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What Sony is forgetting is that the playstation has been dominant in the market not because of its "extra features"; instead, the reason that Sony has dominated the past two generations is because of the rich library of games. By touting the system not as a gaming system and claiming it as a "multimedia system", Sony is alienating the one, and obviously the single most important group in the gaming industry, the gamer.
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Sony has never called their system a gaming console, instead calling it a "supercomputer for computer entertainment."

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_61246 81.html

Who's the dumbass here? If you actually read what happened about Oblivion you'd know that Oblivion only got rerated because of the gore. The ESRB did a piss-poor job rating Oblivion and since somebody brought to their attention a nude texture, they looked over the game and found it to contain too much gore to be rated Teen. Don't believe me? Read this: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6148897.html

Yeah, they're still getting the nudity descriptor, but I think that was more of a thing to get people to shut up and stop arguing about it. Since the game was going to be rerated anyway, they figured the easiest thing to get the argument on whether the nudity should be accounted for was just to throw a nudity descriptor on it. An appeasement if you will.

Are folks really so impatient that waiting a few seconds to input a command is just intolerable?

One of the biggest complaints about Final Fantasy VIII was that summons took forever. They were a major part of the game, one couldn't do without them, and it was just the exact same animation over and over. Long battles can be interesting if the animation is varied, if the unexpected can occur, but since in a Final Fantasy game one gets in hundreds of battles, it would be a lot of work for the producers to come up with enough different scenes for the player to stay interested.

I really wish there were battles nowadays where you could just tape down a button, go to sleep, and wake up to find you've reached a very high level, as in Final Fantasy VI (III in the U.S.)

eh, some of us enjoy avoiding 200 lightning bolts... over an over in the case of a game save loss

Bruce

You really think mainstream stores would stop carrying titles like Halo, DOA, Hitman, etc (I think those are all M)? Why, they like throwing away money? People like buying them, so the stores will stock them. They still carry rated R movies, don't they?

Backwards compatibility is yet another promise that Sony may end up breaking, wholy or in part. http://www.gamespot.com/news/6136677.html

As for the difficulty of the hardware... I've seen about twice as many games announced for the Revolution as for the PS3, and even if I missed something, early announcements don't necessarily indicate what the industry is going to find cost effective down the road. If the Revolution costs 1/10th as much to develop a game for, as many people are predicting, and sells as well as many people expect, it may just not be worth it to KEEP making games for the PS3 after the first wave ships.

Which is, of course, why almost all non-UMA graphics architectures work this way. Reading from the local memory of a PC graphics card is also an extremely slow process. We're talking tens of megabytes per second over a 4GB AGP bus. That really doesn't hurt anything --- because you almost never need to read from GPU memory.

Which is why AGP has been relegated to "legacy" status, and PCIe is the future of GPUs.

The Xbox 360 is capable, and has seen good performance, using Havok's physics libraries, doing physics calculations on the GPU.
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?se archid=9435
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6136639.html

In the second article, they reference the PS3, but I'm guessing that if the Cell is incapable of properly reading from the GPU's local memory (or causes a ridiculous system stall while doing so) we'll never seen high-end physics processing on the PS3, which is lame.

The video demonstrations I've seen of hardware accelerated physics are simply amazing. Imagine pixel/vertex shaders for geometry. It's beautiful, and adds a tremendous amount to gameplay. There's a game up-and-coming which takes advantage of the PhysX processor, and I'm guessing that Havok (from their interviews) is going to start accelerating all their physics operatins on PCIe accelerates in Havok 3.

All of this is denied to the PS3. If they can shoe-horn this into XBox 360 titles, the 2007-2008 line of XBox games will be visually superior to PS3 games, and that's not good for a system released two years after the XBox 360.

I say this as a serious anti-Microsoft person. I hope the Wii can beat both ;-)

It looks like Moore's comments were so damaging that Microsoft has started implementing damage control in order to show that they're actually committed to continuing to expand the 360's backwards-compatibility.

It sounds to me like Microsoft needs a smarter, more committed, and more confident leader at the helm of their entertainment department.

the sad part is if he wanted to play C&C he could have used a windows computer and picked this up http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/commandconquer thefirstdecade/index.html
Far cheeper than buying a P-P-PowerBook :)

We don't compete with the $10M projects.

