shenstra

While I'm hopeful that NIntendo will pull another rabbit out of its big red hat, the situation is pretty dire. Considering only the stock price, as an indicator of investor's estimated future profit potential, Nintendo is back to the pre-Wii situation which, you may remember, was rather dire. The general consensus was that Nintendo's hardware (both the DS and the Wii) had to be a hit for Nintendo to remain healthy. Of course, both were huge hits and Nintendo's stock exploded (at the height of Wii hype, Nintendo stock was over ¥70.000 per share, almost six times the current value).

They're now back to the same position they were in in 2006, but instead of the DS and the Wii (Revolution at the time), they have the 3DS and Wii U to work with. Not only is the marketplace (and the global economy for that matter) different, but they're also competing against their former selves. Both the 3DS and Wii U invoke thoughts of their predecessors, through name, appearance and functionality. How are they going to convince DS owners who now just play shitty iPhone games that they should buy a 3DS? How are they going to convince Wii owners whose shiny little toy has been gathering dust for years that the Wii U will be different?

We've all been asking those questions ever since these new devices were announced and the stakes have been getting higher. Most gamers' answer is that Nintendo should make more and better games and people will start buying consoles and software. But that hasn't exactly worked for Nintendo for the past fifteen years or so. Perhaps partly because the games they do develop are less amazing and less original as time goes by. But more importantly, I think, because people demand something different from video games nowadays. Nintendo has been hopelessly out of touch, and I've been one of the schmucks defending their decision making because I don't care about online and I don't care about graphics and I don't care about shootan games. But the rest of the world does, and by sticking to their old ways, Nintendo has painted itself into a corner, or a niche, if you will. A niche that cannot sustain a console, let alone an entire company the size of Nintendo. Especially since Sony and Microsoft are also increasingly catering to that niche market.

So it turns out Nintendo hasn't been doing all that well for as long as most of us can remember. All the hype around Nintendo's success in recent years is based on two products. The DS has done very well over a long period of time, but the 3DS has a hard time getting near the same level of success. It may still manage (after all, the DS had a slow start too), but it's a harder sell and the 3DS has actual competition. The Wii has turned out to be a flash in the pan. It has made Nintendo a lot of money in the short run, but hasn't substantially changed the position they're in when looking at the long term.

The blue ocean, it turns out, doesn't hold many fish.

That is all. ;-P

@ZombiePie: Thanks for lighting my spot! I never expected people to respond so well to what is, essentially, an in-the-heat-of-the-moment rant. Being spotlit feels a bit like earning a trophy for a game. In a twisted sort of way, it feels more meaningful than the activity for which it is awarded. :-)

@Axersia said:

Oh man, I just realized I may have dodged a bullet by grabbing inFamous off my US account rather than my NL account. Didn't us Dutchies flip out about that as well back when it was first released? I remember reading this news story on how Sony planned to only release the Dutch/German version in NL and not include the English voice track. Not sure if they ever went through with it, but I can definitely recall people being pissed and opting to import the UK version instead.

I don't know about the disc version, but the version I got off PSN as part of the Welcome Back programme was in English. I didn't even realize there was a Dutch version. I don't understand where this trend is coming from. More and more games are being translated into Dutch, while more Dutch people speak English than ever before, especially gamers. They're not expanding their market by any measurable degree. If anything, they're weaning the Dutch, who have always been happy to play games in English, on Dutch translations, making it increasingly important that future games also be translated.

My main concern is that I now have to proactively check games for undesirable translations before buying them. I may end up importing all my games from the UK, just to make sure I get English language versions.

@MysteriousBob said:

Wait, those are all Dutch?
You assholes. I had no idea English had such a large effect in your country. As an English Language student, I'm stunned that someone would opt for English rather than their own natively developed tongue. Just strikes me as bizarre. Don't you consider the localisation as an acknowledgement of your national identity?

I (and many of my fellow countrymen) don't have a strong sense of national identity (unless there's a football (soccer) match going on). I feel more strongly about my Frisian roots (despite having never lived in Frisia, a Dutch province) than I do about being Dutch. At times, I feel more European than Dutch. More than anything, I am a world citizen. A human being who happened to be born in the Netherlands. I can appreciate many things about my country, but I'm also aware that most of that appreciation derives from being raised in this country by people who were raised in this country who in turn were raised by people raised in this country.

@dabe said:

Dutch accents when speaking English are some of the best in the world. One only has to take Martin Jol and Tim Krul as footballing examples.

Ugh, I can't stand bad Dutch accents. My own accent is kinda strange. I grew up being exposed mostly to Queen's English through the BBC and English friends of the family. So I grew up speaking (something close to) Queen's English. As I grew older, I was exposed more and more to American accents (mostly General American) which warped my accent. Now I'm somewhere in between and from time to time, I'll suddenly slip into either an American accent, or Received Pronunciation.

@Kyreo said:

Yeah I getcha. It's a real leap to think in another language.

