Slashdot Mirror
More ApeXtreme Info
Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech has some pretty interesting follow up information to last week's sneak peek and discussion concerning VIA's attempt to penetrate the console market. By the looks of it, the S3 DeltaChrome GPU is horribly incapable of making VIA/Apex a formidable gaming console." More on vaporware at CES: Bob Gortician points to this "interesting, if terse, piece on the Phantom game console's debut..."
Sony, Nitendo, Microsoft -- that's it. That's all the market can handle...
Sorry boys, there is no more room for you.
They will lose like all the consoles that have come and gone before. Xbox would have lost too... if they didn't have Microsoft's endless wealth behind them.
Keep it vapor guys... It'll be cheaper that way for you.
AC
This whole console thing is starting to make me feel like its the 70's again, or early 80's anyway. Here a console there a console, everyones got a consol either out or coming out.
Remember some of the oddball consoles (some REALLY cool at the time) that just completley FLOPPED.
would someone go to such elaborate measures and great expense(putting together a prototype, sending exhibitors to CES, et al.) just to not demonstrate anything? No one has ever seen this system running, the offices of the company are one empty room in a strip mall. If its not a hoax it would be easy to prove, just show a system that does somthing.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"They're too big, and most likely can't be dethroned."
You could have said that about Nintendo in the 80's and early 90's... Then along came a blunder called the Nintendo 64.
If we've learned anything, it's that you can never predict what will happen when the next generation of concoles comes out.
And as far as Nintendo being on the way out... The price drop to 99$ has (arguably) put them back in the #2 spot. They're still the undisputed king of the handheld market (N-Gage being as good as say... N'Sync- AND as cleverly named), and unlike Microsoft, they actually make a profit everytime they sell a console.
Nintendo is already on its way out to becoming a software-only company like Sega was. Microsoft is doing reasonably well in the US, but flopping in Japan and Europe. Sony dominates in all three areas, because they've been the standard since the PS1 -- which they're still backwards compatible with, by the way.
Nintendo is hardly on its way out.
The Gamecube is globally selling as much as, or more than, the XBox (depending on which particular analyst you listen to), and Nintendo aren't pumping cash into it like Microsoft are to prop up the XBox. The Gameboy is of course selling in the millions.
Sony has certainly outsold both Nintendo and Microsoft, but neither of the second placed companies are going to be moving out of consoles any time soon. Expect to see a new Nintendo box released, along with the PS3 and the XBox 2, and expect it to perform well.
Contrary to popular belief, a company does not have to be in the number 1 position to be either profitable or successful.
There is room in most markets for multiple competitors. This is something for which I'm exceedingly grateful given that the current incumbent number 1 companies are producing, invariably, lesser experiences than those on a smaller scale.
Calls for a Highlander-esque "there can be only one!" death match are usually only by fanboys who can't see that there must be more than a single "winner".
This is a game console. We're talking TV resolutions here. Something like 720x480 for NTSC? Even mid-level cards will make games go fast. Besides, the level of eye candy can be tuned before release so that the chip will always run fast.
I hear that word and I almost want to punch somebody.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Yeah, how did no-one notice what a craptacular name it is? Surely someone must have stopped at some point and thought "Woah! It looks like we're trying to market snow-boarding simians over here . . ."
Everytime I see it I get visions of Monkey Kombat.
Oop Ack Chee indeed.
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
I just want to know, how the HECK is this thing going to make money for VIA or Apex? It has enough "asshole technology" to limit its usability to the level that unless nice people at Apex kindly allowed you to play a particular game, it won't run it at all, however PC games give no revenue to the hardware makers -- just the opposite, Apex has to make installer/uninstaller scripts for them. At its $400 price it is barely below similarly-specced PCs, so I guess, there is some slim profit margin in that, considering that all chips are VIA.
But the problem is, it competes with small PCs made mostly from... VIA's chips! VIA sells the same parts, probably at the same or higher profit, to PC makers, and those produce small "media/games" PCs for a bit higher price and infinitely higher flexibility. So VIA gets an inflexible product squeezed between traditional consoles ($100-$200 price range) and cheap gaming-capable PCs ($400-$600 price range), and to add insult to the stupid situation, the latter, that they are so busy undercutting, is also their best client.
If VIA just wanted to undercut the PCs it could just produce a fully-functional PC, price it at $400-$500, and enjoy the results. But with $400 thing that costs almost as much as an equivalent $500 PC, but does much less (not to mention, can't be upgraded to be able to meet new games' requirements in a few years), they just can't get enough users that buy that thing instead of either cheaper console, or a PC.
So why bother?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You _do_ have to deal with hardware upgrades (often ugly ones) and incompatibility. Talk to anyone who tried playing import games on their PlayStation. Doing so often requires chipping, a procedure which can be (though just like upgrading the hardware on a PC, doesn't have to be) very tricky to perform.
