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fivegears4reverse posted:They didn't fail because of some (totally wrong) law that states MORE POWERFUL=MORE FAIL, they failed because Sega had been doing worse than its direct competition since the days of the Master System and ultimately could not be supported by Sega. The Saturn did not benefit nearly as much as the PS1 did from the third party exodus away from Nintendo, and it had very few games that reached out to the broader market compared to its competition. The Dreamcast died because Sega simply ran out of money to keep supporting a console while being involved with game development. Well, it was also because the NA division insisted that like every localized Saturn game ever be 3D, to compete with the PS1 (the Saturn was a loving crazy powerful 2D console). The Japanese Saturn was a really good console with a lot of fun games, but no one in America can say that with a straight face, which is why you get an Action Replay 4M.
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May 21, 2013 08:54
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NESguerilla posted:I don't think there is any sort of law that says that. If graphics were the big draw in PS1, people just weren't paying attention because the saturn was out for quite a while before the PS1 and the games looked just as good. As a Saturn owner I wasn't impressed by the PS1's graphics in the least. I eventually gravitated towards it because it had better games. I was just saying that the games where what sold the PS1, not graphics. Again, there's a key difference between the Sega and Sony that mattered a lot more than the visuals at the time: Sega was already playing second bannana to Nintendo by the time the PS1 came out, even while Nintendo was starting to grapple with the fact that they were losing a lot of third party support to the Sony. The Saturn never had a library that was competitive to either the PS1 or the N64, and ultimately the system only sold close to ten million units. One fun fact is that, like the PS3, the Saturn was a massive pain in the rear end to actually program for. Unlike Sony, Sega was incapable of doing anything to turn the system's fortunes around. Sony was the new kid in town and threw a lot of money at courting some very important people to its fold. The PS1 became the home of JRPG fans worldwide with the amazing support from companies like Squaresoft, it is the place where one of the most influential franchises of all time got its real start (Metal Gear Solid). It had the extremely popular Tekken series for fighting fans, and even had a solid FPS library for its time (including the first Medal of Honor). The PS1 ultimate broke a 100 million units sold, in no small part due to the fact that just like the PS2, loving EVERYTHING was coming to the PS1. I mean, where else was it going to go, the N64? The Gameboy? By the time the Dreamcast blasted onto the scene, it was representing a company already on the verge of complete irrelevance. Had the DC not been the last console in a string of constant setbacks and failures (and if the PS1 hadn't been so successful to begin with), then it could have stood a chance against the PS2. That it did as well as it did in the end is testament to how good the Dreamcast was despite the fact that Sega itself was hardly competition to anyone in the console market (and not for lack of effort, mind you). Sales numbers of a system also have a lot to do with what comes to it and what doesn't, which is another reason why the Wii U is in the poo poo right now: developers and publishers are not convinced that it's going to be where the consumer is going to go. It doesn't help that it's more or less on par with current generation hardware, stuff that has been selling fewer and fewer systems over the last couple years. It doesn't help that the incredibly successful Wii was more or less killed ahead of its time, which has lead to both the PS3 and the 360 slowly creeping up on the Wii for total units sold. 160 million HD consoles have been sold during this generation. People DO want fancy visuals to go with their games, and it certainly doesn't have to be and either/or thing when it comes to graphics and gameplay. VVV You know it was totally possible for there to be game saves on NES carts, right? (I think you do, but the way you worded that makes it sound like the ability to save was just too much for the poor wittle NES, despite FINAL FANTASY and DRAGON QUEST/WARRIOR being on the system but whatevs) Or that there were still plenty of SNES games that didn't feature saving whatsoever? Hell, many shooters didn't even bother saving your high scores. MMX 1-3 still used a password system. I remember leaving my SNES on over many nights to 'save' progress on Jurassic Park. fivegears4reverse fucked around with this message at 09:05 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 08:58
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fivegears4reverse posted:Which ones? Any one which uses save games? Most NES games didn't have the ability to save. If they did it was built into the cartridge. That should be an obvious indicator that the system was a bit limited.
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May 21, 2013 09:00
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Mulefisk posted:Any one which uses save games? Most NES games didn't have the ability to save. If they did it was built into the cartridge. That should be an obvious indicator that the system was a bit limited. 
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May 21, 2013 09:04
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Was saving on the Saturn built in or a cart? I don't even remember anymore. I keep thinking of that weird tamogatchi the dreamcast used to save games.
