With all due respect, I still think that the key to this entire issue is cultural relevance. It isn't that Nintendo simply isn't culturally relevant anymore in the US market, it's that they're getting left behind by the Japanese culture as well (with that market shrinking to boot).
To restate, I believe that Nintendo simply will never be able to be in the "Playstation or XBox" question simply because Nintendo games are different. The style they're made in, the effort put into them, even the values that drive them, make Nintendo games among the highest quality, and most culturally insignificant videogames of our time.
Sony and Microsoft, even in their japanese game divisions, and along with a great many third parties, apparently keep up with modern culture. They make games about sports, warfare, sexual themes, movies, violent emotions and underground racing. They make games that the average American (or increasingly, Japanese) consumer can look at, and immediately correlate with a million other experiences they've encountered in their own life or through the media.
The rest of the industry makes games that are culturally in tune with the times:
cynical anti-heroes fighting terrorist nuclear armageddon (compare: 9/11),
Sexualized depictions of women (compare: Desperate Housewives on TV, Sex in the Movies, Maxim magazine),
Satyrical humor (compare: the Daly Show(god I love that show!), Bowling for Columbine, The Onion)
Sports (compare: The Boston Red Sox, The Super Bowl, Nekkid women playing beach volleyball a.k.a. Olympics)
etc.
Nintendo, god bless them, makes the best games in the world but doesn't make games that address our lives, and thus, is easily overlooked by consumers who need to shift through thousands of data points, and would appreciate something that they recognize more than something totally alien to them. The most culturally relevant thing that Nintendo's made is about ant-like creatures that run around a rural garden setting... But with the urbanization of our world, who has time for gardening? Who's even seen a plot of cultivated soil in the inner city?
This isn't bad. I don't blame Nintendo for making games that address our lives. In fact, it's probably the only way that Nintendo can focus purely on the artform of making the game, avoiding all the distractions of the modern world in order to create totally abstract, yet brilliant gameplay. And at the same time I don't blame people like my office co-workers for not knowing Nintendo exists, or my neighbors. Plumbers aren't relevant to their lives, Seinfeld and CounterStrike and romances are. There's absolutely no blame.
But that still leaves Nintendo lying squarely in the field of cultural irrelevance due to the very nature of their brilliant Nintendo games. Miyamoto and EAD create games that are so focused on amazing gameplay that they seem abstract and irrational and simplified from the viewpoint of modern culture.
And I don't think we can ask Nintendo to change that. Because to ask Nintendo to become culturally relevant, you'd destroy the legacy and style and quality of Miyamoto's work. How would Miyamoto or EAD develop a football game? There are already too many rules in football to follow, too much arcane trivia, too much obsession with glitz and pizazz. How would Miyamoto, the man who watches the ants in his garden, try to sell us a game where we're supposed to drive around a city stealing cars and commiting crimes? How would Miyamoto, the humble, salaried, family man, design a game that is focused on beautiful women and the fashion of wearing next to nothing? How would Miyamoto, who's always given us steadfast, straightforward heroes, give us a Max Payne? A Blood Rayne? A Daxter from Jak and Daxter? And doesn't he bike to work? How could we even expect Nintendo to give us a decent import car racing game then!?!
No, they would almost definitely fail. And they wouldn't be Nintendo anymore, because they'd have thrown away all their ideas about what videogames are about and how to make them. They'd have sacrificed their only strength, the only thing that makes them unique in this gaming industry, and they'd have exchanged it for a place at the bottom of the food chain being preyed upon not just by Sony and Microsoft and Electronic Arts, but also Midway and Atari and Tecmo.
And the thing is, as long as Nintendo's games stay culturally irrelevant, third parties will never, NEVER, make up the gap between the big N and the competition. They'd give Nintendo a few scraps, ports, an exclusive here and there, but it'd be lip service because anyone who actually wanted to sell to the market as a whole, the market that has a modern and evolving and inward-looking culture, would be on the PS3 or the XBox2. And Nintendo can wrestle as many exclusives from third parties as they want, but they'll never catch up that way. Viewtiful Joe 2 is coming out on the PS2: Nintendo's hard fought-for Capcom agreement is now moving over to PS2 territory.
It isn't about marketting. It isn't about technology. It isn't about corporate culture. That's all important, but they aren't the problem that keeps Nintendo out of the "PS2 or XBox?" question. The issue here is Nintendo's relevance to modern culture, modern times, and modern lifestyles. It's about people nowadays having the luxury to choose between a game inspired by gardenning, or exploring caves, or racing go karts and a game inspired by a sport, or a movie, or violence, and choosing the later.
I think it's time to face it. Nintendo's time for marketshare leadership has come and gone. They resurrected the gaming industry, they made it profitable, they made it international, they made it revolutionary. Now, it's time for other people to give the gaming industry what it didn't need in the 80's and 90's, but what it needs now.
But that still leaves each Nintendo fanboy his own dilemma.
Have my tastes changed? Am I now a modern gamer? Do I want to play Need for Speed Underground? Do I want to play The Guy Game (actually, I played The Guy Game recently... it rocked! The double-layered scoring system and the best 4-player minigames I've played in years! Even if it featured naked fat men I'd love it!)? Do I want to play Metal Gear Solid? Do I want to play Halo 2? Do I want to play GTA?
That's a personal question. Let me recommend this: Play Tales of Phantasia, then play Paper Mario 2. Compare. Play Mario Sunshine, then play Jak and Daxter 2. Compare. Play Harvest Moon, then play Animal Crossing. Compare. Play Yugioh, then Play Pokemon. Compare.
If, after you compare all those games, you think that you can live without Nintendo, you're a better man than me. Because I tried playing Dark Cloud 2, and it felt nauseous because I compared it to Windwaker. I just watched Jak and Daxter and had less fun than being crushed under the weight of a 260 pound friend of a friend of a friend (which happened that same night in fact).
For me, a gamer who can't afford two systems, and can tell if a game is Nintendo developed or not depending on the feel of the game control (for example: I hated F-Zero because it felt like a friggin Sega game...I want my F-Zero X back!)... for a person who's so attuned to Nintendo that I cannot enjoy 70% of the games out there in the market because I feel as if the developers were lazy and cheap and did little better than trained monkeys...
For a Nintendo fanboy like me, I couldn't care less whether other people even take the time to consider Nintendo when asking me what videogame system I play. Because the fact of the matter is, I've just come to care more about the games than Nintendo's prominence in the marketshare rankings, or their prominence in the mindset of a mass of unnamed teenagers and 20-somethings and whatevers out there. All I care about is that Nintendo keeps making Nintendo style games, Nintendo quality games, and Nintendo quality systems.
So yeah... Nintendo doesn't figure in the minds of others. Nintendo isn't culturally relevant. Nintendo games don't have complex and mature and cynical themes.
But given the choice between playing only Nintendo games vs. never playing a Nintendo game again, but playing anything else...basically, without Nintendo games, console gaming would be dead for me.
So I guess I've finally made my choice. My dilemma as a Nintendo Fanboy is over. I'm sticking with Nintendo, even if their as culturally irrelevant as a Japanese mastercraftsman in a world of slick businessmen and brutally efficient product cycles.
Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com 
Topic: Editorial: PlayStation or Xbox? (Read 31345 times)