:)
I wouldn't consider chipping to be a standard hardware upgrade. It's more like modifying the hardware itself(eg Athlon XP -> MP).
You also need to upgrade your hardware in the more traditional sense, because even consoles eventually get too old - ask any SNES owner.
Okay, I guess buying a new console technically counts as a hardware upgrade. But at the very least it's a benchmark-free upgrade.
Sure, you can keep the old console around (until it breaks - and when it does, you generally can't just swap out the faulty component like on a PC),
You can get a new system from even the previous generation for less than the cost of a minor PC component.
but then you either need some sort of switch or you need to poke the wires behind the TV every time you want to use the older one (if you don't have multiple sets).
Passthrough RF adaptors were common on consoles up until the time TVs with multiple inputs became common. You can still go out and buy them if it's that big of an issue.
My 2003 PC can still play games that were released in the early 90's for completely different hardware, and doing so requires no special reconfiguration between games.
Tried playing an old DOS game recently? Have fun getting sound.
Not being able to play old games on the same system is indeed a disadvantage of consoles, but it looks like backwards compatibility is starting to take hold. Here's hoping that it sticks around.
This greatly depends on how you define quality regarding games. If you are talking bugs per line of code, yes, PC games may be buggier overall, but there are millions more PC games than there are console games for any single console. Because it's so easy to develop and release PC games, there are a lot of junk games out there. But on the PC, bugs can always be fixed post-release. On a console, they can't. This is clearly a huge advantage for PC's, and if it leads to (some) games being a bit buggier to start with, that's fine. Most if not all such games are eventually fixed and noone forces you to buy those games before they are. And on PC, you don't need to waste your money, there are always ways to try before you buy (not that console games aren't warezed, too).
I've played far more console games in the past few years that I'd be willing to spend $50 on than PC games. Maybe that's just an artifact of my choice of games, but it's also a general impression I get from reading reviews and such.
On the topic of bugginess, console games don't need patches because it is extremely rare to find any but the most minor bugs in a console game. It's amazing how sturdy code can get when you code for one platform and don't get any second chances.
Looking at aspects other than bugginess I'd argue that PC games are generally of a higher quality than console ones. PC games generally offer more ways to customize the game, support for more and different input devices (you can configure a keybd+mouse in many more ways than you can configure a simple joypad).
Okay, this is something important that I failed to mention. Thank you for pointing it out.
Oh, and not to forget, modifications to the games themselves - I don't think I need to tell you how PC's sweep the floor with consoles in that regard.
I wish PCs would sweet the floor *more* in that regard, seeing as how the most popular mod on the net is *still* fucking Counterstrike.
If you had RTFA'ed, you'd know that this console is in fact NOT impossible to upgrade. They even included an empty DIMM slot on the motherboard for pete's sake! And as far as limited funct
Visit the
So it's not ok to have fun playing adult oriented games? Look dipstick, I'm not talking about adult games as in sexual content, i'm talking about games pitched to adults. Let's try some examples in other media to maybe help you get an idea of what I mean:
A TV show like Law and Order. Law and Order is a hugely successful show (as is apparant by them running it all the time on every channel) but try and get your average 6 year old to watch it. They'll be bored in 5 minutes with most episodes.
A movie like Boondock Saints. A kid might think that the violence in Boondock's is cool, but I doubt they get the humour or much in the way of the message of the movie. They and their friends are not going to discuss the moral implications.
These are both examples of adult oriented entertainment. They were designed with an adult audience in mind. Compare this to something like Aladin, which clearly had a young audience in mind.
Now this doesn't mean that adults don't enjoy kid-oriented entertainment or that some kids don't enjoy adult oriented entertainment, or even that there's a hard line between the two. However it is quite clear that you can design something with different audiences in mind, and which one you choose will affect the demographic that buys your product.
Games have an even wider range since there is not only the topic and content to consider, but the mechanics and difficulty. Some games are simply too difficult for most kids. One I clearly remember was Master of Orion 2. When it first came out I decided to try it, and hated it. I just couldn't figure the damn thing out. Too complecated. A few years later I tried it again and loved it, still play it to this day. Other games are the opposite, I found them challenging when I first played them as a kid and find them trivial now.
So look, it's not bad that game companies are relasing games targeted to adults. Don't get in a huff because your chosen console provider didn't tend to go for that. Nintendo had always been a kid oriented platform, with mainly kid titles. Sony went witha more adult orient platform. It was a real winner. Doesn't mean there's no market for kid games, as is obvious from the ample supply, or that adults don't enjoy playing them.
However there are those of us that want games that present something different, things that most kids won't enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that and doesn't mean we are playing games to "determine our dick size", it just means we choose to be entertained in a different way or on a different level.