MNC Videos

I'm just curious, to what extent do you guys at uber entertainment plan to make videos that are not gameplay videos? will you guys be continuing to create advertisement videos over time for the endorsement companies? If so, will you be only doing a few more or all of them? One last thing, is it possible to see other humorous videos such as something similar to tf2 with the meet the class videos?

I'm feeling kind of let down by the lack of gameplay vids, dev interviews, demos, hands on reports, (etc.) online from E3. Especially in light of the Summer of Arcade announcement.

Whomever you guys have been busy showing the game to need to spread the goodness.

It took a couple of days after PAX for most of the previews of the game to get posted; give it some time.

And for as big as PAX was, the number of games shown on the floor is relatively small in comparison to E3. I would guesstimate several orders of magnitude difference in the number of things trying to get attention. If you've never been able to attend an E3, the easiest way I can think to describe the current state of things is walking around a warehouse with 100 of the loudest heavy metal and techno bands you know with the volume set to 11, and a lot more garage bands standing near the walls trying to be heard.

As much as I'd love to see some of the bigger gaming sites doing more previews of MNC right now, the Nintendo 3DS, Sony Move and Kinect are bigger news. I mean, how can we hope to top Kinectimals?

I'm a realist and, quite frankly, nothing is ever going to top Kinectimals. How is Skittles, by the way? Better say the right thing, or that little demo girl will go all Assassin on your ***.

I actually had the pleasure of attending back-to-back-to-back E3's earlier this decade (before the ridiculous downsize experiment), and I know what you're saying regarding getting attention at that show. It is also bitter sweet that you're selected for Summer of Arcade the year that MS decides to skip talking about XBLA at their presser. Still scratching my head on that one.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that some good content comes out of the show for you guys.

Nintendo 3DS surprised me, the Nintendo DSi only came out like 2 months ago lucky I didn't get that one. I will go for the 3DS.

The irony that PS3 and Xbox are going for the motion gaming now and the fact that their controls/camera are more responsive than the Wii controls(Even with the new Wii motion plus). It's really funny, Though I was looking forward to a new Zelda game but the live demo only proved that motion controls have ruined the game (He was having so much trouble trying to slash in the right directions... it's just sad.)

I hated the latest Zelda on the Wii -- even sold my Wii after owning it for a couple years and putting MAYBE 50 hours on it, total.

I think it was pretty good compared to Wind Waker. It felt like OoT and Link to the Past combined, Puzzles weren't hard though I wish they would spend more time making complex Hook shot puzzles and stuff. The hook shot was barely used in Twilight Princess.

Finished it in 40 hours 100% as well, Only thing I didn't like about it was the Wii control for the fighting I enjoyed the light gun shooting for the bow and stuff.

I wrote on another forum that, no matter how hard I try, I just am not excited or interested in buying anything Nintendo had to show. This was unquestionably their best showing in years and they brought out every big franchise, and then some...welcome back Kid Icarus.

Everything from them just looks either dated or gimmicky. (I don't do handheld gaming. Haven't for well over a decade now.)

One of two things have happened...either Nintendo has left me behind, or I have moved on from Nintendo. I can't pinpoint which it is, but we're no longer speaking the same gaming language.

I just expect more from my gaming experience. If MNC was just another third person shooter, I wouldn't give a rats *** about it, but the Uber team have built much more into the experience. It is a perfect example of the type of creative thought and execution I appreciate.

Unless I play it and it sucks. :twisted:

I'll be bluntly honest. I'm a die-hard Nintendo fan boy.

When I was very young, I saved up my allowance and bought an NES after an uncle of mine introduced me to it (or, more accurately, I saved up $5, plus a couple of bucks I'd gotten for Christmas from extended family, and my parents paid the majority of it).

My sister and I played Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, Excite Bike, Metroid, Duck Tales, Mega Man 2, Ninja Gaiden, Paper Boy, RC Pro Am, River City Ransom, TMNT 2, Dragon Warrior and way more games than I can list here.

