darkjak

I'm fine with original ideas. But when Nintendo start abusing loved franchises rather than just making an evolved version, then that pisses me off. Wind Waker would've been fine, if they didn't try to market it as a Zelda game! And then we have purely lame stuff like Wii Music which shouldn't even be released. Back in the N64 days, a week didn't go by without Nintendo magazines getting letters with people asking if there'd be a GT-beater for the N64. And in every single preview or review of a realistic looking racing game, magazines commented that the N64 lacked a good racer. Since then, many Nintendo fans have stopped being Nintendo fans, quite simply because the games they were expecting didn't happen. Do you really consider Excitebots an evolution over Excitetrucks? For gods sake, it's not original, it's just a rehash of Excitetrucks with pwetty wobots in it. Well yeah, if Nintendo were listening to their fans they'd know that New Zelda= Best Game EVAH! Yes. They brought out multiple games instead of just launching one game. Hence it's like Pokémon. What games didn't make those mistakes? Like what? When it comes to for example the portable Zeldas, I've not heard that much positive being said about them. Some argue that SA is as good as SM64. I personally, along with a lot of other people prefer Virtua Fighter over Tekken. And for the time Sega GT was a good evolution over Gran Turismo (although in turn Sega GT looked dated as soon as GT3 came out). Sega didn't need to bring out their own FPS, because the DC got all the latest and greatest FPS games. But even in spite of that, they brought out Outtrigger. Also, there was a monster collecting game in Sonic Adventure. You're talking like Nintendo was just one team. Nintendo have lots of teams, and in case they don't think they have people who could make a good sim, then they can recruit people that they do know are able to pull it off. One of my teachers has constantly said one thing: game developing is 5% creativity and 95% work. If you have good management only the budget decides how good the game comes out. Creativity is not actually a necessity. Why did Duke Nukem Forever take so long to get finished? Bad manegement. When you're a small company, you can't afford to make AAA games and hence you develop something original that hopefully will catch peoples eyes. However, most people do want MORE and BETTER. Of course, no two games are alike, because the team that develops it naturally has their own style. I'm focusing on being a level designer and my levels are unique, just like anyone elses. Of course. But as I've previously stated: why won't Nintendo start recruiting a buckload of people? They have the financial resources for sure, and they do seem to be unable to pump out the games they should. Actually no. But nothing indicated that that game would be easier. The toony graphics actually showed Nintendo were more aiming towards kids (not saying WW actually was childish, just that it was received that way and probably marketed that way as well). We all have original ideas of our own. And we're all pretty certain we'll never be allowed to make any of them. There are two things you have to take in to consideration What the heck prevents BW from doing exactly that: a modern military shooter with elaborate and branched stories. I for one would be thrilled, as I think that the stories in CoD aren't the slightest bit interresting. That said, the people at BW like to do their own thing. Nintendo should make a GT beater to start winning back the core and because that'll make the Wii more appealing to more people. Further more, Gran Turismo is not a simulator, no matter what the games slogan is. It's Need for Speed with over a thousand cars and no cop chases. Because you're wrong. Just because I want to develop a military shooter for example, doesen't mean that I have to make it like CoD. By better I don't mean that it's got better graphics or more levels. It can be that the entire fundamentals of the game have changed. Like instead of taking place in the middle east, it'll take place on the Falklands during the 80's. Instead of being a corridor shooter, the levels will be much more open. And instead of being a lonely elite soldier, you're just a regular private dependant on his platoon. I've previously said that GT isn't a simulator. However, games that pretend to be simulators, like GT and Forza do sell really well, so it's hardly a niche. GT (along with FFVII and a few others) is what essentially made the PS1 a success.

Nintendo are a first party developer and they should go to any lengths to make sure their console has a competitive range of games. Sega never made realistic games either. Yet they released Sega GT and Shenmue. A CoD-beater from Bioware would've been interesting. Even if they'd make a modern military shooter, it would still be a Bioware game and Bioware would undoubtedly have their own spin on things.v Just like if Nintendo were to make a GT-beater, I wouldn't actually want them to have real racetracks, Instead I'd like their levels to be very scenic, sort of how they are in Mariokart or the older Need for Speed games. That Nintendo haven't done anything before shouldn't stop them. If so, then they never would've done the motion stuff. I think that developers should listen. However, that you listen doesen't mean you have to obey. I'm currently studying game development and I've had to take feedback on my work as well. At times it's just frankly been stupid feedback, but at times I've actually had to realise that my idea is flawed and that it needs to change. Nintendo on the other hand live in their own world and waste time and money on games that deminish their reputation. I for one would have loved to see Nintendo go forward with the Zelda game they displayed at E3 2000. Quite simply a "realistic" Zelda with a much higher difficulty level than WW.

