Live data from Hacker News

Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

medium.com

91–100 of 182 posts

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your gaming PC is gathering dust but you play the switch, you probably are falling for the marketing. PC has nearly every game switch has, and more. Nintendo is a big marketing company, advertising when you were a child and unaware. Now people nostalgia and automatically but their products. My best example of this is BOTW which is an average game, but the fans have claimed it's the greatest game of all time. (Whic…

I think this is a bait, but, I'm curious: if BOTW is average, could you provide me with ~25 above average games? I would love to add them to my library and play them. Or even just 15?

I don’t think I would describe Breath of the Wild as average, but it probably falls under my top 10 most times I consider such a list. I could probably get to 15 games I find better, all of which are older than BotW. I’ll list some of you really are interested.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#92

Love it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15 years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table. While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence, there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory. It gives me hope for the future - if we c…

Got some examples?

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your gaming PC is gathering dust but you play the switch, you probably are falling for the marketing. PC has nearly every game switch has, and more. Nintendo is a big marketing company, advertising when you were a child and unaware. Now people nostalgia and automatically but their products. My best example of this is BOTW which is an average game, but the fans have claimed it's the greatest game of all time. (Whic…

I think this is a bait, but, I'm curious: if BOTW is average, could you provide me with ~25 above average games? I would love to add them to my library and play them. Or even just 15?

Sure, btw this list has a lot of 2, you don't need to play the originals.

Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock, borderlands 2, call of duty modern warfare 2, (divinity Original sin, combat was great, hated the puzzles), doom 2016, elder scrolls (hardcore start with Morrowind, otherwise oblivion), fable, factorio, fallout 3, far cry 3, Gris(short, get it on sale), half life 2, magika, shadow of Mordor and war, saints row 1 and maybe 2, the Stanley parable, Kotor 1, Minecraft(and Terraria if you have someone to do coop with), maybe West of loathing.

Those are at least botw tier.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bait, but, I'm curious: if BOTW is average, could you provide me with ~25 above average games? I would love to add them to my library and play them. Or even just 15?

I don’t think I would describe Breath of the Wild as average, but it probably falls under my top 10 most times I consider such a list. I could probably get to 15 games I find better, all of which are older than BotW. I’ll list some of you really are interested.

Let me guess, you've been playing Zelda since you were a child.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#95
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called double shot injection molding. The cheaper Nokia Lumia phones use it to great effect. A bunch of products also use clear plastic with the inside surface painted to get a similar depth effect (think Apple Magic Mouse).

I actually almost mentioned the Nokia phones - the Lumia 620 with its exchangeable double-shot rounded plastic backs (and near-perfect form factor in hand, with a 3.8" screen) may be the nicest phone I've ever used, as a pure physical object, despite being among the cheapest. Pity about the screen though - and, some might argue, what appeared on it, at least in terms of apps. This sort of design for joy rather than f…

Yeah, I think the iPhone 5c, especially in combination with those punched-hole cases, hit this spot to a degree, but the market apparently disagreed and they went back to prestige.

Teenage Engineering does joy better than anyone else I can think of, but it's impressive when the huge companies do any of it. Remember when dumb mobile phones became commodity enough that industrial designers really got creative? Thinking KDDI in Japan, especially the Infobar. Some manufacturers still do that but don't have the software chops to complete the thought.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#96

What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998…

Also overlooked is that this strategy backfires on Nintendo nearly as often as it succeeds.

The Wii may have sold a lot of units, but it didn’t get _played_ as much as its contemporaries in large part due to the fact that Nintendo refused to release a high-def version, right when the world dumped all their old TVs en masse.

The Wii U nearly sunk the damn company. If the 3DS hadn't been popular, Nintendo would be where Sega is by now.

It's fine, excellent in fact, to go with tried-and-true tech, but you also need the foresight to see what's inadequate.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I would describe Breath of the Wild as average, but it probably falls under my top 10 most times I consider such a list. I could probably get to 15 games I find better, all of which are older than BotW. I’ll list some of you really are interested.

Let me guess, you've been playing Zelda since you were a child.

It would be a stretch to say that’s, I did not own any Zelda games before Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 (I didn’t even like it enough to finish it), I had played some of them via rentals. I also have not played any of the Zelda series after Ocarina of Time. So, just for context I have owned consoles, handhelds, and had a PC to play games on since 1986, so it’s not like I did not play games during my childhood, but the Zelda series was never really one of them.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bait, but, I'm curious: if BOTW is average, could you provide me with ~25 above average games? I would love to add them to my library and play them. Or even just 15?

Sure, btw this list has a lot of 2, you don't need to play the originals. Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock, borderlands 2, call of duty modern warfare 2, (divinity Original sin, combat was great, hated the puzzles), doom 2016, elder scrolls (hardcore start with Morrowind, otherwise oblivion), fable, factorio, fallout 3, far cry 3, Gris(short, get it on sale), half life 2, magika, shadow of Mordor and war, saints row 1 an…

But the question was, if Breath of the Wild is average, what are _above_ average games, in your eyes?

I could, personally, point out about half of that list that I found just... dull, compared to Zelda. But games are subjective, so I'll let you enjoy what you enjoy!

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#99

It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables. If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling…

[deleted]

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#100

It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables. If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling…

>releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor

The reason the Switch doesn't hit PS4/XBox One levels of power is because it's hard to hit that mark while staying within weight considerations, having decent battery life, and also coming in at the price points console gamers intend to pay (It seems like they're trying to back into it by turning the consoles into in-home gaming servers and have you use your smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. as a display that the console streams to.

Post reply on HN