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1

Nintendo Gaming / RE:This article says: Gamecube Kiddy, buy Xbox

« on: December 19, 2003, 01:41:26 PM »

 Hello people. I haven't read the article all I read was the initial post and the four following ones and I just had the urge to say something. If this guy as you put it (or as he puts it) has been playing since he got an Atari and his favourite games are first person shooters and Tomb Raider, then what the hell did he enjoy playing for 20 years before first person shooters and Tomb Raider?

I myself have been playing games fanatically for 20 years and believe me, regardless of how long each and every one of you have been playing it all comes down to one thing:everyone plays what they find to be fun. Or at least that is the lesson and the attitude we teck geeks had 20 years ago.

I can't accept a person speaking the truth about playing games for 20+ years when he tells me he finds todays games to ge great. To be frank I have spent more time playing with old emulated games than with my GC, and the GC along with the titles I have have, has given me the old good feeling that older games gave me.

Historical ignorance is the indication that a man can be manipulated. And older games are gaming history. You lived it or you've played it and studied it...your historically educated, as long as games are concerned. Today the media and the advertising attitude have not marked only Nintendo as kiddy and lame, but old games too, so people don't play them and thus never see the obvious about todays games.

What is it? Even when you take games an analyze them to the core (which I believe is a bad habit unless your in the buisness) one can rarely find anything other than graphical and acoustical superiority to be the only difference. There are even times when this superiority is lacking in comparison to older games. But still, gameplay is what defines a good game and in this department (a part of games that still has not been properly and accurately defined) monstrous things have been said: "Next gen gameplay" and all the game has is a jump action, an attack action and maybe an inventory. So all mindless people who spit on old games because the block of pixels doesn't look like a head think that the money muncher they are buying really has "next gen" gameplay and they never even realise that the gameplay style they are playing with is a 20 year gameplay concept, unchanged! All we need now is a super neat looking glowing 3d bar moving up and down blocking a sphere an then wait for the whole gaming media to tell us that this will be the best and newest thing in gamplay (fine print:because none of the millions who will play have ever heard of Pong!).

Had this guy really been playing for so long as he claims, he would have understood the difference in the gameplay of,say, Megaman, Castlevanina and Donkey Kong. All platformers, all the same actions but still many differences in their gampley, that are not to be mentioned here, that have made them different games alltogether, basic lessons in gamemaking that todays designers seem to ignore. And why shouldn't they, since people like this guy don't care and don't notice. They will, in 10 years maybe.

They say that thinking that you know is worse than not knowing. I guess it is correct.

2

Nintendo Gaming / RE:Sales would be better on PS2 or Xbox!

« on: October 23, 2003, 02:53:06 PM »

 This subject is rather interesting as it is a key element in why some things have been happening in the game industry the past 5-6 years and the way developers work sometimes seems to be illogical. What mr_tibbs is mentioning, that developers should be horrified with the fact that a console like the PS2 with a user base of 18 million should be worried because not many games make good sales, is correct. There is one thing though that makes them think this way, statistics.

The fact that the user base is 18 million is promising because this gives even the developer who is making a game that is a burden to society, a better chance at actually selling 50 or 200,000 copies. 18 million people possibly means 9 million idiots and that also may mean 1 or 2 million idiot rich kids who buy anything they want even if it's not good cause daddy can afford to get more games for them anyway. Developers don't really care about making a good game most of the time, the more money they can make for a stupid game the better.

What the developers study is the buyers and their competitors. In GameCube's case it is more their competitor rather than the buyer. Still, I believe that the people who own a GameCube have a basic experience in games, they at least appreciate them and they are somewhat demanding. It is harder to sell a bad game to a person like this (I am not saying that all GC owners are great games critics and that there are no people who might be suckered up into getting a bad game or who may not care if the game is bad but are just attracted by one feature like graphics), therefore companies are somewhat hesitant on making a game for the Cube. Add the fact that Nintendo is every developer's main competitor and the GameCube becomes a dangerous investment. This all without counting the fact that there are alot less Cubes than PS2's around.