Which company do you consider to be the successor to Rare? For those who are a bit young, Rare were, second to Nintendo, the main developer for the N64. They brought out everything from platformers (Donkey Kong 64, Conkers Bad Fur Day, Banjo Kazooie), racers (Diddy Kong Racing, Mickeys Speedway), action games (Blast Corps, Jet Force Gemini) and first person shooters (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark). All these games were awesome and until this day I regret I didn't get Jet Force Gemini or Conkers Bad Fur Day while it was reasonably cheap. But quite exactly 10 years ago Nintendo sold their shares in Rare to Microsoft and since then there have been no Rare games for Nintendo consoles and to be honest, Rare haven't released a single good game since then. It's gone so far that Microsoft don't see them worthy of developing anything with a mention worth budget. So, what company is worthy of filling this gap? To me the only two studios that could be in question are Retro Studios and High Voltage. What are your thoughts?

That's simply enough because you're not car enthusiasts in real life. I on the other hand am a car enthusiast and if I could, I would spend my weekends at the race track. I have a 360 and I play Forza a lot. To me, it's not the one or the other. While I like a game that contains pretty much every car I would ever dream of buying (and if it doesen't contain it, I can be sure that it'll become DLC very soon), I've enjoyed 1080 on the GC, Waverace on the N64 and F-Zero on both. What I haven't enjoyed at all, however has been Excitebots. Nintendo are wealthy as trolls, so they can pretty much hire every single dude and gal whose finished studying game development on the planet and start churning out games!

I'm going to add what I have to call Wiis graphically most uneven games. Some areas are blocky like an N64-game, while others are frankly jaw droppingly gorgeous. Disaster Day of Crisis And then there's the frankly obvious stuff.

I think that Nintendo need to do a whole lot of listening. Nintendo fans have been asking for a Gran Turismo beater for 14 years and Nintendo haven't even made an attempt to answer the prayers. Nintendo keep launching stuff like Wii Music, while the Wii lacks F-Zero, Stafox, Waverace, 1080 among a very long list of other things. Nintendo have also diminished the value of the Zelda franchise. Where basically all games up until Ocarina of Time (not counting the CD-i crap) were killer aps, Nintendo have now started to spit out too many Zelda games. The reason TP received criticism wasn't that it was dark, I loved the graphics in that game. TP received criticism because it wasn't what a Zelda game was supposed to be in 2006. I'm afraid that neither Skyward Sword will be where it's supposed to be. Firstly, we've been bombarded with Zelda games for the last decade. The Oracle-games (attempting to do a Pokémon-ish thing), the two frankly mediocre DS games, Crossbow Training, that GC Zelda you needed a GBA to play among many others. All this has made Zelda much less special. Anything with Zelda in its name should be THE killer app for a console. If a console is to receive a second Zelda, the second Zelda should be the NEW killer app for the system. Let me explain. When Ocarina of Time was released, it pushed its console to the limit. The graphics were richly detailed and Nintendo pushed the interactivity farther than any other game had before. The first time I played it, I got stuck as I didn't realise that you could set fire to a stick and then use it to set fire to something else in a videogame. And the amount of cutscenes put all the PS1 games with FMV to shame. Plus that every single NPC in the entire game had something unique to say. And it was the first game with a day/night cycle and random weather. Basically, Nintendo did everything that wasn't supposed to be possible on cartridge based consoles. What Nintendo have been doing since then has been to tweek the OoT formula. They've just made new levels and different graphics for a 12 year old game. And thus TP left a lot to ask. Why was the music still in Midi? Why did the overworld consist of tight passages rather than a single huge open area? Why didn't they use voices? Why weren't there any side quests? OK that the surroundings are dark, but why were they BLAND? Whose bright idea was it to put Kakariko in a narrow, brown canyon instead of having an interresting, open look in OoT style? Why was the castle town so small? Beyond Zelda we have the question of Nintendo doing really stupid stuff with for example Starfox (on foot sections? drawing out where you should go with the stylus?) or the Excite series (Excitetrucks was an interresting deviation, Excitebots was just retarded, just give us a proper sequel to Excitebike 64!). So yes, please ask! And ask the people who give two shits about what they buy!

