"What! How can we have a Generation VIII if we are still in Generation VII of consoles? It is because, silly, we are looking at naval history and making strange but fun connections to video game consoles. By following naval history’s progress, perhaps we can predict what Generation VIII will be."

"Generation VII was a revolution of underwater warfare that the disruption of the Wii submarine created. But Generation VIII will be a revolution of overwater with the dominance of air power. Airplanes."

"The Internet is, to this day, still used primarily for information. No one has tapped it fully for entertainment purposes. The founder of NCsoft says someone will do this and their company will become bigger than Google."

"Both Microsoft and Sony will abandon the idea of a ‘super-dreadnought’. The PS3 and Xbox 360 will be the last ‘console on steroids’ as we know it due to their clash only ended up draining profitability from the gaming industry. All three console companies will attempt to take hold of the growing new trends of air power."

"Instead of super-dreadnoughts with powerful guns battling it out in seas, aircraft carriers began to dominate. As ships, they were vulnerable but received their power from the aircraft that came from the mainland and parked on their ships. In the same way, the future consoles will feature no such great power as graphics and processor speeds. All consoles will be online all the time and will transmit games and data continuously from the game companies. Generation VII may be on the last to see games on the shelf and that, as the product, you buy. With Generation VIII, what is on the shelf is but the gateway to content. Instead of games being seen as products, they will be seen as services. Games will begin to mimic MMORPGs in their business structure."

"Already, Sony is describing the Playstation 4 as having no disc drive. And where Sony goes, Microsoft will follow. Nintendo is already planting the seeds for this era in its Virtual Console."




From our sage and prophet himself:



http://thewiikly.zogdog.com/article.php?article=97&ed=12

How dare he change his mind on things.

Email: Nintendo shows Sega the way

^^^Just when I thought I was done with Malstrom, he writes something excellent to pull me back in.

Aah... Malstrom. Always posting doom and gloom blogs three times in a row. Did he have a job or something making blogs frequently with detailed analysis and such? We knew Nintendo and third parties wouldnt listen to him o even read his blogs. And its already proven. Anyway, just to make a topic out of this since he always whines about Zelda:





http://sethhearthstone.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/casual-games-arcade-action/




There are rumors going around that Sean Malstrom has risen from the dead to post once more. Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it. How can he continue to post about a game console whose games he has promised to never buy again? Then again, not having any idea what he’s talking about hasn’t stopped Sean in the past. For example, he often wrote that the rise of “Casual Games” was really the return of the Ancient Glory of the Arcades. He postulated that the new era of games would draw inspiration from their roots in the arcade classics of days-gone-by.

Quote:

“The Expanded Audience are the Old School gamers. While much media focus has been placed on Wii being in nursing homes and housewives playing, there is no focus that housewives did play console games as well as the entire family over twenty years ago. This ‘family gaming’ of the Atari and NES era, this arcade-era type gaming is what spawned the games we today call classics. It is in this environment that games like Super Mario Brothers was made”.

Quote:

“The so-called ‘casual gamer’ has been painted by some in the game industry as a retard, as a dunce, as an airhead, and as an invader. The truth is that the ‘casual gamer’ is really the ‘arcade gamer’. These ‘arcade gamers’ are the rock on which the game industry was built.”

You said it, Sean! Let’s take another look at these Expanded Audience games and their “Arcade-style” should be as plain as day!

I can just feel the action! This really brings me back to my days in the Arcade, solving math equations and lazily filling in sudoku puzzles. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t such a good example. Surely we’ll find a casual game that matches this “Arcade-style” definition!

See? It’s exactly like Robotron and Smash TV! Well, I guess the Soccer minigame reminds me a little bit of ski-ball, but I somehow doubt that’s what Sean means by “Arcade-era type gaming”. Yes, dear reader, I can hear you shouting “What about Wii Sports? That’s the Arcade Gameplay he was talking about!”. Can it, reader. Save it for the comments section!

I won’t bother with the other games in Wii Sports, since nobody plays them. The expanded audience plays Wii Bowling exclusively. And will you look at that relaxation! Players take turns. When it is finally their turn, they have as much time as necessary to line up their shot and throw. Again, this is as far removed from “Arcade Action” as you can get! What could have possibly possessed Sean Malstrom to erroneously believe this expanded audience was descended from the arcades?

The short answer is “Short-term time commitment and mass-appeal content”.