I think that we do compete with the $10M projects, and very directly so. After all, we produce "entertainment," so we're already in competition with movies, restaurants, and fun gadgets for consumers' money. The potential customer doesn't separate indie games out from the AAA titles as much as we'd like. Their money is (presumably) finite, so their purchase of one game means that they're less likely to purchase another, regardless of who created it.

We're not after the same markets to begin with - there's a clear separation between hardcore and casual gamers.

Ah, but this further increases the competition, as a casual indie game is up against both the higher-profile casuals (e.g., the Lumineses and Tetrises) and the myriad free games available on Newgrounds and Miniclip.

I believe that small studios will do better once we get ourselves into the mindset that we're squarely in competition with larger ones. Which is fine, because while we may not all be able to compete at the cutting-edge on photorealism, there's precedence for our creating good-looking games that excel in other areas (Uplink, GalCiv).
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www.dejobaan.com - Competing with companies that spend more money on cocktail parties than we do in an entire year.

We don't compete with the $10M projects.

I think that we do compete with the $10M projects, and very directly so. After all, we produce "entertainment," so we're already in competition with movies, restaurants, and fun gadgets for consumers' money. The potential customer doesn't separate indie games out from the AAA titles as much as we'd like. Their money is (presumably) finite, so their purchase of one game means that they're less likely to purchase another, regardless of who created it.

We're not after the same markets to begin with - there's a clear separation between hardcore and casual gamers.

Ah, but this further increases the competition, as a casual indie game is up against both the higher-profile casuals (e.g., the Lumineses and Tetrises) and the myriad free games available on Newgrounds and Miniclip.

I believe that small studios will do better once we get ourselves into the mindset that we're squarely in competition with larger ones. Which is fine, because while we may not all be able to compete at the cutting-edge on photorealism, there's precedence for our creating good-looking games that excel in other areas (Uplink, GalCiv).
_____
www.dejobaan.com - Competing with companies that spend more money on cocktail parties than we do in an entire year.

SNK has already announced a Metal Slug compilation for Wii.

They made $4.5 billion profit last year.

Nintendo has never sold a console at a loss, instead just deciding to intelligently design their consoles to be powerful enough to do what they want, without needing bleeding edge tech to knock the price out of the range of profitability.

The result is that going into this generation, Nintendo is the only profitable one out of the big three -- Sony and Microsoft both lose money every single quarter on their console devisions, Nintendo *makes* more money than Sony loses.

A year ago their Quarterly profit was down 80% but this year It has jumped 12.5%. Around the same time Nintedo had a drop in profit, Sony and MS were still running WELL into the red (last paragraph).

So, uh, yeah. Staying within their means has managed to keep Nintendo, dispite not being #1, nicely afloat and profitable, which is something the other two cannot say. I cannot imagine them doing anything different this time.

Sony seems to think that we're LUCKY to get games for their overpriced console. With their statements about how people would buy it even with no games, and now this garbage?

Sony thinks they're too good for us.

Yeah, they do seem to have that attitude. Remember what they said when people were complaining about the defective PSP buttons?

Link:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/01/24/news_61169 85.html

Quote:
"This is the design that we came up with. There may be people that complain about its usability, but that's something which users and game software developers will have to adapt to. I didn't want the PSP's LCD screen to become any smaller than this, nor did I want its machine body to become any larger.

"The button's location is [architectured] on purpose. It's according to specifications. This is something that we've created, and this is our specification. There was a clear purpose to it, and it wasn't a mistake."

Sony has slowly become the world's most concentrated source of arrogance.

Dated November 2005 - The Death of Used Game Sales? posted our friend, Zonk. "The Inquirer has an interesting piece about a new Sony Patent on a technology that may possible prevent DVD disc media users from using their purchased disks in other machines after they have used them on a specific reader.

Dated November 2005 - Rumor: PlayStation 3s won't play borrowed, used, or rented games - SCEE PR manger Jennie Kong blasted the rumor as " false speculation." "PlayStation 3 software will not be copy protected to a single machine but will be playable on any PlayStation 3 console," she told the Guardian.

Xbox 360 doesn't have HDMI and you can't play HDDVD games on 360, so why not get a stand alone player?

