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Playstation 3 Not A Video Game Machine
Gamespot has coverage of a pair of interviews with Ken Kutaragi in which he states that the PS3 isn't really a gaming console. Instead, it will be an all around device that will allow the owner to experience all sorts of different types of new entertainment. From the article: "The PS3 is the product we have been aiming for since the establishment of SCEI...We haven't been creating our [past] PlayStations for the sake of games. Our belief, and the motivation behind running our company, has been to [explore ways of] applying the power of computers to entertainment and enjoyment. We equipped the original PlayStation with a 3D graphics chip, and we equipped the PS2 with the Emotion engine. The PS3 isn't designed to lean towards games. It's not a computer for children. In the sense that our goal has been [to create] a computer that's meant for entertainment, you could say that the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 had existed as steps towards the PlayStation 3."
Is it me or is Sony starting to sound like Microsoft?
Yes, its not a game machine... it just comes with a gamepad so you can play games :/
The more you focus on trying to be everything to everyone, the more you start to fail everyone in everything. Focus on your core, the stuff you're good at, and you will have those interested in that core beating a path to your door.
Also, the codec comment is a little disturbing. Codecs do matter. If you have unlimited processing power, you still cannot convert a privately held codec due to the DMCA. Also, converting things to the PSP format is what it seems to imply, but I think that's a very small feature in the big picture.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
We like iPods, we like Cell phones, we like digital cameras, but we don't buy PDAs that do all three. Even camera-phones are tremendously underwhelming to all but tech-nerds and 14-year-old girls.
I would suggest that Nintendo is poised for a MAJOR comeback if they do the system right. They have said in no uncertain terms that the revolution is about games, not convergence. You heard it here first.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
We went through this before with the PS2.
Tell me what an emotion engine is, exactly, and why anyone should care? It's a processor. Woopty doo, you gave your video game machine a processor.
Unprecidented.
The PS3 will not be a supercomputer. The PS3 will cost $300 - $500. When an IBM workstation with dozens of PowerPC cores costing half a million dollars can only do 40 or so GigaFLOPs, there's no way in hell that the PS3 (based on the same basic Power Processor architecture) can do 2 TeraFLOPs. Not if they're measuring the same thing anyway. Otherwise, why doesn't IBM just use those in it's big iron instead of Power PCs, and market themselves as offering "A Gazillion YottaFLOPs!!!!"
Because IBM has a reputation to uphold, and they market to people who aren't teenagers dazzled by the biggest number they can think of. The people they market to will hold them to their promises.
Sony is just hype.
Yes, digital convergance. Yes, bringing it all together. Blah blah blah. Sony, you're not the only one working toward this goal, and frankly, you're not NEARLY in the position MS is in to offer it. Their market penetration on the desktop PC gives them a powerful edge, as does the fact that they started doing it in the last generation, so people who were looking for that kind of convergance already found a good thing with the X-Box.
Sony should not be allowed to market.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
His point was that Nintendo's public assertions concerning their purpose is more to his liking, and that he bases his purchases on the games offered. It seems that he likes games in which he can "kill people with a big noisy gun." Ignoring my opinion that a nice PC can compete on that front, XBox definitely leads the current consoles in the killing-with-a-noisy-gun genre. It's the only console with Halo, Halo 2, and Doom 3, with Half-Life 2 on the horizon, and the cross-platform games tend to play and/or look best on the XBox (e.g. the Splinter Cell games. And yeah, the PC versions can look even better, but this is about consoles).
I think I'll probably end up with a 360 and a Revolution in the next round (accidental pun!). I like dedicated gaming systems, but I'm interested to see how well Microsoft handles their convergence efforts. PS3 is a toss-up for me, based on game selection and price, but I'll probably wait regardless.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
I guess you've never played a movie before? This whole thread is so stupid. The guy said that the PS3 will be for more than just games and you've all made some big deal out of it... WTF is the big deal?