The only things the modern Casual Game and the ancient Arcade Game have in common are optionally short gameplay sessions, and the inoffensive mass-appeal quality of the aesthetics used to present them. The short play sessions, however, are solutions to very different problems. In arcade days, players needed to be cycled through a cabinet in a reasonable amount of time. This would allow for the player standing in line to be given a chance to play, or to at least force the current player to invest another token/quarter to continue their play session. Nowadays, the short play session is in response to the increasingly busy lives the average consumer leads. It’s not a question of maintaining a continuous revenue stream to the coin collection unit, it’s a matter of allowing the user to enjoy a brief period of entertainment when they can find time enough to do so. The second commonality is the game “Mythos” centering on something other than teenage power fantasies. Late arcade games (the kind Sean is a fan of) had already gone the way of explosions and bullets, but the early (more successful) games were fun and simply presented. Pong, Pac-Man, and Donky Kong could appeal to everyone.

And yet the actual gameplay of these famous names bear little resemblance to the casual games listed above. Bejeweled, Brain Age Sudoku, and Professor Layton are much slower-paced, more cerebral, and place more emphasis on thought over twitch reactions. Sean once famously questioned why a “narratologist” gamer would “only own a Wii and DS.” It’s as if he never heard of the incredibly successful Professor Layton series, or the Ace Attorney series (which sold out repeatedly in it’s first run in the US, is rare to find in used games stores, and enjoys success on 5 different platforms!), or anything from Telltale Games. Adventure games were hugely popular in the 80s and early 90s, and were enjoyed by all ages. My brothers and sister and I grew up on Sierra’s Kings Quest series. (This is long before I became a hardcore gamer). We played and watched the games in turns, working out the puzzles together. If anyone got further on their own, an earlier save would always be loaded so they could show us how they did it. Lost in a folder somewhere are the maps we made of the mazes. Even to this day we have inside jokes about events from these games. Graham, Valanice, Alexander, and Rosella were a part of our family. They were idiots who kept dying from dehydration and snakes, but they were family.

Kings Quest IV was the height of the series.

I can hear Malstrom spinning in his grave. “CUTSCENES!”, he screams through the casket, “HARDCORE MOVIE GAMES!” But is it? Judging by its wide appeal and save-anywhere allowing for short play sessions, I’d call it casual. And yet Kings Quest had no arcade action. It was a narrative, with quirky and interesting characters, and their problems for you to solve. Its mythos was the eternal mythos of fairytales and fantasy. Note Roberta Williams closing remarks:

“Playing a Kings Quest game is like playing a beautiful fantasy film where you play the lead actor, the director, and you’re also the audience, all at the same time”.

Where Malstrom sees Roberta’s obsession with film as a weakness, I see it as a strength. The emphasis is still on entertainment. A good story is entertainment anyone can enjoy. Roberta was a true storyteller. My siblings and I played every single Kings Quest game to completion. Except for one. The last one.

Sean Malstrom often complains about “Star Finder Mario” and the failure of “3D Mario“. I say he got off easy. Far less changed in Mario’s transition to 3D than Kings Quest’s.

Good gravy! What in blue blazes am I looking at? How is this grim polygonal wasteland even distantly related to the lush and inviting fantasy world of Kings Quest? Where are the colorful characters, the enlightening puzzles, the noble heroics? And what a sausage-fest of developers! Look what Malstrom’s beloved “Arcade Action” did to this franchise. This is what happens when you follow the advice Sean gave to the Zelda developers: fewer puzzles, more swords! And make it sinister! When my father brought this game home to us, nobody could figure out what happened. Roberta gives us a clue in the video above:

“It’s not just about a story, it’s really a lot about having a person who’s playing the game feel like they’re there; to really believe…”

Sean Malstrom is correct to discount immersion, I’ll give him that. But he attributes this to cinematic desires. This is completely wrong-headed. Good films don’t want you to “feel like you’re there”, they want you to sympathize with a protagonist. Visual techniques developed for film are a useful strategy for game designers to make players connect with the emotions in a game’s story. “Feeling like you’re there” is for simulations. For action. Arcade action.

Sean needs to rethink this theory that arcade action simulators are what the casual market needs. It will only lead back to the hardcore games he claims to hate. “Collision Detection” entertainment is not going to bring us the “real expanded audience”. Look how confused he is even about the hardcore market:

“Today’s ‘hardcore’ games are all devoid of arcade based gameplay with exceptions of the FPS and some small games like Geometry Wars”.