You want a crippled, subsitized media player branded as a Mircosoft product? There is nothing wrong with that, but at least admit it. A lot of people buy clothing because of brand name on it.

Actually, the Xbox 360 has a specialized connector that can be whatever connection Microsoft wants to allow it to be. Chances are they'll be releasing an HDMI adapter when the HD-DVD drive is released.

I can get a PS3 with HDMI and games that actually use the higher denisity media for the same prices as an 'upgraded' 360 a year or more after PS3 launch. The last time I heard a timetable announcement for the HDDVD addon was over a year off anyway.

In that aspect, the most game creators will be using of the Blu-Ray for awhile is for the HD cutscene content. To make the kinds of assets (models, textures) used to fill ANY kind of DVD medium be it Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, or even plain jane DVD is a serious undertaking. I personally feel that only the largest of developers will be able to fill a single layer of a Blu-Ray disc, and THAT would be after multiple years of work - i.e. a Final Fantasy game.

The HD-DVD drive will be available this holiday season, a mere six months away [MS' E3 Report: Check out 12:21].

Personally, as someone without an HDTV neither console's video capability does anything special for me. Until I get an HDTV, it would be a waste for me to invest in such things when bills need to get paid ^_^. Having said that, I like the idea that with Microsoft's support choice for HD, if the drive dies I don't have to send in my whole system, and the drive is bound to be very cheap in comparison to a dedicated player (which really only costs $500 anyways). On top of that, if HDDVD doesn't take off as expected, they can simply make a BR drive. If the BR drive in the PS3 dies, game over until you send it in to Sony.

All in all, I want a gaming console - which I have. When Sony announced the price, i'd rather wait until the low model comes down to $400. If I wanted to pay near a grand for a computer - as Sony freely admits the PS3 is - i'd rather just get a MacBook :).

Will they be using this as the interface software?

This is why the clueful read reviews of games before purchasing them. Typically there's a reason if you haven't heard of a game before.

It still doesn't. But you do bring up a good point. The X360 version's of Far Cry is just taking adavantage of newer shaders that were "not" available when FCI was being developed for the PC. If you recall, FC was originally developed during the 9Xxx generation. FCI was released when the X8xx was still the best ATI had to offer for PCs. So it's kind of obvious that games being developed for newer GPUs, "should" look better and PCs already have access to newer and more powerful GPUs than the X360, if you catch my drift?

Take a look at Oblivion. It's a good comparsion, because the PC version is using all of the latest and greatest shaders, as is the X360. It's also a good comparision, because they're not using a the latest and greatest PCs; http://www.gamespot.com/features/6147028/p-2.html

The article states that the the X360 looks sligthly better than a mid-range PC, which it should, since its GPU is a generation ahead of a 6600, which is a few years old now. Currently a X1600 is a mid-level card, it only costs $40 more than the 6600 used in these examples. Dual-core CPUs also have come down quite a bit, so it's safe to say that a current mid-range systems have more than enough juice to turn up the detail to match the best of what X360 can currently offer. But their are plenty of titles on the X360 that don't do it justice and even an older PC can match its level of detail, and in most cases surpass it.

Ask yourself this, what's faster; a X1600 SE, or a full fledged X1900? Of course the latter fo the two and of course that card costs just as much as a X360. The point I'm making, is you get what you pay for and a X360 is using lower-priced components to keep it in a certain price range. MS probably doesn't want to loose 4-billion this time around; http://theinquirer.net/?article=26497

Honestly, don't fall for the hype. MS isn't going to include components that would substantially bring their loss up on each console sold. The X360 will pick up speed as developers get used to it and it does have the advanatage of being a dedicated meidia-center, err, I mean game console, which uses a more effiecent way of handling memory, but it's not more powerfull than a uber PC. I was being nice when I mentioned a much more powerful 7900 GTX SLI setup, a quad-SLI system absolutely destroys the x360 by many-many fold. But of course that comes at a huge price.

<]=)

A next-gen console loosing to the oldest console is NOT that big an endorsement.

I guess all those people who say it is gameplay and not graphics that matter are right after all.

A PS2 game should NOT be the best seller but it is.