There are two reasons in my opinion for this phenomenon, one is the mass of more casual or "trendy" gamers, and the other is the overwhelming freedon Sony (and Microsoft) have given developers. There is nothing that controls or presses the developers into really giving it their best shot, all they need is to pay the license fee to Sony, launch their game and get their little piece from the large sum or money that is moving around. They let probability work for them. As long as they sell some copies, say 50,000, that's good enough. For an average of $25 bucks a piece that totals up to $1,250,000, a average to low quality game costs around $500,000 to $800,000 to develop, so these guys even make a profit! I rember back in the 80's when Nintendo did two important things, the licence fee was large and they gave each developer only two titles a year on their console. Did this lead to zero bad games? No, but it did lead to many of the francises we enjoy even today, games that influenced and shaped the gaming industry, formed the large developers and set the standards for various genre and styles of gameplay. Capcom for instance had only two shots at Nintendo's machine a year, so they thought that they ought to be great ones, the most known result of their serious effort was MegaMan, who made Capcom, I believe, what it is today and laid the groundwork for the creation of SF2. Today though it takes alot more for developers to make good stuff and it is more scarce because the way the system works now, there are developers who don't give a damn and are just in the industry for the easy profits they can steal. I mean, why do you think there are people out there making some games that when you see them cause you to remain speechless and keep thinking of the phrase "What the hell where they thinking?". I bet it isn't their love and passion to make games.

Maybe I am wrong, anyone have any other thoughts?

3

Nintendo Gaming / Where to get TMNT

« on: October 21, 2003, 02:34:01 PM »

 I was wondering if anyone knew where I could order the new Ninja Turtles game online. I saw the news here in PlanetGC and there are places where they sell the game and give shirts, or DVD's along with the game. I am not in the States so I can't go get a copy from some big store that would most probably be giving these things with the game so I was wondering if anyone knows where I could buy the game online and get say, a t-shirt.

4

Nintendo Gaming / Wind Waker is SOOOOOO Blurry!!!!!!

« on: June 12, 2003, 03:52:33 PM »

 Ha, this is a nice topic, I never though anyone would complain about this.

Well as is has been said, the blurring is used to simulate depth of field, a focal effect, like when a camera focuses on something close to it, then the background gets blurry. I really found this addition to be great, I don't know why it would bother anyone. They used this to make the objects and characters in the foreground to look more realistic when viewed against a background with a great distance. If you've ever tried any 3d software just using a slight focal effect instantly makes the image more realistic, makes the object pop out. It happens in WW too. Try bringing the camera to a nice side view close to the boat when you travel and you'll notice that the whole scene looks as if Link and the boat are almost plastic models you can reach out and catch. Neat. But still, this effect is only noticable when travelling at sea, and it's nice to look at while you wait to get to your destination.

So, it's not your TV's not the color, maybe the sharpness will fix things abit but it's not there to make the game run faster or make the Cube draw the world in a greater distance, quite the contrary this effect takes more to do. You see, this effect take the rendered image, uses the z-buffer information of each pixel to find out how far from the camera the pixel is and if it's farther than a given distance it get's blurred, and depending on what way they used, it's either done after the rendering or while the image is being rendered. Either way it steals power but it's nice to have it in there. Maybe next time they'll add some "director AI" and let the camera focus automatically and make nice dramatic shots here and there.

Ah, all you youngsters have gotten all used to all this 3d photoreal dolby surround nonsense, try playing 2 colored, low res, 2 frames per animation style games, that ought to make you appreciate good games, hehe. Sorry, that was my Cranky Kong outburst.

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Nintendo Gaming / GI being idiotic to nintendo

« on: June 09, 2003, 06:11:40 PM »

 Ahh, now this kind of thing is something I wanted to talk about for a long time. Magazines. Unfortunately they come in many kinds of styles, pretty much like websites. The way they write varies, the way they rate games varies, but ultimately they all have one thing in common and that's that they will write anything for the money.

