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In the PC version, you had to organise your inventory in such a way to fit whatever you picked up and each item that you could take required a different number of inventory squares. In the PS2 version, everything just stacked and there was no differentiation between different item sizes, nor the amount you could carry.{/blockquote>

But didn't some PC players find the inventory system and constant micro-management annoying and reducing the immersion? And there are limits to the inventory in the PS2 version. While items do stack, the stack size is limited, and you're limited to 4 ranged weapons. Yes, you can carry more than the PC version, but that's to reduce how often you need to futz with the inventory, which was a complaint some had about the PC version, as I said.

The UI in the PS2 version was also significantly dumbed down. For example, when you come across a keypad in the PC version, you could literally sit there and guess codes. In the PS2 version, you either had the code and automatically used it or didn't have it, there was no sense of it being a realistic environment where you would expect to be able to punch in codes manually.

Suppose you encounter a keypad in the real world. Would you be able to try codes indefinitely or would it lock you out after 3 tries and set off an alarm. Also they keypad was changed because they couldn't guarantee console players had a mouse to point at buttons, and they probably didn't want to annoy console players with having to take manual notes (or be looking up notes in the UI all the time to refresh their memory). That's one of the things I found annoying about the PC version of the game, it didn't separate character memory from player memory. If my character has all these skills with weapons and equipment that I as a player don't have, why make me remember/write down access codes.

The PS2 version also had a gargantuan HUD that was constantly in the way. One thing I can at least say about the DX2 PC port is that the large HUD could be set to fade completely away after a couple of seconds.

Probably designed with SD sets in mind, even though the PS2 can support greater than SD resolutions. No widescreen either. Blame the limitations of TV's in 2001, back then it was almost all SD.

On top of the dumbed down damage system, tiny level fragments and long load times, the PS2 version suffered from horrible framerate problems and used prerendered cutscenes that did not fit with the look of the game.

The levels aren't that tiny and the load times aren't that long, and the framerate is fine. Did you actually play it, or are you just quoting some "we hate consoles so we're going to diss the console ports of OUR games" website. The PS2 version is actually graphically enhanced over the PC version, there's more detail in the characters and their movements are mo-capped.

Here's Warren Spector himself on the PS2 port:

http://www.gaming-age.com/cgi-bin/specials/page2.pl?spec=deusps2&pagenum=2&pages=2

You mean something similar to Sony's initial funding deals for 40 PSN titles and their newer pub fund program which exchanges funding for exclusivity?

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2006/11/1-2

http://www.ps3informer.com/playstation-3/news/sony-will-pay-devs-for-psn-exclusivity-010110.php

I played Everquest for 3.5 years and I had to pay extra for every single expansion.
 
Expansion pack? Yes. But they did add new zones without having to get expansion packs. http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2001/8/29-205
 
  Secondly Everquest doesn't have anywhere near 1000 zones. It's more like 200 zones if that many.
 
I will agree to this. I could have swore that they announced their 1000th zone a while back. My Bad. Nonetheless EQ1 does have "Over 375 zones" according to Sony and "more than 400" according to Wiki.
 
  Also I doubt Everquest has anywhere near 500,000 subscribers. At its peak Everquest had around 800,000 subscribers and that number began dropping in 2004 when they released the GoD expansion and then it plummeted further when WoW came out.
 
never made this claim. I don't know where you're going with this. Also, their numbers went down when EQ2 came out which was months before WoW.
 
  Did you people actually play Everquest or are you just making stuff up?
 
Seeings as where I've proven you wrong on two of the three points that I actually made in the first posting my question is if you've ever played Everquest.

The original Deus Ex was PC/Mac only

After all, without a story you can do "sequels" (read: Count up the release year and sell it as a new game) more easily.

But seriously. What do you want to sell a game with if not story? Graphics? We're already past super realistic 100% accurate graphics. If anything, story is a seller.

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2005/8/15-44

And this is old.

It's pretty weird that there's another charity that does almost exactly the same thing as Child's Play. In fact I can't really see any difference other than the fact that Child's Play has the publicity associated with Penny-Arcade.

I first read about this other one because Microsoft made some sort of a large donation to it recently. Apparently it's been in operation since 2001 however, incorporated in 2003.
http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2005/12/2-3

And the obligatory review links: one, two

disclaimer: I'm from UK and I hope I haven't fallen for a troll

The following stats in general conflict with your opinion. Xbox stats follow what you say, the picture is quite different for other consoles. Especially if you then normalise for population, gdp per head, whichever other metric you choose.

