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The PS2 - A Betamax In the Making?
Feedmag is running an article that talks about the "openness" of the PS2, as well as the upcoming competition with the widely anticipated X-Box. Well thought out and interesting.
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Looking back at the run of the original PlayStation, it's very clear that the games have become better and better visually as time has progressed, and the programmers have learned to better utilise the hardware and it's abilities. I only hope for Sony's sake that they can do that again.
Of course, this always happens with console platforms. For example, compare
As developers familiarise themselves and build up/optimize their platform skills, the amount of performance they wrench out can be amazing. You should have seen the Spectrum port of Chase HQ - it's unbelievable how much they crammed into that crappy little box!
The real deciding factor tends to be the gap in technologies at deployment. The most successful consoles had a combination of far superior technology and good early games. That's why the SNES killed the Genesis, and the Playstation killed the Saturn. N64 was hampered by a late arrival and fairly insignificant graphical advances. More pointedly, the Sega 32-bit upgrade didn't really offer much above the SNES so it flopped. So the question is - how much better (tech wise) is the PS/2. I can't really say - initially it looked like the tech would blow everything out of the water, but now I'm not so sure. All I know is, if it flops, there goes another victim of the RAMBUS touch of death. :)
Today is a great time to be a gamer!!
I work at a EB in my town, and I hear all sides of how people are looking at the next round of console wars. Basically, there are a few groups that pretty much everyone can be put it.
A) The platform loyalists. I have heard people come in and say they will buy whatever Sony/Nintendo/Sega/Microsoft/Grandma/Acme puts out and they have no doubts that it will be the system that destroys all others.
B) The patient waiter. These are the people that are going to wait for the next 3 systems to be released and then buy the one (ones) that have the best games. This seems to be the most logically one, but these days, whats logic anyways)
C) The misinformed. You would be amazed at what some people think about the various systems. This is where the hype really plays in, and these are the people that marketing folks just LOVE.
Unfortunately, it seems that most people fall into category C. Some peolpe think the PS2 is more powerful than a $3000 PC. Others think the GameCube is less powerful than the Dreamcast. Others still will try and convince you that Superman for the N64 is a good game.
The Betamax comparison is completely off base here. The reason being that Betamax was actually better quality than VHS, but VHS still won the war. If anything, in the coming months Sony and its PS2 will be the VHS of the upcoming console shoot out, and it will be up to their marketing department to make the PS2 the mainstream machine.
Everyone here knows that superior tech wont mean squat if you don't have a compelling reason to use it. On consoles this means exclusive games. Its looking like the PS2 is not going to get those exclusive titles from third parties like Oddworld 2 (recently announced to have switched to XBox exclusively), and instead they are going to have to rely on their in house dev teams (there is only ONE Sony brand launch title) to draw people to their platform.
These upcoming console wars are going to be interesting indeed.
Plus, you *have* to play NFL2K1. The gameplay and artificial intelligence are outstanding.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
At first I was going to wait for the Nintendo 64, then I was going to wait for the Dreamcast, then I was going to way for the Playstation 2, and now I'm thinking of waiting for the X-Box, but it finally hit me.
Man can own multiple console machines at the same time.
Apparently, there is no crime against owning both a Playstation 2 and a Dreamcast at the same time or even, dare I say it, a Nintendo 64, Playstation 2 and Dreamcast at the same time.
Now, I'm not sure why I thought that I couldn't own two consoles at the same time. I guess it just feels a bit wrong owning two machines which do basically the exact same thing only because sony, sega and nintendo can't get it through their heads that the money is in the software.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I imagine it's true for the PSX and other 1st gen consoles, but even back in the Amiga days you could get the best performance by directly addressing the graphics chip to do parallel processing, etc.
Hell, the same could even be said for the Pentium with its multiple pipelines, and with the fancy graphics cards, but the majority of developers just forget about it and let DirectX or the compiler work out how to do it well enough, or they just go and licence the Quake, etc, engine where someone else has gone to the trouble of hand-optimising.
As with all new systems, there's going to be a learning process. Go back to the launch of the PSX and look at some of the games you went WOW over, and compare them with the speed and complexity of new titles for exactly the same handware, now that developers have had a chance to work out how to squeeze every last drop out of the system.
And given the success of Linux, obsucre technical documentation seems to be no hurdle to the average programmer...
The PS2 has a TOSLINK (optical digital) on the back for digital audio and can do AC3 and DTS out to an external decoder just fine.
It's in the specs somewhere. Games will be able to use this as well - it'll be nice to have full home theatre surround instead of the tinny 4 speaker setups that most PC surround sound is today.
