There certainly has been a lot of talk lately about whether or not Nintendo should quit hardware and become a third party. This sort of discussion baffles me because I’m not aware of any year Nintendo ever lost money to such an extent that “going third party” was a necessity. In fact, even in the recent “trouble years,” according to several game news websites, Nintendo still pulled down billions in profit. The comparisons to Sega are thrown around as if they meant anything, despite Sega’s situation having been the result of a decade of financial missteps. Sega was losing money for years before they were forced to become a third party in order to stay alive in the industry. Nintendo is sitting fat on billions upon billions of dollars, and has never posted a yearly loss, ever.
Category: Industry Health
We’re about making games UALEUALEUALEUALE
Because Zelda…Zelda never changes…
The Capcom Five – Video Memorial
NEVER FORGET
Before they cancelled Mega Man Legends 3, before they ignored Wii Pointer controls in Monster Hunter Tri, before they rewarded Resident Evil fans with rail shooters, before Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop could handle 6 zombies at once, before they announce Resident Evil: Revelations including the free Mercenaries HD for PS Vita launching simultaneously with the 3DS version (hi-ho 2012 release date) – Capcom presented… THE FIVE.
Never one to forget 3rd Party achievements, I put this little post together to help last generation’s players and this gen’s newcomers remember the pain for years to come. Actually, before rambling about the quintet’s history that everyone’s heard before, I want to bring attention to the titles as they were announced: by sharing nice-quality versions of their debut trailers (well, 4 out of 5 of them). If we’ll remember ANY of it, let’s at least see clean copies of them; one last face-to-face before closing the casket. I know you can search for the moldy Flash videos originating from Matt C.’s IGN, but try to have some respect for the departed. Those videos came from a time when magazine, internet, and even Nintendo’s own coverage made “good” GameCube games look crappy.
Tracking down known copies of these trailers a couple years ago took some time and $rupees$. My search was narrowed to a couple auctions for rare promo DVDs from Japan, eventually making some sellers very happy. In addition, I managed to gather almost all the promo videos for these games since their announcement. One last step (took forever), each video was processed piece by piece – deinterlacing, cropping out blank borders, scaling the frames for consistency – whenever reasonable, trying to help them look their best. It’s only these past couple months that I seriously sat down to finish converting this junk. When hobbies start to feel like work… I tend to avoid them. Recently feeling an urgent sense of justice, I could delay no more.
So here’s what I got: a few custom screencaps, my personal thoughts/description of each game at inconsistent degrees of relevance, and links to the DivX-formatted media on my homepage. But seriously, I went overboard, so don’t read all of it.
This first one up was the first one to go down…
3DS Wall Update
Hey, how have you guys been?
What?
Where have I been?
Mostly looking for work which is pretty hard to find where I am. I know I promised bimonthly updates to the Wall, but truth be told not a lot of movement in 3DS games happened initially after the first publication.
But enough about that, let’s get down to brass tacks. As usual, the only criteria is that a company has to have released a game or have finalized (or near such) boxart with a release date. Boxarts are followed by GameRankings Averages of each title and the company’s library as a whole.
Two ways to do a content subscription service
Those of you who’ve been paying careful attention to Electronic Arts, and really you have no excuse not to, would know they’re pretty interested in this whole internet thing and how it could be leveraged to provide a constant revenue stream from increasingly dependent consumers. They’ve been pulling their games from Steam and relaunched Origin, the developer of Ultima they purchased a decade ago, as a digital distribution client, the only place to buy new multi million dollar MMO: Star Wars: The Old Republic. And then they ruined my birthday by announcing a subscription service to their sports games.
Now here’s what EA are planning to do.
- The privilege of downloading their sports games a few days before EB Games put it on display and slap pre-owned stickers on last year’s edition.
- Discounts on downloadable content, including on disc DLC.
- Permission to use that purchased content on future roster updates.
- Stats recorded on a webpage that you can browse with your internet communication gizmo.
- A little badge so everyone knows you’re an idiot paying for the above.
I know right, some sort of joke. The very fact that EA’s offering, if I can indulge you and call it that, can be summarised down to five bulletpoints shows you everything wrong with their approach. You can’t summarise Xbox Live or Steam in 5 dot points and you shouldn’t be able to summarise EA’s either. If EA want to charge a subscription then they have to at least be on that level, offer a service of their own on the scale of Xbox Live. They’re a big company and their sport games cater to a big market – they can do it. God knows they want to do it but they’re too cowardly to try. The next few paragraphs I’m going to envision how they should run a subscription service that fosters the kind of sycophantic devotees, who’ll maintain their subscriptions indefinitely.
Continue reading “Two ways to do a content subscription service”
Operation Rainfall’s biggest challenge
It’s not from Nintendo. It’s not language barriers or translation issues. It’s not some greedy CEO who gets a hard-on from punishing people. It’s the gaming media, and so called “fans” who are threatening boycotts and trolling Wii just like they’ve been doing since 2006.
On the Next Episode of Dorky Dad
With the kids out on Kamp Kinect for the weekend, Dorky Dad finally has some time to himself!
But oh no!
PSN Failure Time Capsule
As many will know, Sony has run into some trouble with their PlayStation 3 again. Recently we’ve seen systems crashing and randomly deleting data, trying to comprehend the date February 30. We’ve also been warned of PS3 controllers that may explode, and witnessed the sinking of one of Sony’s own PR representative’s battleships.
