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I had been hoping for either a portable Gamecube or possibly some sort of VR/holographic wonder thingy that Satoru Iwata was teasing us with. This is just confusing... maybe once I see an actual product, I'll understand.

Heck, I thought they were going to use the 8cm discs in thier newer products and for it to be a "de facto standard". Looks like they are sticking with solid state.

My first thoughts on the dual screens is so that the device can be closed with the screens touching, thus being protected. However, there may also be other reasons... observe:

* Playing Battleship the way it was meant to be played. One screen has your ships and the other has where you fired.

* Flip the screen around and use it for two player games. The unit may even have a second controller for this purpose.

* Hook up to special headgear that would position device right in front of eyes to recreate Virtual Boy experience. (my favorite)

* Plug two Pokemon cartridges (1 screen for each game) into device to trade Pokemon back and forth. It is all about the Pokemon after all.

These are just a few unique gaming concepts I can think of at the moment. Anyone else care to speculate?

What will always be my memory when I hear the words "The Getaway" is "The Big Lie", the lie, of course, was in the screenshots that got posted to fark.com that I happened to see (this was 3 years ago, and Fark was tiny).

Luckily, the web provides the shots I originally saw: here, here, here. I mean, if you saw these things, your mind said "we're here, we have photorealistic games, the world has opened anew in dewy wonder and I am reborn".

So I waited and waited and waited for this game to come out; the dumb "Getaway" name made it hard to keep track of, but man, when I did re-find those screenshots, I mean, it was like a lollipop in my mind.

Finally, quietly, the damned game came out and it wasn't anywhere near those initial promises. Yeah, call me naive, but they really did look so good.

What will always be my memory when I hear the words "The Getaway" is "The Big Lie", the lie, of course, was in the screenshots that got posted to fark.com that I happened to see (this was 3 years ago, and Fark was tiny).

Luckily, the web provides the shots I originally saw: here, here, here. I mean, if you saw these things, your mind said "we're here, we have photorealistic games, the world has opened anew in dewy wonder and I am reborn".

So I waited and waited and waited for this game to come out; the dumb "Getaway" name made it hard to keep track of, but man, when I did re-find those screenshots, I mean, it was like a lollipop in my mind.

Finally, quietly, the damned game came out and it wasn't anywhere near those initial promises. Yeah, call me naive, but they really did look so good.

What will always be my memory when I hear the words "The Getaway" is "The Big Lie", the lie, of course, was in the screenshots that got posted to fark.com that I happened to see (this was 3 years ago, and Fark was tiny).

Luckily, the web provides the shots I originally saw: here, here, here. I mean, if you saw these things, your mind said "we're here, we have photorealistic games, the world has opened anew in dewy wonder and I am reborn".

So I waited and waited and waited for this game to come out; the dumb "Getaway" name made it hard to keep track of, but man, when I did re-find those screenshots, I mean, it was like a lollipop in my mind.

Finally, quietly, the damned game came out and it wasn't anywhere near those initial promises. Yeah, call me naive, but they really did look so good.

Although I think the basic problem here is that Konami lacks the "mascot" characters that companies like Nintendo have. Most of Konami's games are more serious and oriented towards an older audience: Solid Snake, Alucard, and the heroes from the Silent Hill series are less given to the sort of caricature that is in some respects essential for games of this ilk.

Your prayers were answered before you even knew you had them. The game features Dracula from Castlevania, Grey Fox from Metal Gear Solid, Goemon from Mystical Ninja, Vic Viper from Gradius, and, of course, the ever-present Moai.

is anyone taking the X-box seriously?.

What, with high quality games like DOA Extreme Volleyball? How could anyone fail to take it seriously?

Second, there are a few fledgling programs out there that are written for the Dreamcast by non-typical 3rd parties, like Sintendo, and the oft-cited Bleem! for Dreamcast. Why? Because unlike Sony, the Dreamcast hasn't been secured extremely well against piracy. You can bet your life that Sony's gonna have one hell of a tough anti-piracy system after the debacle of the mod-chip / backup copy mess that went on with the first Playstation. So? Well, the Dreamcast can be ported to a lot more easily than the PS2 (Old-schoolers: Grow up, we're not talking about the PS/2, despite what some posters claim. And no, moderators, it's not funny anymore.) Unless damn powerful libraries come out to route around the oddities, I doubt that too many developers will bother pushing the system to its max. Learning entirely new systems, while fun, is costly.

Another interesting point that the article made: The Dreamcast has done much better than its specs claimed it could, but the PS2 has not. The whole "early games" argument holds no water for me. The PS2's been out for a year now in more Easterly parts of the world (read: Japan), and the developers have had time to adjust. It's a big step, and those are much easier to take in terms of programming paradigm shifts than small ones, I find. (This is why I still program in Pascal. C still evades me, without all the little idiosyncrasies that I've become accustomed to. Programming in ASM came much easier) There are no little quirks to max the system out. It's just one hulking behemoth. I'm sure we'll see games use more than todays as time progresses, but 5-6Mpolys/sec on a machien supposedly capable of 10 times that? No amount of programmer stupidity can account for that kind of short coming unless its something in hardware, especially when the livelihoods of these programmers is resting on it.

Anyways, I'm likely going to be buying a Dreamcast soon. Why? Because it's hackable. Sega's a lot more open about its hardware than Sony.

-=Canar=-
--over and out.