of Princess Hands-On: An Explosive Brawler | Siliconera

This is looking pretty good, it's by the creators of Guardian Heroes and Atlus USA picked it up for this Fall.

[Malacite]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

uh, as soon as I clicked that link you posted BBQ Malware bytes said there was a very nasty virus and quarantined it right away.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

It's Siliconera >.>

Shouldn't be anything nefarious about the site, maybe it's just one of thier ads?

[Firewind]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

It's probably one of the ads or something embedded into the Javascript. I'm not getting anything though I do run Ablock Plus, Noscript, Flash Block and better Privacy on Firefox.

No. I bought my Wii day 1 and love the hell out of Twilight Princess. And then it was like 3 months until Prime 3. And then another few months until Mario Galaxy etc etc and then I just stopped buying games on it altogether. I'm not sorry I bought a Wii, I'm sorry I paid full price on Day 1 for what eventually became a glorified ivory paper weight. I'll buy it when the price comes down and if there's compelling software, I just won't pick up a console ever again like that on Day 1 unless there's a slew of good shit already available and on the horizon.

Honestly it's why I never buy a console on Day 1 any more unless it has Backwards Compatibility. My 3DS is basically a big black £200/$320 paperweight as far as 3DS games go unless I want to play a DS game over Wi-Fi (because the DS and Wii hates WPA-2 encryption even though the PS3, PSP and eventually the 360 support it).

While I'm happy I didn't have to pay full price for it, 3DS games are as expensive as console games here and this is a big dealbreaker. Why would I buy a stripped down, handheld version of a game when I can have the full version on a console it has been optimised to be played on for less?

New console games in the UK cost £40+ or about $64+. New 3DS games I've seen being sold for £45 or about $72. Compare to Steam (as much as I bash Steam I don't think I've ever called it a bad platform, I just dislike having to open up multiple third party programmes to launch a game which is something that even Origin got right) where the MOST you will pay for a brand new game is £35 or about $56 and gog.com sells classic games for less than $10 and even brand new games for less than $20 and you will probably see why I'm started to become jaded with consoles.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

Ive yet to play "stripped down" console game on 3DS. RE:R played like if had elsewhere, MGS3 played fine with and without CCP, Zelda and Starfox were the same experience as before. Same with Tales of the Abyss and Samurai Warriors. Thosed aside, everything else has been made for the 3DS and functional.

The price issues are on NOE's head. Here 3DS and Vita games are $10 less than new Wii games and $20 less than other retail console games.

As for having enough games at launch, man, if you're frowning over a console not haveing a new game you want to buy each week, your priorities are kinda fucked anyway. There are thousands of games out there, most of the ones gamers buy are left unfinished to buy another one.

People complain about a lack of third party titles on Wii, but when they come the exact same folks ignore them and only buy the Nintendo stuff. It's kinda of annoying. Has Mal played Muramasa, No More Heroes or Little King's Story? Xenoblade? Zelda and Metriod are cool but if you're not there for the other stuff what's the point?

[Icemage]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

Filters. I'm sure they'll have in place a parental control system, much like Blizzard has available in Battle.net accounts, where parents can control or limit the game time of their children. However, if this isn't what Nintendo is planning to do, then I agree with you that their going about this the wrong way.

Read the linked article. Nintendo's planning on filters PLUS community flagging PLUS human moderation of every post.

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Re: The Wii's problems
I don't think the Wii's issues are down to one source.

The Wiimote being the default control scheme was a huge problem in terms of multiplatform releases. Many games use configurations which rely on the position of certain controls (see: Tekken's reliance on face buttons, Call of Duty's use of L3/R3 and heavy shoulder button use, and more games than I can count that use dual analog for camera control). For games which were developed for the Wii natively, that's not usually an issue because the developers can work around the controls more or less (The Conduit). Consider a game like Batman: Arkham Asylum that relies heavily on multiple face buttons and two analog sticks though; things start falling apart because there's no graceful way to translate those controls onto the default control scheme (Wiimote + Nunchuk). Even with the Classic Controller it would have been awkward for many games, and not many developers are going to design their game interface around an optional add-on.

