Does Sega Have Secret Plans To Release A New Home Console?

[MrPopo]

And once again the Nintendo fans of the world unite and laugh at all you poor Sega devouts.

Those Nintendo fans seem to be feeling pretty swell with themselves now that Nintendo finally released a decent game for the first time in about a year. Don't worry - you'll be back to your old self when Metroid: Other M gets delayed.

The real Nintendo fans have never bemoaned what the Wii's been doing. It's just the fair-weather fans that whine about "all the crappy games".

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

http://www.tssznews.com/2010/01/01/in-i ... nsole-biz/

Well that's that then..

You know what I saw there?

Lies. Bold vehement lies.

And once again the Nintendo fans of the world unite and laugh at all you poor Sega devouts.

Why can't we just have another bloo....friendly Sega Vs. Nintendo system war?

WHY?

Anyhow, Ninty's got me giddy at what they have in store for us this year.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

And once again the Nintendo fans of the world unite and laugh at all you poor Sega devouts.

Those Nintendo fans seem to be feeling pretty swell with themselves now that Nintendo finally released a decent game for the first time in about a year. Don't worry - you'll be back to your old self when Metroid: Other M gets delayed.

The real Nintendo fans have never bemoaned what the Wii's been doing. It's just the fair-weather fans that whine about "all the crappy games".

Agreed, either you love it all with no qualms and selectively purchase what you want, or you moan and groan about all the stuff that other people want and buy.

[GSZX1337]

Agreed, either you love it all with no qualms and selectively purchase what you want, or you moan and groan about all the stuff that other people want and buy.

Yarp. I still don't understand this "Nintendo abandoned us" shit. How has Ninty abandoned its fans? We're getting our usual Ninty games: A 3D Mario game (with a sequel to be released), a 2D Mario game, a Metroid game (with a new Metroid platformer coming, hopefully), a Zelda game (two if you count Link's Crossbow Training), a Super Smash Bros. game, a Punch Out!! game, a WarioWare game, a Wario Land game, a Mario Kart game, shit, we even got (what appears to be) a spiritual successor to Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong Barrel Blast (Before anyone says it, I don't care about the motion controls, if Mario Kart Wii only used the Wii Mote, I would've still bought it). Let's see, that's 10 games aimed at Nintendo "hardcores" in three years. I think that's fine.

[the7k]

Actually, I was just trying to start another Sega vs Nintendo war again. Logic has no place in a console war.

[Dylan]

Actually, I was just trying to start another Sega vs Nintendo war again. Logic has no place in a console war.

If you're on the Sega side maybe

[MrPopo]

Actually, I was just trying to start another Sega vs Nintendo war again. Logic has no place in a console war.

If you're on the Sega side maybe

He likes lost causes.

[the7k]

Not on either side, really. I loved the NES, SNES, Saturn and Dreamcast. However, I hate what Sega has become, and I think I've outgrown Nintendo. Despite this, watching two sides filled with human failures duke it out is satisfying. Makes me feel better about life.

Wait, I'm sorry. I've not fulfilled my role.
"Nintendo DS? Moar liek Nintendo BS, amirite?"

[wip3outguy7]

^epic post

[Original_Name]

Watching two sides filled with human failures duke it out is satisfying. Makes me feel better about life.

(Apologies for the massive walls of text I type... I have a tendency of doing this to you guys.)

That's an interesting way to put it... I've always felt that video gaming's soul was lost when Sammy ate Sega. I grew up more or less surgically attached to my Sega Genesis, so for a long time I had a huge bias towards the company, but now that I've become more open-minded (I've been enjoying the hell out of the Super Nintendo I bought a few months back) I feel like I've been able to really put the company's identity into perspective.

If you ask me, while Nintendo has a ton of charm, they don't have a whole lot of soul to them as a video game company. They treat themselves, and always have treated themselves, like a toy company. This presentation undoubtedly came from the awkward state of video games during which they grew up as a company. They were a respectable arcade company who had to find a way to introduce console video games to an apathetic (Japan) and a dead (US) market, so they marketed themselves as artists of a different, ever-thriving medium: toys. Nintendo commercials in the United States featured young kids playing their video games presented in ways strikingly similar to toy commercials at the time - even instructing kids to get mom 'n dad to help hook their console up. And so forever forth, this is what they remained. They produce a low number of titles, make sure they all have mass-appeal, and then market the living shit out of them in the vein of Hasbro or Milton-Bradley.