I used to work for the Greek version of GamePro (yup, there's a Greek GamePro believe it or not) and for the Greek Playstation Magazine and I did some reviews for some PC gaming mag. They were all published by the same company. Anyway, even though most of the news, reviews ect were merely translations of the english and american texts some games were reviewed and the people who worked there I must say weren't gamers (OK maybe one or two and two more PC gaming dudes that were convinced that strategy games have 'depth'). To give and example, the editor of the Playstation magazine (my 'boss') was a woman who didn't even know what a game looked like. Sure I know that this is not the case with american and british magazines but there was this one time when I was assigned to write a review of this stinking PSX game called Koudelka (do I have the spelling correct?). Anyway, the british PSM gave that waste of MB a 3/10, now I was asked to write a review giving the game a 8/10 because the publisher of the game had some deal going on with the publisher of the magazine (go figure), I was of course not going to get any extra pay but even if I was I wouldn't do it, first because the game sucked so badly that even a 3/10 was too good and second because I am ethical when it comes to games, simply because I love them and my interest is in the industry's wellfare and not into cheating poor 8 to 12 year-olds (who were to core readers of the mag opposite to the chief's beliefs, a read through the mail would convince anyone) to spend their parents cash for some bad game and even worse, cheating a child into getting a bad game and then letting it down and dissapointing it. I was guided into writing specific answers to childrens mail about how great the PSX was (and all this when SOny of Europe didn't give a rat's left butt cheak about the PSM while they held the Greek GamePro in high regard) and not give a more balanced opinion even if it still was in the PSX'x favor. I was made to respond to 8 year-olds as if they were 23, dissing them and being ironic when they asked a simple question showing so much trust and friendship towards the magazine they were writing to. I couldn't stand it so I got into a fight with the editor who was a pain in everyone's butt (even the owner of the publishing company hated her but she owned some stock of the company so the owner couldn't fire her) and I quit like a hero, pissing her off so badly that she even refused to give me references, but so what.

So, if this happens in a small country like Greece and to a small time mag that makes no difference to the world then just imagine what gives in all those other big mags.

There is also one more thing I'd like to mention. Has anyone noticed how much the attitude of gaming magazines and their quality has changed over the years. Seven or eight years ago, there would be plenty or mags and people in that buisness that were on the looks out for excellence in gaming, now they all seem to throw in a score for gameplay as if it corresponds to the number of buttons on the controller that are used.

Take my advice, read EGDE and FLEX hehe...

6

Nintendo Gaming / Nintendo takes the Japanese charts by storm!

« on: June 02, 2003, 06:42:04 AM »

 How are the charts in the US and Europe?

7

Nintendo Gaming / New Nintendo mascots?

« on: June 02, 2003, 06:35:42 AM »

 I think we should stop using the word 'replacing', since we all agree that this won't be the case and it won't. Nintendo didn't replace Mario for Link, it didn't replace Link for Samus and it surely didn't replace any of them for Pikachu. It's very interesting to see how easily we can be mislead by these articles by bad translations ect. That's why I just listen only to officil announcments when they're ready.

Also I don't feel that Nintendo will need to bring a character thats known from another game of theirs. They've done this already and it didn't work, it would show that they would be trying to go the safe way around and such characters would probably bring the kiddie thing with them. It's simple, they got new talent there, these new guys are gonna make fresh characters and they will be taught on how to design good games and great gameplay by the older masters, then they'll take this knowlege and use it in their own more modern way. Don't worry.

What I would like to see though, is a dark action RPG set in a futuristic busted up world. If you've ever heard of Shadowrun then you know what I'm talking about.

8

Nintendo Gaming / New Nintendo mascots?

« on: June 01, 2003, 04:45:00 PM »

 After the nice Harry Potter brake let me put us back in the discussion that all of you have so nicely brought up to this point.

What we have here is two things, Iwata and all this talk about new 'mascots'. Iwata is a great guy, he's young and ambitious like Yamauchi was back in the 80's, let's not forget how daring it must have been for Nintendo to launch a consle back then after the 84' crash in the States, and it mustn't have been an easy job to take the whole industry into their own hands and make it grow. Let's face it, most 3rd parties out their own part of their success to Nintendo's ballsy aand bossy attitude. Iwata knows this, but now he's just trying to catch up. I don't think he's going to take the company into making more games with less quality, after all Nintendo didn't do that when they dominated and that was more than what Sony has been doing, so I don't think they'll do it now. What they will do is upgrade their marketing strategy, change their image. Their gonna try to put more guts into their style, remember "Now you're playing with power"? That phrase sold games on it's own.

This change can't do much I'm afraid on it's own. The leaders at Kyoto know this also, so whats the answer? Mascots, or rather...characters. see, Mario can't be changed, neither can Link (actually he did change in the Space World 200 demo but we all saw it as a OOT upgrade). These characters can't change either because the 'kiddie' thing has been stuck on them or because stupid PC gamers who have been playing the same variation of C&C for the past 6 years(?) say "Come on, Zelda, again? Same ol' same ol'". Nintendo has seen this and it pisses them off that they are the ones that have been innovative the most compared to any other company and at the same time they are getting the least out of it because of stupid reasons (the 'kiddie' thing is bad but dumb guys who are playing the same games with different graphics for years while accusing these new and innovative games of being the same thing is worse). So, Nintendo has to win these players with new stuff. Innovative? Maybe, but the goal is to win them over by selling them things that appeal to them more that the excisting arsenal and ensuring their (the gamers') 'image' by changing their own to a cooler one.

