Nintendo, What Went Wrong

[cimerians]

They should sell to Apple...call em Napple, nipple....

[Flojomojo]

I agree with everything above except selling out to Sony, et al. The day Nintendo sells out is the day they pull a "Sega". Releasing games on Sony or other platform is admitting defeat. Mobile is a different horse however, but Nintendo will not release games on mobile because mobile devices cannot provide the kind of game experience Nintendo is accustomed to providing because no buttons...

Nintendo does seem very proud, if one can apply personal characteristics to a big corporation.

 

They're doing Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing on mobile soon. Those games should work great with touch controls. Hopefully they won't junk them up with greedy in app purchases.

 

Miitomo is slowing down. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/273734

[Flojomojo]

They should sell to Apple...call em Napple, nipple....

I don't think Apple would know what to do with them. They never really supported games. Their "benign neglect" of the App Store is the best thing they've ever done, building an ecosystem and marketplace but leaving the creative stuff to developers. People who don't enjoy it can say it's a toilet, but the good stuff in there is where I like to spend my gaming time and attention nowadays. It's the true heir to classic gaming as far as I'm concerned.

[BillyHW]

1. True

 

2. True

 

3. The SNES won it's generation so what does that matter?

 

4. Aside from the Neo Geo it's the most powerful system of its generation so what does that matter?

 

5. I suppose

 

6. Still won it's generation

 

7. It definitely is

 

But waiting too long to release the SNES and then releasing with a too slow CPU, and no backwards compatibility opened the way for Sega to grab a huge chunk of the market and Nintendo's total dominance was destroyed forever.

 

The Wii still won it's generation on paper, but it also did a great amount of damage to Nintendo's reputation in the long run, associating it with being underpowered, kid stuff, not serious gamer stuff etc. Sometimes you can sell millions of something but still do damage to your reputation over the long run.

[Schizophretard]

If only something like THIS had existed, someones concept for a machine that existed before the original NES and SuperNES, hell I would STILL love to have this. Funny thing is these types of games could actually be delivered as a supplemental library on Nintnedo's next system which would certainly satisfy the die hard Nintendo fans. I suspect though if what you see in the article were dropped in today's market I would still be nore excited for it than whatever Nintendo is actually planning with NX etc.

 

Meet The Famicube, The NES Successor That Only Exists In A Parallel Universe

 

 

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/05/art_meet_the_famicube_the_nes_successor_that_only_exists_in_a_parallel_universe

 

 

 

 

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/05/art_meet_the_famicube_the_nes_successor_that_only_exists_in_a_parallel_universe

 

Even TODAY it would rock and could be done cheaply and easily with today's low end hardware boards. Hey Nintendo keeps proving they are not into competing powerful hardware so why not embrace that stance fully?

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/05/art_meet_the_famicube_the_nes_successor_that_only_exists_in_a_parallel_universe

 

Now, I would buy that in a Jaguar shell!

[Andromeda Stardust]

I Like the Famicube look. However floppy disks would have severely limited the game size, but more importantly affected longevity of the media. Any SNES title over 1.5 Mb would not be possible on a floppy disk, assuming that they were high density 1.44Mb. Early games like Super Mario World could even fit on a single 720Mb disk, but you would have loading times to deal with in addition to juggling multiple disk for larger games. You've also got piracy issues. Assuming a 1.44Mb disk, you could crack open the case and rip/burn images with a standard floppy drive, then reseal them as a new game. Such disks would be very easy to manufacture.

[Pixelboy]

I believe Nintendo's biggest mistake was taking third-party developers and publishers for granted, and always staying behind one generation technologically in order to keep their latest console "affordable". Over time, these two points have become mutually exclusive: You cannot expect third-parties to develop for "older" technology while also developing for "cutting-edge" technology (i.e. Microsoft and Sony's consoles) mostly because high-profile console games have become so large and complex that there MUST be easy ways to convert assets over from one console to the other to make the effort profitable. This implies that Nintendo's console needs to be on par with other consoles of the same generation, especially in terms of graphic chips, RAM and data storage.

