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http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/26/news_61265 52.html

GameSpot's quarterly report said PC sales were down, and that they only account for 4% of sales. You could argue that PC sales remained the same and console related sales skyrocketed, but this is the tail end of a console generation when people are usually saving up money for the next console.

Since GameSpot doesn't sell PCs that I know of and console hardware sales are around 20% from that same report, you can venture that roughly 70% of sales are from console games. That's a staggering number from the number one games only retailer.

But really, just look at your Walmart and Best Buy. Console games store space take up at least 2 times as much space as PC game titles. Look at the sheer number of console games too compared to PC games. Ever wonder why companies like Epic are moving to console games and supporting those platforms? It's not a big mystery why console games outsell PC games.

The enemy soldiers in Iraq are not very good fighers. Our army would rather they attack head on, since all those encounters lead to tremendous losses for the insurgents.

I didn't care a whole lot for The Moment of Silence. The premise was ok, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Worst aspect has to be the movement controls. It is a real pain in the ass trying to get the character to go where you want him to sometimes.

The best adventure game I've played in a long while is Still Life.

Real Life, a huge MMRPG, got a great review from Gamespot! Life sounds like a cool MMRPG, we should check it out!!

I'll second this. The Longest Journey is a really marvellous adventure game. If you enjoyed Grim Fandango, please get yourself a copy of this game :)

Developers simply don't have the balls to make an adventure game these days. There's a game studio in Auckland called Binary Star I visited about a year ago. At the time they were developing a game called Homeland which was most definately a Lucasarts style inventory based 3rd person adventure game. Over the last year, due presumably to some sort of financial pressure, or maybe sheer idiocy, it has turned in to an fps 'with adventure elements'. I suspect this is typical of the entire industry, and is a pretty depressing state of affairs.

There are still intelligent and innovative games made today, like Katamari Damashii for example, but sadly the adventure genre really does appear to be dead.

Lucas Arts - how about a new indy adventure game to tie in with the movie?

I'll second this. The Longest Journey is a really marvellous adventure game. If you enjoyed Grim Fandango, please get yourself a copy of this game :)

Developers simply don't have the balls to make an adventure game these days. There's a game studio in Auckland called Binary Star I visited about a year ago. At the time they were developing a game called Homeland which was most definately a Lucasarts style inventory based 3rd person adventure game. Over the last year, due presumably to some sort of financial pressure, or maybe sheer idiocy, it has turned in to an fps 'with adventure elements'. I suspect this is typical of the entire industry, and is a pretty depressing state of affairs.

There are still intelligent and innovative games made today, like Katamari Damashii for example, but sadly the adventure genre really does appear to be dead.

Lucas Arts - how about a new indy adventure game to tie in with the movie?

The manifesto asks, where are the lawyer and stranded-on-a-desert-island games? On the DS, evidently:

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Lost in Blue

The manifesto asks, where are the lawyer and stranded-on-a-desert-island games? On the DS, evidently:

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Lost in Blue

...and apparently for the PS2 also, unless they wanted to pay someone boatloads for that first stage of Starblade, which comes up whenever the PS2 version of Tekken 5 is started.

Interestingly, they seem to own patents on Flash versions of their non-Flash games, too.

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter
This game looks like it could fit that description.

Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer
Here's another.

Where's the game where we get to play as Dr. House and diagnose mysterious illnesses while crushing the patient's spirit with cruel insults.
That would be fun, but there's a surgeon game coming out for the DS too. :)

I find it interresting that both his examples are games that are coming out in the near future. But I do get his point : these kind of different games are very few and very far between.

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter
This game looks like it could fit that description.

Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer
Here's another.

Where's the game where we get to play as Dr. House and diagnose mysterious illnesses while crushing the patient's spirit with cruel insults.
That would be fun, but there's a surgeon game coming out for the DS too. :)

I find it interresting that both his examples are games that are coming out in the near future. But I do get his point : these kind of different games are very few and very far between.

Umm, apparently you're not keeping up well (and not very good at spelling, either):

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/26/news_61265 07.html

The Midway announcement you are referring to is just that they will not have titles ready for X360 launch. That's a far cry from dropping support for the box. With MS already owning a sizeable portion of a growing market, with a good chance of picking up more with an early launch, no major publisher is foolish enough to drop support for 360. Just to clarify, Midway is a publisher, by the way, not a developer. Big difference.

