"When I developed the Famicom, I put all the basic functions that were necessary to make it as a gaming device. For the Switch, it's inherited all that over the years. All the successes and failures of the Famicom are inherited by the next generation of consoles and onward."
What did he consider to be the failures?
EDIT: Added the first sentence of the quote.
The way I read the quote is he felt there where fundamental designs decisions that have been passed down all the way to the Switch. Some of which he considers to be failures.
I think the quote isn't meant for such literal interpretation. Basically, saying they have all learned from good and bad things which puts them to where they are today. It's like one of those "I regret nothing because without my failures I wouldn't be the person I am today" type quotes.
The virtual boy was a failure by any measure, 64DD, the Wii U sucked, and the 3DS wasn’t very popular compared to the DS, and wouldn’t have had any success if it didn’t have backwards compatibility.
It was a very fun console. It is unfortunate that asymmetrical game play wasn't explored more.
It really was the first step towards what the Switch is now. Being able to remotely play games anywhere in my house, or have someone else watch TV while I played on the Wii U, was super cool.
I wonder if some are even portable. I would love to have Windwaker HD on Switch but I remember the touchpad screen being pretty integral (and part of why it was a lot better than the original)
Wait, you didn't like Crystal Chronicles? Maybe I'm just a nostalgic millennial, but I thought the game's aesthetic was pristine and the multiplayer super clever.
It's up there with Pac Man Vs. for that sort of thing.
I own a few of the cables. If we ever somehow meet in real life someday, would you want to try it with me and some friends?
There are moments where it feels like a bit of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the towns, or roadside scenes, or everyone receiving individual letters from home.
The Wii U and 3DS were some of the best consoles Nintendo ever made.
I get that they weren't large hits in the general market, I get that they were not financial successes.
But for dedicated folks, these consoles represented some of the very best design and product packages that Nintendo had ever offered. (A good chunk of which was lost in the transition to the Switch, like proper Virtual Console support, or Nintendo Mii's getting heavy usage, or StreetPass).
Yes, they also offered backwards compatibility, but that's not "why" they had success -- they were successful as products entirely in their own right.
They weren’t “good failures” like Dreamcast. I can’t think of any game that was great on either off the top of my head, but the Dreamcast I can name several exclusives that were. A lot of the good games were just remakes, like Devil Survivor Overclocked.
> They weren’t “good failures” like Dreamcast. I can’t think of any game that was great on either off the top of my head, but the Dreamcast I can name several exclusives that were.
Really? The Wii U lineup is like a perfect Dreamcast-like example of a "good failure". It was so good, that half of the best selling Switch games from it's first two years, were just past Wii U exclusive games (or 3DS games), ported up to the switch.
Zelda: BotW, Mario Kart 8, Lego City Undercover, Pokken Tournament, Bayonetta 2, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Hyrule Warriors, Super Mario Brothers U, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Wonderful 101, Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World, Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water, Super Mario Maker, and Xenoblade Chronicles (1).
All of those are either Wii U / 3DS exclusives ported forward, or planned to be exclusives and got last-minute ports near the end of development cycle (like Zelda BotW).
The 3DS isn't really a "failure". It still sold 70+ million units. Only in comparison to the 150 million of the DS is it a failure. Both Wii U and 3DS have some fantastic exclusives (although most of the good ones on Wii U ended up Switch or 3DS or both).
Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World are IMO the two best 3D Mario games made, 3DS has a trio of fantastic Fire Emblem games (granted one is a remake but for English audiences not really), excellent JRPGs in stuff like Bravely Default, SMTIV, Pokémon X&Y, Mario Kart 7 and Smash were as good as always and LoZ: A Link Between Worlds is really good. Yes, there was plenty of ports and remakes but they were ports and remakes of great games made portable like Ocarina of Time 3D, DQ7 and DQ8, etc.
Wii U had great exclusives like Mario Maker, Bayonetta 2, the aforementioned Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Breath of the Wild, Hyrule Warriors, Splatoon, Pikmin 3, Xenoblade Chronicles X, etc.
My bet is you have more fondness for the Dreamcast because you spent more time with it. Wii U was a fantastic system and still is.