"From gaming-age: http://forums.gaming-age.com/showthread.php?t=3362 8

All shipment figures as of December 2004.

PS2

19.47m Japan
32.86m USA
29.06m Europe

81.39 Total

XB

1.70m Japan (asia pacific- some discrepancy as sony and microsft count as japan, others count as Europe/Pal)
13.20m USA
5.00m Europe

19.90m Total

GC

3.78m Japan
10.11m USA
4.13m Europe

18.02m Total

GBA

15.48m Japan
32.82m USA
17.44m Europe

65.74 Total

DS

1.45m Japan
1.36m USA
0.03m Europe

2.84m Total
"
Taken from http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=14 306

"From what I hear, the PS2 was very hard to develop for, leading to a lot of frustration getting the most out of the system, a big part of which was middleware inadequacy."

Wow, did you like read that on teamxbox?

So, let me get this straight, Sony who has essentially every console dev house and publisher on the planet on board filling stores with games for the PS2 had a problem with 'developer support'

Do you have any idea what a dunce that makes you sound like?

"The faster Sony gets the developers to realize the full power of the system (especially important with a new architecture of the Cell) the faster they can claim technological victory."

http://forum.gaming-age.com/showthread.php?t=56146 &page=4

Sony wins.

Funny how MS is only a few months away from shipping the 360 and the aren't showing any real footage of games? The 360 is a nightmare to code for. Developers are struggling to get something out the door by November. Being stuck with DirectX on a multi-core machine is like trying to run a race with cement boots.

Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?

The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?

Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.

To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!

2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...

Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.

Not so easy, is it?

There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.

I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.

3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics

Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.

Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.

I blame the developers formerly known as Square for this.

So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?

4. Nipples?

not true, the launch psp is clocked @ 222mhz cap. read this. there was a nicer looking article about it, but it lacked specificity.
-e

www.gaming-age.com is a great resource (IMHO), the content on the message boards vary from very useful and insightful information/reviews to borderline trolling though.

...but also, apparently an entire mode.

Dristone/Drillstone mode is a sort of RPG mode, and I guess the US version doesn't have it--Namco did reply to an inquiry about the exclusion of some features here.

"We didn't have the time to implement the some elements/features in order to make the DS launch date in North America,"

Which is kind of funny, as they launched simultaneously.

Uh, what was the topic?

You really like your Xbox huh?

1) You just know that I'm right. =P The reason this is an issue is that it's the primary bottleneck on the Xbox. Faster GPU means nothing if it's sitting there waiting for its data half the time. GameCube has huge bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and the memory chosen for GameCube specializes in quick seek time. Meaning that developers may optimize to the hardware to a great degree.

2) Whatever. I honestly don't care if my sound is in 4.1 Dolby Prologic 2 or 5.1 Dolby Digital. They sound nearly identical to me. (I did check on this though, and you are correct, in that it's not 2.1... it's 5.1, but only 4 or 5 out of the 6 5.1 channels are actually used, bringing it down to the level of Prologic II). My last word on this subject, as I think that the sound on both consoles is perfectly adequate, and has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.

3) Your friends have no problems with crashing. Mine do. Your word against mine, I honestly don't care. But other people do have these problems. I'm most certainly not going to buy an Xbox to win a stupid argument online.

4) Ever play Metroid Prime? Or Metal Gear Solid? Or Eternal Darkness? Show me an Xbox game with better load times.

5) Rogue Squadron III pushes about 14 to 15 million polys per second. Halo 2 pushes something like 7 or 8 million per second. The thing is that Bungie REDUCED the poly count from Halo 1 to Halo 2 in favor of more effects. Factor 5 upped both the poly counts and the effects. Asserting that my assertion that Rogue Squadron III has a higher poly count is wrong is just plain WRONG. Deal with it. =P (honestly, I don't know why I'm still debating this with you after that comment).

GameCube is firmly in second place in worldwide sales. The reason being that Xbox's lineup is VERY American, while GameCube has a nice mix of Japanese/American games, as well as a whole whack of games not available elsewhere (Baten Kaitos, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Starfox, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Crystal Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia (in the US), etc.) (While Xbox really just has Halo to call its own, relying on empty promises of better graphics to sell systems).