My wishlist: Return of the still MIA franchises. Excitebike (not Excitetrucks, Excitebots or Excitegnomes, I'm talking about a worthy successor to Excitebike 64), Pilotwings, Waverace, F-Zero, Starfox and that lot. Players Choice: At least here in Sweden bestsellers like Smash Bros and Mariokart have only dropped like 5 euros in price since launch. Nintendo should release a Players Choice lineup where these games get their prices sliced in half. A good Nintendo exclusive racer. I'm not talking about Mariokart, I'm talking about something similar to Gran Turismo or the old Need for Speed games. Of course since it'll be first or second party, the graphics will utilise the power of the Wii really well and a real effort will be put in to it. Dreamcast collection: A big collectors box or a series of compilation discs where a bunch of Dreamcast ports and light remakes are included. Shenmue I&II, Daytona USA 2001, Metropolis Street Racer, Virtuafighter 3tb, Skies of Arcadia, Sega Rally, Sega GT, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi 2 and Jet Set Radio.

This is probably going to be the first game I'll buy for the 3DS. I've wanted a new PW for over 10 years. What I want from the next game: AT LEAST four levels. Return of the attack helicopter, birdman suit and spring boots.

Please explain.

My mum just bought a brand new Sony HD TV with a piano black finish. However, obsessed with cleanlyness as she is, she saw fingerprints on the frame and tried to polish them off with the sleeve of her sweater, which in turn scratched it. And now she wants to do something about that. So, any suggestions on how to get rid of those tiny scratches on the piano black frame?