No matter what games we played, we always ended up coming back to Super Mario Brothers. We played the game over and over so often that seeing a goomba instead of a buzzy beetle was a little weird, we even managed to hit the 100+ lives bug with out using the shell trick.
I had a subscription to Nintendo Power from mid 1990 (with a free copy of Dragon Warrior w/ the guide!) until maybe 2002 or 2003.
Before my wife and I moved in together I played through Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64 on at least once a month. You can play through Star Fox 64 in about 30-45 minutes easily, in about 2 hours you can play through ever level in the game. I've deleted Mario 64 saves with yoshi more times than I can remember.
When I got my GameBoy I would play through Kirby's Dream Land on family road trips, and actually started to judge time by how many play throughs of the game it took to get somewhere (the game was only 10-15 minutes long). "How long till we get there?" "About 2 hours." "Ok, I'll just play Kirby 8 times through then..."

I've owned every American Nintendo home console, I even bought the purple GameCube the year it came out. I own a Wii I still play it (when there's a new Mario game out at least, 129 stars in to Mario Galaxy 2).

I still have my original GameBoy. I never owned a GameBoy Color or GameBoy Pocket, but did own the Super GameBoy. I never owned a GameBoy Advanced, but bought the GBA SP the day it came out. I own and still use the original DS brick, though have multiple times gotten up to the register of many an EB or GameStop with a DS Lite in my hand before my wife turns me away. I haven't bought a DSi mainly because I still play GBA games on my DS.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy a 3DS, if for no other reason than to be able to play Star Fox. I'd even buy a remake of Super Mario 64, again.


Is any of this rational? Probably not. But something about Nintendo games still grabs me. I no longer get excited about Christmas gifts or my birthday, but a new Mario game can make me giddy. I did finish Red Dead Redemption, but I have a huge stack of other recent 360 and PS3 games and I probably won't touch a single one until I get the very last green star in Super Mario Galaxy 2.


I don't think Nintendo has changed that much in the past 20 years, and part of me hopes they still haven't 20 years from now.

Great post, Ben. Totally respect your position on Nintendo.

My first console experience was the Odyssey, but the first console I saved up for on my own? The NES. And I kept that bad boy with me all the way into my college years. Super Mario Bros was everything, as was Zelda, Duck Hunt, that frustrating as hell Gumshoe, Metroid and the aforementioned Kid Icarus. When Tecmo Bowl hit the scene...nuff said there. Any road trip we took as a family required me to have the latest issue of Nintendo Power. I was a HUGE Nintendo fan, anxious to see what was coming next.

But as the last 20 years have ticked by, I feel like Nintendo fanboys trapped the company in a sort of limbo. They were Nintendo's best friend and greatest enemy at the same time. And as a result, Nintendo almost couldn't change for the next 20 years. And it started to cost them. As fans like me began to tire of the same (admittedly great) franchises, and gravitated to other options, Nintendo's market share slid...HARD. Even in the Gamecube years, a new release of a major franchise would sell huge in the first week, when fanboys would get their copies, and then drop of the chart like a rock. It was fascinating to watch.

And now there is the Wii. Nintendo realized that going head to head with MS & Sony at their game, while relying upon a shrinking/aging fanbase wasn't going to work. A brilliant move on their part that ushered in tens of millions of fans outside of my demographic...which is what brought me to my post above. Did Nintendo abandon me, or did I abandon them? Perhaps it is just semantics.

My wife, kids and mother-in-law love Wii Bowling...they would never understand Monday Night Combat. My daughter is going to freak out when I put her in front of Kinectimals and my wife is interested in the fitness aps for Kinect, but didn't understand why I was up till 4am to experience the conclusion of Commander Sheperd taking the fight to the Collectors.