If a developer like Factor 5 signs on for PS3 exclusivity, that to me is not a major sea change of support. That just means one small developer responsible for one major game has switched exclusivity from one system to another. They are obviously happy with an exclusivity arrangement, so there is no way you could read into their move as some sort of indictment of X360, other than that they expect PS3 to have a larger market share (and offer them more $$ on the exclusivity arrangement). I think it's pretty easy to predict that PS3 will have a larger market share than competitors, the big question is how much larger this time around as opposed to last time.

Oh, and please quit with the made up connections to developers, and the implication that none of us have the inside info that you do. It's insulting to "our" intelligence. Everything you are saying is based on misread news headlines, flavored with your own personal view of "how things are".

Despite what you hear from Gamespot and the like, the Killzone 2 trailer was NOT of actual gameplay and was created in the 3 months before E3. This is supposed to be "an accurate representation of what [we] want it to be". This goes to show that publishers will go to any lengths to make their game (and also their console, the makers of Killzone 2 are funded by Sony). If you watch G4TV at all, there is an interview with a top sony guy with Morgan Webb and he repeatably dodged the prerendered question until he finally admitted that it was a video(aka prerendered).

Boktai: The sun is in your hands

http://www.gamespot.com/gba/adventure/boktai/index .html

Uses a solar panel for your character in the game to build up sun light to attack vampires and other evil beings.

In defense of the one-billion comment, J Allard was saying the game industry in general would reach one-billion, not just the Xbox 360.

As for crack smoking, here's a quote from Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment regarding the power of the Playstation 3:

"Users will be able to store their content in an online storage server called the 'Cell Storage.' And the Cell processor, when it's not being used, can refine the content's quality. We call it the 'aging' process. For example, users can 'age' their Standard Definition (SD) video and up-convert it to High Definition (HD) video."

via Gamespot

More crack smoking from MS, claiming the Xbox 360 has 6x the bandwidth of the PS3 (carefully skewing numbers to favor the 360).

The only sound coverage of the new consoles so far has been this piece at Ars and hopefully, the piece Anand has been working on.

It just ain't fun anymore.

actually their video is produced via an nVidia GPU

http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-15015-1985-4 -4-x
[second section, second para]

Gamespot's coverage of the crap section of E3 was hilarious. Mainly slightly blurry digital photographs with milk-through-nose-spewingly funny captions below them. Either this is really funny or I am really tired.

CPU power; Both platforms are going to deliver a huge leap in power, but the cell is going to deliver more, and it's looking like a lot more.

GPU;Tough call. The PS3's Nvidia claims "twice the performance of two 6800 Ultras", and doesn't talk pipelines, the 360 says 48 pipelines + USA, whatever that means for performance. Both will look amazing, and I think the killer games this generation will be more about pushing physics and simulation than graphics.

I/O; The PS3 is loaded compared to the XBox 360, built in wireless, bluetooth, gigabit ethernet X 3, BluRay, 6 X USB2.0. And don't forget the dual 1080p outputs.

I think the PS3 is the more desirable, at this point, but things can change. One area I see changing is clock speed. The IBM fab tapeouts of the Cell were running faster than that, the memory can handle it, and it's an easy way to one up the competition at the last moment. Other specs can change also. Price is a factor, but I think the market is different this time around. These are not just game machines, but super-slick-media-p2p-internetworking-entertainmen t-thingies, which bring me to my last point; software.

Both consoles have tons of power, and the software is going to mean a lot in how that is delivered. Can I stream HD video over the network to other boxes? Can I use video chat in games? Outside of games? Can I share media? Etc.

I thought Sony's presentation was awesome. The X-Box 360 presentation was all about pizazz, and how they would be everything to every gamer, and how the new Live would change everything. They also showed clips from many action and sports titles. Blah. But Sony's presentation was all about numbers, the new cell technology, and tech demos actually SHOWING what their new tech can do. It was awesome. You can get the micrososft conference here as a torrent or direct download: http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=e3xbox _20050516_300.wmv. Unfortunately, I can't find a link for the sony presentation. I myself dumped it to my hard drive from a video stream found on Gamespot http://www.gamespot.com/.

