commented out

I am absolutely staying indoors today. Too many creepy people might know about this.

Take a look at these links:
Nintendo unveils controller for the Revolution
Nintendo Revolution Controller Demo Showcase on GameSpot

Now tell me that Nintendo hasn’t gone completely insane. They’ve protected this secret as if it were the meaning of life. Nobody is going to copy that; it’s way too different. It’s also a very large gamble for Nintendo to take. If this new controller can live up to three criteria, they may be on to something: accuracy, responsiveness, and easy for third-party developers to implement. Furthermore, Nintendo needs to launch the system with solid games that demonstrate that this is a good idea, and not just novelty games. Take the DS, for example. It launched along with Mario 64 DS, and came with a demo copy of Metroid: Hunters. That’s a good deal. Then they released touch-sensitive mini-games like WarioWare and Feel The Magic: XY/XX, along with Yoshi Touch n Go, which were all good, but they felt too gimmicky.

If this new device of theirs performs well and is coupled with some strong launch titles, Nintendo could feasibly beat out Microsoft and Sony, just on “cool factor” alone. Otherwise, they might be in a bit of trouble.

What’s one thing you can’t escape from in games, no matter how great your machine is? Loading. Play Half-Life 2, and you’ll load between levels. Morrowind? Lots of loading, as it threads the cells to simulate a seamless world. Pixel shading, bump mapping, vertex shading, mip-mapping, and all those other buzzwords are wonderful eye candy, but can’t we take a break? Both the Doom3 and Source engines look great. Oblivion’s engine looks fantastic. Slow down with the shaders and shiny stuff, and start putting your rendering power into seamless worlds.

I have no qualms with games looking the same for another couple of years, because they look incredible enough. So far, the Massive genre seems to have it. World of WarCraft? It loads for instances, and that’s fine for instances. Gothic didn’t load very much, and the game world was richer for it. I’m glad my Radeon X800 has a whole mess of texture memory and pixel piplelines, but let’s start putting that high-speed memory to better use than just huge textures, and start caching worlds. I’m sure this will all come to pass anyway, as the technology is reworked toward perfection, but I want it now, or at the very least really soon.