Nintendo Press Conference: Stream & Discussion

[Dyne]

On the SDK thing - holy mother of god. PS3 is the most frustrating dev kit ever.

Xbox SDK is great. PiX, which monitors framerate and performance, Watson, which logs game code useful for developers, DVD emulation, video capturing, and hell, debug menus come up right away. You load your build on to the xbox's developer hard drive, and you play it.

PS3 SDK is completely different. Performance stuff? Code that **** yourself. DVD emulation? Hah, you can either run a build off a computer hard drive, or burn a DVD every time, which gets costly. Debug menus? They take 10 seconds to come up, because it's not stored locally. Screenshots? Video? No. Sony hasn't even bothered.

The only thing the PS3 SDK has going for it is the logging software, and that's about as standard as it gets.

It has some powerful gears in there, but damn, there's no way anyone can expect to develop easily with that thing.

[Perfect Stu]

Originally Posted by Dyne

Wow Stu, I never thought the tables would turn like this.

How do you mean?

p.s. I think I'm going to enjoy this

[Dyne]

Oh I forgot to quote.

Well, at least Nintendo is getting smoked.

That could have been said more cleanly.

[Perfect Stu]

Originally Posted by Dyne

Oh I forgot to quote.



That could have been said more cleanly.

Oh, I forgot to clarify.

What tables have turned? How were the tables before?

[Dyne]

It means I'm the one not making stupid comments this time.

[Perfect Stu]

Originally Posted by Dyne

It means I'm the one not making stupid comments this time.

That's fair. I still love you Dyne.

[TheGame]

I know this is the Nintendo press conference thread, and its getting off track, buuut.. but I saw a good quote from Sony's VP of marketing: (Peter Dille)

I don't want to be argumentative, but I take issue with Microsoft either having a long tail, or being profitable, because they've never done either. They've never made a dime in this business, number one, and number two, they've never had a tail. They've never been successful enough to have a tail! So the notion of a back half of the curve doesn't exist for them. They stopped the Xbox and I kind of feel for the guy that bought an Xbox the month before they said 'we're out of business, we're moving on.'With the Xbox 360 you've got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don't, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD-DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a 10 year product? And by the way, it doesn't even work. Do they want to be selling it for 10 years and refurbishing them all for 10 more years? I don't think that's a 10 year product. You could disagree with me, or they could disagree with me, but I'd put that up against the PS3 any day.

Not sure, but I found that quote to be interesting.

[bobcat]

Originally Posted by Perfect Stu

That's fair. I still love you Dyne.

I can feel the love ^_^

[Jonbo298]

I felt more of a "meh" from Nintendo's conference this year. WiiFit is a good thing and all, but there wasn't alot of new "games" announced from Nintendo themselves like they usually do.

Hopefully next year is better.

[thatmariolover]

In honest truth, Nintendo's press conference was very disheartening for me. I am hoping they have some more stuff up their sleeves or I'll be a rather disappointed fan. Nintendo took the industry by storm this generation but they can only ride that hype wave for so long and once the momentum dies it's gonna come down to the games (which to this point, haven't been stellar save for a few titles).

There have been some good games, but all in all, only a few that really stand out. Many of Nintendo's Wii tuned sequels have been hugely gimmicky. I liked Wario Ware, it was fun, but it ignored standard play style and only focused on the new controller – whereas a combination would have been more difficult, diverse, and ultimately rewarding. It also shared a problem with Mario Party: The different play-styles weren't fun. The mini-games themselves weren't bad, but they lacked diversity, and ultimately contributed to games that felt stale far more quickly than their predecessors.

On the other hand, Nintendo has Metroid, Mario, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart on the way, which should guarantee at least a steady stream of hardware/software sales. But if there isn't something planned for soon after, we're gonna hit a long three quarter waiting period until the games showcased at next E3 are released. Which leads me to my next gripe: E3.

Where does Nintendo get off showing Wii Fit as their star title – not showing Smash Bros in even a video demo – let alone a playable format? Certainly Wii Fit is a novel concept, but all the same, it's not going to hit the Mainstream the same way Wii Sports did. It's cool, it's interesting, and ultimately probably should have been done. But making it the star of Nintendo's showing at E3 was a move that leaves me with questions to the motives. Did they not realize it wasn't going to hit the mainstream crowd? Or did they really just have nothing better to show? Neither answer bodes well for Nintendo's future in the coming few years.

I guess it just becomes wait and see. As for the PS3, Sony is just silly. They continue bad mouthing the competition and talking about the PS3 as if it were the hottest gadget on the market – when their sales were bad to start with and have steadily declined since launch day. Pride and arrogance do nothing to endear people to a brand name – it simply makes their smug fanboys smugger regardless of reality.

Their SDK issues are nothing new. God of War looking better than first generation PS2 titles isn't really something to talk up. It underscores how poorly the dev tools Sony provided their programmers with were designed. And it begs the question 'why didn't they do better this time around'. They seem to have failed to recognize that hardware without the proper tools to make software is worthless. And until developer libraries are fleshed out and distributed properly it's going to be an ongoing issue.

Bah, I've said enough. It's late and I'm exhausted.