1980 Taunting Berzerkers
Manufacturer Stern introduces the innovative shooter Berzerk, which features the most recognizable voice synthesizer module of the early arcade era: "Get the humanoid!" "Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" "The humanoid must not escape!" "Chicken! Fight like a robot!" Inexplicably, players seem to enjoy being mocked and taunted by a machine and continue to feed it money. The market for Microsoft operating systems is born.

Actually, there are GC controller ports on the unit.

One of the pictures shows a shot of the side (or top, if you have the Revolution positioned vertically) of the unit. On that face there is a panel that opens up to reveal what appear to be 2 memory card slots, along with 4 GC controller ports.

This picture, actually: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/17/screens_61 25078.html?page=6

HardOCP did a great expose on this company.

Of course, they then sued HardOCP and were generally nasty, so I'm pretty happy about the way this all turned out.

Is this what xbox 360 games are going to look like? I might have to join the console dark side. Course if the game play isn't any good...

Look at these screenshots!

The Revolution is out powered - in technical terms - by the other two.

God damn it!

Listen to me, and listen to me good. This isn't directed solely at the parent, EVERYONE needs to listen.

This generation Nintendo said that their machine would push 6-12 million polygons per second. Sony still claims 75 million/second on the PS2, and Microsoft claims 125 million/sec.

Take a look for yourself.

This would suggest that the XBOX and the PS2 were 5 to 10 times more powerful than the GameCube.

This is completely not true. The Gamecube, in reality, is much more powerful than the PS2 and on par with the XBOX (don't get into semantics, both the GC and the XBOX do things better than the other).

Now, right now, Sony and Microsoft are claiming their consoles will effectively be 5 to 10 times more powerful than the Revolution.

Do you see the connection? Can we, as intelligent gamers, learn from the not so distant history?

Let them show footage before you make your judgement, but I am 99% certain that the Revolution's graphics will be just as impressive as its competitors. Unlike Sony and MS, Nintendo does not give crazy theoretical numbers, they give the numbers you will see on the screen

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/04/12/news_61221 17.html

From TFA:

According to Enterbrain Inc., publisher of Famitsu and other game magazines in Japan, sales of the Sony PSP have begun to outpace those of the Nintendo DS.

According to independent research conducted by Enterbrain, Sony's PSP bested Nintendo in handheld console sales in both February and March of this year.

The most popular handheld in Japan is still the Nintendo DS. However, the DS sold an impressive 1.09 million units during December, a total that Sony has only just now reached after four months of sales.

The PSP, suffering from production delays, sold only 330,000 units in December. The DS continued to beat the PSP in January, selling 450,000 units to the PSP's 360,000 units.

But the tables turned in February, when 195,000 PSP units were sold, edging out 121,000 DS units. PSP sales increased by a small margin in March, reaching 202,000 units, and DS sales also increased, reaching 136,000 units.

While these new numbers are encouraging for Sony, the PSP still lags behind the DS in overall penetration: Japanese consumers currently own 1.09 million PSPs and 1.8 million DSes.

I doubt MS cares

Plus, that was a launch title!

Just in case anyone wanted to actually RTFA . . .

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/18/news_61254 22.html

Article.

Article is here:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/18/news_61254 22.html

Hopefully it is better than the first foray into portables -- GTA Advance

Like evilmousse pointed out, it's plain amazing to see how many titles the Castlevania title has spawned -- Gamespot just had a great article on the history of Castlevania, and it references the following titles:

Vampire Killer, Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Super Castlevania IV, Dracula X: The Rondo of Blood, Akumajo Dracula X68000, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Castlevania: Dracula X, Castlevania: Symphony of The Night, Castlevania 64, Castlevania 64: Legacy of Darkness, Akumajo Dracula: Circle of the Moon. Castlevania Adventure, Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge, Castlevania Legends, Haunted Castle, Vs. Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, , Castlevania: Resurrection

If that's not a killer franchise, I don't know what is :)

- dmaduram

Hardware lags behind the others.
Yawn
MONO GameBoy vs Sega GameGear
NES vs Genesis
SNES vs 32x ? CD? oh yeah 3d0 & Jaguar
n64 vs Saturn or Dreamcast or PS1
Cube vs PS2 or Xbox

Backwards Compatable.
Ok so the n64 wasn't but GB(A) always has been since SNES.The great thing about this (for N) now, all the way back to MONO tetris, nintendo has no abandonware. The whole catalog is potentially profitable, thus giving them a new weapon in their never ending battle to stop N games from being run on non-N hardware. Those patch-wearing, peg-legged, parrot-perchin, pirate bastards must be stopped.