Beyond control schemes, non-HD resolution and lower processing power still caused huge issues, because game engines simply couldn't be ported onto the Wii. Due to having less processing power and less memory, engines had to be retooled and art assets had to be downrezzed carefully, causing loss of visual fidelity even compared to the same games running in 480p on the other consoles. For multiplatform publishers, dumbing down a game so it would work on the Wii, only to see it perform less capably and typically sell for less than its 360 and PS3 counterparts ended up not being a good business decision, especially within the last few years as a sizable chunk of avid gamers now own multiple consoles and will pretty much never choose the Wii version if there is an alternative.

You can't really point at a game like Muramasa and whine about why no one bought it. Heck, I own a Wii and I didn't even buy it (though I did buy a number of other exclusive and interesting games like Lost in Shadow and MadWorld). These games don't exist in a vacuum - there are lots of games out there now, and whining about people not buying the core games on Wii is naive because the people who "would" have bought them probably bought something else to play instead - like I did.

Fortunately for Nintendo, the hype train for Wii Sports + Wii Fit still let them sell truckloads of hardware despite the absence of many of these games. That train has left the station, however, hence why Wii console sales have tanked in the last year or so.

---

On the good side for Nintendo, the Wii U's default control scheme does allow for relatively simple ports from PS360 titles, as does the hardware - at least for now. It certainly puts Nintendo on a much more equal footing with Microsoft and Sony with respect to bringing those 3rd party games back to their platform, at least for the next year or so.

I suspect that when the dust settles in a couple of years, assuming things go more or less as expected, Nintendo will still have the least powerful hardware (but with much less of a quality gap), the weakest online service by a much larger gap (which I don't think will ever close in any meaningful fashion), a handful of standout experiences which are unique to the Wii U because Nintendo still makes great games, and they'll still have their kid-friendly image to counterbalance the hamstrung online service.

Icemage

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

You can't really point at a game like Muramasa and whine about why no one bought it. Heck, I own a Wii and I didn't even buy it (though I did buy a number of other exclusive and interesting games like Lost in Shadow and MadWorld). These games don't exist in a vacuum - there are lots of games out there now, and whining about people not buying the core games on Wii is naive because the people who "would" have bought them probably bought something else to play instead - like I did.

You're missing the point here.

People say Wii has no good third party games.
There are, but they just buy the first party stuff, even though they complain about too many Zeldas and shit.
They complain there are no new IP.
Then it has new IPs and great third party games, they complain they're not on PS3 and 360.
They lament they're not in HD, even though they know that's impossible for Wii.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

People fail to realize, however, that the last time Nintendo tried to match and exceed the competition we got GameCube in a distant third place. Each time they have gone a different way, they do better. All this theorycrafting and complaining and armchair industry analysis is debunked - Nintendo does not have to do what Sony and MS do.

And who is it kludging together ways to emulate what Wii U does?

Smartglass and Vita connectivity say hi. They're half measures at best, too. They wouldn't know which way the toilet was if Nintendo didn't show them where to piss.

[Malacite]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

NMH was a bit odd, but I did try it. Xenoblade is the last game I really give a toss about for the Wii, otherwise it's just a vast sea of crap among the few 1st party gems that are always there.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

For all the more cinema-focused games that were shown, I was much more impressed with Tomb Raider than most of the other, aside from Watch Dogs. TR risked coming too close to Uncharted but sets itself far apart by making Lara more vulnerable, scared and forced to survive. Nathan Drake walks away from thinks with maybesome dirt and blood on his shirt. Lara walks away covered in dirt and blood, faces the wild, hunts for food, tries to find her friends, is made captive, fights off and kills a rapist among her captors.

It makes Nathan's life look like a cakewalk.

[Icemage]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

You're missing the point here.

