Topic: GameCube’s Mid-Term Report Card

[odifiend]

Me too, Zoidberg. Me, too. <<Wipes tear>>.
Radical I don't agree with all your ideas but I have to agree with Zelda @ SW2k.  People who branded Nintendo as kiddie were going to buy GCN for this alone.  Wind Waker was alright but it was no system seller.  To yours and my dismay, I think Nintendo canned Zelda because the dark themes started on the N64 would be made darker and they might have to bump the Zelda series to Teen ruining Miyamoto's (maker of Zelda) vision for the entire series.  You have to admit though that the Great Fairies, the Skulltulas and the Redeads, rendered any better than they were, might traumatize some kids.

[NWR_Lindy]

I just can't escape this thread.

I don't see why Nintendo can't make a mature-themed action adventure.  How hard would that be?  Maybe put Mario and Zelda on the back burner for a while and actually start <gasp> A NEW FRANCHISE.

Really, Nintendo hasn't launched a cool "adult" franchise since Super Smash Brothers Melee, and it seems that they've completed abandoned that one.  And don't mention Pikmin because frankly, nobody cares about it.  Neat game but it wasn't, and isn't, on the radar of most people.  Animal Crossing is cool but doesn't appeal to most adults.

Metroid Prime?  Super Mario Sunshine?  StarFox Adventures? Donkey Konga? F-Zero GX?  Zelda: Wind Waker?  Wave Race: Blue Storm?  Mario Kart Double Dash?  Mario Golf Toadstool Tour?  Nothing new there.  All based on existing franchises that have been done to death.  Heck, Metroid Prime is the best GC game by far, and that's because it's based on a franchise that hasn't already been milked dry over the last 10 years.

Just a thought: you'd figure that Nintendo would look at their own N64 and say, "Hey, Goldeneye was the most-acclaimed and most-admired game on that system", and then look at the XBox and say, "Hey, HALO is what's kept that system afloat for two years because people absolutely love it", and maybe get a second-party to make a full-blown HALO-killing FPS.  But nooooooo, instead we get another Mario Kart game.  Whooopee.

All I can say is that Metroid Prime 2 had better have some insane multiplayer, if not full-blown online play.  I have HALO 2 on pre-order just in case.

I don't mean to bitch but I really can't understand Nintendo's apparent refusal to make anything outside of its existing game library.

silks

[nolimit19]

im with silks(nice sig by the way). nintendo needs a new franchise. brand new....im thinking they could do with a few new franchises actually. number 1 they need a couple new rpg franchises for the console...we see all this poke crap on the gba, just put a little effort into an rpg or 2 on the cube. i also think they should really look at making zelda realistic. i will admit i loved cell shaded, and i personally would not mind it staying cell shaded, but it would be better for nintendo to make it realistic. either that or make a similar franchise with more of a lord of the rings type feel. that would be super cool...and of course lastly but not leastly, they need another golden eye/perfect dark/halo type game. golden eye (best game ever) was the reason the 64 didnt do as crappy as the cube is doing right now. PERIOD

[Hostile Creation]

A thoroughly hyped up Fire Emblem for Gamecube might do well for an RPG.  OR WHATEVER.

[Ocarina Blue]

A GC Golden Sun would't go amiss. Neither would a GC version of a GB type Pokemon game. I mean, most of my friends and I lost interest in Pokemon after the first game: all the rest have been cheap franchise games or too similar. But if a real RPG (not a turn based fighting game with one tacked on the end) was released, most of the people I've questioned on the matter said they would immediatley go and buy a Cube to play it. It might be different for other areas, but I rekon something like that would do the Cube a world of good.

To be fair on Nintendo, most of their new franchise games don't sell nearly as well as their well-known ones. Pikmin is a good example. But I agree, more new franchises out of Nintendo would be nice.  

[NWR_Lindy]

Yeah, whatever happened to the supposed Golden Sun RPG for Gamecube?

Now, Geist looks interesting, and Metroid Prime 2 will be amazing of course...Tales of Symphonia will be good, but it'll be hard for me to justify buying that when I have a gang of Final Fantasy's (just picked up FF Chronicles and FF Anthology for PSOne) staring me in the face.

