Nintendo on the other hand is showing immense foolishness now that they've actually got their system out and selling. Miyamato's GDC keynote was a retelling of everything we already know and a slideshow.
Okay, I actually did find it a worthwhile thing; after all, this is the game developer's conference, not E3. He is talking about game development in general and that's a great thing. From the perspective of doing something constructive that fits with GDC's way, his keynote was pretty decent.
However, Nintendo's biggest release lately seems to have been the voting channel for Wii, while at the same time Sony is pulling out ginormously complicated things like this.
Hopefully for them, they are just keeping something really big really secret because otherwise they are lately being really dumb. Nintendo has been practically silent since January and they continue to tote the past as if last year's successes will last them for eternity.
Yes, I know Nintendogs worked. What else works?!
The worst thing is that Nintendo has now decided to port all their successful innovations from the DS over to the Wii. Surprise! People - more people, in fact - have already played the DS games! Brain Age and Cooking Mama are not the sorts of games you make a franchise out of and I really do hope that they imediately stop sequelizing them and return to their sadly ignored ideas room.
As for Sony's Home, it looks very well implemented so far but I am a bit of a sceptic until I can actually see it living on a PS3. Have we seen how they get from the menu to there? For this to work, it has to be seamless. It has to feel like "Home" is an extension of the interface rather than a whole heap of bloat hanging off the back. The novelty will wear off, and when it does people will be thinking: "Why do I have to load this whole thing and connect to the Internet just to play bowling?". That is, unless it is seamless.
I used to frequent a web site called Cybertown, which uses VRML to provide a user-run 3D web site. This was ages before the whole Web 2.0 craze, but it was (and is, though it has stagnated) certainly a very open-ended thing. Almost all of the content was user-created, peoples' avatars were their own, peoples' homes were decorated in all sorts of interesting ways... Really a big role-playing thing, where the whole gist of it is effectively getting meaningless 3D objects to put in your meaningless 3D home. People submit objects to the mall, from where they are sold if accepted. (You can make virtual money from sales of your objects, of course).
VRML, though a terrible language, is a cool idea. It integrates with Javascript so stuff can be given all sorts of fancy scripting, and user content is really easy because an object in a scene can come from anywhere. For example, my Cybertown avatar was hosted on my own web space.
Anyway, my point is that Sony's stuff here is similar though a lot more modern. Little Big Planet sounds like openness is its middle name, though I wonder about Home...
Okay, I actually did find it a worthwhile thing; after all, this is the game developer's conference, not E3. He is talking about game development in general and that's a great thing. From the perspective of doing something constructive that fits with GDC's way, his keynote was pretty decent.
However, Nintendo's biggest release lately seems to have been the voting channel for Wii, while at the same time Sony is pulling out ginormously complicated things like this.
Hopefully for them, they are just keeping something really big really secret because otherwise they are lately being really dumb. Nintendo has been practically silent since January and they continue to tote the past as if last year's successes will last them for eternity.
Yes, I know Nintendogs worked. What else works?!
The worst thing is that Nintendo has now decided to port all their successful innovations from the DS over to the Wii. Surprise! People - more people, in fact - have already played the DS games! Brain Age and Cooking Mama are not the sorts of games you make a franchise out of and I really do hope that they imediately stop sequelizing them and return to their sadly ignored ideas room.
As for Sony's Home, it looks very well implemented so far but I am a bit of a sceptic until I can actually see it living on a PS3. Have we seen how they get from the menu to there? For this to work, it has to be seamless. It has to feel like "Home" is an extension of the interface rather than a whole heap of bloat hanging off the back. The novelty will wear off, and when it does people will be thinking: "Why do I have to load this whole thing and connect to the Internet just to play bowling?". That is, unless it is seamless.
I used to frequent a web site called Cybertown, which uses VRML to provide a user-run 3D web site. This was ages before the whole Web 2.0 craze, but it was (and is, though it has stagnated) certainly a very open-ended thing. Almost all of the content was user-created, peoples' avatars were their own, peoples' homes were decorated in all sorts of interesting ways... Really a big role-playing thing, where the whole gist of it is effectively getting meaningless 3D objects to put in your meaningless 3D home. People submit objects to the mall, from where they are sold if accepted. (You can make virtual money from sales of your objects, of course).
VRML, though a terrible language, is a cool idea. It integrates with Javascript so stuff can be given all sorts of fancy scripting, and user content is really easy because an object in a scene can come from anywhere. For example, my Cybertown avatar was hosted on my own web space.
Anyway, my point is that Sony's stuff here is similar though a lot more modern. Little Big Planet sounds like openness is its middle name, though I wonder about Home...