No, I don't believe I am.

Internet babble means nothing. What matters at the end of the day is what games are available and their quality, and what ELSE is available elsewhere, and on that front, the Wii is a distant, distant third if you factor out Nintendo's first-party games. As a platform the Wii is mostly a failure for 3rd party software. That has nothing to do with people nerd-raging on Nintendo, and everything to do with the fact that when push came to shove, the software offerings simply didn't measure up to the competition for the current market environment.

That doesn't mean Muramasa, Zak & Wiki, MadWorld, No More Heroes, Lost in Shadow, or similar Wii-exclusive third party offerings are bad games; on the contrary, those games and a number of others like them are quite decent. It does mean they weren't compelling enough to sway the market of Wii owners to buy them instead of spending the money on some other form of entertainment. Despite an install base almost twice the size of the Xbox 360 or PS3, these titles underperformed expectations because people would rather spend their money elsewhere. We can argue all you like about whether Nintendo's "Blue Ocean" strategy was a smart one, but from the perspective of 3rd party publishers, the sales numbers simply don't lie; the people who bought the Wii for Wii Sports and Wii Fit by and large never made the transition into buying other games that didn't have the Nintendo branding on them.

3rd party publishers didn't find the Wii profitable for their core franchises except in those rare cases where there was massive publicity/nostalgia (Resident Evil 4) or ridiculously low development cost (Carnival Games), which led to the hardcore gamers going where the "real" games ended up (on PC, 360, and PS3). Blaming people for their largely correct perception that the Wii has a very incomplete game library seems pretty irrational to me, and the blame for that really does fall on Nintendo's shoulders for the design decisions that started the dominos falling the way they did.


Icemage

[Aeni]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

Read the linked article. Nintendo's planning on filters PLUS community flagging PLUS human moderation of every post.

My bad. I read it but misunderstood your original post. I thought the issue was a lack of controls which a parent should have over and not leave it to Nintendo to do those. The issue you raise (that I missed) is that Nintendo is over-reaching their own liabilities and having to put down resources they don't currently have. Although I assumed that this wasn't what was intended, but who knows if the reporting was accurate, if something got lost in translation or if this is just hot air at E3.

Censorship can be done with automatic filters which would redirect "questionable" items to an active "human supervised" team to go through it while killing off blatant questionable items (probably the majority of those that get held up) and releasing the "good stuff". But you could be right, maybe Nintendo is really doing it the wrong way, and is going to actively censor (with live humans) every single item that is running through the Miiverse.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

Again I refute the idea that Nintendo designed Wii "wrong." Nintendo still made their core games, but core third party developers just wanted to do do straight, lazy ports and bring nothing unique to any platform that they couldn't get paid extra for by way of DLC or digital preorder bonuses. Gamers can't flock to games developers don't bring, but gamers could stand to get with the fucking times and realize we don't have to be restricted to a dual shock anymore and that I can fault gamers for. In 2012 we see them bury thier heads in the sand at the sight of a touchscreen and cry "gimmick" like it's 2004. Voice, motion, touch and 3D are here to stay and will only become more and more relevant.

Even MS and Sony have had to admit it and there was proof positive in thier presentation, though if anything at E3 was gimmicky, it was Wonderbook. I mean, yeah, let's take away the imagination behind reading books. And it went on longer than Nintendo Land (which Nintendo could have shortened as well, they did have five demos on the floor).

If Nintendo's execution with Wii, 3DS and Wii U was wrong, MS and Sony would not be presenting variants of the ideas. I don't believe for a second that Smartglass - though interesting - came out of the popularity of smartphones and tablets. It was to be able to get in on whatever Wii U might get. I don't think it will pan out, but I do appreciate that both MS and Nintendo are willing to bring media applications to iOS and Android while Sony will only go with specific phone brands it deigns worthy.

[Raydeus]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

I just realized something. BBQ, you really like Nintendo don't you?