Being that this will probably be my last post on the subject, I will just say that my original post was referring to the fact that the Xbox's hardware does not seem to be gaming oriented in the slightest. I think if you take a careful look at the hardware, it's in plain sight that the design choices made were out of laziness rather than any desire to squeeze more power out of the system. It's designed to be a general purpose computing machine. GameCube was designed purely to play games. I think I've shown that as well as I can without digging through hundreds of google queries to find the links I need to absolutely prove my claims. You can say "You're just plain wrong" all that you want, but I don't think your views on this are any more valid than mine as it stands. I could get more links to prove my claims, but this is again in the territory of "not caring enough to bother". I honestly don't care if you think that I'm an idiot and the Xbox is clearly the superior console.

More pics:

big product picture: http://premium.uploadit.org/dsn2000/ps25.JPG

four views: http://img63.exs.cx/img63/2233/7178.jpg

another big picture: http://www.playfrance.com/news/images/7,7958379/zo om/4645.jpg

what's included: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20040921/ sce03.jpg

size reference: http://www.aftonbladet.se/spela/0409/21/litenps22. jpg

fliptop open: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20040921/ scej24.jpg

circuit board top: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20040921/ scej29.jpg

circuit board bottom: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20040921/ scej31.jpg

cover removed: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20040921/ scej30.jpg

These are all from Gaming Age Forums:
http://forums.gaming-age.com/showthread.php?t=1535 1&page=1

Do you know what is really going on in the world? (Beyond your bedroom door?)

In the console world (and the article is referring to console games) game sales in 2003 were broken down like this:

action (27.1%)
sports (17.6 %)
racing (15.7%)
role-playing games (8.7%)
fighting games (6.9%)
family entertainment (4.7%)
shooter games (4.6%)

Contrary to what you might guess by reading Slashdot, the world is not full of RPG playing geeks drooling over the latest mmorpg. Two of the most maligned genres (sports and racing) make up 33% of sales. That's a lot of games- and a lot of people. PC game sales are only about 1/3 of console game sales (and falling).

I just had 5 people come over to my house last night, and we played games for a while. Did they ask to play Morrowind? Or Zelda? Or KotOR? No...we played Basketball, Tennis and Golf.

Those games work in a social environment- there were guys and girls, some with experience on the games, some without. But we all had fun playing, and everyone liked the games. (I will go on record saying that Top Spin is one of the best party games ever).

It's fine that you like RPGs, and maybe you think they are the best things ever. But please realize that a large part of the world disagrees with you.

Does this include shopping mall security guards?

some LifeLine info

I really liked the old SEGA commercials. They seemed to be pretty popular with the target age group. Gotta love it when that guy would scream "SEGA!" at the end =)
some old sega aommercials

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2000/12/20-115

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2000/12/20-115

well after a bit of google searching i found that supposedly a 39.99 broadband adapater is being shipped this month for the PS2.

details at gaming-age.com.

-sam

And how is that, I might ask? I haven't seen anyone reporting that their Xboxes are crashing or anything.

Try this link

Does anyone know if this is some kind of real problem with these things?

My XBox didn't have flames shooting out of it but it did burn up after only 3 days. After playing Halo for about 8 hours straight, there was some kind of electrical pop and that was all she wrote. There was the distinct smell of electrical burning.

Here's a link for all you doubting Thomas' who think the XBox is impervious to such problems.

An Xbox unit in the Germantown, MD Target store is reported to have "freezing" problems that requires employees to open the kiosk every 75 minutes to reset the console.

An Xbox unit in Software Etc. store in Souix Falls, SD was reported to skip, freeze, and have audio problems.

An Xbox unit at a Babbages store in Mobile, AL was reported to have similar problems.

A Babbages employee at the Dearborn, MI store reports that their Xbox unit does not function.

Um, why has an unqualified picture of an XBox Development Kit* message box been promoted to front page news? All we can glean from this is that the "oct" in the URL implies that it was posted to HardOCP in October. There's no evidence that this is from a unit sold to a consumer. Nor is there evidence that this is from a crashing in-store demo kiosk.**

Michael, this is neither funny nor professional. You're doing more to reinforce Slashdot's reputation as a childish, "M$ sux0rs linux 0wnz j00" site than any hundred Anonymous Cowards.