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May 21, 2013 09:21
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homeless snail posted:You mean exactly like the SNES? Some games on the SNES didn't keep savegames. I remember writing down passwords for Megaman X, despite renting games like Chrono Trigger just to see how far other people had gotten in the game. (And being very freaked out by the Black Omen as a young child. :P )
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May 21, 2013 09:26
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NESguerilla posted:Was saving on the Saturn built in or a cart? I don't even remember anymore. I keep thinking of that weird tamogatchi the dreamcast used to save games. There was an internal battery, the kind that goes in a camera (one of those coin ones) that governed that. However, if you get a 4 megabyte Action Replay memory cart in the slot, you can get your saves on that instead. Once the battery went out the saves reset on the regular Saturn internal memory. It was something around half a megabyte IIRC. The extra bonus to the AR cart was that it allowed region free play, and cheats.
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May 21, 2013 09:29
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homeless snail posted:You mean exactly like the SNES? poo poo dude, there were games on the N64 that didn't save on cart.
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May 21, 2013 09:47
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Proletarian posted:poo poo dude, there were games on the N64 that didn't save on cart. gently caress you, Castlevania 64.
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May 21, 2013 10:01
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fivegears4reverse posted:In addition to the obvious visual improvements, the more powerful the consoles have become, the larger the in game worlds can be, the more content can be provided. Enemies are capable of doing more than just following obviously pathed routes, or even a larger number of enemies (or allies, or random NPCs) can help further immerse the player or make for a more challenging game. quote:Look at games like Dragon's Dogma or Dark Souls: the detailed animations of both your player and the monsters themselves add additional personality to the game visually while also adding to the gameplay by giving you things to actually look for to help combat the enemies and avoid taking serious damage. quote:Things like motion controls are rarely, if ever used properly. quote:Online connectivity for videogames has been around a lot longer than when things like the Dreamcast and the Xbox made them standards for consoles to reach for. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 10:26 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 10:23
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OneEightHundred posted:If games with advantages like these exist, where are they? I wish the PS2-era fad of DESTRUCTIBLE ENVIRONMENTS came back for the PS4 generation. It was missing because people focused too hard on setpieces this gen. That's something more power can do.
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May 21, 2013 10:31
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sandpiper posted:I wish the PS2-era fad of DESTRUCTIBLE ENVIRONMENTS came back for the PS4 generation. It was missing because people focused too hard on setpieces this gen.
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May 21, 2013 10:35
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Samurai Sanders posted:Besides, as you said, developers wanting to have a lot of control over the experience of their game, isn't a destructable world a QA nightmare? I thought that's why we didn't see many of those games and that doesn't have anything to do with hardware. Destructible environments means a hell of a lot more physics and particle calculations, which is more strain on the engine. It's why some of those PS2 era games had massive slowdown when you destroyed a bunch of things at a time because it couldn't handle it all.
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May 21, 2013 10:56
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Destructable environments generally have a lot of design problems. It's partially system power and partially just that they're a lot of effort for very little payoff unless the only thing you're going for making a battle look more destructive. They could be done on modern systems there just really isn't a lot of reason to. It isn't about focusing on setpieces so much as... like, destructable environments are one of those buzzwords that sounds cool and usually is kind of dull in practice. Even in a sandbox environment, there's only so much fully destructable environments offer before they actually detract from the experience. What'd be more significant with the new generation isn't stuff that is going to be so obvious. Faster loading time, more enemies onscreen, more enemies onscreen actually capable of functioning, less slowdown, larger areas to explore... all that kinda cool stuff which isn't bright and shiny but will have a tangible effect on how games can be designed. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 11:12 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 11:05
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On the other hand, the destruction physics in Red Faction: Guerrilla were actually really fun to mess around with, it's just a shame it was attached to what was otherwise a really mediocre sandbox game.
