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Smaller Playstation 2 Theorized
Tim Grube writes "According to Gaming Horizon and several other industry insiders,
Sony will be
celebrating their fourth-year anniversary of the Playstation 2 on October 26th
by releasing a smaller, more compact version of the game system with the new
name PStwo.
Some analysts believe the PStwo will retail at $149.99, the
current price of the Playstation 2."
You do know that if you call up Sony and say anything about a "disk read error" that they will have you ship them your PS2 and send you back one with a new DVD-ROM and/or a new mobo with all the latest firmware updates and DVD player software right?
Creative Demolition
There's no way I know of. You can use
ln(x) = n * ln(n)
and fiddle with n until it's close enough, though.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Halo wasn't the greatest game ever. It had some really, really serious problems. Chief among them, I'd say, were a devastating lack in variety of weapons and enemies, and over-long and under-varied missions, which could drive the player to the verge of insanity with sheer boredom. However, what it did have was potential. The multiplayer is a blast; probably the strongest console fps for multiplayer (although Timesplitters 2 is also good). Some sections of the game, particularly the all-too-short bits where you got to play with the vehicles, were great fun. It also had a decent plot and game-world, which verged on being actual science-fiction at times (rare in games), as opposed to an action game in space. As such, if the developers have figured all this out and worked to correct the flaws, Halo 2 could potentially be awesome.
Console multiplayer is pretty big these days, in my experience. X-Box Live seems to be noticably busier than it was 9 months ago when I first signed up for it. The biggest X-Box Live games tend not to be the fpses, like Halo, but rather the genres which don't get much of a look-in on the PC. MechAssault and Crimson Skies are both among the most popular games, although fpses such as Halo and the Rainbow 6 games are obviously still significant. Over on the PS2, there's SOCOM, Final Fantasy XI (which is, so far as I know, pretty much the ONLY online game on any platform to have had a significant impact in Japan) and, hopefully very soon now, Gran Turismo 4. The only console without a decent and popular online lineup is the Gamecube.
I think production of PSones has already stopped, they're just going through remaining stock. In the UK "Game" stores had a neat PSOne + official LCD Screen + GBP10 game deal for GBP80 (the PSOne's RRP is GBP50). Pity I didn't have enough money to get it at the time, as it was obviously a stock clearance measure.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
Also, I'm sure a lot of people bought PSones as replacements for PSXs that died. We did - my kids inherited my 1998-vintage PSX when I got my PS2, but a year or so later they killed it by leaving it on overnight...
GTRacer
- Wondering what an import PSP will cost...
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Prove to me that Sony has sold all their consoles at a loss.
I guarantee you cannot cite adequate evidence to support this. You don't know what you're talking about and you're just repeating the same old crap that gets posted in the games section all the time. Not all consoles are sold at a loss - get over it.
Most of the reliable sources (newspapers, magazines) don't have the stories available for the PlayStation and PS2 in easily-searchable sources like Google news, but a quick search turned up two interesting bits about their current plans:
As per 1Up's article, Sony plans to sell the PSP at a loss. And if you Ctrl+F for the word "loss" in ZDNet's PSX story, it will not only tell you that the PSX was planned to sell at a loss, but that it is generally an industry standard, much like the razorblade entry.
makers typically sell hardware at a loss and make their profits from royalties on game software sales. That model gets shaky, however, when you start cramming nongame functions into the same box, Cole said.
"They've been able to get the price way down on game systems, because they can make it up on software," Cole said. "With these kinds of hybrid devices, you're selling to people who aren't necessarily going to buy a lot of games. But you can't necessarily expect to charge a premium over the existing products it's intended to replace."
The only thing I can't really prove is that Nintendo actually sells theirs at a profit. That's mostly from print sources like EGM's Quartermann column.