I've almost never agreed with Jon Katz's editorials. But I've always felt that squelching his opinion by banning him from my front page was wrong. You, Michael, have crossed that line. I'm banning you from my front page. I know that will cut my story count in half, but at least I can read the front page with the resonable expectation that I won't have my intelligence insulted.

*: That's the XDK in "XDK Launcher".
**: Sorry 'bout the annoying pop-unders, but that's the only crashing demo reference I could find through HardOCP on short notice.

Gaming Age has a response from Microsoft about the broken XBox units.. Here's the scoop:

A Microsoft representative has responded to yesterday's FiXbox story. Here's the official company line on in-store Xbox units.
"With over 10,000 playable Xbox kiosks at retail over a month before launch, there are bound to be a few issues that crop up. Microsoft representatives are currently following up with retailers across the country to insure proper functionality of kiosks. Overall, the displays are working great and we are on track to achieve our goal of having 100% of the Xbox interactive displays working correctly and demonstrating the Xbox difference."

If you take a look at the display setup for the XBox you can see that the XBox is sealed in a clear plastic case.
I'm sure the marketing departed thought this would look cool (no pun indened), but it doesn't allow any air to circulate. If you threw a PC running linux in there it probably would also crash.
This is just another case of the marketing department not talking to the tech people. I've never seen that happen before. =)

The guy did a cool hack.

But if you dont want to hack, you can buy a PSOne LCD screen for it, there are few types.

http://www.sonyweb.com/news/0101/049.html
http://www.gaming-age.com/cgi-bin/specials/special .pl?spec=psone&pagenum=1
http://www.happypuppy.com/psx/hardware/psonehardw- hw-1.html
http://www.games-console.com/acatalog/Games_Consol e_Sony_PSone___Consoles___Screens_22.html
http://www.eclectic-vg.com/psoneeng.htm

On a related note, Gaming Age have MPEG movies of the Nintendo Dolphin version of Star Wars Episode 2 Racer, here!
--

Here is a breif post on rumors of ethernet for the dreamcast.

http://www.gaming-age.com/ne ws2/november98/111998e.htm
http://www.gamenfo.com/Dreamcast/dr eamcast.html (ick, apologies in advance for the popup)

The 56k modem is in a pluggable module, so evidently Sega designed for this.

I've made a small list of what seems to be a pretty complete list of the new PS2 info. If I've missed any, feel free to add-on.

Sony of America

Sony of Europe

Sony of Japan

PSX Nation

IGNPSX

Gaming Age

Next-Generation

Gamespot

The Magic Box

And then I'd also recomend you check out the MB's connected with some of those sites because there are some very interesting discussions in there. Also expect the major news organizations (MSNBC, ZDNET, CNN) to pick it up sometime tonight too.

You're wrong : ) Story here tells all about the networking cababilities. Heck, I won't even make you click, just read:

.....In addition to packaged media, and recognizing the potential of broadband networks to offer the consumer a vast selection of content and the convenience of download capability, Sony Computer Entertainment will establish broadband based distribution of digital content, beginning with the PlayStation and PlayStation2 software libraries. With an Ethernet connection to a broadband network such as digital cable, PlayStation2 users will be able to download data-intensive computer entertainment content to hard-disc drives to be provided by Sony Computer Entertainment.

Sony Computer Entertainment will develop an electronic transaction system, including authentication and encryption technology, to support the e-distribution system. The company will also include in 2001 a PlayStation2 expansion module as a network adapter (PC card interface) and establish an e-distribution server.

That is a developer unit which is used by gaming companies to create and test games.

That is a developer unit which is used by gaming companies to create and test games.

(Some) controller details are available at Gaming Age.

Head over to Gaming Age for the full lineup. And bear in mind that these are all Japanese titles, and the make-up is likely to be very different for the Western launch (can't see there being too much room in the US for a 'Realtime Simulation Game Mahjong').

For me, highlights include Tekken Tag Tournament, Namco's Ridge Racer game (10% development screenshots look spectacular, and by all accounts it's even better in motion), Jade Cocoon 2, GT2000 (almost as pretty as Ridge Racer, but likely to be a lot deeper), Armored Core 2 (again, spectacular screenshots) and The Bouncer. Great stuff.

http://www.gaming-age.com/news2/m ay98/052198j.htm

Go to Gaming Age Online
Next Generation is a joke. They appear to enjoy plagerism too much. I believe this same info about the PS2 was on GAO earlier this week.

Could these be fake, with the PSX2 image being "borrowed" from FF8?