Here's my wish list:

1) A signature RPG series to compete with the Final Fantasy's and Dragon Warrior's of the world (Golden Sun may fill this slot, but I'd personally like to see something less cartoony)
2) Pokemon RPG - heck, I'm far from a kid but I'd buy it
3) A dark and edgy first-person-shooter that has full-blown online play
4) Golden Sun console RPG
5) A Zelda game that follows in the style of Ocarina of Time (I don't want it to be "edgy" or "mature", but for crying out loud, get with the times and stop trying to turn the series into a Disney cartoon)
6) A console Fire Emblem would be killer
7) Super Smash Brothers Melee 2 with online play, records and rankings (now THIS is a series that deserves to be exploited)

Nintendo REALLY needs to focus on RPGs with the next console.  They should just update the Super NES, really.  The SNES didn't have a lot of sports games but man did it have RPGs locked.  If Nintendo's next console became known as the "RPG console" that'd go a long way towards Nintendo getting back the hardcore, non-Nintendophile audience.

silks

[odifiend]

damn straight silks, but the Playstation has that lock now.  Not only have they pretty much owned Square since Nintendo's and Square's fight but now Square has merged with Enix making it unlikely that we might even get Dragon Warrior.  Those two companies are synonymous with RPG and much as I wish the reverse I don't see things changing with the N5.

[vudu]

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Originally posted by: Silks Just a thought: you'd figure that Nintendo would look at their own N64 and say, "Hey, Goldeneye was the most-acclaimed and most-admired game on that system", and then look at the XBox and say, "Hey, HALO is what's kept that system afloat for two years because people absolutely love it", and maybe get a second-party to make a full-blown HALO-killing FPS.  But nooooooo, instead we get another Mario Kart game.  Whooopee.

::cough geist cough::

[KDR_11k]

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Originally posted by: Silks
Tales of Symphonia will be good, but it'll be hard for me to justify buying that when I have a gang of Final Fantasy's (just picked up FF Chronicles and FF Anthology for PSOne) staring me in the face.

You need a justification? How about "This game is much better than any Final Fantasy"?

[Jonnyboy117]

I'm hoping that Geist turns out really well, but I think it's a stretch to imagine, from the E3 demo last year, that it's any sort of Halo-killer or Goldeneye successor.  It's more like a Deus Ex or System Shock, perhaps.

[vudu]

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Originally posted by: Jonnyboy117  It's more like a Deus Ex or System Shock, perhaps.

well that's ten times better in my mind.

[Inkwell]

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I just HAD to point this out, since I can't believe Johnny missed it- the simple fact that Sega made an F-Zero game, both for the arcade and Gamecube, and the fact that Konami is letting Silicon Knights, a Nintendo 2nd party, remake one of its best games ever, is reason enough to believe that Nintendo has very good relations with both these companies and will get some great support from them in the future.

I have a problem with this. If Konami had such a great relationship with Nintendo why wouldn't they make the Twin Snake game themselves? What is the point of obtaining a second party that has thier own agenda for trying to make excellent games just to take it away to say work on this game because this would improve relationships between the two. WTF! SK could be working on thier own thing rather wasting time making a remake of a game that Konami should be handling themselves. Just like Sega making F-Zero (good game by the way) what was the point? Sega really didn't do anything more to the series except update it to the GC....Nintendo could of done that. Sega should have doing original content. Oh even though Sega games haven't been selling all to well on X-Box, atleast they have been getting far more original content (which makes no sense). IMO Nintendo third-parties have been utter crap; the major companies...not so much with Capcom...have been almost worthless.

 

[shanyu]

I know this reply is a little delayed.... however let me attempt to illuminate the subject of why the GameCube isn't necessarily the easiest platform to deal with, and why typically companies choose to develop first for PS2 rather than XBox or GameCube.

First off, lets deal with the later subject.  Its a simple game of numbers for the upper management of the companies, and a sound strategem at that.  There are more PS2 machines out there than any other console.  There are still more PS2 machines purchased annually than any other console.  The largest market share of game consoles is PS2, so it makes sense that first and foremost you develop for that platform.  Now then, if you can engineer your code to be cross platform, you can spend many man years (team of 20+ for 18 months) developing for the primary platform (PS2) but only a few man years porting (team of 1 or 2 for 18 months) to the other platforms (XBox and GameCube).  