There are several things that will change. Technically I think Nintendo need to look in to the following: 1) Storage Blu Ray A basic upgrade to the current technology. Very conventional, huge storage capacity. Issue is however the price of physical distribution and ease of piracy. DLC An all DLC-console will have a few upsides. Firstly, games will be cheaper due to the removal of manufacturing a physical disc+case+manual and also all the different middle hands. You'll loose the cost of adding a disc drive to the system, although that will probably be more than outweighed by the cost of a larger hard drive. An undoubtable con in this case is that people with no or bad internet will be alienated. Solid state cartridge Nintendo were to my knowlege the last to produce a stationary cartrdige based console. The reason they quit was firstly price and secondly limited storage. However now there are now completely new possibilities for the technology. Solid state has become mainstream. I remember buying a USB stick in about 2001. I thought it was awesome: 128 MB for so little money. And well, yesteryear, I bought another USB stick. It was 2GB and cost about a third of what I payed for the old one. Now Solid state drives are being sold for the PC, usually used to make the OS run smoother. With this drop in price and constant rise in storage capacity, it's a whole new ball game. Just like the electric car is coming back after being deemed obsolete nearly 100 years ago, we might get new cartridge based systems. On the plus side, cartridges are more difficult to pirate than discs/DLC and the loading times are virtually non existant. Also, there's no limitation on how much you'll be able to store on a solid state cartridge as time goes on. Plus we'll be able to see different kinds of enhancements built in to the cartridges. Cloud Cloud gaming is in my opinion the future of gaming. Piracy will be eliminated, as gamers never get their hands on the actual game. The console will be cheap and probably won't need to be replaced. EVER! The middle hands will yet again be gone, making games cheaper. Developers will be able to make better and better looking games without any regard beyond how powerful the servers are. With cloud gaming, Nintendo will be able to make the Wii produce graphics far superior of anything seen on the PS3 (although whether it'll be possible to display it in HD or not remains unanswered). Perhaps the Wii WILL be Nintendos last console ever after all! The con is yet again: Nintendo will alienate people with bad or no internet connections. Not only that, such a machine will probably be paid on a subscriber basis. The con is that some people might not like that. The pro with this is that good games will be much more profitable than bad ones. Let me explain: let us say that you pay a certain amount for the service, giving you an unlimited ammount of playtime for the entire game library for the system. Then Nintendo divide your subscription fees between the consoles formats depending on how much time you have played each game. So games that suck so bad that people only play it for an hour won't be as profitable as a game that's so good that you spend hundreds of hours playing it (Call of Duty, WoW or in my case: Zelda and Shenmue). That'll mean that games that have a small, but avid user base will be able to be more profitable than cheap to develop crap which fool a million people into buying it. 2) Controllers Improved Wiimote: Let's face it. There are flaws in the motion sensing in the Wiimote and nunchuck, and also some more general flaws. Nintendo could improve the pointer (perhaps so the remote'll be able to track movement even when it can't see the wand), and the motion sensing. Maybe a pointer in the nunchuck to remove the probem with turning in FPS games for the Wii. Perhaps the Z and B triggers could be made analogue to better suit racing games and the d-pad enlarged. Personally I'd like an adjustable pointer. Let me explain. In first person shooters you need to aim the controller at the screen. However, I find it straining to hold the controller in a horizontal fashion. I'd rather hold the controller vertically, like on let's say a real gun. Wiimote + camera: The Kinect idea is just stupid. The idea only works with a few casual games. But what if you mix that technology with the Wiimote. Then suddenly it'll be possible to adopt the tech into first person shooters (Imagine going prone for your character to go prone IRL or moving your right hand over your hand to throw a grenade). Brain controlled: The technology exists. Imagine getting rid of the interface alltogether. To be able to pick anything from the Zelda inventory without entering the pause menu. Or to be able to control your units in Starcraft as swiftly as those damn koreans. 3) Graphics PS3-level By the time the Wii2 will come out, the PS3 will be quite old. The raw horse power will be cheap to replicate. So Nintendo will be able to sell a cheap console capable of HD and whatnot. It'll be possible to cheaply port PS3 and XB360-games. The problem is however that the console will have the same issues as the Wii has now: a lack of ports of many popular games and a lacking quality on the ones that are ported. Also, Nintendo will have problems in expanding their demographics. Next-gen Nintendo could create a true next-gen system. A machine that can out brawn the PS3 by far. A machine that'll be on par with the other next gen systems, or in case Nintendo will be first, a machine that will set the standards (and undoubtedly be outrun by its competitors). I find this a bit unlikely, as Nintendo never sell a product at a loss, unlike Sony and MS. Cloud Cloud gaming means that the graphical quality won't be decided by the consoles, but by the power of their server fleet. A console for 100 Euros will be able to produce cutting edge graphics perhaps half a century after release! Proprietary viewing device It's possible that Nintendo invent their own viewing device especially made for the format. Maybe some kind of direct brainwave input system (unlikely), goggles, floating holograms or whatever.

Hopefully, everyone's at this point familiar with the term "cloud gaming". Essentially it's a system where your computer or console gets reduced to a "dumb terminal"- all it does is to send input from a control unit to another computer, which then sends output back. With OnLive, we have proof that the technology to make this work allready exists. So my thought is: why won't Nintendo make a cloud channel. It would mean an ability for using the Wiiware framework to distribute games that wouldn't fit on to Wii discs, much less the Wii's flash memory. Also, it would be possible to launch games that look like PS3 games or even better for the Wii. I've heard that the Wii actually DOES support HD, although such games would look really bad. That means that the Wii should be capable of playing HD cloud games. Such a service would eliminate piracy and restrictions of how many players parttake in an online multiplayer match. So what do you think about this?

Didn't Nintendo talk about this like when the WM+ was announced? And Nintendo are probably going to still be manufacturing Wiis in 5+ years, so it feels strange to have these little dongles compulsory to play many games. I think that six months from now, the Wiimote+ will be the default controller that'll be sold with all new Wiis.

Sure hope the game'll be compatible with this peripheral:

Too bad they didn't include the Swedish K SMG: Very strange, since it was a very popular gun among US Marines and CIA from Vietnam until at least the first Gulf war.

Off topic: Monica Bellucci! On topic: Wonder how the girls will look in this game.

Bean and Brosnan were the only ones that were really clear. Ourmov, Natalya and Xenia were barelly recognisable.