It does however make sense. Even if the 360 is going to be a success it simply isn't out there in enough number yet to compete with the PS2. No point in buying a game if you don't have the console after all.

Claiming that the 360 is behind this revival reeks of fanboyness.

What is far more likely is that some big titles have finally launched, titles that people cared about who actually buy games, not just fanboys.

Charts are all very nice but I would like to see some hard figures. I am willing to bet there is a big gap between the number one seller and number two seller.

Oh well. Guess all the reports about the death of gaming were premature. Once again.

This is true. I an my friends watched the E3 coverage over the 'Net. Beforehand, we were pretty keen on the 360, quite psyched for the Wii, and, as usual, fairly ambivalent towards the PS3. Afterwards, we're all getting 360s and definitely getting Wiis.

I think the trend identified here is set to continue well into the year. The 360 has some really top notch games coming out, with Gears of War and Chrome Hounds just two of them. Huxley is also shaping up quite well, even though it has recieved mixed reviews.

Turns out console gaming in 2006 is going to be just as awesome as PC gaming in 2006."

Now if only they released a new Bomber, Man game (err... Bomberman).

Opps... wrong title. I meant Portrait of Ruin. However, with Dawn of Sorrow being available, I might get a DS Lite sooner than expected. :P

I can see the Wiimote working ok for some of these games, but would you honestly want to use one on the latest racing game or FPS?

This story disagrees with you there.

You'll hold the main controller sideways, with the D pad side in your left hand and the 1 and 2 buttons over in your right. The 2 button will serve as your accelerator, while the D pad will let you trigger your turbo. You'll steer your truck by moving the controller left and right--basically, imagine that it's a steering wheel.

And to cover the FPS point: Metroid Prime:

The game uses the remote-plus-nunchuk configuration, where you'll want to use the remote in your dominant hand, as that is what handles aiming. Simply point the remote at the screen to aim Samus' arm cannon.

Don't get me wrong, you wouldn't find me playing Counter-Strike on anything but my PC, but who's to say that the WASD-mouse configuration is really the best FPS configuration?

I can see the Wiimote working ok for some of these games, but would you honestly want to use one on the latest racing game or FPS?

This story disagrees with you there.

You'll hold the main controller sideways, with the D pad side in your left hand and the 1 and 2 buttons over in your right. The 2 button will serve as your accelerator, while the D pad will let you trigger your turbo. You'll steer your truck by moving the controller left and right--basically, imagine that it's a steering wheel.

And to cover the FPS point: Metroid Prime:

The game uses the remote-plus-nunchuk configuration, where you'll want to use the remote in your dominant hand, as that is what handles aiming. Simply point the remote at the screen to aim Samus' arm cannon.

Don't get me wrong, you wouldn't find me playing Counter-Strike on anything but my PC, but who's to say that the WASD-mouse configuration is really the best FPS configuration?

Source

read this link: http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3blog.html?topic_id=24 600407 if anything, Sony and Nintendo both ripped off of a 20 year old Atari controller...

"THQ president and CEO Brian Farrell spoke about developing for the Nintendo Wii, touching on a number of topics including THQ's first reactions to its Wii games..."

"...[The Wii] wasn't a whole new programming environment," Farrell said. "So we had a lot of tools and tech that work in that environment. So those costs--and again, I hate these broad generalizations--but they could be as little as a third of the high-end next-gen titles... Maybe the range is a quarter to a half."

This is a wave of sentiment going over the internet that is rather quite short sighted. First of all it goes without saying that it is given that the PS3 will garner enough developer support which in turn will show people why they should get a PS3. Ok! Lets say you are not going to get an HDTV and you are never planning on getting one.If the PS3 devs can actually turn the theoretical 2 teraflops of information into actual reality then you wont even need an HDTV to see the difference. Right now to comparing games that are being showed "6 MONTHS" (not one is over 70% complete)before the system is released to games that are entering a consoles 2nd generationI can already see a difference.Also the fact that the final ps3 dev kits were shipped in march and the majority of game devs were working on a considerably weaker kit
to give you the "same" looking graphics as the 360 that you saw at E3.