I have a bias to Dreamcast, I was able to pick up any random game and it was gonna be good. The Dreamcast has a total of 624 games compared to the Wii U with 783, and if we remove remakes the good ones are mostly Nintendo, Dreamcast has 3rd parties that made good ones too. BoTW was a backport, but odd that list, I can confirm splatoon was pretty good.
BoTW is not a backport. It was announced originally for Wii U and came out the same day. There's not really very many remakes or remasters on Wii U, there's some enhanced ports of PS3/360 games but if you remove enhanced ports a lot of DC games disappear too...
The 783 game list also doesn't include any of the virtual console games and there's some really good stuff there that getting a hold of on the original system is pricey like Metroid Fusion and Ogre Battle 64.
Wii U games have the benefit of still being good today. Most DC games you need to add the caveat "for the time". There's also plenty of trash on DC too. I'm sure if you actually picked any random game it would more likely be trash than good. Wii U also has that problem but all consoles do.
3ds and wii U were marketing issues in that it wasn't clear that it was the next version of the system, like nes->snes but just a slightly different version of the same thing, like DS->DS Lite.
It doesn't help that Nintendo rereleases their consoles multiple times a generation, or does things like the New 3ds which is only a slight improvement over the 3ds (extra joystick, slightly improved hardware).
But yeah, virtual boy was a failure by pretty much any metric.
N64 wasn’t a continuation of SNES and 3DS sounds like a new DS, as does the Wii U unless you’re stating Xbox one failed because it’s name is 359 less, and was not an obvious continuation of Xbox 360. They went N64, GameCube, Wii which don’t have any continuity nor does Wii U to switch.
Seems like continuity hurts rather than helps Nintendo.
I don't think GP was saying that Nintendo had full continuation, just that they assumed people would see Wii U and 3DS the same way they saw the SNES. But by the time those were released people had just been through multiple models of DS and Gameboy Advanced that were just modified versions of the same hardware.
There are no "antiquated calls" on a machine which had no os or standard library :)
Anyway, the switch not being special technology wise is very inline with the nintendo philosophy actually[0]. The NES wasn't that special for the time either, having not as that great specs of consoles in the late second generation, but it was how it was used, the games that came with it that made history.
Insertions and removals did work well on the Famicom, but not so much on the NES; the famicom had a typical edge-connector while the NES had a zero-insertion-force (ZIF) connector.
The pins would be repositioned with each insertion and you had to hope that all 72 pins made a good-enough contact. If the 10NES made poor contact you got a 1Hz reboot loop. If other pins made poor contact the game would kind-of sort-of work until it crashed.
Thank you so much Uemura-san for these great consoles!
I often think about how great it was to play these games, the amount of effort and care that went into them, and the sense of fairness and pure joy that you bought a game and could truly experience it! There was a magic and sincerity in these consoles that is buried under layers of ads, in-game purchases, tracking, updates etc. in more recent devices and games.
The NES and SNES still feel like the greatest consoles that ever existed. Thank you again!
What an absolute giant. The design of the NES made possible the games that revived the entire industry we know and love. There's no telling what gaming would look like for the past 35 years without his work. Godspeed sir.
It's sad Byuu is gone but they don't represent the SNES becoming an artifact of history nor does a big thread about them belong in a memorial thread about Masayuki Uemura. There are many more SNES emu programmers who will take their place. That being said. RIP David Kirk Ginder.
I assume by "that year", you mean this year, since Byuu's (sigh, "alleged") suicide note was posted in June. But frankly, the notion that there was an entire year in which not a single foreign citizen died in Japan is absurd on it's face. Surely you can point me to that press release, and maybe some news coverage of that statistical miracle.
There's also a statement given to USA Today by their employer confirming their death, including their full name (previously not public), and a new photograph of them. I suppose that was part of the con, or hell, maybe USA Today is in on the conspiracy.
OK, I've updated that sentence to be a little more neutral. Now I'm interested to to hear your response to the rest of what I wrote.
What is the Japanese government agency that provides reports about the number of foreign nations who die on Japanese soil, and where is the report from the time period including late June 2021, showing that nobody died. And for comparison, where can I read a sample report from a time period in which the number of deaths exceeded zero?
