The truth about Nintendo

[Zod95]

sundin13 said:

Zod95 said:

I'm not assuming they aren't high quality because my focus isn't on quality but commitment to it (remember our conversation on the Unity thread?). Commitment is easier to perceive through objective variables like effort, time and money.

I would just like to say that "effort" is not objective and you have no way of knowing how much time and money was put into the music that was created for any given game...

doesn't that destroy your entire argument from an objective standpoint? (meaning that you cannot objectively argue that Nintendo puts in less effort or time or money into music than any other game).

Let me ask you again...what exactly is your point here? I think we have not only proven that Nintendo does, and has for a while used vocals in their soundtracks and we have said that there is no objective measure that can be used to measure effort or complexity or quality in music...doesn't that mean that you have essentially no point in this particular debate and you cannot objectively stand by your vague conclusion or assumptions?

Effort can be translated into number of man-hours work. And that's objective.

Yes, I have no way of knowing that but I have several ways to estimate it. Let me give you one example: TrackMania. Nadeo hired 12 bands to create exclusive music tracks to TrackMania Sunrise. The result was: 13 tracks, most of them with vocal parts. Then they made Nations and United, each one with a brand new soundtrack this time instrumental-only: Nations got 4 tracks and United got 8. Do you know who made them? One guy. That's all it needs to create instrumental-only music. Not 12 bands, 1 guy. Of course I don't know if the previous 12 bands spent only a few ours and this new guy spent thousands of hours creating those musics, but I'm confident this was not the case.

Let me give you another example, this time out of videogaming: Rurouni Kenshin. Aside from the openings and endings, do you know how many music tracks the anime has? 92. Do you know who made them? One guy. Again, I don't know whether he spent his entire life doing that. But I'm pretty sure it took a lot less than that. I'm a fan of instrumental-only music and I know a lot more cases than these two. And, by my experience, I'm inclined to say that this kind of music usually takes a lot less resources to be made than vocal music. Of course I know some other cases where such music demands an entire orchestra. Here the effort is similar, since it takes more people but less time (again, this is only considering my knowledge as a fan of instrumental music). But these cases are not common in videogaming.

Now let's look at Sonic and Mario. Sonic Adventure 1 has: 7 vocal music tracks and around 30 instrumental music tracks. Mario 64 has: 0 vocal music tracks and around 20 instrumental. Now I have 2 questions for you. First, why didn't Sonic Team create 30 vocal and 7 instrumental, why was it the other way around? Second, what do you estimate to have been the most demanding soundtrack to create: the one from Sonic Adventure or the one from Mario 64? I guess you already know what my conclusions are.

To conclude, what is my point (on the OP) with all of this? Simple, just to deliver some indicators about the effort Nintendo puts into its games (compared to the competition). Then people decide what conclusions can be taken. Some may easily perceive that vocal music demands a different kind of commitment while others may twist any logic that that exposes Nintendo's fragilities until the end of the world.