This more will be good for us too. Not about the image and stuff cause if we were afraid of being call pussies because we got the wimpy purple cube and not the slick black...cube, we wouldn't be here. But thing of the options. We were all upset when we found out that Zelda would go the cel-shaded way and not the SW 2000 way, well not maybe we'll get some new character, that will do Link's job in such a setting. It might all end up being just copies of the things we are familiar with now, but it will get those idiots to get a Nintendo console and we can get a more 'mature' Nintendo gaming fix. Also this give Nintendo the chance to let younger designers of theirs step up and make their own myths, wasn't it announced that Nintendo opened a studio in Tokyo recently? All this will bring newer characters, newer characters will bring 3rd parties and they will, in turn, bring some of their games to us. Hooray!

There's one thing that saddens me though. The GC has been such a great console for me. It has brought old NES and Snes day back, that;s how good it games are to me. It really is a pitty Nintendo hadn't prepared these changes for the GC era. But I guess that would show just what kind of followers people are. Just imaging, in a different reality, the idiots that diss the GC, walking around with it in their hands just because of a different image...

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Nintendo Gaming / Game-Boy "Next"

« on: June 01, 2003, 03:56:38 PM »

 Hi everyone. I don't think that Sony's announcment of making a handheld was a surprise to many of us, I for one was expecting such a move sometime, the PSOne gave me such thoughts.

I don't think Nintendo will be releasing a new GB any time soon, not even in 2005. It's too soon I think, but on the other handthat's what did the damage before. But still, the handheld market is nothing like the home console market, Nintendo knows this and so does Sony but it's Nintendo who is in the defence now.

I would like to see afew things in Nintendo's next handheld. I'd like to see wireless connectivity or maybe the use of infrared for locan networking. Next I'd like to see some new media but it's not of essence, I'd much rather prefer the new GB to be able to connect with a hard disk or maybe use some sort of memory stick. I want to see something like this cause then we could use the GB to listen to music, view photos or say read a document backed up in such a device. Graphically I want things to remain 2d, just in higher res on 24 bit color, I don't care about 3D. It would also be very interesting if Nintendo could somehow make deals or arrangement so that the GB could probably use emulators. Running MAME on it and playing old games on the road would set the mood for the console. Generally I'd like to see more and better 2d stuff while making an effort to cheat emulators into the deal, and also have the option to use the GB in other ways -like using the HD as I said before.

Thinking of all this it would be rather cool to hear of a new Nintendo handheld soon, but t would kill the GBA too soon, and it would damage the longevity of the handheld market which, I think, is the most important thing.

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Nintendo Gaming / A few thoughts about this GBS vs PSP thing...

« on: May 27, 2003, 04:15:14 PM »

 Hmm, the things that could be happening to the console market now and the things that could happen with the release of the PSP in a short while are all but predictable from what my experience tells me. But my instinct tells me that the outcome of the scenario will be bad. Bad for Nintendo? I can't say, and maybe it shouldn't matter much but it does. But what I do know is that the bad thing that will happen will mostly happen to the games.

Take the current situation for instance. The PSX brought a truckload of new people to the videogames industry. Now plenty of years later we see that the market has grown indeed and we have billions of dollars going into this market, but where is the result of all this money? Look at the games that are available and look at the money moving around then compare this state to what was going on in say, 1988-89. The money that was being put into the video games industry was significantly less, the technology was far lesser than that of today, yet we are all bitching about how more flops and medicore and uninnovative games are being released year after year. That my friends, is happening because the industry is being driven by people who are unapreciative of the fun a game may give, people who have no idea about what it means to be innovative, people who have no demand for their money. In the past just because gamers were people who played games because they loved them, their minds would imagine new things, write them to the magazines or the developers, they would be more demanding of each sequel or of every company and this all resulted in games being better as a whole. Noone would go spend his money on flop games unless the very few who got some lesser liked games really saw something in them.

