The Score	Nintendo Stands Alone
By Ben Calica Gamasutra March 13, 1998 Vol. 2: Issue 11 Past Scores Everything Old is New Again [02.13.98] The Year of the Bottom Feeders [01.30.98] To Mac or Not to Mac [01.23.98] Settle the Score? [View Thread] Haven't joined yet? [Join Now]	Nintendo of Japan has finally announced the 64DD, a disk based delivery medium for the Nintendo 64. At 64 megabytes, it's massive by floppy standards and twice the size of the largest cartridge they've ever shipped, but plain anemic by CD-ROM standards. This is apparently a re-writeable medium, so they're citing cost as the reason for so little space. At the same time, they're also explaining why that's not so important, based on their lack of belief in the value of full-motion video and over use of sound (the two biggest chewers of disk space in games.) And they're also saying that there are too many dull/complicated games out there. It's easy to dismiss these comments as massive rationalizations based on the fact that they have no good CD-ROM support and by coming out with it now they'd be admitting they were wrong (something they're not particularly in the habit of doing.) Gee, would the company that's generating about a new title every Feb. 29th make a big deal about their competition having just too damn many titles? Sounds about right. And I have to go with them on at least one of those right off the surface. If I never see another full-motion video in a game in my life, I'll die fat and happy. Hell, I'd be happy to never see another pre-rendered 15 minute animation intro to a game that's designed to show off that the company finally acceded to some artist's whining and bought 'em an SGI. They're waaaay too long and just ended up making the game look like crap in relative comparison. Can't go with them on the sound though. Generated music is just fine on the current collection of games, but sound effects can really add the magic to a game that cranks the experience up to eleven. The more room for that the better. Also for texture maps. The current crop of digital artists (sorry about the earlier crack, boys) have become wizards at making 3D look great with texture mapping. (Still think Hulk Hogan looks like a wood mannequin with a Hulk Hogan sticker wrapped around it. Kind of like putting on one of those Tony the Tiger masks you cut off the back of a box of Frosted-oh excuse me-Corn Flakes and imagining someone's going to buy you as a real tiger.) Nonetheless, this seems to be an area where art is solving a bunch of the problems of technology. The more room you have for textures on the disk/cart, the cooler the title ends up being. Nintendo is into the 3D thing with both feet now. All the N64's hardware lives around it. The other boxes are using their basic hardware muscle to bull their way into 3D directly, but they can also do both and successfully sell 2D titles. Obviously you can just fake a plane and make all the side scrollers you want on an N64, but who would actually buy it and not feel it was overpriced and lame? So for better or worse, Nintendo is real-time 3D's biggest champion. And since they don't seem to really get the value of big-ass texture map libraries, 64 megs of space seems plenty. Smells wrong, smells like a loser, but who knows with these boys? They've saved up one of their best sellers to solve the chicken and egg problem, a version of Legend of Zelda. That's a lot of playing to gamer lust. Now to the final argument, that there are too many complicated/dull games out there. This one sounds like serious sour grapes, given how long it's taking them to birth each N64 title, but there's on thing to remember here: this is how they won in the first place!!! It was Nintendo's control freak tactics that brought the video game business back from the Atari/ET crap-filled pit that it had dug itself into. They saved the entire business by being right about this before. Based on the amount of crap I've been playing and how little I'm looking forward to the next title, this one sounds and feels like maybe we ought to heed the words of warning: No More Dull Games! Not such a bad idea. -B Unemployed with a Theater Degree from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica has been making a living in the computer and gaming business in various incarnations since then, Including: Founding Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few single boys to write for Parents Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia authoring system, SuperCard Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker) Product Manger for the ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for AT&T [which, by the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe I'd better tell that another time]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into real good argument with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple Game Sprockets... He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work. Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish, an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs. He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then he'd have to kill you.