Now for the techical diffculties leading from developing cross platform games and the GameCube's particular woes.  First, the GameCube doesn't have as much physical memory as the PS2 or XBox.  The PS2 has 32 MB of memory available for the runtime, the geometry, the physics representations, the textures, display buffers, etc.  It is fortunate to have separate memory allocated for the audio subsystem.  The XBox, however, has 64 MB of unified memory that is shared for everything, audio, display buffers, geometry, game runtime, textures, etc.  The GameCube has 24MB of memory for general use for the display buffers, geometry, game runtime, etc, and 16 MB for audio.  There are tools for stealing 8 MB of the audio memory to use for game runtime memory, but it has restrictions (its horrible slow, can't be used for anything the graphics chip wants to talk to and must be managed carefully).  The GameCube can do DXT1 texture compression (S3 Compression) but unfortunately that doesn't do transparency very well (like at all really... 1 bit transparency is neigh usless), so what you end up having to do is horrible texture compression color channel swapping that results in alpha textures being twice as big as they need to be.  Did I mention the GameCube doesn't have a vector processor?  That's right, the main processor has to do all of the vector processing for multibone weighted skinning and so can't be done in hardware on the GameCube like it can on XBox or PS2.  Then there is the problem of the actual DVDs being smaller than a normal DVD.  So not only must the developer manage to get a game designed to run in 32MB of memory run in 24MB, but they must also fit all the data on a disc half the size.  Never mind that you also must make sure that you've correctly stored the data (oh yeah, the GameCube is BigEndian vs Little Endian like the XBox and PS2) so developers must take special care to ensure that the data gets byte swapped properly or else numbers like 1 turn into numbers like 65535.  There are also the game play concerns of the XBox and PS2 having more buttons (3 more) and all of them being analog or digital vs the GameCube having only 2 analog buttons.  Nevermind that the PS2 and XBox both have 2 rumble motors that have an analog speed vs the GameCube's single motor that can Go, Stop, or Stop Right Now.  That can make it difficult to make the rumble effects feel consistant across platforms.

Don't get me wrong, the GameCube is a great little piece of hardware.  In fact, I was the one slated originally to do the GameCube port of that game PsiOps that was so elegantly referred to as a "piece of crap".  But developing for the GameCube isn't as rosy as one would think, and to be honest it doesn't make a whole lot of economical sense for 3rd party developers to spend so much time and so much pain trying to make sure their game can be ported to GameCube when they'll only end up selling 20,000 units or so.

[NWR_Lindy]

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Originally posted by: KDR_11k: You need a justification? How about "This game is much better than any Final Fantasy"?

Heeeey, watch that.  I loves me my old-school Final Fantasy's.  I'll give Tales of Symphonia a look though.

kingvudu: Geist could be neat, but I'll believe it when I see it.  I can guarantee it won't be nearly as good as HALO 2, and it likely won't have any online play either (although I'd love to be proved wrong Nintendo).  But I bet it scores about an 8.5 - very good but not great.

Even if it is good, it'll have to be REALLY good - like, the BEST console FPS out there - for people to even care.  Unfortunately, the "Best console FPS" ship will be sailing with HALO 2.

silks

[vudu]

i hope you're right about halo 2, silks.  i'd love to play it on my pc in about 3 years.

i just got done playing all the way through halo for the first time about a month ago.  i'm going to have to agree with pretty much everyone else out there ... the level design sucked.  i really liked the health/armor system, and i loved that you could throw gernades without putting down your primary weapon.  i even enjoyed only being able to hold 2 weapons at a time.  but the level design came close to nearly ruining the entire game.

i trust they'll fix this problem for halo 2, and i probably won't have any complaints with it, unless they do another crappy pc port.

[Ian Sane]

"SK could be working on thier own thing rather wasting time making a remake of a game that Konami should be handling themselves. Just like Sega making F-Zero (good game by the way) what was the point? Sega really didn't do anything more to the series except update it to the GC....Nintendo could of done that."

Well one advantage to having SK and Sega work on someone else's game is that it frees up Konami and Nintendo to work on something else.  Now I somewhat agree that SK is being wasted on MGS and in that case really only Konami benefits since while they have more time to work on something else I REALLY doubt they're using that time to work on something for the Cube.  At least having Sega work on F-Zero allowed EAD to work on other Cube projects.  I guess Nintendo is just trying to suck up to Konami a bit.  If Twin Snakes is successful I imagine Konami will be quite grateful they are making money off of a game they barely had to work on themselves.

As for the F-Zero thing Nintendo could probably have made the final game themselves but I don't know if they knew exactly what Sega was cooking up when they gave them the game.  For all we know Nintendo gave them free reign to do as the wish and Sega chose to make something that didn't really do much with the series.  They did at least add the story mode so it's not total cookie cutter.

[mouse_clicker]

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I can guarantee it won't be nearly as good as HALO 2

I find it very odd that one can make such a blanket statement after seeing no more than short videos of either game. Do you work at N-Space or Bungie, Silks, have you played these games? Do you know for a FACT that Halo 2 will carry on Halo's crown of "Best Console FPS", a title bestowed on it by very few people?

[NWR_Lindy]

Geist looks neat, don't get me wrong...I just don't think it's going to be on the level of HALO 2.  The HALO universe is a proven formula and Bungie REALLY knows what they're doing.  They're revamping the graphics, adding online multiplayer, and improving the level design.  As a fan of HALO I don't know what more I could ask for.

