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...
Topic: New Nintendo mascots? (Read 23434 times)
