You should have the "right" to create a game without jumping through any
damn hoops for Nintendo? Yeah, right. And I should have the right to play
football for Liverpool :) Why should personal reasons, such as hating a
company, stand in the way of making a game that works on their hardware. If
it's the best format for a game then it should be done on that platform.
Yes, true that it's harder for small companies to do well because of the
restrictions Nintendo have, but where is this ANY different from any other
line of business? It isn't. Large comapnies ALWAYS tend to have the most
miserable employees, simply because they can't give evreyone the same level
of attention, and large copanies always give the small ones hassle. Sure
there are some good large companies out there.

The reason this industry isn't as creative and exciting as it used to be is
because it's a bigger more mature market, with more astute buyers at the end
of it all, so the risk factor has gone up for all developers and publishers.
If you have an idea that's good enough for the market, no matter what it is,
some publisher out there will take it on, risk or not, and if you present a
nearly finished game, the risk is a lot lower for a publisher, and the
chances of getting it published are higher. If you present a finished game
and no-one wants to publish, face it, the game isn't good enough. Plain and
simple.

The thing though, it's not just Nintendo. You have to fill in forms for
both Sony and Microsoft to become approved developers, even if a publisher
is prepared to buy the development kits for a developer. The developer
still has to be approved. Just in the case of Sony it's a lot easier
because they were at least a lot less discerning about who they let on
board. Look at all the absolute rubbish that appeared on PS1. OK, there
were some GREAT games, not disputing that, but a lot of crap also. Now look
at N64 as another example. When top 10 games lists are compiled, I bet
there's at least 3 N64 games in there. Another thing is they wouldn't have
the best selling piece of game hardware in the world if they didn't know
what they were doing would they.

Quite a number of the Nintendo censorship issues as well are to cut down on
controversial issues. I remember back on both the Megadrive and SNES the
Hell levels had to be removed from Worms, as did the crosses when the worms
died. These were turned into tombstones. This was simply because Nintendo
and Sega would not allow anything with religious overtones into any of their
games. Sure this got toned down later, but it just saves Mrs. X phoning up
and complaining, and maintains their image as really being a family company.

If you don't want to develop for Nintendo platforms, why bitch about them?
Just go and work on WonderSwan or something. The bottom line is Nintendo do
what they do, and are successful. Why try and fix it if it isn't broken? I
for one think the quality over quantity "ruling" makes a stronger platform
in the end.

FGL