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Tag Archives: Wii
The future of console gaming?
I read two articles over at Gamespot concerning the future of gaming [1, 2]. Both of them paint the future (in the articles put: 2020) as pretty grim for consoles.
What Gamespot wrote…
First sign of trouble is the amount of money being invested in Xbox360 and Playstation 3 by Microsoft and Sony respectivly. The length of time these machines have to be on the market to become profitible are much longer than their predecessors.
The new trend of downloaded content will have an impact on local stores carrying games, why should they keep selling games when games are bought on-line and consoles often sold at a loss? Also games will be played “on-line” much like the MMO games of today, with the bulk of the processing being done on a central server.
Technology is making new games even more realistic and the need to keep up with technology will favour PCs over consoles. While we wait for the next leap in techonology the game developers must focus on other characteristics of the game in order to win an advantage.
And now for my take on it…
This is what they said… but let’s reflect a little. They seem to predict the future of the gaming market by pure extrapolation of our current situation. Did any of them glance at Nintendo? Did anyone notice that Nintendo acctually put up a much “lesser machine” but still beats the crap out of the two others (in units sold at least)?
I have no figures at all but my guess is Nintendo is winning this battle easily while Sony and Microsoft are pouring in money to get second place. Why? Because Nintendo did not just extrapolate, they innovated! One thing did the articles at Gamespot get right, advanced graphics technology makes developers have to look to other solutions to set them apart and that’s just what Nintendo did. Is that a bad thing? As I remember we had the same situation back in the 8-bit days, only then we only had crappy graphics and the price went to whoever could invent something cool to do with it.
As I’ve said before the game market probably needs to be re-evaluated because new techonology and better graphics isn’t the only thing we want… honestly for myself I’d much rather have a great game than great graphics.
The argument about downloaded content carries some weight, game retailers might fear this one… but why stop selling consoles? People would need them to download the content and the retailers make money on selling the consoles, it’s the manufacturer that often subsidies them.
Playing games on-line through a service is currently almost only being done on PCs (mostly MMOs). This is however an advantage that might become a turningpoint for consoles if used correctly. As I remember one of the great advantages of the old Nintendo cartridges was that the cartridges where upgraded as time went by but the console stayed the same, by allowing games to “upgrade” the console the Nintendo probably lasted much longer than it would have with a non-evolving media. Having the whole Internet as media must mean that, if used correctly, you only need to have a machine capable of displaying the graphics and handling input and leave the rest up to the “super computer” at the other end!
The days of consoles might still be numbered, maybe some hybrid “home entetrainment machine” of some sort will take it’s place. Call it a PC if you’d like (because it will much likely have better resemblance to a PC than a console), however I do not believe any of the given arguments are enough to pursuade me of this change in the future.
Posted in Nonsens
Tagged Future, Gaming, Innovation, Microsoft, Nintendo, PS3, Sony, Utveckling, Wii, Xbox 360
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A sure thing…
-Who plays computer games?
-Boys!
-What does boys like?
-Girls!
-What kind of action does boys like?
-Zombie movies!
8-bit for life
It’s with great joy I see lots of my old favourite games from 20 years back make a come back on the market. Some have resurfaced as handheld games while others are downloaded or played on-line. How is it that when we have consoles that can outperform anything we had 20 years ago we still look back to those old games and bring them to life? Wii have a built in virtual console souly for the purpose of redistributing old games (which however is starting to be used for new games as well).
The battle of the gaming market is almost always fought in media by counting the number of units sold, here Wii (24,5 million sold units) just overtook Xbox360 (19 million sold units) and the Playstation 3 is far behind (14 million sold units). One seldom mentioned fact is that both the Wii and Xbox360 are far surpased by both Playstation Portable (PSP, 37 million sold units) and most of all Nintendo DS (70 million sold units!). The major part of the gaming market is now in hand held devices.
What I’m getting at is despite the highly advanced PS3 and Xbox360 that can make incredibly advanced games it’s the hand held devices with far inferior technology that actually sells the most. The price of the units are surely also a large factor in this (the Wii and hand helds are much cheaper than PS3 and Xbox360). A game published on the PS3 or Xbox360 is expected to have superiour graphics and use the extreme hardware to the maximum, if not it’s a dissapointment. This creates a heavy presurre on developers to invest alot of time into making the game perfect (graphics wise) and only major developers can afford this.
On hand helds, or even better downloaded content, the technology is no longer a basis for judgement. While graphics do play a major role (and perhaps using the available pixels and colour depths as best as one can) it will no longer become a central role in the verdict on the playability of the game.
Games will invariably become better looking as the consoles keep getting better, I do however believe that there will always be a market for simple games like those on hand helds and downloaded content today. It’s simply to much fun in 8 bit!