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May 21, 2013 11:12
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OneEightHundred posted:If games with advantages like these exist, where are they? Even enormous games are still smaller than Test Drive Unlimited and True Crime LA, enemies still behave simplistically and there are rarely ever more computer-controlled units active at a given time than you'd see in Madden. Sure, it's possible to processing speed improvements to allow these to be done better, but it's rare. Games like this exist, and you named two of them, but the rest don't count becauuuuuuse?????? I mean, come on, Skyrim is absurd in size and it (sorta kinda) runs even on the PS3.Newer consoles are going to have a SIGNIFICANT amount of memory over their predecessors and the Wii U. There's no reason why we can't see even larger game worlds on them, with fewer loading zones, or faster area transitions in general, with fewer "instances" within a game world so everything flows together more smoothly. quote:"Personality" is visuals and attack telegraphing has been done for about as long as attack animations have existed. And they have become more complex, which can lend a game not just better visuals, but they can allow for more complex scenarios to take place. Yes, ten years ago we could have giant dragons on a commercial PC game and even on a console, but the dragons found in modern games can move more convincingly menacing than ever, in real time, as opposed to merely in cutscenes. Look at the difference between Tomb Raider on the PS1 and Uncharted on the PS3, or Kings Field on the PS1 and Dark Souls on the PS3. Animation has changed a lot, not just how things are presented, but how the characters we control interact with the world, affecting how games play. We didn't have games could allow a character to feel as agile as an Assassin freerunning across the rooftops ten years ago. quote:Analog sticks, shoulder buttons, pressure-sensitive face buttons, fake musical instrument controllers, and the entire gimmick of the Wii console have been pretty significant. What are you trying to say here? The entire gimmick of the Wii was so significant Nintendo all but threw it under the bus with the Wii U. Sure, people can play their old games with their old Wiimotes, but very little at launch actually shows that anyone not named Nintendo developing for the system gives a poo poo about this capability. The fact that it's more optional than ever means that its only going to continue getting ignored by most third parties, assuming they continue to stick around and develop for the system. It did influence knock offs like the PS Move (essentially dead, very little uses it and very few people actually give a poo poo about it) and Kinect (which hasn't exactly had a great showing on the 360 regardless of how hard MS is trying to push it in a desperate attempt to get some of the Wii's pie). However, the PS3 and the 360 did JUST FINE as they were. Their respective motion control garbage did nothing to actually push gaming forward, much like the original Wiimote was an inaccurate mess that reduced most "motion games" to "waggle that goddamned stick really hard", while the Motion Plus excited as many people as it frustrated. I don't think you should look at add-on peripheral controllers as a net positive. Fake musical instrument controllers are mostly dead because the games that support them are either short lived experiments/character IP cash-ins (Donkey Konga  ), or the various series (the Something Hero games for example) are essentially dead in the water because they got run into the ground. Only the PS3 currently does pressure sensitive face-buttons (and few games make good use of it, just like in the PS2 days). About the most innovative and truly influential thing Nintendo has ever done with controls is bringing Analog sticks to the table, and their competition ran roughshod over them with that innovation until the original Wii. Which is the first time since the SNES that they were a console market leader. Obviously the story is different in the handheld side of things.quote:It's only recently been the case that actually getting into an online game wasn't a complete chore. It's a good thing Nintendo is catching up in this regard.
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May 21, 2013 11:12
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ImpAtom posted:Destructable environments generally have a lot of design problems. It's partially system power and partially just that they're a lot of effort for very little payoff unless the only thing you're going for making a battle look more destructive. They could be done on modern systems there just really isn't a lot of reason to. Well I've just been playing the Otogi series and they really add to a hack and slash surprisingly well, as in slamming a demon into a post, wall, rock or whatever with a sword slash and the object crumbles away, and the debris actually doing damage/even setting them on fire if they crashed into a lit torch or something. Being able to slash your way right through walls, having airborne combat where you spike an enemy down towards the ground and they hurtle and crash, leaving an actual three dimensional crater on the ground that just stays there and taking extra damage from having been slammed into something. Of course, the applications and the return on the effort involved are limited, I was just thinking about that after being immersed in all that. There was Black, which had some crazy environmental destruction and people still want a sequel to that and remember it to this day for the extent of destruction there was. There's Phantom Dust, which also has strategic environmental destruction where one can destroy the base of a pillar and the crumbling debris does damage by itself falling onto an enemy, or if you cast a spell it destroys the fences/bridges in its way. Now that I think about it, most of these titles were on the original Xbox. drat that was a powerful system.
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May 21, 2013 11:14
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ImpAtom posted:What'd be more significant with the new generation isn't stuff that is going to be so obvious. Faster loading time, more enemies onscreen, more enemies onscreen actually capable of functioning, less slowdown, larger areas to explore... all that kinda cool stuff which isn't bright and shiny but will have a tangible effect on how games can be designed. Come on next gen Dynasty Warriors 
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May 21, 2013 11:23
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sandpiper posted:Well I've just been playing the Otogi series and they really add to a hack and slash surprisingly well, as in slamming a demon into a post, wall, rock or whatever with a sword slash and the object crumbles away, and the debris actually doing damage/even setting them on fire if they crashed into a lit torch or something. Being able to slash your way right through walls, having airborne combat where you spike an enemy down towards the ground and they hurtle and crash, leaving an actual three dimensional crater on the ground that just stays there and taking extra damage from having been slammed into something. Yeah, but those sorts of things haven't gone away and good setpiece design can even take them into account. Otogi is a fun game largely because they put a lot of work into each setpiece, and there are still plenty of games that do that. Metal Gear Rising comes to mind as a recent example. A real true destructible environment runs into the Red Faction problem basically. It's incredibly cool when you're fooling around destroying thing but it's really hard to make the rest of the game particularly engaging. Man, I want to replay Otogi now and I don't know if it's even backwards compatable.  OatmealRaisin posted:Come on next gen Dynasty Warriors I wouldn't hold out hope for that particular franchise to change.
ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 11:32 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 11:29
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sandpiper posted:Otogi You are a good person.
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May 21, 2013 11:30
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The problem with saying that "We don't need to improve the performance of our consoles, the older ones were perfectly capable of doing this", is that the more visual and technological prowess you squeeze out of a console, the more the performance is going to suffer. That Donkey Kong Country for the NES video showed one of the big limitations of the system, the sprite limit. Yes, you could have big, detailed sprites on the NES, but then you have to significantly reduce the number of them on screen or they're going to be flickering and slowing down the game. This is also the case with the PS2 version of Shadow of the Colossus. Set in a huge, seamless world, with a gigantic draw distance, cloth physics, motion blur, bloom, realistic fur, procedural animation, and, of course, the loving colossi, the game achieved what was considered only possible on the new Xbox 360. However, this meant that the frame rate rarely ventured above 20 fps, until it was ported to the PS3 several years later by the excellent Bluepoint studio. We're seeing that with this generation now as well. Dragon's Dogma is a fantastic looking game, with richly detailed monsters and an incredible character creation system, but it has a poor frame rate on both consoles. It even has black borders on the top and bottom of the screen to reduce the number of pixels to render, without needing to smudge the image by stretching a sub-720p image to the whole screen. No matter how much optimisation is done, there's only so much you can get out of a console. There are other reasons for welcoming a new set of consoles, such as the fact that it lets new IPs get noticed more easily. Assassin's Creed could have just been another Prince of Persia game if the developers didn't want to start something new for this generation.
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May 21, 2013 11:48
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OatmealRaisin posted:Come on next gen Dynasty Warriors You better hope Tak Fuji has a 99Nights 3 for this E3, then!
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May 21, 2013 11:53
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fivegears4reverse posted:It's a good thing Nintendo is catching up in this regard. Catching up? It's 2013 for gently caress's sake. Part of me wants to just brush it off as Nintendo being a based in a country where Starbucks just started rolling out free wifi in the last few months and fax machines still enjoy considerable popularity, but that's just making excuses; this is sheer ineptitude on Nintendo's part.
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May 21, 2013 12:17
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Iacen posted:You better hope Tak Fuji has a 99Nights 3 for this E3, then! And I would buy and play the poo poo out of that day one.
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May 21, 2013 12:35
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Hobo Siege posted:Pokemon MMO Seriously, why DON'T we have a Pokemon MMO? I would spend all of my hours playing it.
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May 21, 2013 12:44
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Because their current model is way cheaper and gives way better returns.
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May 21, 2013 12:52
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Longanimitas posted:Seriously, why DON'T we have a Pokemon MMO? I would spend all of my hours playing it. I assume because Nintendo doesn't want the main demographic of Pokemon (children) to be exposed to the horrors of other people online. I mean, I guess they could always take away any way to communicate with another player beyond a stock set of replies (Let's trade! Let's battle! No thanks! Thanks! etc) but at that point you might as well just be playing with NPCs. This is all just a guess of course, I don't know the actual reason, and I don't think Ninteno has ever actually said one way or the other. But that's what I assume is the reason we haven't seen a Pokemon MMO yet. Even though a Pokemon MMO would sell like a billion dollars even with it being just on the WiiU. Of course if it was on the PC they could build a statue made of gold and diamonds of Reggie and Miyamoto high fiving that's bigger than that Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.
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May 21, 2013 12:56
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Or it would fail just like every other non WoW MMORPG, no matter how well made, at best trickling in profits after a hundreds of millions of dollars investment.