Here is the real surprise PRICE. No Way M$ or $ony can afford to undercut these units. Same as the portable wars. GBA, SP, DS != PSP (Graphic Quality, Function, Design) But just like those old MONO GBs they are still flying off the shelves. So will this thing. My household is begging for a PS3 but we all know we'll have a Revolution first, right beside our PS2, 3 PCs, Gamecube (maybe sell the GC or Linux it http://www.gc-linux.org/

Great Ad Campaign for MS or Sony.
So you say you wanna revolution. Man you gotta change your head.

e3 Nintendo Press Unveiling with Video Stream.http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/17/new s_6125078.html

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

Check the re-feed.. it's in there in the middle somewhere.

As for Gamecube/Revolution backwards compatibility, it's already been confirmed.

Fixed link: FF7 technical demo

Check it:

STORAGE
--HDD Detachable 2.5" HDD slot x 1
--I/O--USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
--Memory Stickstandard/Duo, PRO x 1
--SD standard/mini x 1
--CompactFlash(Type I, II) x 1

It has a slot for a HDD, but no mention of actually including one in the box. If it was included, don't you think they would specifically say so?

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_61246 81.html?q=1

Take a look at the Final Fantasy VII tech demo at the bottom of this page, shown during the press conference at E3. I cried at first, then got strangely aroused.

Now I'm gonna board a plane, go down to E3, and then put the Square-Enix chairman into a figure-four lock until he agrees to devote all resources necessary to have FFVII redone in time for the launch of the PS3.

You guys should check out the gamespot.com E3 coverage. You can use bugmenot.com to login for free and take a look at the Sony Press Conference. Also it is a windows media stream, sorry *NIX guys. The stream is about 1 hour 50 mins long. It shows all the new games and tons of presentations. Lot of stuff about capturing new markets but the PS3 console looks amazing.
http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3live.html

The Cell processor is IBM's jewel, it might be the single killer against the x86 market. Not to mention that the Cell processor in PS3 is revision 3 while the one in the xbox is revision 2. The new cell processor is gonna knock the socks of all you folks.
Trust me :)

Another thing is that 7 controllers that run Blue Tooth, I don't get it either. But the main thing is that games will be more and more interactive. But the Final Fantasy games out there look amazing but beyond that the Gran Turismo games are also kick ass (please cars flip over...please ) But the Tekken for PS3 was an amazing intro. You could see Jin's muscles and sweat and then the heat rising from his body and with the punch you could see sweat fly from his fists. There was another game a FPS that was amazing where marines come in through the sky and fight on the ground urban warfare style. I don't know how much of it are rendered movies and how much is real time work but the Unreal PS3 engine was amazing, it really was the explosions with the rockets and the smoke. But beyond that they had the CEO of EA come in ( yeah I know he didn't pay overtime ) and brought in Fight Night, that was great with the facial expressions of the boxers at every punch I just can imagine Rockstar Games' new GTA will definately be something. And also there are tons of new API's in the Nvidia GFX processor subsystem that have tons of stuff, like transparency and skin diffusion, water refraction. Amazing stuff. Xbox to be cool had to come on MTV, Sony being classy just went to E3 and showed who's who what there lil box can do. But over all whole press conference was kick ass, marketing venture yes. But the xbox360 on MTV was so .... teenager oriented that the PS3 is for bigboys, and the lil'boys. Sony was cool and professional while the Xbox 360 was like in your face kind of advertisement. End result xbox360 looks good PS3 looks kickass, kungfu punch, matrix lobby scene better. Also the PSP using 802.11 can become an auxillary input into the PS3 ( huh, why what do they want us to buy everything that Sony has to offer or what?? ).
But the dual HD output is great, and it also takes VGA :) . And it is backward compatiable with PS, PS2 etc.
But the estiemated price of the PS3 is $250 for just the gaming rig and $500 for the works. But definately they will sell there console for a loss.And make money on the games. Looking at the way the PSP sold I wouldn't be suprised it would sell for US$300.
Also our beloved Hedijo Kojima of MGS showed up, may the Lord Bless his soul, yes there is going to be a MGS for the PS3.
The xbox 360 has major major competiton. Cell technology puts them on the same playing field including the Nintendo Revolution. What makes them different are the games they have to offer. Even with life like reality in the end it is the simple thrill of Pong and Pacman and Mario Bros. that makes us want to play more and more games.
Frag away, Drive away, Super Combo away and what ever Final Fantasy does ...

