darkjak

For the last few weeks I've been doing a course at the university where I'm supposed to design a car. I've made five different 3D draft models, and now I need your feedback. Based upon your feedback, I'm going to create a much more well detailed model. So please vote! Take part in the survey here.

My personal opinion for the future of gaming: Cloud gaming: All high-end games will be launched for Cloud gaming-services, such as OnLive. Consumers won't have to wory about buying a new console again, until perhaps there'll be some major change in viewing technology (3D, Holograms etc). The possibility to completely eliminate piracy will attract the developers, and the cheapness of the service (short term renting of brand new games along with the possibility of renting play paks, plus the small initial cost of the system), along with the posibility to play your games anywhere, and keep your savefiles will be very appealing to consumers. Nomad: Remember the Sega Nomad? A portable console that only played Mega Drive games. Well, that's my vision of the future: the portable consoles and home consoles will be one and the same. Essentially, you buy a portable console like the 3DS, you play your game on the move, then you come home and connect it to a power source and a TV, and you have HD home gameplay. Perhaps you'll keep the console in your hand, perhaps you'll hook up a more ergonomical controller. The difference between portable games and stationary is continually shrinking. Remember the mid 90's? We had the N64 at home, and a weak black and white Game Boy on the go, or perhaps a Game Gear, if you had deep pockets. In the late 90's you had a Dreamcast at home and the same Gameboy, only in colour on the go. In other words, portable home consoles were about four generations behind. By 2004 we had Gamecubes and yet we got the DS which was as powerful as an N64. Soon it'll be pointless to have two seperate machines. Cellphones Cellphones will keep getting games, and keep earning big money. But I think that phone makers will want to keep the buttons to a minimum. Both consumers and developers will learn what kinds of games work on phones and which don't. The cellphone will not take over the market, even though certain people would want them to. Just like Toyota, Subaru, Hyundai, Chevrolet, Dodge and a whole bunch of other car manufacturers in the last few years have realised that the car market has enthusiasts who want true drivers cars, the game industry will have to deal with the fact that there are lots (over a hundred milion and growing) of enthusiasts who wants gamers games to play on dedicated devices.

Nearly 100 hours of gameplay= Awesome Upgrade system= Awesome Controls (if they work, which I'm certain they will)= Awesome Graphics= Doesen't look like a painting like Nintendo claimed they wanted it to. Not too happy about cel shading (why Nintendo use cel shading on Zelda, but not in any Mario or Kirby games just seems insane to me). Sounds= Not even close to what I'm expecting from a Nintendo flagship in2011.

I've done it, and it's really good.

Do you KNOW anything about this game? Do you KNOW if it's any good? Do you actually KNOW if it's got a huge scope and so on? Gameloft have an amazing skill to create games that look good in screenshots and even trailers, but rarely is the gameplay any good. I however don't think that scope is any problem. Modern cellphones have ginormous amounts of memory and can store pretty much any game. What I yet again want to adress is the controls. And also the lacking financial viability of making games with a large scope and selling them for 5euro or less. Yes, you can make games and make a profit selling them for 5 euro a pop. And yes, you can make games with huge scopes and fairly high-end graphics for modern cellphones. What you cannot do is BOTH. And like I've stated before, and I'll keep stating again is that with the modern touchscreen only-layout, developers will be limited as to what they'll be able to release. Nintendo can release a dedicated portable machine and sell games for it for a fair bit of money. And they're making a profit from it. Let me put it like this: who gives a s**t about Atari now that they've stopped making consoles? As a matter of fact: who gives a s**t about Sega now in the post-Dreamcast era. The only thing Sega can develop and sell now, are ports of the games they released back in the day. If Nintendo were to stop making hardware, noone'd care about their games. And because Nintendo make hardware, they earn a lot of money from that fact. They get license money from everyone who releases a game for any of their machines. And they earn money from the machines themselves. I see two variations of the future in front of me. One where Nintendo launch a DS-phone. And a second where your stationary home console will be the same as your portable one. Let me elaborate: you have a device similar to the 3DS which you play while on the move. When you come home, you attach the charging cable (or don't, if your battery is good) and then connect to your TV wirelessly.