 

As the Wii and Wii U demonstrated, there's no point in porting high-profile titles for a "technologically inferior" console, since the "inferior port" will get trashed by critics and social media alike, and the end result will be that most people will flock to the same games on superior consoles. You can call those people "graphic whores" if you like, but that's how the world turns. Those that took a chance with Nintendo (especially in the early days of the Wii U) ended up saying "Yeah, instead of releasing games on Nintendo's inferior/gimmicky console, we should have invested our resources in new PS4 and Xbox One titles, it would have been more profitable for us." Today, many third-party devs won't even take a chance with Nintendo anymore, to the benefit of Nintendo's competitors.

[Serguei2]

I Like the Famicube look. However floppy disks would have severely limited the game size, but more importantly affected longevity of the media. Any SNES title over 1.5 Mb would not be possible on a floppy disk, assuming that they were high density 1.44Mb. Early games like Super Mario World could even fit on a single 720Mb disk, but you would have loading times to deal with in addition to juggling multiple disk for larger games. You've also got piracy issues. Assuming a 1.44Mb disk, you could crack open the case and rip/burn images with a standard floppy drive, then reseal them as a new game. Such disks would be very easy to manufacture.

 

It would be possible if a game included with more one disk.

 

The player would need to swap disks to play.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

It would be possible if a game included with more one disk.

 

The player would need to swap disks to play.

And also deal with loading times and swapping out which would be a PITA. I think the Famicom Mini Cube form factor would be a sweet case for a custom Game Cube mod though. The slot loading drive could accept Game Cube mini discs instead of Floppies...

[JamesD]

N64 - carts instead of CD
Gamecube - too slow

Wii - not HD and too slow. HD TVs dropped in price rapidly and anything not HD dropped in popularity
Wii U - Buy it, it's as fast as their last gen!

Relying on controller gimmicks to sell consoles ever since Donkey Kong Country's bongos
We are Nintendo, people will buy our product because we have popular characters

[cimerians]

 

Relying on controller gimmicks to sell consoles ever since Donkey Kong Country's bongos

We are Nintendo, people will buy our product because we have popular characters

 

 

When I posted a picture of an Xbox 360 controller I meant it. I mean, I had fun with the Wii and to some minor degree the gamepad on the Wii U but that time is gone and I don't want it coming back. Just want a standard traditional controller on a launch system that doesn't focus on any other nonsense. Also put a Mario game as a pack in (or heaven forbid my prayer of packing in a Zelda game). They want swipe controllers, wands and pointy things on the NX? Make them accessories, not pack ins. I don't want a 'new way to play', I didn't ask for it. Stop forcing me to play games on a controller.

 

None of my wishes will come true of course. No, 1991 and my fond memories of buying an SNES will never happen again.

 

[MotoRacer]

N64 - carts instead of CD

Gamecube - too slow

Wii - not HD and too slow. HD TVs dropped in price rapidly and anything not HD dropped in popularity

Wii U - Buy it, it's as fast as their last gen!

 

Relying on controller gimmicks to sell consoles ever since Donkey Kong Country's bongos

We are Nintendo, people will buy our product because we have popular characters

 

 

Ok, I agree on your other points, but the GameCube was NOT slow. The DC and PS2 hold the trophies for the weakest hardware of that generation, while the Xbox and GC are tied for most powerful (Xbox is better in some areas, GC is better in others).

 

That doesn't mean the GC was without problems. Hardly any online play, no dvd support, and comparatively weak 3rd party offerings certainly did it no favors, nor did the lunch box exterior. But the system was pretty damn powerful for its time.

[Mord]

 

Ok, I agree on your other points, but the GameCube was NOT slow. The DC and PS2 hold the trophies for the weakest hardware of that generation, while the Xbox and GC are tied for most powerful (Xbox is better in some areas, GC is better in others).