Check the video of the full conference at the bottom of this page.

While they did not say it is real-time or not, as far as Killzone is concerned, the PS3 seems more than capable of making a game look like this. The only issue I have with how the clip is presented is that it's a hell of a lot more "cinematic" than what actual gameplay would look like. I don't care if you script the hell out of everything that happens on the screen, it will still not end up looking like you're inside a CG "movie". It probably WILL look like a CG movie from a graphical standpoint, but not from the presentation.

At the press-conference, several real-time demos were screened. One of the most impressive was probably the boxing game that EA demoed. The character detail and animation looked absolutely staggering. It honestly looked like state-of-the-art CG of the Final Fantasy: The Movie variety. Like Killzone, it too featured an exagerated cinematic camera to showcase the game, but the game was completely controlled by the guy on the stage. He actually was playing it. They merely programmed the camera to zoom in on faces and really show off the graphics.

The specs are on Gamespot. http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_61246 81.html?q=1&tag=gs_hp_topslot_click

More news on the gaming story of the decade, which is what Slashdot *should* be reporting right now. Be patient, Gamespot is getting hammered, probably because they have the entire PS3 unveiling press conference on decent quality streaming video, including detailed specs, tech demos, tons of awesome-looking game previews, and the unveiling of the actual design (looks bigger than I thought, and what's with that controller?). It's got everything: Cell, NVidia's next chipset, 512 MB total RAM, USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Blu-Ray, slots for Memory sticks (of course) but also SD cards and Compact Flash (!), 2x HDMI, 1080p (!), and of course Bluetooth. It uses the same type of power cord that plugs into your PC's power supply. It's going to be a monster.

According to the Gamespot coverage:

In what must come as a relief to developers, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney was on hand to vouch for the PS3, saying it was "easy to program for" and that Epic had received its first PS3 hardware two months ago.

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

mem card slots, 7 bluetooth controllers, 2.18(!) teraflops processing power, 1080p rez

wowzer..

Here is a Gamespot link that is being updated frequently tonight: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_61246 81.html

linky:

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

in short:
PS3 name confirmed
2006 release date confirmed

I suppose, if by "failed", you mean "failed to achieve complete and total domination". They certainly make a profit on their server OS, server tools, development tools, hardware, XBox, ...

I thought I was quite clear about exactly what I meant by "failed": failed to achieve #1 position in the market and profitable status, which is what all the Slashdot articles have been suggesting Xbox 360 will do in the console market. In fact, this latest one seems to think they'll get over 50% market share like they did with Windows on the desktop.

Thanks for spreading more Microsoft propaganda, anyway. As of this quarter, Xbox is still losing money. SQL Server is a distant third in market share after DB2 and Oracle. Entertainment software and mobile devices both run at a loss. Microsoft's developer tools business isn't evidence that they can achieve another big success, because it basically has no competition--if you want to develop Windows applications for current and future versions of Windows, you have no serious alternative.

When it comes to server OS market share, note that most pro-Microsoft articles (e.g. from IDC) deliberately undercount Linux and BSD by only counting sales of boxed product. Restricting ourselves to more statistically valid data, we see that Microsoft's web server market share is a fraction of OSS's. In messaging, Exchange may or may not be #1 in commercial offerings (it's highly disputed), but add in OSS and their market share is well below 50%.

So in short: you're wrong, or deliberately lying.

It's easy to get market share or profits; Microsoft could make Xbox 360 the #1 console by sales volume just by dumping (i.e. selling below cost) even more than they did with the first Xbox. That's not what I call a business success, though.

How freaking sad do you have to be to be convinced that anyone who doesn't rabidly hate the XBox as much as you do has to be a "Microsft astroturfer"?

So I guess you want us to believe you're just an ill-informed idiot, rather than a paid shill? OK by me.

From Gamespot

Nintendo's next-gen console will also be around an inch tall; will support GameCube and DVD discs.

gamespot says it will play dvds...

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/13/news_61244 49.html

nope that pic is from the xbox 360 launch over at gamespot http://www.gamespot.com/features/6124293/p-4.html/ the screenshot is exactly the same