PlayStation: It Only Does Single Player
PlayStation Network has been down for a number of days with no official word on when it’ll be back. Due to the unfortunate existence of “online only” single player games on PS3, many gamers around the world are stuck with games they can’t play. There’s also reports of peoples personal information and credit card details being leaked from Sony’s database. It’s a tough world for PS3 fans, one week you’re enjoying mandatory 24 hour patch installs, the next you’re sitting there alone, forced to finally watch the free Blu-ray of “Planet Earth” you got with your PS3. Before dwelling too much on the negatives, we’ve got to appreciate the humour of the situation. The disaster has been called everything from PlayStation Notwork to The Great Collaps3. Microsoft has taken this opportunity to rub salt in Sony’s wounds by unbanning a mass amount of people from Xbox Live. PSN has even been compared to pop-sensation Rebecca Black, both sharing the joy of getting down on Friday.
Easter, PSN and Public Radio News
This Easter all I wanted to do was try out the PSN. This is no joke either, I’ve had a PSP for years but using that for internet related shenanigans is a nightmare. My new housemate has a PS3 though and this Easter he and his missus (my other housemate) were going down south for the long weekend. I was planning to charge up his PS3 and get some Battlefield 1943 action going. Maybe see how it’s movie purchases compared to iTunes, my current digital store of choice.
You can imagine my disappointment at the mysterious error code I received. The ever reliable Penny Arcade confirmed that the PSN network was down. I did however, strangely, successfully manage to download an update to my housemate’s copy of Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. Surprised he owned it really. So with my weekend fun cancelled I had to settle down and read All Quiet on the Western Front instead. I also got to eat a lot of chocolate and play online games on all the other systems in the house so the weekend was alright in the end.
The Continuous 3DS Wall Project
In the spirit of our previous efforts to showcase the horrible atrocities committed to the Wii by third-party developers, we at Pietriots are proud to announce our new 3DS Wall.
The 3rd Party Wall of Shame was an analysis of wrongs committed after the fact. This wall is intended to be a display of the building libraries of every developer for the 3DS, along with aggregated critical scores of each title individually and together as a group.
The original wall was made in response to unscrupulous claims from a few third parties that complained that their games were not selling on the Wii, despite their “obvious quality,” and that people were buying Nintendo’s games instead. The 3rd Party Wall of Shame showed those claims to be totally unfounded, as said third parties published some of the worst titles in their histories. The question was asked, “Who deserves to sell more?” The responses were silence and sudden anger at the creators of the Wall.
This is an ongoing project, which I will attempt to keep up with weekly or bi-weekly, depending on holidays or work. And sometimes just mood.
Wii Sniper Rifle Video – Gameplay Montage
(DivX video link at end of post; watch the new video here)
A follow-up to my previous The House of the Dead: Overkill videos, this time focusing on the two affordable current-generation last-generation games that handle aiming calibration properly: Ghost Squad and The House of the Dead 2&3 Return. The video is a series of quick gameplay cuts trying to get the point across: with the appropriate gun+game combo, everything works “great”, not perfectly, but sometimes better than I expect. The footage says a lot, but there’s more I want to add.
Continue reading “Wii Sniper Rifle Video – Gameplay Montage”
Game Boy Advance – Impressions
Today I got the chance to play some games on Game Boy Advance. It was quite fun going back to it after playing so many new handhelds, and finding that it still has its place.
Friend Codes
Friend Codes are a controversial online schematic that can mildly be described as cumbersome. The IDEA behind Friend Codes is a good one, but the execution of this idea has until recently been poorly lacking.
However, with the announcement of the universality of Friend Codes for the 3DS, the Friend Code system rises from unwieldy to a viable alternative that’s even superior in many ways to alternate online systems.
Nintendo 3DS? Does anyone care?
Nintendo are in a state of fear, the complete destruction of Nintendo DS last year at the hands of PSP has backed Nintendo into a corner. PSP was the highest selling system of 2010, and also had the highest selling Monster Hunter game. The overwhelming presence of iPhone and the looming danger of the mighty Playstation Phone now have Nintendo scrambling around hopelessly in the dark. Nintendo crapped their pants, and 3DS is what came out. This mere evolution of DS, with it’s ridiculous gimmick attached, will be completely forgotten by the end of the year, and here’s why.
The 3rd Party Wall of Shame
Editor’s note: This project was initially presented on January 27, 2010 and finalized on April 4, 2010 somewhere in Former Nintendo Fan Report Planet (FNFRP). FNFRP staff said its community was being too “positive” about Wii and Nintendo in general, so we decided to deliver some fresh, steaming negativity. “Why do you hate 3rd Parties so much?” they asked. “Did you not read the damn post at all?” I pondered.
Visitors making the pilgrimage for the first time: Read The Text, or you will miss the context – this difference easily exposes the internet morons in your community. The specific order of the box arts and items in the text don’t match 100%; it was meant to read casually and maybe quickly, so the idea is what counts. This WAS just an overblown forum post on some fansite, after all. Caution: contains language most foul and intense 3rd Party imagery; some graphics are known to cause birth defects, depending on the laws in your country/state/community. Kids, ask your government’s permission before buying 3rd Party software.
You might be thinking of the Vietnam Memorial, or the stars of the World War II memorial, or the wall of fallen operatives at CIA headquarters — THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF WALL. This wall has its own significance, and its name below is exactly what it recognizes.
Pietriots 