 

That doesn't mean the GC was without problems. Hardly any online play, no dvd support, and comparatively weak 3rd party offerings certainly did it no favors, nor did the lunch box exterior. But the system was pretty damn powerful for its time.

 

Pretty much agreed although I wouldn't really hold the online play issue against it given the market leader at the time, PS2, was in the same boat. To most people back then it just wasn't that big an issue - although they should have been taking notes about how Microsoft was doing things with Live at the time for when the Wii launched. And they should have picked a better name. When the PS3/360 gen launched, Online offerings had started to become more important to more people, and while Nintendo had an e-shop and the like, their method of doing things just turned a lot of serious gamers (The type that buy lots of games, even digitally) off.

[JamesD]

The Gamecube's PowerPC CPU is clocked faster than the PS2's MIPS, but the specs I saw list it at 1.9 GFLOPS vs the PS2's 6.2 GFLOPS.
Or is the Wiki misleading?

[MotoRacer]

The Gamecube's PowerPC CPU is clocked faster than the PS2's MIPS, but the specs I saw list it at 1.9 GFLOPS vs the PS2's 6.2 GFLOPS.

Or is the Wiki misleading?

 

 

 

Dude, you can't go off of crappy ports to determine the power of a console. The GC was more powerful, and that's not even up for debate. Not trying to sound rude, but this has been proven time and time again.

 

Processor Clock Freq:

GC: 485mhz

PS2: 294mhz

 

Processor:

GC: 203 mhz

PS2: 147mhz

 

System Floating-Point Arithmetic:

GC: 10.5 GFLOPS

PS2: 6.2 GFLOPS

 

Instructions Per Second:

GC: 925 million

PS2: 30 million

 

Real-World Polygon Count Per Second

GC: 6 to 12 million

PS2: 2 to 4 million

 

Total System Memory:

GC: 40mb

PS2: 32mb

 

Furthermore, the PS2 wasn't capable of a lot of effects that its competition was capable of, including shaders. In fact, ALL it's competition had better effects available, even the DC, which could do bump mapping (along with GC and Xbox). PS2 wasn't capable of this, hence why a lot of its games looked very flat by comparison.

 

You also had other missing effects that the GC could do, such as anti-aliasing, bilinear filtering, and MIP mapping (which allows you to have multiple different resolutions of the same texture file in one file).

 

Again, the PS2 is a great system, and I still have one today and love it dearly. But even the little Dreamcast bested it in many ways. It was NOT as powerful as it was hyped to be, and you can look at a plethora of games from the GC and Xbox library to be able to see the graphic difference those systems afforded.

[BillyHW]

GameCube was more powerful than PS2 and pretty close to Xbox. The only thing is that the way it looked and the smaller discs led people to believe it wasn't as powerful.

 

Plus all the crazy hype before the PS2 launched about it being banned by the military for export and a lot of other hooey...

[atarilovesyou]

I'm just waiting for the remaining Wii U consoles to drop in price like the Wii did so I can scoop up the admittedly few great games.

[JamesD]

 

Dude, you can't go off of crappy ports to determine the power of a console. The GC was more powerful, and that's not even up for debate. Not trying to sound rude, but this has been proven time and time again.

 

Processor Clock Freq:

GC: 485mhz

PS2: 294mhz

 

Processor:

GC: 203 mhz

PS2: 147mhz

 

System Floating-Point Arithmetic:

GC: 10.5 GFLOPS

PS2: 6.2 GFLOPS

...

