deanb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGzN-ursd2Y Some more VFX work. Nice that the office fist scene is miniatures. 3D printed ones at that.

Open Source however does mean the code is free to peruse and see how it was done, though I'm sure hiring on a few folks with mobile development knowledge probably isn't hard in this day and age. And apart from one being a physical on/off switch and the other a virtual on/off switch the control schemes aren't that far removed from each other, you're either pushing or you're not. I'm not suggesting they re-develop their older games to work with all the flicks, and hovers and swirls afforded by touch screens, just pure and simple emulation. No Wind Waker HD style remake. "Games as they used to be, IAP free!". It's a model that's worked well enough for GOG so far. The back catalog released on mobile isn't there there to save Nintendo, it's there to bandage them up. It's the radical change from their aging hardware policy focused mostly on local play using proprietary hardware that I'm suggesting would save them (at least in a way that wouldn't have them turning into Sega which is always the other option). - Continue plugging the Wii U - Drop the Wii U, Make Wii U 2 - Go the way of Sega - Become an Android console company If their IP was valuable in current games then the Wii U and 3DS wouldn't be doing absolutely shit at sales right now and this discussion wouldn't be happening. Their value is/was in being the "safe" choice, but Nintendo has been supplanted for that and never bother attempting to regain it and just slapped "U" on Super Mario Bros and called it job done. Keeping their 30 years of IP locked up or tied to failing hardware platforms is certainly not ideal either. Wii U sales exploded with the release of Wind Waker HD so there's definitely gold to be had in them there nostalgia hills. (See also aforementioned sales of FFIV on Android and GOGs successful business model).

Wait, why do we get the launch last? Gaikai already works here. The population density and availability of high speed internet also makes it much more practical and ideal for streaming purposes.

As for "stealing or buying", there's no one to buy it, and most emulators are actually open source making it about as easy to steal as air. On top of that I'd take a stab in the dark that the Virtual Console stuff suggests Nintendo has already figured the whole emulation of most of thier own consoles already. And *gasp* is able to talk to publishers about putting non-Nintendo games up there too. Is the irrational hatred a fair few gamers have of mobile as a gaming platform so great that folks would rather see Nintendo die in a ...well not even a burning wreck their demise is so unspectacular and boring, than even contemplate releasing titles to mobile platforms?

So ignoring the fact that Twilight Princess came out for Gamecube and Wii, a good 2-3 generations after the "pre-N64" stop-gap I mentioned before, let's get onto the stage where quite a lot of people have already got the ground work on emulation laid down and pretty much most of the library works too, and that's without needing Nintendo's enormous cash reserves. So I'm not really seeing it as an expensive endeavour beyond the whole "adding a bit of polish to what's already there, oh and slapping NintendoTM on the app somewhere". Oh and the $25/$99 Play Store/App Store cost which I guess Nintendo might struggle to cover.

Not just a decline over 3 years, but a non-Yamauchi helming the current decline. I imagine what's keeping him in place is the spurt from the Wii coming out. That did generate quite a bit of money for them.