[Icemage]

Re: Spike TV/Gametrailers E3 Schedule

Again I refute the idea that Nintendo designed Wii "wrong." Nintendo still made their core games, but core third party developers just wanted to do do straight, lazy ports and bring nothing unique to any platform that they couldn't get paid extra for by way of DLC or digital preorder bonuses.

That's complete and utter rubbish.

No one is saying Nintendo did anything "wrong" (least of all me). They set out to do something very specific (appeal to the wider market / "Blue Ocean" strategy) by their own admission. It just so happens that those design decisions ALSO had the side effect of alienating 3rd party publishers and developers (and resulted in large-scale abandonment by the hardcore gamers when the games they wanted were not forthcoming). Your problem is that you don't seem to recognize that Nintendo could have achieved exactly what they intended, yet still cause all of these side-effects.

DLC and digital pre-orders weren't even a thing in 2006, so I've no idea where you were going with that. No one knew when the Xbox 360 / PS3 / Wii launched how the market would react to digitally downloaded content.

Gamers can't flock to games developers don't bring, but gamers could stand to get with the fucking times and realize we don't have to be restricted to a dual shock anymore and that I can fault gamers for. In 2012 we see them bury thier heads in the sand at the sight of a touchscreen and cry "gimmick" like it's 2004. Voice, motion, touch and 3D are here to stay and will only become more and more relevant.

The main reason people are crying "gimmick" is because the applications on display at E3 do not enhance or expand the game experience. How does it help immersion to look away from your TV to manage your inventory while something beats the crap out of you because you're fumbling for a healing potion? THAT is the sort of stuff that's on display right now.

Are there applications where having the touchscreen is beneficial? Of course there are, but the things that games like Batman Arkham City and Ninja Gaiden 3 are doing are not helpful, and even NintendoLand, supposedly Nintendo's flag-bearer for why the Wii U should be awesome... isn't exactly setting the world on fire. I'm sure there are good ideas and gameplay that can be had, but the honest truth is that Nintendo just hasn't done a whole lot to offer something compelling to anything but their own die-hard faithful.

Nintendo needed NintendoLand to be Wii Sports, but it's not. The beauty of Wii Sports as a marketing tool is that you can watch someone playing it for 30 seconds and instantly understand what's going on.

Instead what we're seeing is a mish-mash of tech demos that play like tech demos, and this drum-beat about "asymmetric gameplay". This last is one of the most bizarre attempts I've ever seen at a Big Lie. Nintendo's trying very hard to convince people that only having 1 GamePad is a Good Thing since you get "different experiences" for the other players, instead of calling it what it is: a technical limitation that will quite often hamstring local multiplayer, and likely be a massive headache for game designers as well (because now you have two or more sets of control schemes to plan activities for).

Even MS and Sony have had to admit it and there was proof positive in thier presentation, though if anything at E3 was gimmicky, it was Wonderbook. I mean, yeah, let's take away the imagination behind reading books. And it went on longer than Nintendo Land (which Nintendo could have shortened as well, they did have five demos on the floor).

Pretty sure everyone hated the Wonderbook presentation, aside from the JK Rowling fans out there. It's not that the idea is "that" bad, but spending 20 minutes on it was about five times as much time as it merited.

If Nintendo's execution with Wii, 3DS and Wii U was wrong, MS and Sony would not be presenting variants of the ideas. I don't believe for a second that Smartglass - though interesting - came out of the popularity of smartphones and tablets. It was to be able to get in on whatever Wii U might get. I don't think it will pan out, but I do appreciate that both MS and Nintendo are willing to bring media applications to iOS and Android while Sony will only go with specific phone brands it deigns worthy.

Here you would be completely wrong. Microsoft doesn't give a damn about what Nintendo's doing with the Wii U. MSFT has made it clear for years (even before Bill Gates retired) that they'd like to transform the way people live, which is why their energy the past few years has been laser focused on bringing in all these casual and non-gaming experiences to the Xbox 360.


Icemage