My tastes have just evolved, but Nintendo didn't evolve with me. While the base of "I hope Nintendo doesn't change" is still a large one, it is shrinking. But instead of bringing back those that have left, they diluted focus from the hardcore fan to bring in those that may have never played. FANTASTIC for Nintendo, but incredibly uninteresting for me.

Blimey. Quite a few "parents" on this forum, I see.

Seems like almost NONE of you have enough time on your hands to also play games at the same time as managing a family?

Or not? Meh, I don't know, I'm not having a kid anytime soon anyway.

I'm not entire sure I'd blame Nintendo's fans for their decline during the N64 and Gamecube era. Nintendo has always had one stead fast rule when it came to sales: make money on everything.

Every Nintendo console ever made, they make some profit on every console sold. The same can not be said about Sony, Sega, or Microsoft. This, plus their famously draconic control over content that appeared on their consoles, and thus extreme dislike of disc media, let Sony and Microsoft in on the gaming pie.

Oddly, Sega's complete opposite views on those topics are a large part of what killed their hardware presence.

The D-Pad of the NES, the 4 face buttons and shoulder buttons of the SNES, the thumb controlled analog stick and beginnings of a dedicated camera control of the N64. These were all things Nintendo were made fun of for, but have since become industry standards.

With the N64, and throwing away their partnership with Sony, Nintendo bet heavy on cartridge tech. The slow load times of Sony Playstation games were offset by the FMV cutscenes and audio quality that Nintendo couldn't hope to match. By the end of the N64's lifespan their largest cartridges were 1/10th the size of the base CD capacity. Sony also managed to get a great deal of developers on their side with large sacks of cash, the promise of more helpful developer relationship, and the lure of a mature game market that Sega's falling market share and aging hardware was loosing.

The GameCube was the first console from Nintendo that felt like them playing catch up rather than being the strong leaders, and they suffered greatly from it. At the time Sony and Microsoft were loosing hundreds of dollars on every console sold, and the result was a greatly increased expectation from consumers on the quality of graphics possible, as well as a relatively cheap DVD player. Nintendo's controller seemed like a weird bastard child of the Dual Shock and the Dreamcast. And while the graphic capabilities far surpassed those of previous generations, and even most PS2 games, their "kiddy" image couldn't be shaken by a generation of gamers now in their teens or early 20's who had already converted to Sony.

During this era is the first time I broke from my purely Nintendo (and PC) world. I never bought a PS1, but my PS2 and Xbox became major components of my gaming life. There were some good games on the GameCube, but not great. I mean Luigi's Mansion was their killer app at launch. Personally, I loved the game. It was a puzzle / fishing game with all the ingeniously playful game play concepts most Nintendo games exude. In a way the game perfectly personifies the state Nintendo was in. At a point where they were desperately trying to prove to the world they were a top tier console and their games didn't suck to a community that wasn't listening, their major launch title stars their 2nd tier character in a game about sucking ghosts.

At this point, I think most of the gaming world had left Nintendo. We'd all started cheating on them with their ex-best friend.

I've always felt that economics played a role in the PS1/N64 days. Aside from the alleged buckets-o-cash from Sony to build momentum with developers and publishers early on, the cartridge decision became a huge cost barrier for publishers as well. Consumers saw the technical advantages of CDs, but you were talking pennies for printing a CD versus dollars for a manufacturing cartridges.

But let's face it, if the content was there, the customers would have remained, meaning the publishers as well.

I would also argue that Nintendo most definitely did not make money on GCN hardware until LATE in it's lifespan, which is why it was during the GCN years that Nintendo, for the first time ever, posted quarterly and annual losses. It certainly wasn't due to their handheld business, which was skyrocketing at the time. The GCN hardware was their anchor. From the software side, their first party franchises were just about the only thing selling on the platform, but in smaller numbers than they used to...another indication of the shrinking and/or "cheating" fanbase. (I love the analogy by the way)

A classic case of "Who moved my cheese." They continued to try and appease the same audience they had been for the previous decade+, but it wasn't sticking around in the same numbers. They said we didn't want or need to play online and refused to embrace magical new game development features like "voice recording" and non-MIDI musical scores. And, yes, the dreaded K-Word label became attached.