Also, in your scenario, did Byuu completely invent the company Datapower Development for the sake of appearances, or did they merely impersonate the founder, Wayne Becket, when talking to a reporter? Or is this a multi-person conspiracy?
> What is the Japanese government agency that provides reports about the number of foreign nations who die on Japanese soil, and where is the report from the time period including late June 2021, showing that nobody died. And for comparison, where can I read a sample report from a time period in which the number of deaths exceeded zero?
I found this site, it’s operated by the US government rather than the Japanese government. If you look for US citizens who died in Japan in June 2021, it does in fact show that there were no deaths.
Note that the site only has statistics up to June 2021 and is only updated every 6 months. I thought that maybe the statistics were only updated up to the beginning of June but I tried another country (Mexico) and there was a death listed on June 28 so it seems like they’re up to the end of June.
"I'm very very angry – furious with Kiwi Farms," Beckett told USA TODAY. "I just want them to appreciate the gravity of what they've done. They certainly contributed to (Ginder's) death. ... They were quite precious to us. How do you replace the irreplaceable?"
On June 27, 2021, Near posted a suicidal note on Twitter, disclosing the extent of the harassment they had faced from the website Kiwi Farms. Héctor Martín Cantero later announced he had confirmed Near's death with the police. One month later, their death was confirmed by their employer to USA Today.[12] Near was non-binary.[13][14][15][12]
Really naive question here, but... what _is_ their purpose? Do they have some sort of binding ideology?
LE: I just... googled them and looked at the wiki. What the fuck? This is just... way worse than I imagined, at first glance. They seem to celebrate their targets commiting suicide and their whole goal is harassing people. In this, i think they are waaay worse than politically motivated harrassers, at least the politically motivated ones want some sort of end result that is, in their twisted view, better than the status quo. Kiwifarmers seem to just want to destroy people. What the fuck.
It is absolutely sick. And they build up these huge elaborate structures of lies to convince themselves that actually, they are the good guys and whoever they are going after deserves it. They don't care at all about truth when doing this, they will just latch onto anything and twist it to justify what they are doing.
It's basically a shared mental illness enabled through the internet. Absolutely terrifying.
This is a massive, gross misrepresentation. And you need to leave that site now, forget every lie its told you, and try to comprehend just how evil and damaging it actually is.
I assume you're referring to the USA Today article, which did, in fact, include a quote.
You do realize that obituaries don't just happen? Your loved ones (or your estate, etc) have to pay the newspaper to run them. If they don't, then nothing happens. There's no government agency out there making sure everybody gets an obituary.
Here's my question to you. Show me an example of the "documentation" you want for somebody, anybody, else. If it's public information that's so easy to find, I'm sure you'll have no trouble at all pointing to an example. After all, people die in Japan everyday.
Occam's Razor, dude. On the one hand, a non-binary person killed themselves after being bullied, which is regrettably more common than it should be. On the other hand, you have an (at least) 3-person conspiracy to fake Byuu's death, not to mention get them a new legal identity since they've already publicly declared "David Ginder" to be dead.
I've presented corroborating evidence, in the form of the newspaper article. I'll admit it's not absolutely ironclad, but it would not be trivial to fake. Under the circumstances, it's more "official" evidence than I would expect from any other death of an American national living in Japan, all else being equal.
Meanwhile, in this thread, you've made several falsifiable claims that haven't been borne out. Starting with the claim that there is affirmative Japanese documentation that no Americans died in Japan during the relevant time period. Still waiting for you to back that one up. Then you claimed that the journalist didn't provide an official quote from Byuu's employer, which they clearly did. Now you're gone from claiming that we don't have sufficient evidence one way or the other to saying I should "be happy that Byuu is still alive". Where's your documentation for that claim?
You seem very invested in convincing other people on the internet that Byuu faked their death. I'm pretty sure that if I were able to produce a death certificate, that you would just move the goalposts again and say that there's no proof that David Ginder was really Byuu. (Or would you commit now to accepting a death certificate for David Ginder as proof that Byuu was cyberbullied into killing themselves?)
First off, "that year" is this year, so you're boldly claiming there's a document claiming a lack of deaths in a whole year that hasn't ended yet.