It has been said plenty of times in these forums that it is Nintendo's fault that the GC has no support because their games are better than those of the 3rd parties and too close in their releases. 3rd paries having worse sales because Nintendo's games are better? Them make better games dammit! Or do they expect me to pay for a bad game. Nintendo made AAA titles in '92 then why did I buy Konami's Castlevania, Ninja Turtles and Contra games in the same year and all AFTER havning seen them first to judge them and not just getting them due to their great prequels? Because they were good.

DRJ mentioned the fact of software for the PS2 in comparison to the GC as grounds to suggest that the same might happen in the situation of the GBA vs the PSP, meaning that just because the GBA has more gamnes the PSP will fail or be in second place. This may be correct but, to suggest that the PS2 is where it is because of the plethora of quality titles os wrong. Take a look at what most people, the casual gamers are buying. They don't even have the sense of worth of their money and most of them are supposed to be adults! Look at where the quality games are and what is selling. Even on the PS2 itself games like ICO are being put aside while mega trash games are selling well. How many Final Fantasies can one take. It makes me think, what the heck is so final aout this fantasy when it's spawned a light year of sequels. This is all the result of marketing and crowd manipulation my friends. If not, why is the GC with so many quality tiltes for it taking the shaft even as a second cosole and the PS2 is so far up front with all its medicore games? Hell, even the Xbox that's almost identical to the PS2 and PC combo -which is pretty popular these days- is selling more than the Cube and I can't tell why, they both have the same games! This is all to say my friends, that the gaming industry has become dangerously over crowded for its own good. Companies that are sucking our blood without even giving us something new are popping out like mushrooms. So there really is no guarante as to what will happen to the GBA vs PSP but one thing, the company that is best at marketing a machine and manipulating the crowd will prevail. The millions of GBA's sold and the 1000+ games available mean nothing, because a casual gamer will not go looking for Fall of the Foot Clan on ebay because he will like to look at Lara Croft's 3D ding dongs, because society sais that's cooler.

I read this review somewhere on the new Indiana Jones game for Xbox...at some point the reviews read that the "next generation graphics and the next generation gameplay will make want to play the games many times more after you've finished it". I could let you guess what I did when I read "next generation gameplay". The review explained the control setup and what each button does and after having a good idea of how the game played, reading such a remark made wish I had the ignorant person who wrote it to point out a billion 15 or 20 year old games that had the SAME kind of gameplay as that. Nothing next-gen about that. If this is the situation with consoles, why would competition make the handheld market any better?

As you can see, this makes things more complicated. Every company is looking for more ways to draind the money from the pockets of an ever more poorer people, and we are getting poorer. Don't believe for a second that the dollar will rise and the US will fix the world, that even though the Euro is going up that there is a prospect for the global economy to come to, or that just because all the companies in the world are making more games, tin cans or a new kind of soup, that there are more people working and more money made. They know this more than you or me, that's why Sony and Microsoft will want more of the handheld market and that's why every electronics company I can think of is producing some hardware with connection capabilities. The GBA vs PSP will make things worse for our Electronic entertainment, cause then someone else will want to get into it, and someone else ect ect. I don't know, for now, I am enjoying the Master Quest, playing Link to the Past at the same time, trying out some old GB and NES games again, and hoping to get a job to gather some money in order to move out of this rat hole and go to England and try to enroll on a course for games design. But first, I gotta beat Metroid Prime...

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Nintendo Gaming / A few thoughts about this GBS vs PSP thing...

« on: May 26, 2003, 07:05:22 AM »

 Hmm. I don't know. I feel that it will be very tricky to design this handheld in a way that will make it slim and usefull. Of course as you say the screen will probably be flip-top, that's the best solution but in order to make the thing slightly thinker than the GBA they will have to do alot of redesigning in the hardware, they will probably have to try to make the whole PS hardware be incorporated into one chip in order to save space and power. The other features are going to take up plenty of space also, and the controls I think are going to take up alot of space making the machine thicker. I didn't know they wanted to incorporate an analoge control. But still my greatest thought about this thing is what it will do to the 2d gaming scene, a scene that quite frankly I believe hasn't seen it's full potential not to the least. So really I guess I'm just concerned about the games. No doubt the console will be a good piece of hardware theat will be nice to have as a 'walkman', I personally am interested in some piece of hardware that works in this manner (heck I was interested when I heard that there will be episodes of cartoons out for GBA!) but I don't think such a machine made by Sony with the intentions that Sony has will do any good to the gaming scene.