Rather than adjust to regain the hardcore, they went a different direction with Wii. And the rest is history. Whether it is good for the industry depends on who you ask, but it was unquestionably good for Nintendo...and their fanboys who you would swear all own a piece of the company.

Great sharing thoughts on this, by the way. Nintendo is an interesting case study to be sure.

A good deal of Nintendo's losses were due to the vast amounts of money they were spending in development of software that didn't sell in volumes needed to turn a profit. Rare's last game for Nintendo, Star Fox Adventures, took several years to make and obviously suffered from Rare's disillusionment post Conker and Miyamoto's misunderstanding of the western market's love of Star Fox. It sold barely 1 million copies, and may have been one of the more expensive games Nintendo ever made.

At the start of the N64 days Nintendo had the arrogance that Sony had recently, and they both paid dearly for it. The market and players are so much bigger now than they used to be that a platform playing the "core gamer" area can't survive with out the help of the likes of EA of the past, or the Activision of today. I totally have to agree with your comments about the cartridge costs being a major factor. I don't remember the exact numbers, but something like 50% of cost of a cartridge (after the vendor's share) went to Nintendo to pay for the license to release on their console, and the cost to use their exclusive facilities to make cartridges.

Sony on the other hand was giving money to publishers, and the discs could be made by anyone. (Including little Timmy using daddy's CD burner.)

Every developer has their hit or misses, but for GCN, hardware losses were a line item on their annual report. It was the nature of the beast then. Nintendo didn't discover some magical loophole in technology availability (IBM CPU, ATI GPU) that allowed them to be more cost effective than MS or Sony, yet retain technical performance parity. I applauded them for it at the time. They did something I NEVER thought I would see Nintendo do: Utilize a Subsidizing model..the old Razor & Razor Blades/Cell Phone/Satellite TV & Service model. Sell hardware for a loss and make it up on the software and service side. But Nintendo built in their own disadvantages...no online and an odd controller made it easy to choose Xbox or PS2 for the broader game library, or for more feature rich versions of the same game. People bought the Nintendo console to play Nintendo games made the old Nintendo way.

You're also right that the market had drastically changed. Dreamcast crashed and burned without 3rd Party Support and Nintendo rolls out GCN with a controller that clearly had Nintendo in mind first and 3rd Party second...if at all. I'm with you on that one as well.

And today, the casual market is all the rage for market expansion, led by Wii. I got a huge laugh out of gaming websites this past week in response to the MS conference. For about a decade, MS has been criticized that all they do is cater to the "hardcore" gamer. So when their press event isn't another 90 minute love letter to hardcore gamers, they freak out over Kinectimals and Kinect Adventures, there is instant backlash. You'll never find a better example of 'what have you done for me lately' than in gaming. MS isn't allowed an hour, after a decade of commitment to gamers, to address the casual market without gamers crying foul. It is one of the major reasons that, despite the massive industry dollars, the gaming industry gets a bad rap at times. An overly vocal minority that paints a bad picture. But it is what it is.

Too much to read right now, But I think Nintendo is doing fine but the lack of online community capabilities is their downfall.

Xbox and PS2 had online games with friends lists and GameCube only had a small amount of online games.

Xbox 360 and PS3 have full party chat and everything and Wii you can only play with friends if you write down your Wii's IP address and tell your friends it over the internet.

I don't know any statistics but I think Nintendo is doing fine but they don't put enough effort into their consoles.

How did this go from Monday Night Combat to an incredibly long and boring lecture about Nintendo?

I wouldn't say its boring I actually think its kinda interesting but I would say it is off topic and they should make a new post annd put it in the off topic section not in MNC section where nitendo has nothing to do with MNC

Oh I wholeheartedly agree.

Thanks for the great read TGO and BGolus.