Sony is a company which is hard to judge... they're essentially a hodge-podge of bought-up developers with hardly any relationship to one another besides having to answer to the same quality-control up top. The Sony PlayStation's greatest contribution to gaming was that it grew the medium up from something aimed at children and adolescents to one accessible to young adults - thing is, Sony had very little to do with this. Sony basically built a box and said, "Everyone make games for it!" while SquareSoft, Konami, and Capcom did all the work of growing the medium up for them - Sony's Gran Turismo and Crash Bandicoot (developed by former-Sega Technical Institude personnel), while popular, had little to do with this growing sophistication of the medium. Sony of Japan's Team ICO and Sony of America's SCE Studios Santa Monica have begun to contribute to this sophistication in video games (Team ICO with ICO and Shadow of the Colossus quite obviously and SCESSM with the mature-in-a-juvenile-sorta-way God of War series). I feel that a couple of the SCE's underlings have done enough things to give them merit as game artists, although the company as a whole is a rather soulless entity without any real vision as a company besides the accumulation of cash. That, of course, is what a company is more or less supposed to do in their capitalistic ventures, but still, it doesn't lend a whole lot to a personality, let alone soul as a company.

Microsoft essentially did exactly what Sony did with the PlayStation - offered a box and said "Go for it", then bought out a hodge-podge of developers to do their in-house bidding. Only exception is that as a developer, Microsoft has never added anything to the medium other than growing its popularity by publishing titles such as Halo, Gears of War, and Fable, as well as publishing Rare's post-Nintendo endeavors. The company has even less personality than Sony in the field of video game craftsmanship - the Xbox consoles serve no purpose other than being a potential money-making venture for Microsoft. They do, however, score points for finishing what Sega started with Xbox Live. That's not to say that I'm one of the many who view the Xbox brand as the spiritual successor to Sega's vision for the Dreamcast - that's a rather uninformed view in my opinion.

The thing with Sega is that they were a company whose identity, personality, and soul oozed out of every game they made, whether you liked it or not. Alot of gamers take this notion for granted, but can you imagine what it must have been like in the conservative Japanese culture in the early 1980's with sparse vocational training (Yuji Naka for instance never went to college and essentially taught himself how to program) and telling your parents, "Hey, I'm not gonna get a normal job in the field of law, medicine, education, or even PRACTICAL consumer electronics - I'm gonna chance my entire future on contributing to the shakiest business of the decade - those bizarre, expensive side-show amusements called video games!"? I mean really, this might sound like a joke, but I would imagine that their announcements were rarely met with approval from their parents. Now, Nintendo employees surely went through similar ordeals, but as previously stated, they had a plan: passing themselves off as a fancy toy company. Sega never did this. Sega always wore their heart on their sleeve: they made arcade games and now they were doing their best to bring those experience home on the most advanced gadgets currently available. Furthermore, the way Nintendo controlled the video game market in the mid-eighties, you would have had to have been an idiot to even attempt to get your foot into that bolted door, but they tried anyway because they felt that they had something to contribute to that market.

Sega finally hit it big in the US with their Genesis - their strategy? Push the hell out of their Sonic the Hedgehog franchise (without whom they never would have made enough headway in the market to be recognized) and bombard gamers from all directions with bizarre, imaginative titles and publishing and hyping projects that wouldn't have had a chance otherwise (ToeJam & Earl, Ecco the Dolphin, et cetera). Sometimes you would get a game from Sega that you wouldn't like - not a single Sega game was ever perfect, y'know. Somewhere in their library though was a game that, while still imperfect, appealed to you so greatly that you could forgive its flaws - they had made the game you never knew you wanted to play! Maybe you didn't like the idea of trumping around a floating world as a funky alien looking for pieces of your space ship, but you couldn't get enough of time-traveling as a star-spangled dolphin! Both of these games when judged objectively earn scores of around 7 or 8/10 for their inherent flaws, but the experiences they offered were so unique that you just might not give a shit.