But even assuming such a document exists, do you have evidence that he hadn't naturalized and therefore would have given up US citizenship as part of that process?
Are you claiming he faked his own death to escape his harassers? It is true it's hard to find concrete evidence of his death - the sole source of information is a twitter thread from "Hector"[0].
You seem to have no idea how obituaries work, you usually have to pay a newspaper to carry them, they aren't automatic, and if the news is published widely enough in the relevant communities why would you bother to pay for it? As for government records, vital records are often limited to people with an interest, such as family members, they aren't usually offered to the public. And why would such a person publish that record online? You might as well be claiming David Bowie didn't really die, I've never seen his death certificate.
Obituaries aren't official records, they're media statements. The official records are kept in a civil registry, which usually isn't open to the public until X years have passed (obviously this differs by nation; in NL, death records don't become public until after 50 years).
It is incredible that Uemura has been giving lectures at foreign universities even in his late age, and a member from our local video game archivist organization was extraordinarily lucky to get a NES signed from him when he was visiting Bratislava.
78 is definitely not young, and various age-related health conditions develop rather abruptly with age. While your mind might be crystal clear, the rest of the daily life is far harder at 78 than say at 48.
Most of the US is obese and unhealthy as well. If we remove child deaths from ancient Roman times it wasn’t that different not accounting for infant mortality, and in Britain for males it’s 79.
>If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.
Ask them what age and they’ll tell you what age they think a 78 year old should look like (examples like on oxygen, can’t use legs, obese, completely wrinkly, no teeth, had 20 pills they need daily, basically on the verge of death).
Ask people how does this person look and they’ll often be surprised, epigenetic age matters more (obesity raises it for example) and when we think of age we don’t think years as much as “how old they look”. There are 50 year olds that show accelerated aging and 80 year olds that still look younger than their age. https://www.odditycentral.com/news/ripped-81-year-old-bodybu...
I’ve always found mean life expectancy an odd metric. Median life expectancy seems more useful to answer “how long am I expected to live?” and appears to be 3-4 years higher in the US.
Sad to hear about this :( He brought so much joy into the hearts of small kids and big kids.
Maybe I'm biased, but I feel that Japanese video game developers don't enjoy the long life I think Japanese should enjoy. There are other examples. 78 is not bad but still far from good.
I hope to live that long. The average life expectancy for a Japanese male is 84, but there is this pandemic going on and it has definitely hit the older generation hard.
My friend at Tokyo university says they keep public windows open, cases are low, and it didn’t hit Japan hard at all, they were used to wearing masks long before, and most people isolate naturally anyway.
I played my first Nintendo games in black and white on an NES that my dad brought back to Brazil after a trip to the US, and I loved them!
The reason the games were black and white had something to do with the differences between broadcast color encoding systems of PAL, used in Brazil, and NTSC, used in the US.
Eventually the hardware in my NES was modified and I could play the games in color, but it was, I suspect, an experience that shaped my own visual preferences.
It's a sad moment for gamers. He started working at Sharp, where he sold solar cell and light sensor technology, but he's best remembered for a long and highly influential run at Nintendo that effectively revived the video game industry following the 1983 crash.
Nintendo Famicon was the first console I ever played, and to this day, controller-based sidescrollers are my favorite type of games. Chances are, it's because all those hours I put into Famicon (Dendy, actually) as a kid.
Thank you for all the memories!