Then Microsoft will have the same problem Sony had where developers were bypassing their published SDK, writing directly to hardware and creating games that were incompatible with certain model PSX's. Not a pretty site, and could be a PR disaster. Sony cracked down on it hard and fast, telling developers in no uncertain terms that they were to use the SDK at all times. When programmers write to the so-called "bare metal", you lose the ability to correct errors and flaws in the underlying hardware and software.
In a war of FUD, don't you think Nintendo could trump even MS and the X-box?
FUD? FUD doesn't apply to a world where sales are predominantly decided by children. In that world, whatever has the best graphics, games and commercials (and to a lesser extent, price) is the one that will sell, and the others will vanish into the woodwork. Probably the most important factor will be the fact that console games and PC games have been traditionally vastly different in varieties, and gameplay. There has been some crossover, notably Quake, Final Fantasy and a few others, but for the most part the crossover versions paled in comparison to the native versions. I have a feeling that the X-Box will be more of a threat to the traditional PC gaming markets than the console markets. Remember that Microsoft also doesn't have the Japanese game designers that have made most of the games you'd commonly associate with console machines, but rather has US-based developers who are more often than not more familiar with PC games. I can see it cutting heavily into the PC markets and making a lot of Microsoft's OEM partners very angry.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Official PlayStation 2 Release: October 26/2000 at a price of $299 USD.
$299 for a DVD player with digital sound (Dolby 5.1), FireWire, USB, game controller, 3.5" drive bay, backwards compatibility with PSX games, and an intitial selection of more than 30 games, including Unreal Tournament. (There are only about 7 obscure PS1 games which won't play. All current DVDs including the Matrix do play.) Here's the list of games:
Consumers can find the following titles in October at more than 20,000 retail locations
(listed in alphabetical order):
More than 10 additional titles are expected to be shipped in November and at least 9 titles in December, totaling more than 50 PlayStation 2-specific software titles in market by the holidays.
November 2000 releases include (listed in alphabetical order):
December 2000 releases include (listed in alphabetical order):
First quarter of 2001 titles include (listed in alphabetical order):
First quarter of 2001 titles continued (listed in alphabetical order):
--
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
The differences between the US and Japanses PS2's are that the US has a drive bay in the back for a hard disk/ ethernet card instead of the PCMCIA slots that the Japanese one had, and the US one has the DVD playing software in ROM instead of as a file on the memory card, so it can't be corrupted by games, which was a big fiasco over there (Ridge Racer broke the DVD player when it saved). Cool that you can execute stuff off the memory card though...
It still decodes in software, it's just that the software is in ROM, not on the memory card.
BBK
- Standards-compliant PC hardware.
- Fixed form the same as a console.
- Consistent C++ programming language with no major differences (easy to port to from PC).
- Stellar graphics hardware from NVidia, especially at TV resolutions.
- A groundbreaking amount of voices on the soundcard.
If you were a developer and got a chance to play with this toy, would you turn it down? PS2 is good and all, but to say XBox is going to be bad because "it's using standard parts" is, in your words "so damned lazy".
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, published and developed by Tecmo
I liked this game better when I played it on Dreamcast six months ago. And it even had better, less jagged graphics then. New costumes though...
Eternal Ring, published by Agetec and developed by From Software
Evergrace, published by Agetec and developed by From Software
FantaVisionÔ , published by SCEAM
I have a really hard time even telling these games apart. Fantavision is such a yawn-fest that some places are requiring you buy the game to get the system.
Gun Griffon Blaze, published by Working Designs and developed by Game Arts
Wow, a 2D shooter with 3D graphics. Where have I seen this before?
Kessen, published by Electronic Arts and developed by Koei
It's Romance of the Three Kingdoms with graphics ripped out of Shogun. Neat idea, but Americans hate these kinds of games. Myself included.
Ridge Racer V, published and developed by Namco
I think I played this game a couple years ago, when it was called R4. Nice shiney, jagged, plastic cars though. Think I'll go back to F355, a superior game in every imaginable way.
Street Fighter® EX3, published and developed by Capcom
I think it's been pretty much established that this game is crap. It was ported from a PSX-based arcade machine. And 3D street fighter was a bad idea to begin with...
Summoner, published by THQ and developed by Volition, Inc
Wow, they fixed the jaggies...to bad about the game itself though...
Tekken Tag Tournament, published and developed by Namco
I think when this game was called Tekken 3 it...oh fudge it...