Additionally I see it as a better thing to have the Blu ray built into the PS3 versions instead of an addon. Addons to a system doesn't get that much attention from game devs because they do not want to block out a major portion of the market.Unless it was an
absolute that most PS3 owners was going to buy a Blu ray addon, why
program for that in mind? Case in point the hard drive addon for the
Ps2..... exactly how much developer love did that get? That being
said, gamer will eventually care about the blu ray drives especially
if game developers would actually like to take advantage of the larger
space.
"From Software producer Masanori Takeuchi, who's been
working on Enchant Arm, a role-playing game slated to be an Xbox 360
launch title, said developers will also be running into issues of
storage space in the next generation. While the Xbox 360 is a
next-generation console, Microsoft decided to equip it with a normal
DVD reader rather than give it HD-DVD or Blu-ray reading
capabilities.
"The volume of data in Enchant Arms won't fit
into a single DVD. It's an RPG, so we're thinking it would be
inevitable that we release it on two discs," says Takeuchi. "But to
be honest, that's even looking grim."
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6132218.html

>>They're not losing money at present...

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6148465.html

"On the gaming side of the business, Sony's game division showed strong revenue performance but lackluster profitability, with 958.6 billion yen ($8.2 billion) in revenue yielding only 8.7 billion yen ($75 million) in income. Despite revenue growth of 31 percent, profits for the division fell 80 percent year-on-year, a sharp decline that Sony attributed to continued high R&D costs for the PlayStation 3 and "charges associated with preparation for the launch of the PS3." As a result, the game business was a drag on the company's overall profitability this year; despite bringing in about 13 percent of overall revenue, games yielded only 7 percent of the company's profits."

Their profitability has been shrinking quite a bit - and they are gunna have to spend a lot of $$$ to push the PS3 - if that doesn't sell as many units as they think (and they think 10 million which is insane) their profitability will be hurting even more.

It's not the fact of whether or not they are profitable - it's the fact that if it's not as profitable as they claim it should be - it will be considered a flop. And I believe this time Sony is overselling itself - setting themselves up for a hard time ahead...

It'll never happen, primarily because the DL size would be prohibitive, I would think, but it sure would be cool to play through Ys Book I & II. My spoiled-rotten cousin had a TurboGrafx CD system and all I ever got to do was watch him play and "help" him with puzzles and stuff... Grrrrr.

That game was so mesmerizing at the time. The music was some of the best ever composed for a game, in my opinion. I'm tempted to buy a copy of the disc from ebay just to rip the music... I recall with the TGCD games, the game data was track one, then all the rest were redbook audio. It sure would be cool to play through it without trying to get a working TGCD system together.

Can you confirm your specs on the Wii from a source that hasn't been discredited as making shit up? The site that first gave those specs has made stuff up in the past and isn't considered reliable. Note that neither gamespot nor wikipedia speculate on the actual chips inside.

It seems that everyone has taken the "probably too cheap" statement out of context. By reading the interview it is clear that Ken means that the console is probably too cheap because Sony expects it may not be able to keep up with demand at that price.

From Sony's last quarterly earnings report, it is clear that the company is spending massively on the development and launch of the PS3. By pricing the console as high as the market will bear, they can recoup some of that money.

In other words, it doesn't make sense to sell out of your console at a lower price point when you can make more from the same number of sales by pricing it higher.

What all this means is: Expect availability numbers to be low this November if the PS3 price is very high.

Personally, I don't care about Blue-Ray and I won't care for at least a couple of years (if it makes it at all). In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the Wii and the 360 this holiday season.

Gamespot has an awesome 15-20 minute video with Executive Producer, John Tam. Meanwhile 2 other Gamespot editors rock out to KISS "Strutter", Primus "John The Fisherman" and Rush "YYZ". Primus Sucks! http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3live.html?autoplay=61 50057

Another question was presented to Sakurai. "How will Super Smash Bros. Brawl take advantage of the Wii controller?" The designer said he had been working with different ideas, and had found that too much use of the controller's pointing and motion-sensor functions was not a good thing. He then dropped a hint, saying gamers may not want to throw away their old GameCube controllers, which the Wii supports. Sakurai then said he wants to support the console, but offer something different than other Wii games.

Gamespot's article states that "Sakurai said his team will try to take the game online, but he thinks it would be a hard to make four-player online work."

