This masterpiece was carved and crafted by our own boB from the Infendo forums. As always, we here at Infendo wish you a happy Halloween!(Couldn’t go too long without at least one Nintendo themed pumpkin)
Kotaku’s Mark Wilson perceptively describes the current and outdated state of video game reviews.
If there is no such thing as a perfect game, then why are you scoring out of 100?… Movie reviewers solved this problem a long time ago. That’s why most adopted a simpler rating system in which a 4-star movie didn’t imply “perfection” but supreme excellence.
The star classification system (preferably four over five) just works better. It would allow gamers to quickly gauge a game’s quality while paying more attention to the actual review, all without taking the review score too seriously. One star is “poor.” Two stars “mediocre.” Three stars “good,” and four stars “excellent” (never perfect).
Then again, Metacritic would just convert the score to a 10-point scale, but at least you’re doing your part.
Ah, Infendo, let’s embrace it — we loves us some Zelda.
And we’re far from alone in our affinity for sword-slashing and Hyrulian dungeon-crawling. The Legend of Zelda has been one of the most revered video game franchises of all time, selling nearly 50 million units of software and spanning more than 20-years-worth of games. And if the recent release of Phantom Hourglass for the DS is any indication, Zelda fans are as passionate as ever for their series; in the midst of Halo-mania, the touch-controlled handheld masterpiece sold more than 230,000 copies in North America during its launch week and quickly surpassed one million sales worldwide, according to the video game sales-tracking Web site VGChartz.com.
But during lapses between Triforce quests and Stalfos slaying, and increasingly since the release of Ocarina of Time in 1998, many dedicated Zelda players have begun to question the stories being told by Nintendo. Specifically, how do these games fit together? What is the chronological progression of the individual legends of Zelda? Though simple in purpose, the question hints at dramatically complex answers and has spawned elaborate and detailed analyses of the Zelda canon. Entire Web sites have been built, filled to the brim with points and counterpoints in regard to the Legend of Zelda, and communities of Zelda devout have grown, all in the name of exploring perhaps one of the nerdiest – but damn, if it isn’t interesting! – fields of pseudo-study known to man.
The multi-faceted, the multi-branched disciplines of “Zelda theory.”
Says EA, “With 32 player matches, leaderboards, stat tracking, and a wealth of options, the Wii is ready to join the online fight.”
By this time next year, the Nintendo DS could be watching your children, piloting your 737 to see relatives on the West Coast and/or reinventing the wheel. Or something like that.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal today, didn’t quite say all the gibberish I just typed above, but he came close–as far as a video game company is concerned anyway.
The “new Nintendo” will begin to focus next year on expanding the DS even further into super casual land with “features [that] will be useful in places like train stations, amusement parks or museums and [that] could be accessed wirelessly,” Iwata said. We’ve already started to see this at Safeco Field with the Seattle Mariners, and in Japan at a select few museums, but apparently Nintendo wants to take this laid back, non-game thing into the cas-core stratosphere.
El Segundo, Calif., Oct. 30, 2007—Nintendo displaced Sony Corp. as the leader in the video-game console software market in the third quarter of 2007 as it introduced a flood of new titles for both its Wii video-game console and its portable DS system, according to iSuppli Corp. Worldwide revenue for Nintendo DS and Wii gaming software amounted to $1.2 billion in the third quarter, up 31.4 percent from $943.6 million in the second quarter and more than double the $611 million from the third quarter of 2006.
In comparison, Sony Corp. in the third quarter generated $1 billion in gaming software revenue for its PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and PSP players. Microsoft Corp. posted revenue of $317.8 million for Xbox and Xbox 360 software. In the second quarter, Sony generated $1 billion in gaming software revenue for its gaming platforms, while Microsoft was at $271.9 million.
From the “sky is falling” files comes the latest verbal commitment by Nintendo that they are still making games for long-time players despite the increased popularity of casual games. Pro-G tells the story:
Speaking at a press conference in London this morning, David Yarnton, general manager of Nintendo UK, said: “It’s important to know that we’re not ignoring the hardcore gamer. They’re still very important to us.”
Are you one of those people that believes all the good games should come out in Q4? Nintendo was, once upon a time, but just like all the other disrupting they’re doing to the industry right now, they’ve decided to turn their sights to the calendar too. No, I’m not talking Calendar DS Fun Time Touch or some other wacky new title, I’m talking release dates. (more…)
With a plethora of highly anticipated or well reviewed games coming out this holiday season, whether it’s for yourself or others we want to know:
Via DS Fanboy, this ad appeared in Nintendo Power, of all places.
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