If you want to bootstrap a s/nes collection to play/hack on in memoriam (this may or may not work):
1. Update the no-intro rom set. This guy usually post an yearly update: https://archive.org/details/no-intro_romsets
2. Update the no-intro love pack dats (PC-XML): https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php?page=download&s=64&op=daily
3. [Update and Apply patches](https://www.marcrobledo.com/RomPatcher.js/)
4. Pull https://github.com/andrebrait/1g1r-romset-generator
5. Run build.sh to build 1g1r sets
#!/bin/bash
cd 1g1r-romset-generator
git pull
cd ../
# Select what systems you want for you base 1g1r romsets
zips=(
"Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (20210122-114559) [headered]"
"Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (20210122-114559) [headered_iNES2.0_NRS(2020-09-27)]"
"Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (20210122-114559) [unheadered]"
"Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Combined) (20201230-192658)"
)
dats=(
"Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (Parent-Clone) (20210822-055431).dat"
"Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (Parent-Clone) (20210822-055431).dat"
"Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (Parent-Clone) (20210822-055431).dat"
"Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Combined) (Parent-Clone) (Parent-Clone) (20210119-061911).dat"
)
NOINTRODIR="no-intro_romsets/no-intro romsets/"
OUTPUTDIR="roms-output/"
mkdir -p $OUTPUTDIR
for i in "${!zips[@]}"; do
mkdir -p "$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}"
unzip -qq -n -d "$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}" "$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}.zip"
python3 1g1r-romset-generator/generate.py \
--no-all \
--regions=USA,JP,EUR --languages=EN --all-regions \
--input-dir="$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}" --output-dir="$OUTPUTDIR${zips[i]}" \
--threads=16 \
--dat="./No-Intro Love Pack (PC XML) (2021-08-22)/${dats[i]}"
done
With quotes like this, I don't think she will be considered essential in America:
>Interviewed in 2003, she said, "I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire.
The full quote/wikipedia article is a bit more subtle indictment of the USA's foreign military interventions though the name dropping of bin Laden is a provocation - it feels close to paraphrasing Chomsky's the way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in terrorism.
I appreciate that you're not doing this in most of your comments but you're still doing it often enough that we need you to review the site guidelines and fix this properly. If you'd please do so, we'd appreciate it. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Sorry, I have a hard time letting a comment I disagree with alone, and I will generally match the level of effort that the parent comment put in. I could work on my tone, but I find it tough when I hear others politely say horrible things. I guess I live my internet forum life by the standard of the comment I browse past is the comment I accept.
> generally match the level of effort that the parent comment put in
Ah, that's the problem. Everyone overestimates how much badness the other person is adding and underestimates how much they themselves are adding. We all do this— objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, etc. But because this bias is so strong and so universal, if you gauge by other people's behavior you're going to badly miscalculate; and since the other person is probably doing the same, this is the way we get a downward spiral.
The solution is to stick to the guidelines regardless of what other people are doing. That's not easy, of course, but it gets easier with practice, and it's the only way to avoid flamewar hell.
The government sorta did lock her and her family in a camp for 3 years. All for the crime of being Japanese.
To ignore her is to ignore one of our most shameful moments. I want our country to be better. We shouldn't be like the Russians who pretend things like the Holodomor didn't happen.
I have never heard anyone pretend that Japanese internement didn't happen.
But just because something bad happened to you and your family, that does not give you the right to attack and hurt others.
I see some examples where she was doing a lot of good and held great views: Kochiyama also taught English to immigrant students and volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters in New York City.[13] In Debbie Allen's television series Cool Women (2001), Kochiyama stated, "The legacy I would like to leave is that people try to build bridges and not walls."
But she also worked and associated with violent people and had no problem excusing them: Kochiyama and other activists demanded the release of four Puerto Rican nationalists convicted of attempted murder—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez—who in 1954 had opened fire in the House of Representatives, injuring five congressmen.
Kochiyama also supported Yū Kikumura, an alleged member of the Japanese Red Army, who was arrested in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in 1986 when he was found carrying a bomb in his luggage and subsequently convicted of planning to bomb a US Navy recruitment office in the Veteran's Administration building.
I don't have time to dig into her entire history and see if all those accused of violent acts were justified or not but if you praise Osama bin Laden with one breath and then claim that "War and weaponry must be abolished" with the next, then you are not working for the abolition of violence, just want it to be controlled by people you like.
Ronald Reagan supported apartheid South Africa. He accelerated the War on Drugs, ruining the lives of millions. He trivialized HIV, failed to take action, causing untold levels of suffering.
He's still one of our most important presidents. It's important to learn why these things happen. You can even celebrate Ronald Reagan, without celebrating the above.
History is not, and has never been a comic book. It's not as simple as good vs evil.
What did he consider to be the failures?
EDIT: Added the first sentence of the quote.
The way I read the quote is he felt there where fundamental designs decisions that have been passed down all the way to the Switch. Some of which he considers to be failures.
I imagine he is talking about the hardware/software stack. OS seems pretty custom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...