I think much of the appeal of this game would be lost if online weren't supported.

Also from the article:
"He then dropped a hint, saying gamers may not want to throw away their old GameCube controllers, which the Wii supports."
Hmmm...

Can you point to any announcements from to Nintendo that say that? I can point you to videos that show that the controller does not need to even remotely be pointed towards the sensors. Besides, that would make it impossible to hold the controller sideways and use it like a standard game pad. But, maybe Nintendo's invented some form of non-directional IR emitter...

Screenshorts

Not linked from this story are hands on reports on Mario Galaxy from the E3 floor! And here are some photos from the E3 demo stations. This is probably the most exciting thing to come out of this entire E3, this game looks amazing.

The graphics are creative and mindbendingly absurdist, the gameplay sounds intuitive and natural, and even better-- if I understand the Gamespot hands on correctly, Mario Galaxy isn't a stupid star/shine hunt like the last two games were. The point is to just get from point A to point B, like in the 2D mario games-- meaning that the environments can be huge and expansive and there can be a wide variety of them, as opposed to Mario Sunshine where the levels were basically just entering the same 10 boxes over and over to do different little errands in them. I am so happy about this, I cannot wait to play this game. I hope it is a launch title.

Ah, now I've found the hands-on

AND THEN I SAW MIYAMOTO AND HE WAS LIKE MOTHAFUCKA WIIIIIIII

I finally downloaded the E3 conference video, and I was a little underwhelmed. I can't say why, though I suppose I was expecting some mega-huge final info bomb, and the hope that they'd say "Oh yeah, 'Wii'? We punk'd you."

Even so, my little fanboy heart was elated with what I saw. Now that I see the Wiimote in actual use, it looks easier than I thought it might be, and can't wait to get my hands on it myself. The addition of a little hand strap to make sure it doesn't fly out of your hand after hours of gaming is really smart.

One thing I'm curious about is periphenalia. The ability to attach something to the Wiimote opens a load of possibilities for third-party add-ons. I imagine it won't be long before someone makes something that allows the Wiimote-Ninchuck connection to be wireless, as well. Also, the Wiimore might use AA batteries. If it does, this will open the doors for all those companies that made rechargeable battery packs for the GBA and GBC.

Finally, I'm curious about missing games. Where's Pikmin? How about Harvest Moon? I think that those two games would be able to put the Wiimote functionality to particularily good use.

Also, I'd like to see a "Dance Dance Wiivolution", where you have the dance pad and a Wiimote in either hand. Not only do you have the foot steps, but you would wave your hands with waves on the screen. Light would have just basic waving motions, and Hard would have you moving in specific directions. You might actually look like you're dancing, instead of having a seizure!

Might. Disclaimer: I love DDR, and have fun looking like I'm having a seizure.

Is there any video of the show out there?

http://www.gamespot.com/e3/index.html

From http://www.gamespot.com/news/6149746.html

A list of 3rd party games, which are in addition to the 9(?) first party titles (presumably the playable 27 tomorrow should be in this list somewhere). Unfortunately I was unable to copy it directly here because of lameness filter, but there are about 70-80 games listed.

Gamespost has all 3 major conferences:

http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3live.html

Nintendo themselves have the games trailers they showed at the conferences:

http://wii.nintendo.com/home.html

It's worth watching the conferences for the stuff that didn't make it to the Nintendo videos, especially the live play of Red Steel. But watch the Nintendo videos too for better video quality.

12:54: I get the official Rockstar Games announcement of Grand Theft Auto IV in my e-mail--it says that the game will be release simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PS3. Moore said it was coming to 360 first. What the...?

No, but I thought there would be 128 Marios in it, and from what we've seen of this game, it's 127 short.

In related news, whos has seen the new Super Paper Mario (GC) video? It looks sick :D

I found a thread asking for them, and here is the address. If you want torrents at Gamespot, then post here!

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php ?topic_id=24302792

• A tidal wave of content. BG2 remains a legend because of the enormity of the game, and it didn't have MMO revenue to back it up.
  
• Innovation. Say what you will, NWN was a revolution; has any game had a mod community so big? There's like 90GB of add-on NWN content now.
  
• Story. When was the last time you had a "Wow" moment like in KotoR?