As for casual gamers, I insist on my view. I understand and respect your point on the fact that most people have to find that special game that gets them hooked but, ultimately I feel that this is something your born with and if you are really meant to be a gamer you just need to 'awaken'. On the other hand the majority of casual gamers I have met and discussed games with, even if they were into playing around with games for years, didn't find any interest in them other than that of the average casual gamer, playing around with them. It's pretty obvious that a person isn't meant to love games when he's been tinkering around with them for ten years but that's as far as it gets. On the other hand people like me and you are different. I was hooked from the very first play of a game in the arcades (it was back in '83 and the game was Spy Hunter!).

Mentioning arcades I think that casual gamers going to consoles actually killed the arcades more than the actual home gaming scene has. Anyway, I respect anyone who likes games but I prefered the time when games were made by people who loved them and not by buisness men that see the profit potential behind the masses of mindless or rather less experienced casual gamers. I probably wouldn't mind if this didn't affect us but it does and I'm afraid the PSP has the potential to add to this.

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Nintendo Gaming / A few thoughts about this GBS vs PSP thing...

« on: May 25, 2003, 07:02:02 PM »

 After taking the time to read through a few pages of messages in the two topics on the new 'battle' in the handheld part of the gaming world I felt the need to compile some of the thoughts expressed and add some of my own, thoughts that unless I missed weren't discussed but if they were I'd like to apologize beforehand for I'm not trying to prove anything, I just think that some important things should be said.

First thing's first, the discussion about the new Sony handheld and the GBA spawned some nice things, mainly 2D gaming. Your concerns are as good as mine people. What will happen to 2d games and in what direction they will steer to remains to be seen but one thing is certain, gaming in general is dying. Think of it. What have Sony and Microsoft done in their effort to sell more systems and Sony will do once more with the PSP? They have transformed the gaming scene into a multimedia scene. Hardware that so gloriously began life as a piece of elecrtonics made only for gaming is now being sold and developed as a multi-entertainment machine, something like those large printer-scanner-photocopier-fax machines, the ones that have it all but don't do any one of their functions perfectly. This I believe, hurts gaming. Making 3rd party developers flock to the machine that has managed to sell the most and trying to develop games for it is no solution, because your not making games for a machine that was bought for gameplay, your making a game for a stereo/DVD-player that can -surprise, surprise- play games on the side! Games now are the secondary function of these machines or at least they will be in the future, the PSP is already the first one! "The walkman of the 21st century" said Sony. That's walkman, not handheld console.

So what is the result of this? Look at the trio PS2, Xbox, GC. You have the market leader having outsold the other two by 5 to 1, having been stormed by software from every developer you've heard of -or not. But what is the result? Most of the companies aren't making what they should be making. Why? This is a 51 million user base here, why aren't all 51 million buying many games? Simple, because they are using these machines (GC excluded of course) for more than that. OK, ok maybe it's not as bad as I am describing it but allow me to enlarge things abit to make things clear. This situation is a situation of GAMES developers trying to sell GAMES on multimedia machines, that were marketed as multimedia machines and that were bought as multimedia machines. The sales aren't as good as they should be because developers are making games for a false user base number and in order to make up for the poor sales of each game, there must follow a number of cheaper titles that make up for this loss (or miscalculation) and in turn make the money they intended to make. If this is not true then why is every major developer making more games per year than I can hope to remember? If this is not true, then why is Capcom, who are doing so very well on the Cube, putting less money into the user base that is made of 100% gamers, and putting more into a user base of which no one knows what percentage of it are gamers and how it will evolve in the future?

This may be far fetched, but in reality it is happening. Maybe in a small scale, but it will grow. It will grow when the multimedia machine stops looking like a console and starts looking like a stereo system. It will continue to grow when the majority of the pittiful and harmful, for gaming, masses of casual 'gamers' get used to the multimedia hardware. And it all starts with the PSP. So people, the death of 2D gaming not only means the death of it, but the death of us old hardcore gamers, and the death of the 'soul' of gaming in general.

I also saw the unavoidable comparisons between the GBA and the PSP that even had a result of bringing other handhelds as well as older consoles into the discussion. Well, the triumph of the GB so far has been in something I will metion later, but the important thing that seems to have the potential of killing the GBA is software.