The FPS is not the exception to the hardcore market, it is the rule! And nothing interests the expanded audience less than these Arcade Action First Person Simulators. Brain Age (with sales on par with Super Mario Brothers 3) shows that they want puzzles. Professor Layton (with sales that took off where Zelda: Link to the Past flatlined) shows that they want more story than action with their puzzles. Also remember that the rarity of Phoenix Wright games in resale is evidence of satisfied customers. Why, even MYST sold 1.5 million more copies than the original Zelda! If Benoît Sokal’s games could be a little less dreary, or if Zack & Wiki was a little less cheery, or if Quantic Dream stopped making games exclusively about depressing weather patterns, we would most likely see the rise of story puzzle games once more. Earnest adventure, neither serious nor slapstick, is due for a comeback. Banish the pixel hunts, abandon the cathair mustaches, and tell me a story. Puzzles and stories will always be more universal than weapons and enemies.

Sometimes I wonder if the changes in Zelda that Sean hates so much were actually a failed attempt to bring Zelda games to a bigger audience? Could they have been (*GASP*) casual changes!?

Sean has been hiding something all this time. I think I know what it is…

You are just thinking the same way as developers like Ubisoft, but anyway.. im going to point out the core of arcade games and couple of examples both on the wii and other consoles

What is an arcade game? (or at least what i means in the context Malstrom meant)

Arcades games, are games you can play whenever you want, they tend to be simple, fast to learn and tend to have short time objectives, another. Arcade games also lack a complex history and a lot of bottons, they were made to take a couple of mins of your live

Examples:

-Contra
-Mario (2D)
-Tetris
-Megaman (early)
-Ghost n Goblins
-Castlevania
-Metal Slug
-Street Fighter
-Mario Kart

and so on...

Now.. getting back on track on the wii, lets take a look at some of the most succesful wii games

-Mario Kart Wii
-New Super Mario Bros Wii
-Guitar Hero
-Rock Band
-Cooking Mama
-Wii Sports
-Wii Play
-Wii Fit
-House of the Dead 1 an 2

All these games have arcade nature and are succesful on the wii

Nice find, Yushire.

havent you read the blog?




"The short answer is “Short-term time commitment and mass-appeal content”.

"The only things the modern Casual Game and the ancient Arcade Game have in common are optionally short gameplay sessions, and the inoffensive mass-appeal quality of the aesthetics used to present them. The short play sessions, however, are solutions to very different problems. In arcade days, players needed to be cycled through a cabinet in a reasonable amount of time."

". Late arcade games (the kind Sean is a fan of) had already gone the way of explosions and bullets, but the early (more successful) games were fun and simply presented. Pong, Pac-Man, and Donky Kong could appeal to everyone."

"And yet the actual gameplay of these famous names bear little resemblance to the casual games listed above. Bejeweled, Brain Age Sudoku, and Professor Layton are much slower-paced, more cerebral, and place more emphasis on thought over twitch reactions. Sean once famously questioned why a “narratologist” gamer would “only own a Wii and DS.” It’s as if he never heard of the incredibly successful Professor Layton series, or the Ace Attorney series (which sold out repeatedly in it’s first run in the US, is rare to find in used games stores, and enjoys success on 5 different platforms!), or anything from Telltale Games."

Thats the reason why arcade games of the 80s and casual games are similar in some point. Doesnt mean arcade games would have a revival anytime soon. Like I said, gamers left Nintendo not Nintendo left them. If you read the blog(dont worry, its not as long as Malstrom's) casuals likes slow paced puzzle type gameplay than had eye coordination  arcade type of the 80s. Thats why its a bad move for Nintendo to make Zelda arcade type gameplay. It will ruin the Zelda franchise. Overworld to explore yes, but... limit the puzzles and dungeon crawling not ever.

@noname----thanks

It sounds like Malstrom is unaware of Project Needlemouse. Though i suppose he wouldn't acknowledge it and its downloadable nature.

It still doesn´t make sense, the only slow paced games i can think about are Brain Age and Nintendogs, the first one was created to attracta adults to the console, bringing something more than entertainment and Nintendogs its a simulation game, there is no reason to compare it with an arcade as it clearly wasn´t the intetion

On the other side Mario, Wii Sports and Mario Kart, are clearly fast paced games, i won´t deny they are not as hard, and they lack certain things, but the core of the games is arcade, just compare it to the big HD Consoles game, Assasin Creed, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy XIII etc... they just weren´t to be played for a couple of mins