I've owned an android phone for 2 years now. And I NEVER play games on it. Why? Because motion controls and a touchscreen alone doesen't work. I LOATHE having to cover the gameplay with my fingers to play (which is why the DS has two screens), I hate waving my console about. Sure, it works for games like Angry Birds, but for Nintendo games? How the eff would Pilotwings or Ocarina of Time work on a phone? Or even New Mario Bros? Or Starfox? The Xperia Play is going to end up like the N-Gage: everyone's raving on about how amazing it is at first, but noone buys the proprietary games for it and the format quickly dies off. The N-Gage had it's stupid screen which was wide in the wrong direction and the surplus of buttons. The Xperia uses a damn D-pad, making it about as advanced as an SNES (does it even have shoulderbuttons) and it slides up like the epicly failed PSP Move. I'm starting up a game company, and I've talked to a bunch of people about the Android. Firstly, sales for Android games are usually worse than for iPhone. Secondly, there are no set specs on what resolution or processor an Android Phone needs to have. So how demanding your games can be is a bit badly defined. Either you make your game look crap or you alienate many users. Unlike Sony's Xperia Play, the 3DS has shifted milions of copies. Nintendo are giving people a dedicated games machine. Sorry, but as the cellphones are today, it's IMPOSSIBLE to give people the same experiences as a dedicated machine. Has ANYONE here ever played online multiplayer on a cellphone? Or even over local Wifi? I mean, do any of you think that this is the first time this is happening? Don't you remember when Philips tried to sell a jack of all trades? When they tried to make a movie player that also plays games? Ever heard of the CD-i? Remember when someone tried to do the same thing a few later? When DVD's were going to get improved features and even fully fledged 3D games? The Nuon flopped even worse than the CD-i. And you're also forgetting something: 3DS games cost about ten times as much to buy as Android games. Yet Android games don't sell ten times as much. I've talked with people whom have launched a game which ended up on the top 5 on the iPhone for a few months. They sold lots of copies, which they bragged on and on about, but didn't actually make that much money. In the end of the day, Nintendo have sold milions of 3DS-machines and are still selling loads of DS's. Nintendo have allways made money and will continue to do so for a very long time. Even when their consoles were virtually unsellable, they made profit. The only time I know that they've made losses is during one QUARTER of 2004. As a matter of fact, I don't know why Nintendo have any investors anymore. As they've earned millions every year for as far back as I'm aware, they could might as well have freshly printed Euro bills for toilet paper at the offices.

I think that Nintendo have made a bit of a clusterf**k with their portable consoles. First there was the DS, then the DS Lite. OK, fair enough. Then came the DSi which had a camera and some new features, including a store with downloadable stuff, only available through the DSi. So it was some kind of half-way thing, like the PSP Go. And then the DSi XL. I can completely understand the confusion there. And now Nintendo have brought out the 3DS. The machine has only minor visual differences from the old DS versions, which causes confusion. And very few casual gamers actually know it's a different console. Nintendo have been so bad at explaining that it's a different console, that when a festival was advertising (among other things) that people who were there could get hands on with the 3DS, the radio recording (which ran time and time again for a month prior to the festival) kept stating that people would get to "play the brand new Nintendo DS". I see no flaw in this new slimline version. It's going to be cheaper and reach out to the casuals. I personally think it's too similar to the original Wii, which doesen't look as cool today as in 2005. Also, what Nintendo did or didn't show at E3 doesen't matter. Some of the mainstream media might write about it, but the casuals don't read it or even look at it. What does matter is that the console is called Wii U. Which means that the some causals will think that the Wii U is for the Wii, what the DSi was for the DS. And also, I don't think that Nintendo should go after the casuals as much this time. The Wii can be the new NES, with a 15 year lifespan, surviving both the Wii U and the Wii U's successor. Casuals don't care about HD. I know many young, hip girls whom are completely oblivious as to what HD is. The tech-geeks who really care about HD already own HD-consoles. The worst thing Nintendo can do is to shut down the production of the Wii before the launch of the Wii U, as they did with the Gamecube and N64. Keep making Wii's, keep releasing games for it and keep letting third parties release games for it. Nintendo could even make it a policy to port most of their 3DS games for the Wii to keep it alive.

I've had experience with working at a game studio, and there wasn't really any crunch time there. This summer I was however supposed to work at a different company. There was a lot of fuss about the contract, as my employer at first didn't specify my work hours as much as the union required, so it took months and months to get a good contract. When I showed up to sign the contract, the same day I was supposed to start, my boss wanted to postpone my work period until I was needed. Apparently due to Nintendo being unable to give a date when they can send their game in for approval. The boss told me that he was pissed too, as this meant that they would have to cancel their vacation. I've got a teacher whom worked at Dice when they developed BF 1942, and there was a lot of people, including himself who were burned out. The main problem I see is that game companies don't hire as much people as they need. Instead, they have very steep requirements for the people whom want jobs. EVERYONE wants people who have several years of experience or even worse: people whom have worked on at least three AAA titles. The biggest shame is however when companies start becoming buddy-recruiters. A person told me (I cannot actually confirm this is true) that when Grin needed a Creative Director, they just took a guy who was a friend on someone on the company and was unemployed. A person with no degree of any kind and who embodied everything a Designer wasn't supposed to be. Noone barely ever saw him, he'd just come in once in a while and come with ideas, and complain on how certain things aren't how he imagined. This source also told me that during the development of Terminator: Salvation, this guy came in three weeks before the game was supposed to be sent in to Sony and Microsoft, and said that half the games content had to go. However, I've heard that this crunch-culture is going away. Crunch is becoming crunch (extra work in the final stages of development, rather than constant work under slave conditions). Apparently, DICE aren't killing their employees anymore and Massive Entertainment are apparently one of the best work places in all of Sweden. A big problem for young, fresh developers is however the difficulty to get their first job. You pretty much have to start your own company to get in!