Unreal Tournament, published by Infogrames and developed by Epic Games
Very nice tech demo. Really shows off what the machine can do with a one year old PC game. The lack of a modem means you'll be playing with yourself though... Kinda guts the whole concept of this game.
I'll stop there, it's getting silly. My point is, the games just aren't worth the $400 (system, game, memory card, retailer gouging, etc) price of entry. Especially when Dreamcast is keeping me more than busy enough.
Actually, the Playstation development was opened to some degree - you could buy a $700 system called the Net Yarouse (the link is a slashdot story in fact about a GPL'ed development document for the Playstation!!!!).
But that is beside the point, as I'm not sure the existance of the Net Yarouse really helped moved the Playstation all that much (I never owned a PS, but will be getting a PS2).
As for the X-box points you make however, you have a number of flawed assumptions.
As far as being ahead in performance - from the numbers, sure, it sounds like the X-Box must be miles ahead of published specs for the PS2, the Dreamcast, and the Gamecube. However we all know how specs can lie, right? You take a standard PC platform with a few custom chips and all of the various bottlenecks like memory and PCI bus, against three systems stuffed to the gills with high-bandwith buses, and vastly more customized chips. I'm not saying the X-box will not be more powerful but it might not be the leap you'd think from the numbers.
Also, I have to say that all of the X-box movies I've seen (pretty much all from Daily Radar) have really left me cold. They do not seem to show much going on, and simply look rather bland. That could definatly just be a problem with the demo, but long before the PS2 came out I was seeing movies of stuff generated by the system that impressed me a lot more.
Ethernet is the one thing I'll agee on you with. Sony was silly not to include it in the box, though I think they have a pretty good chance at a high sell-though rate on the HD/Ethernet adaptor.
Now about the "no goofy graphic chip to learn". Yes, that is true for games that use DirectX. But will those be system seller games? I have my doubts. The real coders will, in fact be figuring out how to write DIRECTLY to the new chip nVidia is developing for the system, thus they WILL have to learn a new "goofy graphics chip" in order to produce good games. Don't believe me? Read this review with Michael Abrash from the Xbox technology group. One of the telling things he says, and I quote, is:
"The coolest thing about my job is that Xbox is a fixed platform. Performance is my favorite thing, and for the first time since the original 4.77 MHz PC, I can actually justify taking the time to understand things down to the metal and figure out how to really optimize, because the machine is never going to change."
So as you can see, there are developers that will be programming as far down as they can go, they will take some time to understand the chip. I'm not saying that's bad - I'm just saying the X-box turns out to be little different than a console with a good library.
Now as far as it being more expensive, who can say? I'd personally bet it comes out at $300 just because it pretty much has to. But, I also wouldn't be surprised to see $400. Either one might be real trouble if the Gamecube is coming out about the same time for a smaller price. In a war of FUD, don't you think Nintendo could trump even MS and the X-box?
And for worries even from developers using the system, try out the interview with Scott Miller from 3D Realms. He has some serious doubts about the X-box being so close to the PC as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Rambus uses less connections/chip, so it can be packaged smaller, and more channels per chip can be used - the PS2 uses 4 channels of RDRAM for 3.2 GB/s of bandwidth, using fewer pins than the 1.066 GB/s PC133 SDRAM bus in most PC's. Fewer pins means fewer traces and that makes boards cost less. It was the only way that Sony could get the bandwidth it needed for the PS2 while still staying in budget.
The N64 uses an early form of RDRAM as well, one of the first uses of the technology.
It's not that it's bad technology, just misapplied to PC's when supply was not availible,and managed by a company with a overzealous legal department.
BBK
When Sony killed the betamax format, the vcr market was still a very very new and undeveloped market. The same can hardly be said about the videogame console market, which sony currently dominates and has had years of experience dominating.
The second important difference to note is that Sony completely screwed up the marketing/promotion side for betamax. Sony actually cut back marketing expenditures when sales initially rose and failed to raise them when vhs started making headway. But if you've seen any of Sony's marketing efforts recently, you know there's been a lot of change.
The industry is a different place from what it was back in 1975. PS2 might still fail, but if it does, it won't be because it too much resembled betamax.
-- Anne Marie
nintendo's new console gamecube is coming out in the not-too-distant future(fall 2001 for americans), probably before x-box for that matter. sure, its a year away, but upto this point, nintendo has come through with one thing that few others have: quality games! and games are what people own consoles for, not their ability to imitate computers. check out cube.ign.com for more information, and video clips of what this thing can do... its pretty damn impressive in my opinion. -agent oranje
-agent oranje.