I know this isn’t new but I still love that Nintendo did this. It’s such a Nintendo thing. They’re a toy company and think like one.
Did Sony do this with the Vita cartridges? I don’t remember hearing so (and never thought to taste them?).
Heh.
Did Sony do this with the Vita cartridges? I don’t remember hearing so (and never thought to taste them?).
Heh.
Well, wonder no longer. I just licked a PS Vita copy of World of Final Fantasy and it only tastes faintly of plastic.
and thank you
>Intrepid reporter Julia Alexander tried tasting cartridges from the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita. None of them had any particular taste.
Kind of Japan's Apple in some ways (with SEGA unfortunately being Japan's NeXT).
https://stoneagegamer.com/blog/the-xbox-almost-the-dreamcast...
A company like Nintendo doesn’t seem like it has an American equivalent, and I actually can’t imagine a company like that surviving the ups and downs of the 80s/90s/00s tech cycles in the US, especially with our tendency towards M&A.
If anything, Sony is Japan's Microsoft: Do a gazillion things, many of them poorly, to such a unfocused extent that some of your divisions actually end up competition with each other.
Like in Sony's case, how they've had internal battles for decades between the device side (that wants to make devices that are useful) and the content side (that wants DRM out the ass on everything)
They weren't focused back then, but neither was Apple.
Also, random thing, but both Orbis (Playstation operating system) and OS X are based on FreeBSD.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os...
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da... seems to have information on this.
The userland and libc are actually a lot more similar and some pieces are even up to date with them.
Unrelated to your point, but Nintendo is older than Sony and Apple combined.
Apple 45 years
Sony 75 years
Nintendo 132 yearsCan confirm it tastes bad.
Trading cards (cutting edge color printing) -> Mechanical toys (cutting edge machining) -> Basic games like Game and Watch -> Video Games.
Nintendo just makes complex toys using cutting edge tech and always has.
Nintendo still requires uniforms. They're pretty casual about it and you can just throw the factory-style short sleeve shirt or the jacket over whatever you're wearing, but everyone except the suits does wear it.
The names of their products. How do you keep anything straight when the name of each product is UUID?
Q: Which iPhone do you have A: iPhone 12 Pro Max (I choose this one because it's one of the longer iPhone names)
vs
Q: Which Sony headphones do you have A: MX 4 or something like that. Let me check my Amazon order history. Oh yeah, here it is. The WH-1000XM4
I'd much prefer the iPhone naming convention to what Sony does, and Apple having screwed up the iPad naming doesn't really excuse Sony here.
I think the problem for this is they have separate divisions often developing the bits and bolts behind their consumer/business hardware who are doing very high quality and innovative engineering and then the separate company developing the actual devices that use that hardware is more of an afterthought. They just want to sell the bits and bolts to everyone else as well.
What does Sony do poorly? Sony has the same dysfunction Apple has - everything has to be invented in house. If you told me that a company invented an high end camera that 20% more than the competitors and used proprietary connectors and memory cards, I wouldn't be surprised if that was Apple.
>decades between the device side (that wants to make devices that are useful) and the content side (that wants DRM out the ass on everything)
Remember FairPlay?
The Qualia fiasco?
PSPgo?
Was FairPlay the name of the rootkit they'd install if you tried to play one of their audio CDs in a Windows PC?
Sony is like a fancier Microsoft
Who knows with Nintendo
On the other hand, many people thought Nintendo (as we know it at least) might go belly-up in the Gamecube and Wii U eras. There was real talk of them becoming a game dev with no hardware if the Switch was as much of a failure [0]. Similar to the talk around Apple post-Newton, pre-iBook.
[0]https://www.gonintendo.com/stories/376204-after-the-failure-...
Since Sony has entered home console market, Nintendo was essentially unable to compete with them. Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii U weren't successful compared to PlayStation. Wii and Switch on the other hand succeeded by doing something completely different to what PlayStation did.
Another company I'd lump in with these 2 would be Disney for the same reasons as above.
I find they're similar to pre giant-media-conglomerate Disney. Their products target families, and are very child friendly. Ridiculous limits on when you can buy things (Disney Vault, Mario 35). Both are incredibly litigious.
Although I can't think of any comparisons to Nintendo's lack of decent online services.
Especially back in the PS3/XBox360/Wii days, they seemed like the only thing stopping the VG industry from a nofun dystopian duopoly.
It worked for the Game Boy. Its competitors were more powerful, but it turns out that people would rather not spend more money for a color screen if it your system chews through a set of six AA batteries in three hours.
It worked for the Switch. Its competitors were more powerful, but it turns out that people like the portability, and it doesn't seem like they're getting cut-down inferior versions of games for other systems.
It didn't work so well for the N64, Game Cube, or Wii U.
But I use their products, and love them anyway. Cause generally (with exceptions, of course) they create some of the very few computers/consoles/software out there that feels like it had someone constantly questioning whether the thing is fun/nice to use throughout the design process.