We must be looking at completely different pictures then. Because what I'm seing at the top of the page is a console nearly identical to the original Wii, apart from the Wii logo being moved. The Wii U on the other hand is much more rounded in its design. I don't see how they can be confused. And to me, it's the LACK of differentiating features that pisses me off. Look at Sonys small versions. They look completely different from their predecessors.

I'd love for Nintendo to make it possible to carry your home games with you. Just imagine playing Smash on your Wii U, then you're gonna go for a train trip, so you wirelessly transfer your Wii U game save to your 3DS, continue playing on the train, then transfer your save back to your Wii U when you come home.

I'm not sure what you mean by a casual mode. Well, the story missions were a pure pain in the butt. And also I didn't like that you had to buy the missions to play them. Basically, I'd just like a track editor and an onlinemode.

I can draw quite a few paralels between the WM+ and the N64 expansion pack. The N64's main sale argument during the first years was graphics. After a few years, the graphics weren't that remarkable, so Nintendo launched the expansion pack. While it didn't help the console reclaim the graphical throne (the Dreamcast was still more powerful), it did give nice results. The Wiis main sale argument was the motion controler. Nintendo launched the WM+ to improve on that. What else do these two have in common? Well, fairly few people have them and few games actually use the peripheral, as developers fear they'll alienate potential audience. I don't think Nintendo will bundle wiimotes with the Wii U. And because of that, I believe that few games will support it.

Why is everyone complaining about shooters? I mean, sure, I'd rather see Mass Effect Trilogy for the Wii.

Why is everyone complaining about shooters? I mean, sure, I'd rather see Mass Effect Trilogy for the Wii.

When I hear "Wii U", I rather thing "why you?".

I'm quite pleased with the conference. Although I'd like Nintendo to show WAY more Wii & Wii U games.

My character wish list: Leon from Resident Evil What's his name from No More Heroes Ryo Hazuki & Lan Di from Shenmie What's his name from Assassins Creed Viewtiful Joe I just can't come up with a character based game that Nintendo haven't taken characters from. Also, it would be cool if they'd ad movie characters. In that case my list would include: The Terminator Rambo Dirty Harry Mister Blonde (reservoir dogs) Indiana Jones James Bond Or if they're cheapskates, they can just include all the characters from the next Expendables movie.

What else can you demand? Sure, I agree that it looks a bit too clean, but non the less, I like the direction it indicates.

It looks OK in my eyes. I like the style much better that SS and definitely more than WW.

I believe: Nintendo have joined Google and Saab and their new console is: The Nintendo-Saab iQuon.

The thing is, if you look at Ocarina, there was a "dungeon" in Gerudo Valley where you could unlock some or other object. If I remember correctly, you needed to complete everything except Ganondorfs castle to win there. I believe Nintendo should give players something to do once they've completed the game. Something else than finding all the golden skultulas so you can get rewarded with infinite rupies, which you won't even need because you've allready won the game. However, I don't believe this dungeon within the dungeon-stuff. Maye a couple of secret rooms, or a Master Quest-ish thing. Not to go off topic, but I feel more hyped about this supposed new Zelda game than for SS. Even though I don't have the slightest doubt that I'll buy both (if the myster Zelda title isn't something completely underwhelming, like a Crossbow Training).

Excitebike 64!

I tried for the longest time to stick to my Wii. But two years ago I was fed up. I didn't get GTA, the best racing game was Need for Speed Carbon and the best FPS was a port of a PSP game and an entry in a franchise which has since died off (yes, I bought it, and I didn't like it because the controls were bad, the level design was bad and the game looked like it literally could have been beaten by an N64 game). And the few high quality games that were available just never dropped in price (just last week I tried getting Smash Bros and it cost 50euro. USED!). I'm the biggest Nintendo fan in the world and I can see a milion different cool things you can do with a Wiimote, but there too few Nintendo games and too few games that made good use of the Wiimote.

Well, the Wii is actually more powerful than the GC, so there would obviously be improved graphics and physics. But Waverace as well as 1080 would have benefited hugely from much longer single player modes. The GC outings had a few cups and that was it. I don't think that very many Nintendo owned franchises would benefit too much from Café remakes. I'd love to see some sort of Metal Gear Solid trilogy pack, containing MGS: Twin Snakes, MGS: Sons of Liberty and MGS: Snake Eater with HD updated graphics. And I would love to see Time Splitters: Future Perfect with HD and an online mode. PERHAPS I think Nintendo could create complete remake of Excitebike 64, with totaly remade graphics and an online mode. But if they'd do that, I'd just wonder why they didn't just release a proper sequel with a more modern single player campaign and a modern physics engine.

With online.