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles
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Does games change the way we think?
A couple of days ago I posted a video of Will Wright talking about his latest game Spore and what consequenses he hope it would have on the way we think about our own world. Players experience in a game what happens to a world with long term effects of for example pollution and that they have to act to stop it. These are things happening to our own planet right now but so slowly that we hardly notice it ourselves in a lifetime.
Another totally different aspect of how we think occured to me while playing Super Paper Mario on the Wii. In this game they play with the idea of having a 2D world in a 3D environment and what strange effects that could have. Some monsters (and our hero) have the ability to shift between the worlds while most of the game is set in normal 2D format. By experiencing old limitations of the 2D world and seeing the possibilities of shifting into a 3rd dimension might change your view on our own world and it’s 3D boundaries. Can we shift into a 4th dimension? Is the 4th dimension time and what would happen if we could move through it? These are questions nobody asks except, as Stephen Hawking once noted, children and a handfull och scientists. What I’m getting at is if the games we make let’s our children become more open minded about the world we live in.
I believe myself to have very good ability to think of abstract things, if this is due to me playing alot of games where you have to keep track of maps and items or if I’ve played these games due to me having this ability I cannot say. Most likely it’s a little of both.
Zelda – the guinea pig
Why is it that the major title Zelda always gets to use the “latest technology” first on new Nintendo platforms. While I love the Zelda series and collect them all I still find it hard to accept some of the game design choices they’ve made in recent games on Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. With this I mean the use of the Wii remote and the stylus for DS. These new technologies are interesting and useful in many games but in Zelda: Twilight Princess and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass they feel almost forced in there just to show us what they can do.
Zelda: Twilight Princess was one of the first games to come with the Nintendo Wii and had originally been developed for the Gamecube (to which it was released simultaneously) and throughout the game I feel it’s more of a Gamecube game than a full fledged Wii game. To “make it Wii” Nintendo seems to have decided to make all Sword movements based on the motion sensetive Wii remote and this annoys me. Zelda is an adventure game to me more than a action game and even if it was possible to use the remote to slash your enemies I’d love to keep the “traditionall” gameplay (which I think can be done using a classic controller).
When I recently tried out Zelda: Phantom Hourglass I get the very same feeling, that Nintendo overuses the touch screen to trivial things like moving. It feels like they did it “just because they could” and wanted to show off their new great technology. Again a second option to at least be able to move without the stylus would have helped alot.
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Posted in Nonsens
Tagged Game design, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Stylus, Wii, Wii remote, Zelda
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Network bug in latest patch for Wii?
Since a few days back, when I came back from vacation and updated my Wii with the latest patch, my home network has been running very slow. Today I checked the logs and it turns out the Wii is repeatedly connecting to the network every 10 minutes or so. This might only be my own home network acting up but the Wii was the only thing of my wireless devices that was caught in the log over and over.
I have a D-link 624+ router and all have been running fine lately, the only change is the latest Wii update so it might be that… or my router is about to cave in (which is not unlikely, these cheap routers have a way of dying when you least expect them to).
WiiWare!
Someone saw the potential I was looking for in my last post! I’ve been thinking about this since the Wii was released and now I found an article about it in a Swedish newspaper. The article was almost a month old and I guess to much work lately have made me miss important news like this!
WiiWare have got some of the features I was hopeing to see on the Wii. While the developers of the Wii stand a bit confused over the interest of this (having included to little memory in the Wiis, only 512 Mb standard), publishers have started creating games just the way I described yesterday. The amount of games released so far are pretty far from impressive but I really hope this trend catches on (and Nintendo helps us expand the memory of the consoles, apparently the SD-card expansion cant be used for channels, only as a backup).
Still I hope for a SDK to be made more generally available and we can see what the on-line community would be able to build with it.
Wii Channels – game development?
When I first saw Wii and it’s ability to download and play small games I was very impressed. It was a breath of fresh air in the console market, neither of the two large competitors had anything like it. It was pitched as a sales channel for retro games and “all old games would be available”. While that promise is far from true yet there are some of the great old games available for download.
What struck me almost instantly was how could I get my hands on a SDK and start hacking my own games for the Wii? It sadens me now that I’ve realized that this is not something Nintendo planned to make (at least somewhat) public. I had hoped for an “emulated” programming environment, an abstraction layer hiding the hardware (since they would most likely never release control to that to anyone who did not sign fourtytwelve agreements of non-disclousure and other legal notes). This environment could protect the Wii’s system from harm and at the same time provide easy access to a development library for thousands of wannabe game developers. It would be the toy of my dreams!
Unfortunately Nintento is rich enough without having to employ the large group of jobless programmers dreaming of creating their own game.