BlazeHedgehog

Not bad. A little cheesy, and Shadow's animations looked kind of stiff. But not bad.

No, they couldn't have backlit the original GBA. Not if they wanted to keep the battery life they had and the price they had. You see, that's the thing about technology, Scatta - the more time passes, the cheaper older technology gets. When the GBA Launched, Nintendo officially stated the reason there was no backlight is because it would be too costly on battery life. When the GBASP first launched, nearly two years later mind you, power-saving technology had been developed to help light the GBASP while still giving you a long-lasting battery life, and, if I'm not mistaken, the GBASP even gave you an option to turn the backlight off if you so chose. You mention the Game Gear - which, might I add, was nearly three times the size of a GBA, required six AA batteries for four hours of gametime. The GBA in comparison, takes two AA batteries for roughly 8 hours. And? Nintendo is a business, out to make money. It's not so much "until it's convenient" as it is "until we know we can make a profit on it". In 50 years, Nintendo has only ever reported a loss of profit once, something they blame on international currency exchanges and them waiting too long to drop the GC's price to $99. The newer a technology is, and the smaller you want it, the more expensive it is to produce and maintain. While this means Nintendo isn't always on the cutting edge of some technologies, it does mean that they're going to make a hell of a lot more money than Sony or Microsoft. And that's the bottom line: Money. Profit. In the end, did it mean anything that the GBA didn't have a backlight? Hell no. The GBA is still one of the most fastest-selling, widely-used pieces of gaming tech on the planet. As of March 2006, over 75.13 million Gameboy Advances had been sold world-wide. I think you're over-blowing this whole thing as if Nintendo has some kind of personal vendetta against you. As if they want to piss their customers off on purpose. Because, you know, pissing your customers off is really good for business, right? Hind-sight is always 20/20 - that means, your mistakes are always obviously mistakes once you've made them. Cartridges back then were the standard gaming storage medium and other attempts to shift the market to CD as a storage medium had failed. You cannot blame Nintendo for sticking with what worked, could you? Obviously, CD as a storage medium was an experiment they wanted to try, but never enough to actually produce physical hardware. It's been said before, but pretty much all of Final Fantasy VII would've probably fit on a standard N64 cartridge if you removed all that bloated FMV. It's a know fact that all three discs of FF7 contain the entire game on each disc (dialogue and all) - the only difference between each of the three discs is what FMV is contained on it. Actually, I don't think Metroid Prime 3 looks all that bad. Yeah, it still looks kind of like a Gamecube Game, but that's also probably because it was originally a Gamecube Game ported up to the Wii; most people seem to figure that a few of these Wii games will look better by launch, as early Wii devkits were simply Gamecubes with Wii controllers (which were even seen at E3). We'll see what it looks like come November. I don't know where you get "3x more powerful", because Nintendo refuses to release any stats on the Wii itself. All we've had is speculation and vague comments from a couple of developers ("souped-up Xbox", etc). You want new-looking games? Spend $400-$600 on an Xbox 360 or a PS3. You want a great value and an experiment in game control and design? Spend $200 on a Wii.

