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Phantom Game Console Presentation
superultra writes "Glaximus has posted an impressions piece on Penny-Arcade of one of Infinium Lab's first press conferences. Most notable is that which Gabe, of Penny-Arcade fame, also replicates on Penny-Arcade's front page: 'One of the last questions asked was rather direct and perhaps aimed a bit low. "So, I have all my consoles at home, and I have a very powerful PC that plays lots of games and can be upgraded simply by installing new hardware myself. Why would I want to buy a Phantom?" Rob's answer? "Well then you aren't really part of the Phantom's core user base." That got some chuckles from the crowd, sure. But it was Rob's next statement that had the real impact. "See, you people say you have enough consoles, and a powerful PC, but whenever a new console comes out, you people always buy it."' Other details are scarce, except that the release date is now April 2004, and that the Phantom will use highly advanced DMCA techniques such as Epoxy Encapsulation and Case Intrusion Detection. Doing so will, no doubt, provide the Missing Link in Digital Rights Managment."
I forgot who, but someone actually went to the address they had listed for their headquarters. It turned out to be completely abandoned, not even any furniture or anything. When that person called and asked about it, he was hung up on. That, combined with the fact that most of the screenshots look like they're coming from his GARAGE (there were some tires sitting in the corner) and the fact that there's never any real concrete evidence of this thing actually existing make this thing winner of the Vaporware of the Year award.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I remember when Ross Perot gave a speech to the NAACP during his presidential campaign, he kept using the phrase, "You people."
The crowd became outright hostile as the speech wore on. I remember hearing one person incredulously shout, "US people???"
I can't imagine the crowd at the presentation reacted any better.
So Infinium believes Us People will buy basically whatever any console manufacturer makes, eh? I guess they're unaware of the Sega Saturn. Or the Atari Jaguar. Maybe they believe Nokia's press releases, and not their in-store sales figures on the N-Gage. I don't know. It seems to me that the video game industry has more failed consoles than successes.
But then, I'm not in the business; I just play games.
Infinium is this year's Indrema. They've got pie in the sky plans and nothing to show for their hype. If you look at all the features Infinium is proposing for the Phantom it starts to look a lot like an updated L600 from Indrema. The hype for the Phantom actually looks like a cross between Lindows.com's and Indream's hype. It's like the marketoids from both companies got together in a conclave of absurdity.
I want to feel bad for anyone who invests in this flop. I find it exceedingly difficult however because they're painfully stupid. Hopefully the people backing Infinium married well so there's a chance their offspring to end up with decent genes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
here is the hard "truth", or something close enough too it.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This guy is not building a gaming platform. He's building a cable decoder.
Cable companies would like nothing more than to rent you immersive, persistent entertainment. ("Sell? That's so last millennium.") Problem: Cable boxes today are pitifully stupid due to the drive to keep costs low; they have no local storage. Also, they've learned the hard way, both through their spastic "Interactive TV" initiatives and their broadband internet offerings, that there's no way they can serve interactive games without intolerable download waits from the head end.
What they want is a PC that the subscriber can't modify in any way. It looks like the Phantom guys propose to build this.
Or, they could just be a bunch of flakes out to put over an obvious hoax on the industry. (Please support our "phantom" console, ha ha...)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
3DO was too expensive so we had good reason not to. The Jaguar had no good games and the ones that were supposed to be good never were released. And I can't speak for the TurboGrafx 16. As a side note, I owned a Jaguar and loved the Tempest 2000 and Iron Soldier games.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
This is what you are looking for.
The general purpose computer will eventually price crush the game box.
it may price crush them (it's close to that now) but it is nowhere closer to having three things:
1. appliance-style instant-on "plug and play" -- instead you have to load the OS then install the game, then load the game, and so many things can go wrong there.
2. unified controller architecture (man the buzzwords) so that game developers don't have to worry about which version of Microsoft Sidewinder you're going to use, or maybe you'll just use the keyboard and a trackball or what have you.
3. "franchise" games like Nintendo's Mario, oh so popular with the young 'uns.
Now, what the PC does have, is mods. I think that's the big weakness of Xbox live and all that, there's no ability for the community to "embrace and extend" as it were. Kinda ironic, but not surprising. The PC is an open architecture computer, the game consoles are closed-architecture appliances.
At the time, we weren't even in high school yet, let alone had jobs to buy consoles with. Now that we have jobs and money and free time to kill, we're looking for these consoles on eBay.
Of course, these older consoles aren't the ones that require a broadband connection. That's a good way to slash your target market down to an order of magnitude less than what it could be...