The PSP is a piece of hardware that every developer grasps firmly now. The medium is probably cheaper than the GBA's and it certainly has alot more space to use which makes it more appealing. But, there might be a flaw in this superiority. 1st)What kind of company, is going to take a mere handheld seriously enough in order to spend plenty of money on developing a game for it that will be worthy of it's hardware and it's medium's size? (especially when efforts could be used to develop such a titles for a home console). 2)Let alone that the mere resolution of the screen won't allow for much anyway and we all know that no matter how simple a 3d game may be, it still needs more to be developed than a 2d game. So, the PSP may have a minidisc thing, MP3s, 3d, ect. but who will be willing to make something really good for it, and when I say good I mean as good as the better titles for GBA are in comparison to it's lesser titles. This will determine the field upon which the two handhelds will 'fight'. Pricing of software will play a role too.

I also read about how competition makes things better. Not always, and maybe not in this case. The PSP will be expensive no doubt, the games' price will depend on whether they are old or new, but as I said before it depends on what field the two will go head on. If Sony tries to persuade the developers to make 3d games for the machine then if the games are good enough, if the prices are right and if there is interest in portable 3d gaming, then I suppose the PSP will have a good chase at killing the GBA. On the other hand if the price development of 3d games on a handheld (no matter how easy) is too much, if the software price can't be kept at a good minimum, then most developers will probably prefer making 2d games for the PSP but this is a field in which the GBA is stronger and it might also not interest the consumer to pay $200+ for a handheld that has things one could get for less. Why pay alot for 2d games on the PSP when you can pay little for 2d games on the GBA? So the competition in this case may make things better in the price of the hardware, it depends on the PSP's price and what Nintendo will do to counter it, but form a software perspective, that meaning the quality of games, it won't matter much if at all because like bad pop music, the developers will be looking for the lucky combo that will sell and until they find it they will be releasing loads of useless things.

The last part that I believe will be the most significant area in which these two machines will compete is the area that has helped the GB emerege a winner over the years and that's the machine's design. We all know that the fight to take a part of the handheld industry from Nintendo is a song they've heard plenty of times before and i have to say that in th past the technological and cultural difference between the GB and it's competitors was much more radical. The poor old GB faced off both the Lynx and the GameGear, machines that were both black, had colored backlit screens, were many times more advanced that the GB and were marketed as cool consoles. But in the end the four-grey-toned dwarf beat them because of one thing, it was REALLY designed to be a handheld, literally, while the other two lacked due to their bulk and their not being all that flexible (for all this we must praise the late but unsurpassed gaming genuis Gupei Yokoi). As for Neo Geo Pocket and Wonderswan I cannot express an opinion because I haven't seen them upclose but I think the reasons for their failure was probably along the same lines. The importance of design can not and must not be underestimated. Nintendo no doubt expected a move like this from Sony as we all were ever since they released the PSOne, and the answer beforehand is the GBAsp. It's really a very thin GBA in the design of the old GB (a design that even though it being 14 years old is still unmatched) and it can also fold, making it the most portable handheld. So, Sony who want to cram a MP3 player, a USB port, a card reader, a radio (I think this was in the specs, can't reacall), an M-PEG4 decoder, a mini version of the PS1 hardware, a 4.5" backlit screen, a drive for the cartridged disk and the battery source, all in one small box hope to make something that can compete with the GBA on this level. Oh, I almost forgot, this is a PS so we need the d-pad, and we need four buttons at least. Let's see what they will do with the four shoulder buttons (I think they will be left out). I have no doubt that the result will be good-looking but when you consider the amount of mechanical parts in this thing (disk drive, buttons) they will take up plenty of space but I believe that not even god will be able to make something better than a GBAsp in the designe department. But there are other parts as we have all metioned.

All in all, I don't really want the PSP to do well. It's enough that I have to worry about an unfair world that praises those who sell it cheap games with uninnovative 20year old gameplay mechanics and buries the very games the imposters steal from, I don't need to have to worry about Nintendo losing in the only front that it still has a future until it repairs it's home console front. But, if I could have my wish, I'd wish that all these devils of people called 'casual gamers', who have violated to thing we love and live and breath for...I'd wish they would dissappear and go back to doing whatever it was they did before they discovered piracy and sexy 3d bimbos playing beach volley. I'd rather put up with them calling me names and making fun of me playing video games than having to put up with not killing them for trying to show off their skills and 'knowlege' to me just because they discovered Devil may Cry yesterday.