The GBA and everything was legitimate upgrades, though. Nintendo makes hardware that's within their budget, you know? Sony and Microsoft have never made a single dime off of any of their hardware. Do you know why the PS2 rarely has a price drop? Why it still costs $120? Because it's never been cheap to manufacture, and it still hasn't visibly made Sony an actual profit. There's word going around that Microsoft lost $200+ on every Xbox they sold, and as much as $500 on every Xbox 360 they've sold. And yet hardware like the Gamecube can get it's price lowered to $99 - hell, maybe even $75, if the rumors about the upcoming GC price cut are to be believed - and according to Nintendo, they're still not selling it at a loss. The upgrades you speak of were built from two ideals: A) It's a feature the users really wanted It was cheap enough to do the upgrade from a manufacturing standpoint For the GBA, everybody complained: No back light! So, we get the GBASP, which is front-lit. Well, that's fine and all, but the screen still washes out colors and looks kind of junky, so they gave us not only the GBA Micro, but upgraded the original GBASP to the Micro's new fully back-lit screen. The same thing goes for the DS: Not a lot of people liked the design of the original DS, especially next to the PSP. Many people said the original DS design was clunky, bloated, and felt more like a fisher price toy than it did anything to play games on. So, what did Nintendo do? The DS Lite. Smaller, sleeker, and boasting the same improved screen as the GBA Micro. With HD support, Nintendo is anticipating that not a whole lot of people are going to care - and with good reason. Not a whole lot of people out there actually have HD ready TVs. I only know one person with an HD ready TV: My Uncle, whom I never see. HDTVs are expensive and aren't really terribly worth it unless you've already spent $8000 on the rest of the home-theater set-up. When people complain that $600 is too much for a PS3, how many people are going to have a $5000 HDTV set-up to be able to tell the difference between HD and Non-HD content? Not a whole lot! Thus, the Wii isn't HD, because it doesn't need to be: The average joe doesn't have HD yet. When the average joe has HD, Nintendo will move to HD. But until then, why spend money on a feature that will only be used by 25% of your users? That's not cost-effective. To be fair, Nintendo was on to something with cartridges: There are still a lot of things you can do with a cartridge that you can't do with discs, because cartridges provide you with nearly zero loading times. While finally, disc-drives are getting up to a speed where loading times in console games are being minimized, and streaming technology is employed, those sorts of things are only impressive because it's a disc drive. Streaming content from a cartridge is really quite easy. In that sense, technologically speaking, cartridges ARE better - but discs are cheaper. Back then, for the price of a 512mbit cartridge, you could just use a single CD for less than 1/8th the cost. Not only that, but can you blame Nintendo for avoiding CDs, after the likes of the Sega CD, Neo Geo CD, and the other CD add-ons? As for Online, Nintendo had a good reason to stay out of the Online Sector. Little known is the story that, between the end of the NES era and the beginning of the SNES era, Nintendo actually proposed and market-tested an online adapter for the NES, that would allow you to play games over a phone connection, check and trade stocks, and more. They wanted to turn the NES into sort of a cheap family computer. It was slated for a 1990 release - but market testing was so poor in Japan that Nintendo scrapped the idea altogether before even giving it a chance in America. Nintendo stood to lose a LOT of money on the "NES Network" concept, so they decided against it, and swept the entire concept under the carpet. That's exactly the reason why they wanted to make absolutely sure that services like Xbox Live were worth the investment before officially trying Online again. As for visuals - who cares? Visuals are good enough nowadays that, while blocky, most GC games are definitely good enough for me to enjoy their gameplay. And really, when we're talking a good game, do graphics really matter? Look at Katamari Damacy. A very simplistic visual style, with flat colors, simple objects, etc. Yes, it's nice to have something pretty to look at, but graphics ARE reaching the sort of era where it's all starting to blur together. Sure, a game like Gears of War seems to be prettier than, say, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but that doesn't mean Twilight Princess looks terrible, either. Twilight Princess still looks really, really awesome, and is going to be a blast to play - regardless of what Gears of War looks like. And that's what's most important. On the same page, reported a day later:

Everything is going to look dated eventually, especially console games. You need to accept it and move on. The Wii looks good enough, visually. Nintendo DID mention that the successor to the Wii might feature HD - but I don't think that means a "Wii Lite" will be HD. HD isn't something you can just add like that if the game's don't already support it. Otherwise you just get an upscaled signal, which will generally look exactly like a regular signal. Think of it like re-sizing an image. HD = Rendering the image in high-resolution (say, 1024x768) Upscaling to HD = Resizing a small image (say, 640x480) to HD resolution (1024x768 - but it still looks like 640x480). It's this reason I doubt there would be a "Wii 2.0" with HD added. Still possible, mind you, (as games released after "Wii 2.0" could have HD options) but not likely. That's too drastic of a change, I think, especially after Nintendo's "HD isn't worth it yet!" speeches. The only way it would happen is if magically, HD becomes super popular in the next two years to justify it. And I mean, super ultra mega popular to the point where everybody has a HD-ready TV. Which very likely isn't going to happen.

Almost done. Working on score tally stuff right now. I kind of feel bad that this is only ever going to be one level, but I've got other stuff to work on. If you're fast enough, you can beat the stage in under 30 seconds... But you can do that with Green Hill Zone and Emerald Hill Zone, too, and you have to learn how to do that before you can actually do it.

As was said earlier in the thread, I don't think $250 is the price. I recall a lot of places saying "WII PRICE CONFIRMED: $250" only to retract that story, saying Nintendo has said it'll be $250 or cheaper. This has caused quite a bit of confusion. If you check Nintendo's Press Site, there is no press release for "Wii Confirmed at $250" - just a press release that, as I've said, "Wii will be $250 or cheaper". That does not mean it's definitely $250, it just means it could be - or it could be cheaper. $200 is still within range, and almost all Nintendo hardware has launched at $200.

http://anotherblazehedgehog.deviantart.com/ Chosen because somebody from I think the Sonic Stadium took blazehedgehog.deviantart.com, used it for a few weeks, and then abandoned it. Yeah, thanks alot, dude.

Oi, I visit more than once a month. I just forget to visit the mod forum.

Question is: If this is the first case of such an extra limb being this developed, does that mean human beings may be evolving the need for an extra limb?

Every time I see images of this game, I weep with joy.

This is WEIRD. Starting a new topic makes you confirm where you want to post it. o_O The default skin is... too bright, too. Definitely needs some tweaking. A SFGHQ Classic skin like I did for the Proboards would be nice. :E If you want the emoticons I made, too, they're here: http://blazefire.mooglecavern.com/sekrit/emoticons/