Indeed. I can only think in Dutch and English, despite having taken five years of German and six years of French in school. I can understand both German and French fairly well in written form, or when spoken slowly, because in those situations I have time to translate everything. Growing up, half my family used to speak Frisian to and around me and I never got past (perhaps automatically) translating it all into Dutch. It takes both extensive exposure and practice to learn to think in another language.

So.... Beyond Good & Evil HD came out. That's a thing. I've heard so much about this game, I just had to try it. Luckily, there's a demo on the PlayStation Store. Downloaded it (a fairly big download) and had it sit on my HD for a while, whilst I played through inFamous. Tonight, I finally got around to trying the demo, and it... was... in Dutch? Entirely in Dutch? Everything was in Dutch! The menus, the in-game text, even the voice overs. And no way to select another language? What is this madness?!

Sure. I'm Dutch. I speak Dutch, fluently even. But I don't play games in Dutch. I grew up watching a lot of British TV and American movies, reading books in English and, obviously, playing games in English. Games are hardly ever translated into Dutch. The only two examples I've personally encountered (other than Beyond Good & Evil) are Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, and Professor Layton and the Lost Future, both of which I loved despite the translation, rather than because of it. In the case of Professor Layton, I was actually quite startled when the game started speaking Dutch at me. I even considered returning it and importing an English or American copy. Instead, I turned the sound on my DS off (yes, I missed out on most of the wonderful music in that game) and tried not to think about how much better that game would've been in English.

Don't get me wrong, I love Dutch. It's a very quirky language, with some wonderful words and expressions. But mostly, it's a language that was built (or rather, that evolved) to get information across quickly and directly. It's not a language suited to engaging story telling. Let's face it, to people who don't speak Dutch, it sounds like someone trying to clear their throat whilst speaking fake German. You know who tops the Dutch music charts, other than Adele, Bruno Mars, Snoop Dogg et alia? Dutch singers and bands, singing original songs, in English. The reason we flood the world with shittyreality TV and gameshows? Those shows don't rely on language.

Add to that the fact that the Dutch speaking market is relatively small and consists mostly of people who speak English (or French, or German, or all three) fairly well. Why does that matter? Because nearly all Dutch dubs are targeted at young kids, who haven't learnt English yet and thus form the largest audience for dubs. People who do Dutch dubs, whether it be for movies, TV or video games, only know how to do crappy dubs targeted at very young kids. When they get to apply their ~considerable skill~ to an actual piece of entertainment (arguably even "art"), things generally don't end well.

So, there it is. My rant against localization. I guess I'm never going to play Beyond Good & Evil. Dear game industry, please, please. I beg of you. Don't translate things into Dutch. And if you insist on doing so, at least give me the option to play in English anyway.

Sounds like quite a lot of content for such low prices. I'll definitely be getting all of it once the PS Store is back up. Then again, I was always going to buy any DLC they put out for this game. It has (at least temporarily) supplanted Super Mario Bros. 3 as my favorite game.

My issue isn't going straight, its the turns, I always turn too much and spin out.

I'm using a Logitech Driving Force GT on PS3, so a completely different setup from yours. Also, this game marks my first return to Colin McRae games since the late '90s and my first wheel ever on any system, so I'm coming into this completely green. YMMV
 
I don't remember the exact default settings I got, but I'm using a 0% steering dead zone which is working fine for me. A smaller dead zone leaves more room for the game's turning radius to be mapped to the actual wheel, so a smaller dead zone should make the game less twitchy. However, near 0%, it might become more difficult to drive perfectly straight. Likewise, 100% saturation gives more physical range to map the virtual range to. 
 
Linearity is a tricky setting. Negative linearity exaggerates the game's reaction to small movements near the center and decreases it at the extremes. Positive linearity does the opposite. If you find the controls twitchy, increasing linearity might help, while lowering it can help if you suddenly spin out in turns. Setting it to zero makes the controls more predictable overall.
 
The main thing that helped me out was bumping up the wheel weight. It doesn't really do anything to the wheel's sensitivity, but it makes me work a bit harder to turn the wheel, making me less likely to do something to make the car spin out. If I want to spin, I have to work for it, thus if I don't work for it, I don't spin out (much). I also turned the other force feedback options down a bit.
 
Finally, on PC, there's probably some way to configure the wheel separately outside of the game, as a peripheral in general. I don't know anything about this as it's all automagical on the PS3 (the game locks my wheel to a 200° radius while the wheel has a 900° radius available on games that support that option). But there might be some way to increase the turning radius available to you inside the game through configuration outside of the game. If you have the full 270° radius on the Momo wheel available, I'd imagine the steering should be smooth as butter.

" @shenstra: You know you can just get the 3 cymbal pack for like $40. I picked them up at gamestop and attached them to my rock band 2 drums. It's pretty awesome.

edit: wait they don't have standalone cymbals in europe?

"