That was Sega's charm - they did enough marketing and quality-control measures to ensure that if you were a gamer you knew the game was out there and that worst-case-scenario it was a good title which simply didn't appeal to you - but that was all you could be sure of. The games FELT like they'd been made by a bunch of misfit college drop-outs, but if you were with the program, damned if you cared - you weren't gonna get an experience like this anywhere else. For instance, I can admit that Sonic Spinball isn't a great game objectively speaking, but I still love playing it from time to time because it's a pretty good game and the concept and execution is very appealing to me.

The thing that I always found so endearing about Sega was that whenever they had money, they spent that shit. I firmly believe that Sega of Japan didn't give a shit whether they generated enough revenue to comfortably retire, they just wanted to keep on making video games. There was a time when Sega was supporting different six systems at once: the Sega Genesis, Sega Game Gear, Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Nomad, and Sega Pico at once. Of COURSE they knew that there were more economically stable courses of action out there, but that's not why they were a company - they were a company that wanted to create as many experiences as possible: "Wow, super-fast 16-bit gameplay on my Genesis!", "Wow, portable 8-bit action on my Game Gear!", "Wow, full-motion cutscenes, CD-quality soundtracks, Mode-7 style graphics, and longer gameplay on my Sega CD!", "Wow, crisp, 32-bit polygonal graphics on my Sega 32X!", Wow, a portable Genesis with my Sega Nomad!", "Wow, video games as a learning tool for my kids with my Sega Pico!". I firmly believe they spread themselves so thin because there were so many things that they wanted to do as a company - so many aspects of the medium that they wanted to grow.

Sega of America's internal squabbles and ill-implemented corporate dogmatics ruined Sega during the Saturn years, but after that's when they proved themselves once and for all. They were already so far in debt that the chances of them recovering were astronomically low, yet they continued on anyway. There was a point where they knew they were going to fail, and yet they kept making games anyway - games that we still herald today as the pinnacle of creativity in our young artistic medium - many of the ideas were ones that would not, and could not be successful with the average consumer. Did Sega hype up Seaman because they thought a talking fish with the head of a Japanese man would appeal to the American audience? You'd be a fool to think so. They did it because they wanted to produce the most advanced voice-recognition video gaming experience yet, and while they were at it, they sought to make humorous, yet insightful comments about the human experience from an inhuman perspective - it was a piece of art that was impossible in any other medium. They knew they'd be dead in a matter of months when they produced this game for the American audience, but they did it anyway. I wish someone would go ahead and translate Segagaga, but from what I've heard, its message is absolutely beautiful: they knew they were dying, but they kept "marching on" anyway, because crafting video games was not about revenue and milking franchises for all their worth - it was about creating new experiences that no one had ever seen before - it was about nurturing the infantile medium into something greater.

That company with that vision is dead at the hands of the toy company and enormous international corporations whose primary concerns are not related to video games. I regard that as a tragedy which the entire industry should be ashamed for - but that won't happen. Nintendo's rolling in dough by milking the same franchises they've been milking for decades while tacking on a control scheme meant to appeal to people who don't know how to play video games without actually evolving their abilities or the actual experience of playing video games. Sony and Microsoft have a Hollywood mindset about everything they do, blurring the line between games and cinema so heavily that many games now feel like bad movies with cheap interactive gimmicks... and gratuitous violence. I don't want Sega to make a new console because they're not Sega anymore. It would be Sammy whoring out Sega's good name - the guys who have turned "Sega" into a company which "aspires" to be like shitty, worthless THQ (http://www.kotaku.com.au/2008/07/sega_d ... ast_thq-2/). I want the old Sega back, but I'm wise enough to know that such a company can no longer exist in this market. Companies like Squaresoft, Konami, and Capcom may create stellar games, but their visions can never go beyond the stuffy realm of software development - they have to wait on the toy company and the apathetic corporations to advance the industry for them, and I have a feeling advancement is gonna be pretty slow-moving from here on out.

Wow, okay... that is ridiculously long. Apologies to all. I lose track of myself when I write.