Their hardware divisions would continue to bleed money anyway, both the Wii U and 3DS are fundamentally flawed and inflexible devices to deal with upcoming changes to the industry (heck, even now ancient ones like digital stores and decent multiplayer). The lack of momentum means less 3rd party support (which Nintendo already sabotaged last gen anyway) which means they just have Nintendo games to work with and Nintendos creativity in coming up with new game ideas leaves much to be desired. So use nostalgia to make up for current operating loss and knock out back catalog for iOS and Android. Then in 2015 with much of back catalog ported and released and some years after Wii U launch so it's not too much of a kick in the balls, release skinned up Tegra K2 android console designed to play the already existing and released back catalog and (my body is ready) Gamecube and Wii catalog *massive cheering* *twilight princess is shown* *oh and what's this* "And partnering with Nvidia and Valve you will be able to stream your favourite PC games into the living room as Nintendo's first Steam Machine" *Julie Larson-Green's head explodes* "Oh and I know Jack's going to be on his stage later, but he's here too to talk about the upcoming Gaikai partnership" *reddit crashes forever*. Later half is quite fanciful but it's a doable thing. Nintendo continues to stay in the hardware game while turning an enemy into an ally by using the larger manufacturing output, demand, and development to produce quite powerful machines on the cheap that utilise a common framework and Nintendo's years of games to refresh and revitalise the brand for years ahead. The only major snag with all of this is it'd actually require Nintendo to change as a company and the last time they did that was back in the 80's when they figured that these card thingies might not be the future anymore and knocked out the NES. It'd be like if some bright spark developed a rocket to put on side of Titanic when it was 200ft off the sea bed. Nintendo don't have a COD, they don't have an Angry Birds, they don't have a Minecraft or a Warcraft. They have a Mario and a Zelda. They don't stream, they don't do mobile, they barely do digital and online multiplayer. Nintendo and Disney are essentially the same company as far as how parents react to them. Disney and Nintendo are safe. A child can watch a disney film or play a Nintendo game and generally they're not going to be exposed to anything terrible. But that hasn't stopped Disney from adapting and changing, they do 3D animations, they have Marvel, and now Star Wars. Which are both quite "safe" franchises too, they're hardly making Sin City and Event Horizon. Angry Birds (incidentally includes Star Wars) is now a "safe" game and that's on phones and tablets. The Lego games (incidentally also with Marvel and Star Wars) are "safe" games and those are on everything. Nintendo is losing it's monopoly on being the "safe" choice and seemingly doing fuck all about it. PS4 and Xbox have the expensive, adult/teen friendly, high-def console market tied up safe and good, but this doesn't leave Nintendo as the only cheap, child friendly low-end gaming machine on the market anymore. They had that window to themselves in '06 and did quite well in that rare luck of the draw. But that window has gone and Nintendo seemed to think they could repeat the same trick twice.

http://research.google.com/bigpicture/music/ Using data pulled from Play Music, Google have put together a visualization of the popularity of each genre of music for each year over the last 60 years. If you click on the strands you can dig deeper and deeper into the data and find that "60's rock" was popular well into the 70's.... (I believe it's down to the Beatles, who even pop up at "60's rock" in the 90's)

But making home console hardware is their big issue at the moment. As for controls on phones don't forget up until N64 and 3DS most of their games were built for controllers that were just front buttons, which a phone screen would emulate well enough. And push come to shove there's the Moga and similar. Though I'm feeling deja vu on this front. There's 35million 3DS's in the world to get the Nintendo back catalog on the go. There's 200million iOS devices currently in operation (at least according to Apples figures for iOS7), and god knows how many Androids in the wild. S-E have managed to sell 100-500,000 copies of FFIV on Android for £11(!!!) a pop*, which isn't too bad. And I'd wager Nintendo have a much larger and more popular back catalog than S-E. I dunno, maybe my knowledge of mathematics is much worse than those brain boxes over at Nintendo who carry on rerunning their numbers lower and lower each month, but it seems like launching back catalog on mobiles is the way to go. *aka between £1-5million. Not a bad sum since the game was likely mostly paid for already in sales for the DS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGAWcVKDqxg Just found it really relaxing to listen to lately. Also Tron Legacy soundtrack was we watched it other day

Hah we watch it off the internees so no adverts. It really puts an advert before the theme tune even starts? Also I'd say he's main enough. Compared to some/many of the infrequent one off folks who are in.

A picture of the Red Dragon Board so you can understand the Drunk and Fortitude Red Piece is Fortitude (which drops from some drinks, but mainly from brawls and similar.) and clear is your drunkenness which increases with your drinks. Some drinks can reverse drunkenness, like coffee, and some heal you back up. There's also "chaser" cards. So "Elven Wine with a chaser" which means if you've an extra drink card (or in a drinking contest you draw an extra card) you have that too, and so on until you've ran out of chasers. My most was three in a row which I split my drinks.