From the wiki:

"Initiating the GameCube's design in 1998, Nintendo partnered with ArtX (then acquired by ATI Technologies during development) for the system logic and the GPU,^[9] and withIBM for the CPU. IBM designed a PowerPC-based processor for the next-generation console, known as Gekko, which runs at 485 MHz and features a floating point unit (FPU) capable of 1.9 GFLOPS. Designed at 0.18 microns and described as "an extension of the IBM Power PC architecture", Gekko features IBM's reportedly then-unique copper-based chip manufacturing technology.^[8] Codenamed "Flipper", the GPU runs at 162 MHz and, in addition to graphics, manages other tasks through its audio and input/output(I/O) processors."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube

[Austin]

Yeah, the Game Cube was a really strong system. Research has shown that it was about on par with the XBOX despite its different architecture. XBOX still had the advantage because of its graphic capabilities (I don't believe the Game Cube GPU could do bump mapping, for instance), but that doesn't mean the Game Cube was a slouch. It was good hardware from that standpoint.

[MotoRacer]

Oh my jeebus guys, you're killing me.

 

The GameCube could do bump mapping. Look at Rogue Squadron 2 for a good example of this. In fact, Dreamcast, Xbox and Gamecube could do bump mapping. As previously stated, only PS2 didn't have this ability. The ps2 couldn't do 90% of the effects the other 3 systems could produce, like the ones I mentioned above.

 

As far as the GLOPS thing, it depends on what you're talking about. The processor, sure, it's 9.4. But the GC had some help from it's gpu as well, which had an overall rating of 13gflops. But that figure is subjective, depending on how you do the math. Hence the 10.5glops rating I mentioned before, as that's more of a real-world number.

 

Again, these comparisons have been done by people FAR smarter than anyone else here on this thread. It's common knowledge now that the GC far exceeded the PS2 in power and was similar to the Xbox, while the DC (unlike what was thought back in 2000-2001) was far more in line, power wise, to the PS2 than Sony had people think. To be honest, if it wasn't for the DVD support, I don't think the Playstation 2 would have been able to generate as much press as it did to effectively kill the DC before the PS2 even came out.

 

I think people need to also remember that most issues with GC ports came to fruition not because of the console's power, but because of the absurdly small mini discs they chose to use for the GC. Many multiplat games, including many sports games, had missing music, modes, etc simply because there wasn't enough room on one single disc, and it wasn't worth the additional cost or pain in the ass to insert a second disc to remedy the issue.

 

The GC also lost out on a few multiplat games due to the lack of buttons compared to the XBox and PS2. 3 triggers instead of 4 like with the PS2 (or two triggers and black and white buttons, per Xbox), and no click-in joysticks prevented games like Battlefront and Battlefront 2 from being ported over.

Edited May 30, 2016 by MotoRacer

[Austin]

Oh my jeebus guys, you're killing me.

 

The GameCube could do bump mapping. Look at Rogue Squadron 2 for a good example of this. In fact, Dreamcast, Xbox and Gamecube could do bump mapping. As previously stated, only PS2 didn't have this ability. The ps2 couldn't do 90% of the effects the other 3 systems could produce, like the ones I mentioned above.

 

As far as the GLOPS thing, it depends on what you're talking about. The processor, sure, it's 9.4. But the GC had some help from it's gpu as well, which had an overall rating of 13gflops. But that figure is subjective, depending on how you do the math. Hence the 10.5glops rating I mentioned before, as that's more of a real-world number.

 

Again, these comparisons have been done by people FAR smarter than anyone else here on this thread. It's common knowledge now that the GC far exceeded the PS2 in power and was similar to the Xbox, while the DC (unlike what was thought back in 2000-2001) was far more in line, power wise, to the PS2 than Sony had people think. To be honest, if it wasn't for the DVD support, I don't think the Playstation 2 would have been able to generate as much press as it did to effectively kill the DC before the PS2 even came out.

 

I think people need to also remember that most issues with GC ports came to fruition not because of the console's power, but because of the absurdly small mini discs they chose to use for the GC. Many multiplat games, including many sports games, had missing music, modes, etc simply because there wasn't enough room on one single disc, and it wasn't worth the additional cost or pain in the ass to insert a second disc to remedy the issue.

 

The GC also lost out on a few multiplat games due to the lack of buttons compared to the XBox and PS2. 3 triggers instead of 4 like with the PS2 (or two triggers and black and white buttons, per Xbox), and no click-in joysticks prevented games like Battlefront and Battlefront 2 from being ported over.