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May 21, 2013 13:00
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Longanimitas posted:Seriously, why DON'T we have a Pokemon MMO? I would spend all of my hours playing it. A Pokemon MMO honestly would not be a good thing. Pokemon, as it is designed, would not translate 1-for-1 into an MMO because MMOs have very different design priorities. You can't just go "make Pokemon but multiplayer" and have it work. You'd basically have to design an entirely new game from scratch which would have little to with Pokemon as it exists aside from having characters and Pokemon. Even if you just one-for-one copied the basic Pokemon design, you run into other design problems. The competitive aspects of Pokemon are casual enough that they could be ignored and younger or more casual players can enjoy the game on their own level. Many people have no idea a lot of the deeper mechanics exist, they just catch Pikachu and steamroll the game. At the same time they are massively in-depth enough that someone who wants to invest a ton of time and effort into it can. Trying to appeal to both groups in an MMO would be a recipe for disaster. Even on top of this, a modern MMO is almost certainly going to have to be a F2P thing because the subscription model is rapidly dying out. So on top of all the fun design problems you're going to have to be reconcepting Pokemon as a profitable F2P game or else sticking with the outdated and much-hated subscription model. Either way that's a load of trouble. It would be proftable because it is Pokemon but if it can sustain that profit is a much larger question. It's really difficult to think of anything good that would come of a Pokemon MMO. People say they'd play a billion hours but what do you expect to do in it? Raid groups against Mewtwo? Camping the same area of forest as 900 other people trying to make sure you're the guy who catches the shiny Pikachu when it spawns? Basically the only thing that really makes sense is battling other players over the internet and you can do that now anyway. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 13:11 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 13:01
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I don't have a Wii U yet. What would make me purchase one would be a great Smash Bros release and a fantastic Zelda game. The future Smash will really have to pull out all the stops, since Brawl has almost everything I need. (Melee is the reason I got the Gamecube.) As far as Zelda does, it simply needs to feel legendary again. I mean it is the LEGEND of Zelda after all.
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May 21, 2013 13:25
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greatn posted:Or it would fail just like every other non WoW MMORPG, no matter how well made, at best trickling in profits after a hundreds of millions of dollars investment. Multiplayer games have been booming - a proper pet battle game with leagues and etc would be pretty popular. The trick is not to spend those hundreds of millions in the first place.
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May 21, 2013 13:40
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Target is selling the Wii U basic for $239 now. Basically giving it away because no one is buying them. http://m.joystiq.com/2013/05/21/wii-u-basic-going-for-240-at-target/
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May 21, 2013 14:51
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If a Pokemon MMO can let me live out my dream of being a Youngster Joey, with a team of Rattatas, that proclaims to like shorts because they're comfy and easy to wear, then I can forgive a few balance issues. At the very least, Pokemon X and Y are the first fully 3D entries in the series. I'd like battles to be seamless, by showing the actual area around you when you fight, and maybe the ability to see other players in their own games having their own adventures, so I don't feel like the only person working their way up the Pokemon League. I haven't completed a Pokemon game since the GBA versions, so even if the mechanics themselves are similar, I'd like a game that feels more expansive and immersive.
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May 21, 2013 14:54
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The Wii U has a better chance of being Nintendo's Gamecube than Dreamcast. I loved my GC and all the first party Nintendo games on it, so I'm ok with this. This won't kill Nintendo, but it would be fun if Sony and MS expect this next generation to last as long as the previous one and then Nintendo comes out with an amazing piece of new hardware 5 years in. This still wouldn't happen because of the price point Nintendo likes to put it's consoles and because they always make money on their console sales, but like I said, it'd be fun. I also don't see next gen lasting until 2022. How long did it take for the 360 and PS4 hardware to start being profitable? If Nintendo really wanted to be dicks they should just start shortening the lifespan of consoles back to ~5 years. VVV Are either the new Xbox or Playstation supposed to come out in 2013 or are they still slated for 2014? NM. Just looked up PS4 which says Holiday Season 2013. Shyfted One fucked around with this message at 14:58 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 14:54
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Samara posted:Target is selling the Wii U basic for $239 now. Basically giving it away because no one is buying them. "Please get these off our shelves, we're gonna have new Xboxes and Playstations and OUYAs soon."
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May 21, 2013 14:56
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There's a serious possibility the god drat Ouya will outsell the WiiU for several months.
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May 21, 2013 14:59
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The first casualty of the RevOUYAtion.
That Fucking Sned fucked around with this message at 17:57 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 15:06
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greatn posted:There's a serious possibility the god drat Ouya will outsell the WiiU for several months. haha You actually believe this.
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May 21, 2013 15:13
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Ouya is the future, get on board or be left behind. 
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May 21, 2013 15:23
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elf help book posted:haha You actually believe this. I think the Ouya is a joke. That's why it is so bad retail outlets are putting WiiU on clearance to make room for it.
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May 21, 2013 15:26
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