Geist is being developed by a team with no proven track record and unknown development talent.  Sure, they're under Miyamoto's thumb so the game will be good, but HALO 2 quality...I doubt it.  Ten years from now I doubt Geist will be held in the same high regard as, say, Goldeneye (or HALO for that matter).

My prediction is that Geist will be good, but not classic.  HALO 2, on the other hand, could very well be a classic.

silks

[KDR_11k]

How do we know? It could very well be a superseller and classic, unless they pull an ED on it...

[NWR_Lindy]

Just some conjecture from a guy that's seen a lot of games come and go.  Go to mouse_clicker if you want the FACTS.

;-D

silks

[CaseyRyback]

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Originally posted by: mouse_clicker

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I can guarantee it won't be nearly as good as HALO 2

I find it very odd that one can make such a blanket statement after seeing no more than short videos of either game. Do you work at N-Space or Bungie, Silks, have you played these games? Do you know for a FACT that Halo 2 will carry on Halo's crown of "Best Console FPS", a title bestowed on it by very few people?

Halo is the king of the console FPS. No matter what people say, the game has an attachment rate of more than 25 percent of all Xbox's and growing( assuming 12 million Xbox's sold and more than 3 million copies of Halo sold). I think its a solid game, it has its flaws (mainly because rushed for launch) but it is better than any other console FPS out still for the Single Player (rainbow six 3 and SOCOM has better replay value).  Also I agree with silks, in that N-Space made some Barbie game as its last game.

Johnny, does Geist have the skills system like a Spector type game( System Shock, DX)? I was just wondering because you said it was more like those games and they have RPG and other elements as opposed to Goldeneye.

Nintendo needs to get EA to make online games on the Gamecube so that people with more than one console will be able to play online. Online is a strong selling point, and its one of the reasons that ESPN games do a little better on Xbox because they can be played online as opposed to EA games(I know EA still controls the market but saying sales are lost because people want to have an online football game).

Anyone who thinks sports games are meaningless, look at what they did for the Genesis. They helped SEGA sell tons of systems and everybody who played sports wanted them to play with more than two people.  

[vudu]

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Halo is the king of the console FPS. No matter what people say, the game has an attachment rate of more than 25 percent of all Xbox's and growing( assuming 12 million Xbox's sold and more than 3 million copies of Halo sold). I think its a solid game, it has its flaws (mainly because rushed for launch) but it is better than any other console FPS out still for the Single Player

 i actually like timesplitters 2 much much more than halo for a single player experience.  the arcade mode in that game was excellent.

also, i'm pretty sure halo wasn't rushed for the xbox launch.  the game was originally slated for release on computer, so if anything, it was delayed for the xbox's launch.

as it's been pointed out a million times before, the game was really good, save for the level design.  as much as it pains me, i'm going to have to agree with gamespy.com here...

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Worst of all were the levels, which offered fleeting glimpses of brilliance, but all too often degenerated into recycling the same areas over and over until you were bored to tears. It was as if someone at Microsoft or Bungie realized Halo was an amazing six-hour game ... but needed to pad it out to 10.

[KDR_11k]

Kingvudu: It WAS rushed. The devs said so during an interview. Or at least that was their excuse for the level design.

[vudu]

i know this isn't the best source, but i'm too lazy to search for a better one...

penny arcade!

the date on that comic is july 23, 1999, more than two years before the xbox was released.  if bungie had enough of the game finished to show off a movie of the game, it must have been in development for at least a year (give or take) prior to july of 1999.  that's three years.  hardly rushed.  

[mouse_clicker]

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also, i'm pretty sure halo wasn't rushed for the xbox launch. the game was originally slated for release on computer, so if anything, it was delayed for the xbox's launch.

Since this thread has gotten completely off topic, I'd like to interject this- yes, Halo was in development for a very long time, but it began as a Mac exclusive, as are the rest of the entries in the Marathon series. Microsoft then bought up Bungie and they had to go through the arduous process of porting Halo over to the PC. THEN Microsoft decided not only will Halo be an XBox game, it will be a launch title (an ingenious move on MS's part, if I do say so myself)- so now Bungie had to move production yet again, this time to the XBox, and given their limited time, Bungie had to rush production to meet launch. I'm not a huge fan of the game myself- I think the only thing it has over Timesplitters 2 is a story that's actually good. It's not a revolutionary game in the least, it just did most of everything better than the vast majority of stock FPS's out there, albeit a lot better.

Also, Silks, nice to see me quoted in your signature but I'm trying to figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.