 

Chill out dude, seriously.

 

If the Game Cube can do bump mapping, then awesome. The reason I stated that is most games you see on it don't and feature relatively flat textures, even some of the absolute best looking games on the system (F-Zero GX, for example). I never played much of the Rogue Squadron games.

[cimerians]

Its not the hardware that counts its what you do with the hardware over time. Look at the Atari 2600 (HERO), PS2 (God of War), NES (Kirby's Adventure) and the original XBOX 'Ninja Gaiden Black' which looks better than a lot of early 360 games. Heck it looks and plays better than some modern games.

[Atariboy]

I think the downfall started with the GameCube

 

I think the real issue was going with the cartridge format with the Nintendo 64.

 

I think the earliest issue though that still haunts them to this day was their poor relationship with 3rd parties. Once they weren't dominant, companies like Konami had little loyalty to show to them after being mistreated by Nintendo's monopolistic practices.

 

I think you can see clear evidence of their struggles with the sales decline every generation until the Wii anomaly appeared. The console market was growing, but Nintendo's slice of it was only shrinking each generation.

 

And even the Wii generation was a loss in many ways despite the lead in systems sold that it has maintained to this day, in ever shrinking amounts. Last I heard, the competition was something like 85-90 million units sold to Nintendo's 100, yet I bet that there once were periods earlier on where Nintendo could surpass the combined 360/PS3 total.

 

The Wii had no lasting power and all but died when the 360/PS3 were just hitting their prime.

 

The Gamecube's PowerPC CPU is clocked faster than the PS2's MIPS, but the specs I saw list it at 1.9 GFLOPS vs the PS2's 6.2 GFLOPS.

Or is the Wiki misleading?

 

 

 

In essence those two games aren't even the same game in many ways. So that the PS2 version looks so much better doesn't indicate that the PS2 hardware was superior in significant ways to the GameCube.

 

This was one of the last examples of a tradition that was once commonplace where multiplatform "ports" were outsourced to different studios and ended up significantly or even entirely different. The PS2 game was done by EA Black Box and turned out very well to much acclaim. But the PC/Xbox/GCN versions were done by EA Seattle and didn't turn out to be anything special.

 

If you were to compare the GameCube footage to Xbox footage, it compares favorably. And I think it's widely held that the Xbox was the technological leader of that generation. So don't read too much into that comparison video where their hardware is concerned.

 

All it is evidence of is that EA Black Box did a much better job.

Edited May 30, 2016 by Atariboy

[MotoRacer]

 

Chill out dude, seriously.

 

If the Game Cube can do bump mapping, then awesome. The reason I stated that is most games you see on it don't and feature relatively flat textures, even some of the absolute best looking games on the system (F-Zero GX, for example). I never played much of the Rogue Squadron games.

 

I don't think my text is carrying over how I'm talking. I wasn't upset. I meant the "you're killing me" part like I was laughing when saying that (hence why I said Jeebus instead of Jesus). Sorry, forums sometimes don't carry over tone...

 

If it makes you feel any better, it feels like you've been barking at me in some of your recent replies to my posts, so it happens to everyone.

Edited May 30, 2016 by MotoRacer

[enoofu]

Personally i played most of the consoles from Atari to the latest generation

 

I know very few people that attacked N64 or GC except for Nintendo poor marketing in the West

 

Believe a few people were angry about cart prices on the N64 which usually added 10 dollars to games and the delay of the system from 95 to 96, which helped Sony get a larger lead

 

GC was pretty solid, just wasn't marketed property and release late with the Xbox

 

Wii on the other hand..... People attack the controllers especially the remote which didn't feel right, and the fact every game had different control schemes

Then they kinda let the system die for a year at the end, after if launched so many good games.

 

WiiU never played it, was turn off by the controller since i rather play seeing my 40+ inch TV then seeing my controller in front of my face

Edited May 30, 2016 by enoofu