Plus like another 100 accessible via a button cheat. The graphics are much improved. Actually, the characters models look really good!

I remember how all the game mags used to give PDZ quite low marks. Plus I've played it and... well it was nowhere near the old game. I've downloaded PD for XBLA, and it's much better in nearly every way (PDZ has drop in multiplayer, which PD doesen't). The old game had 20 levels, PDZ had like 10. The old PD had more multiplayer settings (FIVE multiplayer skins and FIVE friggin maps? Is that the best you can muster after five years of development?). And beyond that, the singleplayer level design was stupidly flawed. In fact so stupidly flawed that Rare had to add visible lines on the floor to show people where they're supposed to go. The controls were sluggish, the guns weren't fun and the graphics were SO DARK! In essence, they took all the bad stuff from PD1 and kept it (even the framerate issues), then they removed all the good stuff (for example, while PD and even Goldeneye had random heads on the NPC's, PDZ had a clone army). And to stay with the times they added a stupid toony character design and a useless cover system. Sure, PDZ sold well, but interest vanished quite quickly. Just go to Game and have a look. I got my copy of what's equal to about 5 euros a bit more than a year ago, and I still want my money back. Now the game's not even worth that much used. In my city Game have like 5 copies so now I believe they sold the games for 2 Euros (the cheapest game they have beyond antiques like Fifa 97 for the PC). They've gone that low because they can't get rid of them, and they're not willing to pay anything for getting more. I can't say that Viva is a bad game, but I don't find it very amusing either. Haven't played Kameo either. And how is it illogical that they moved a bad studio to making low budget games? If a company's not making enough money from premium products, they try to make cheaper to develop games and try to sell them to a more easilly pleased audience.

Rare quite officially suck nowadays. Even Microsoft are fed up with their stupid crap. I mean, come on! It took them FIVE fucking years to make Perfect Dark Zero. In fact MS are so fed up with them, they're now forcing them to make strictly casual games. Because Viva Pinata is the best game they've released for a DECADE! I used to love Rare. When I was a kid, that logo was in itself a seal of quality. I was devastated when Nintendo sold Rare.

"That helicopter looks EMP-hardened":nono: That's like saying "that car looks like it's Ipod-compatible", or "that computer looks like it's got a Photoshop installed". But this does look like a great game. I just hope the game won't be full of such stupid story solutions. And is it just me, or does Goldeneye seem to be as fast paced at the original, rather than modern games like CoD?

I'm not quite in that crowd. I'm more in the Zelda WAS always perfect-crowd. No truly good Zelda's been released since Wind Waker. Before then, however, every single one was awesome!

I think that Nintendo did a pretty clever thing actually. The PS3 and XB360's main selling points were graphics. That selling point has faded with time, and will continue to fade. The PS3 and the 360 will get shat all over when Nintendo launch their next gen console, and because the Wii was for the casual from the start, it will live on long after its successor has been released. Putting it simply, Nintendo have created an NES for the new century. Nintendo also created a new way to control games, which anyone including my mother can understand (she's quite literally started o play Wii Sports and New Mario Bros, and is now enjoying video games). However, there ARE complaints. Nintendoare rich as trolls, and should afford to start upp a whole bunch of new teams. They should also afford to buy exclusivity deals and invest in their second party developers. Retro Studios were working on four different games at the time of the GC's release.They were all canned to get Metroid Prime finished. Nintendo should give Retro financial resources to grow enough to become what Rare were in the 90's! It's been said a thousand times before, but Nintendo need to do something about the lack of high quality core games. So finally the Wii has got, and is getting good first person shooters (Goldeneye, Grinder, Conduit 1&2, Modern Warfare). But where are the fighters and racers? Couldn't Nintendo get Team Ninja to make a Dead or Alive game at the same time as Other M? Is it too much to ask to make a game on par with Gran Turismo 3 or Forza 1?

So I entered the homepage for Driver: San Francisco, and noticed it's going to get released for the Wii. I hope this isn't going to be rubbish, cuz I really liked the old Driver games!

I'm looking for a song, and I wonder if you could help me. In Fast & Furious Dom goes into a garage and nearly drops an engine on a guys head. My question, what's the background music in the beginning of that scene? It sounds really chill!