What I Want from Nintendo's NX

There is plenty of speculation about Nintendo's next home console but perhaps less excitement than there needs to be if it is to take a substantial part of the market.  With the Wii U being neither old nor successful, and with Xbox One and PS4 both still being quite new and seeming like good performers technically, gamers might be wondering what Nintendo can offer.  The Wii U had plenty of charming, good quality Nintendo-published content but that did not help it's sales.

So here is a run-down of some of the important things Nintendo has to do with the hardware to make it outsell Xbox One (not impossible) and take a decent chunk of the home console marked.

Power

The hardware has to match the PS4 for power in order that 3rd party developers have no doubts about the consoles ability to run their games.  It might also instill confidence in consumers that there will be a decent range of games available for the machine, not just excellent but numerically limited Nintendo releases.

Price

The console will have to hit the shelves at no more than £250.  Dedicated gamers have had a lot of gear to pay for recently and might resent being asked to fork out again.  Especially by a developer which is releasing another home console so quickly and is so fond of keeping the prices of its own games so high.  If sales were slow to start with this would dent the confidence of both developers and slower up-take consumers.

Backwards Compatibility

Wii U games will have to work and work well on the NX.  This might well mean patching some to work not only with new hardware but with a new controller.  This brings me on to my next point...

Controller

In order to keep costs down for themselves and life simple for developers Nintendo have to release the NX with a relatively standard gaming controller perhaps like the Wii U pro controller.  They have to face the facts that the days of the Wii are over and release a gaming machine which is 

 

What's wrong with this?

designed with gamers in mind.  Therefore reverting to the Wii controller would be a mistake.  Including two controllers in the basic package would be too awkward financially.

Even if they do all this I still think Nintendo will have to incentivise publishers to release their games on the NX, at least at first.  This and the high powered console at a reasonable price will mean that Nintendo can expect the machine to be loss making to start with, just not as loss making as releasing another flop.

Well that's what I think.  Please feel free to leave your comments below and don't forget to follow this blog using the link in the right hand column and visit my YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/petracogaming

More next Tuesday...

Past Perfect

From now on I mean to update this Blog every Tuesday.  This entry might seem a bit negative but I hope future ones will be more upbeat.  Please remember to follow me using the button in the right column.  You can also visit my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/petracogaming.

I recently read an article in gamesTM issue 167 about the development of the Xbox 360 and couldn’t help feeling that the interviewee, J Allard, who was a senior developer on the team which designed the console, had rather a selective memory about how good the machine was and the extent of its commercial success.

The 360s true contribution to gaming posterity was a negative one and one for which gamers are still literally paying.  “From a business point of view we had a few simple goals…it was to exceed ten million Xbox Live subscribers within five years,” boasts Allard.  He continues “From an experience point of view we wanted to deliver a console that…felt incomplete if you were offline”.

I find it cynical that Allard is proud to have created something which you could pay £250 for only to get it home and find that you had not finished forking out; and never would.

Allard also claims that the team working on the Xbox 360 foresaw the advent of digital distribution of games and add-on content and the demise of physical media and that the rest of the games industry had to be dragged along.  "...the industry didn't have faith in...downloadable content or digital distribution."  He says.

Given that the first model of the 360 had a 20 GB hard drive I find it hard to believe that Microsoft were anticipating an era of downloadable games in 2002.  More likely Allard is retrospectively trying to trivialise PS3s superior Blue-ray media.  He is also disregarding the fact that, even though Xbox One and PS4 both have substantial hard drives almost all triple-A games are still released on disc.

Allard's insecurities about Sony's higher capacity discs seem to be exposed again when he he later comments "we spent a stupid amount of time on stuff like HD-DVD in response to the competition...A new format for high-resolution movies was not important to us...the HD-DVD effort was a good example of how worrying about the competition can take you off your game."

I read this as meaning "we tried with HD-DVD, it didn't work out for us."

After the Xbox 360 project was over Allard worked first on developing Zune (Microsoft's iPod) and then on a prototype tablet called Courier.  After those two unqualified successes he "retired" from Microsoft and now runs his own bicycle security software company.

As for the 360s commercial success?  In the Anglo-Saxon world it was a massive hit, but this regional success tends to inform the view of many English speaking commentators.  Worldwide Xbox 360 was outsold both by the Wii and (marginally) by the PS3 making it the least successful home console of it's generation.

I am a PlayStation owner and player but I do not criticise Xbox for the sake of it.  Xbox 360 was an excellent machine.  It is J Allard and his selective memory I object to.

A disService to a Rally Game.

Yesterday I found in the Oxfam Bookshop close to where I live a copy of Sega Rally for the PS3 for £2.99 new and sealed!  I felt like a thief buying it and will feel like a vandal when I open it.  I almost feel that it is a shame that games are sometimes undervalued by some shops, even though another part of me enjoys finding and buying games at a bargain price.

I am almost tempted to sell it and buy myself a second hand copy on ebay but I know I won't.  It is on my list of PS3 games I still want and it was cheap so I suppose I'm allowed to have it but I have not played much of Motorstorm yet so I will play more of that before I move on to another racing game.

inFamous - Bourne to be Bad

Today a posted a new video on my YouTube channel.  It is a quick sample of gameplay from the first Infamous game on PS3.  You can watch it here: (apologies, I have since removed this).

I have so far found the game fun to play and there seems to be plenty to do.  In one mission it was quite hard to find the locations I was supposed to be visiting but generally it has been well signposted.

This is one of quite a few PS3 games I've been posted sample videos of lately.  You can find a link to my YouTube channel in the left column of this page.

One PS3 game I have played lately but will not be posting a clip of is The Bourne Conspiracy.

The Bourne films contain intense fighting and shooting and great improvisation by the lead character.  Think of the first film where JB is in a house in a remote part of France and looks around to find a shotgun and ammo and then shoots a propane tank to create a plume of smoke and moves around a wide area under the cover of it.  In the second film he fights using a rolled up magazine as a weapon.

In both scenes you are given the sense that if these improvisations had not been available he would have thought of something else; as you are at other points in the trilogy.  The Bourne Conspiracy features no choices or opportunities for using initiative.  Just linear and clumsy shooting and fighting.  I cannot recommend it.  The only proviso I would make to this is that I could stand so much and no more so have not played the game to the end.

New Playlist on YouTube: Neverwinter Nights 2

I have recently started putting new vids on my YouTube channel so I am also going to re-start using this blog to make a diary of all my gaming related activity.  This will include what I am playing, what I am watching and posting on YouTube and my thoughts on what I read in the gaming media.

I have recently started a playthrough of Neverwinter Nights 2.  I have not played the game for a good while so in the early videos I am feeling my way a bit but I am now up to part 14 (the clips are generally 15-20 minutes long), and I'm getting a bit more fluent.

This is a link to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/PetracoGaming/featured

The characters and script of the game are where it's charm is and plenty of more modern and technically sophisticated games could learn a thing or two from it.  Whenever a new character is introduced it is obvious that the writers have made an effort to develop them rather than simply writing them a few lines which are purely for information.

Well done to Obsidian for this classic but will there ever be a Neverwinter Nights 3?