So had my first after-hours session at Travelling Man (chain of board game/comic-type shops in UK). We played Red Dragon Inn first. Basic premise is you're all heroes drinking in a pub on a boat(I think we're only on the boat due to expansion) you have a board with 1-20 on it and two pieces, one being for your drunkenness and your other fortitude, if you're more drunk than you have fortitude left, or end up skint from gambling and similar acts, you're out the game as unconscious or thrown out. You draw to full hand, play a card, buy someone a drink then drink your drink(s) and make the appropriate changes to fortitude and drunkenness. I played a dwarf, and apart from the slight wording changes I didn't seem to have much in the way of special abilities like others do (my housemate was a druid so could change forms, guy to the left could "Mark" people and one of the lasses was a pet rabbit and could go into drunken rage). It took me a while to kinda get the grasp of it, I think we might have had a few too many players (we had expansions so had 9 of us) to keep on top of it all. I still don't fully grasp the Gambling aspect of it, especially since what seemed like my unique card had quite a lot of not very clear text on it that actually got passed around a few times to fully grasp what was going on (though I think there was some minor contention by the lass I'd used it against). I got taken out by a combination of bankruptcy and drunkenness (a special drink you pay off to pass to someone else, they ganged up on me on penultimate round. Ended up a draw cos kraken killed all who remained). We then played, though didn't complete, Sentinels of the Multiverse. Villain was Omnitron, my hero was Omnitron X. Who was quite fun to play given I could pretty much continue drawing and playing cards well in excess of everyone else. Though I'd only just got quite fully decked when we got told to pack up, from discussion on way home I think we'd have won in that round. It was certainly a game where you've really got to pay attention. I think we also needed a tad more space than we were afforded (we had to split our Red Dragon Inn group into two, the others played Bang. Could have done with whole table). Our main struggle was the Environment which was The Block, and we had a couple Prison Riots which took a while to deal with while trying not to get fucked by Omnitrons attacks (usually we blew his weapons up before they fired). I'd be up for giving it a proper spin though. I think we're having a board game party of sorts (btw that Red Dragon Inn is such an obvious contender for a drinking game, especially if you assigned an IRL drink to each in game drink. Ale, Wines, Rum, coffee, water,..holy water..) on Saturday so likely to play more then, and each Tuesdays for this Travelling Man gig.

Oh god. Very quick episode, mainly helped with the end being a trailer for the rest of the series. And I'm thinking it's going to be pretty damn good.

See the 360 controller became the main go to PC controller because essentially multi-plat devs just do a ctrl+c, ctrl+v on the control layout and poof it works on PC (which Windows Vista onwards by default support the controller and XP through a driver). The Xbox One controller is essentially the same controller (in buttons and functions) so I can't see that really changing much this gen when the only thing supporting Steam Controller by default is Steam OS. From a dev stand point you might as well have your game support the 360/xbox one layout mainly then use that on PC too and let Steam Controller users just kinda emulate 360 pad layout.

Given 360 controller has considerable support at the moment I think that'll take hold for a long time yet. And potentially DS4 will take over after that. Thing is the Steam controller isn't really designed as a controller in itself, but a replacement/hybrid for current controller and kb/m games.

I've been following this saga today on twitter. Polygon (and more specifically Arthur Gies) looking a bit silly(ier) now. Not sure I'll touch it, a lot of the (probably very correct) speculation on them making it now possible to work offline means that they're planning to try and grab as many folks with the change then turn off the servers in like 6 months time. Which means while it'll no longer be always online, it'll lose the MP functions that were a big part of making it always-online.

I'm not seeing the need for them to be different either. It's not like a case of whacking Advent Children Cloud in over the model in FFVII HD, they're both similar quality models between the 7th n 8th gen versions. There was nothing wrong with the original model either that needed fixing up. Maybe something wrong behind the scenes? Lack of licences on using likeness for platforms beyond the original 3? The lost/broke the original model files? Also second one in the second set she has a thousand yard stare going on instead of look of concern the first has that I imagine is the desired effect.

Via NeoStarr

http://socialreader.com/me/content/N54WK Some Star Wars shots from Peter Mayhew.

Which is which, also it looks mostly like different lighting, though bottom one has a less dirty arm (which would make me think top is the new one)