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The Next-Gen Consoles - Sort Fact From Fiction
1up.com continues its trend of topical features by delving into Generation Next: Separating the Facts from the Fiction of the Next-Gen Consoles. From the article: "Photorealistic graphics, streaming multimedia content, complete Internet integration and revolutionary new kinds of gameplay are all promises of next generation gaming. Right now, it's all executives blowing hot air and technobabble, but in just a short few weeks, the battle for the living room starts again, as Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony take the wraps off their new babies and show the world their visions of the industry's future."
Historically, I've always found console launches to be pretty exciting. Saving my money up for a year in advance so I can get the consoles on launch date along with a couple of launch titles. Rallying behind your favorite console (even though I really know it's all about the games, and I generally have all the consoles anyway).
But, this round of console launches seems to be a little disconcerting to me. First and foremost, I'm worried about nintend (seems like someone needs to worry on their behalf) - who should be focusing on rebuilding their relationship with third party game makers, instead of going out of their way to make something strange and difficult to make games for. Microsoft looks like they might really do well this year, which worries me more than the thought that nintendo might utterly fail. It's not that I have anything against microsoft personally, it's just that they seem to really be pushing bringing PC style games onto consoles, as opposed to console style games. I find the vast majority of the xbox games to suck horribly (just my opinion).
Sony seems to be doing it's own sony thing, overhyping the system and such. I'm not sure how well they'll do either, there are a lot of people who were burned by the poor quality of the initial PS2s last time around, and they historically have a hard time getting supply to meet demand. They might also be pulling a nintendo and shooting themselves in the foot with the Cell architecture. Difficulty of programming was one of the biggest complaints about the PS2, and from what I know about the cell architecture sony may have exacerbated the problem.
In the end, I predict that Microsoft will win, sony will take a distant second place with a few ports and very few original games, and nintendo will be completely out in left field making some money on things that bear very little resemblance to traditional games, and which may or may not be any fun at all.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
If Sony had released a half-decent API for PS2 back when it was launched, it would have kicked ass.
Xbox uses a DirectX-flavored API, and I can tell you from experience that it's so much easier to work on something familiar like DirectX, even though it is a mess in itself, at least it's a mess I already figured out long ago. Sure beats learning tricky bare-metal graphics programming on a one-off architecture like PS2's Emotion Engine.
If they release the PS3 with an OpenGL-style interface it would be a pleasure to code for.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Sony NEVER said it would render Toy Story 2 graphics. They said it would render CG quality graphics in real time and proved it with a real time rendered tech demo of the FMV from FF8. I wish fucktards like you would drop the whole Toy Story MYTH
Toy story
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All in all, Toy story looked like crap. MAny games on PS2 look better than Toy Story