And perhaps the tax authorities' definitions of said word?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Which of course is because that nothing that does all three does any of them particularly well. Link me to a device that will play my music with at least 20 gigs capacity, allow me to use it as a drive, and have features at least approaching an iPod or another highend mp3 player; be a cell phone with entertaining ringtones (ok, this isn't hard); and is a digital camera with at least 5 megapixel reso and optical zoom, very good pixel quality, and other "good" digital camera options, and I'm all over it. Oh, and throw in features of a low to mid end GPS as well, and some generic PDA features. And it better be pretty small as well -- should fit in my pocket with no problem. And it should all integrate with my PC.
Helluva task for some designer, not to mention keeping the price of this down since you're miniturizing everything.
So I've been looking for any of the hype- Penny Arcade mentioned a tech demo video that was shown and complained that they certainly never saw anything like that coming out of their playstations. I have not been able to find that video
It was the Ballroom scene from FF8. They showed it rendered "in real time".
I can't find the video.. it was never released online, only shown at E3.
Here are some photos someone took of that scene though:
one
two
three
Sony to unveil PlayStation 2 New console system will reportedly feature graphics on par with "Toy Story"
I forgot how much they love to hype bullshit.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
battery or the external car battery?
You, my friend, are absolutely WRONG!! ;)
;)
The emotion engine was not hype at all, it was used to full effect in Gran Turismo 3
Every AI opponent you faced had their whole life simulated before the race. Their upbringing, how they got into racing, what happened to them in previous races, etc was generated randomly and the racer would react according to this.
For example, one racer may be brought up in a poor family, only racing to make enough money to put food on the table. Once, he almost won a 50000cr race, but spun out on turn 11 of Laguna Seca, and got injured for 5 years. Now, in the race you're competing against him in, there is a turn that resembles the turn in Laguna Seca that caused his tragic injury. But he also needs this money or his parents won't be able to afford the medical care they need. Should he risk it all at the turn, or just let you pass? So many conflicting emotions!
So he just drives in a predetermined pattern completely ignoring the position of his opponents, like the AI in Pole Position.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Its a lean, mean, grilling machine!
What are all these types of new entertainment? What have I missed?
I don't know, but it probably starts with a "po" and ends in "rn". Yup.. popcorn, that's what I was thinking about.
Rod Taylor
The thing is, this convergence box, regardless of who makes it, is going to be somewhere in between a console and a computer in terms of complexity and cost.
Cost is a big issue, because it's one of two things that consoles really have going for them (the other being ease of use, which I'll get to in a moment). Basically, consoles can deliver a whole lot of bang for the buck because they've historically used less powerful hardware, but been much much more optimized specifically for gaming. You can either despecialize the hardware (and become more computer-like), or just throw enough raw power into it that software can pick up the slack. The second option seems to be sony's chosen path, and the high price tags being thrown around for the PS3 reflect that.
Ease of use is the other one. How functional beyond games can something get with a game controller as a primary interface? Once you add a keyboard and a mouse, you're going back to a computer. I guess the point is, this convergence thing is going to be a simplified computer, or a beefed up video game console.
I'd have more faith in a computer company (Apple comes to mind first), successfully paring down their knowledge into something workable than I would a company like Sony kludging together a bunch of different pieces well.
Like the parent post said, the computer is an all in one magic box. It's already here, it's been around for a while, people have experience with it. All that's left is to strip out some of the extra parts and make it easier to use. Sony still has to build something that works first, then strip out the extra stuff, and make it easy to use. That first step is hard.
MS would seem to be in a better position than Sony to do this, except stuff that just works has historically been rather difficult for them.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Actually, this has gone round and round for years.
The Xbox was going to be the ultimate conversion device, that brought gaming and networked communication to a head, with possible movie and music delivery services. The PS2 was the same. Nintendo stayed away. Going Back a generation, The Dreamcast and Saturn were both convergent devices, with modems and browsers. The Playstation talked a good talk about becoming the center of you digital universe, but didn't do anything about it. Nintendo also stayed away. In the generation before, the Genesis had a modem and console-to-console communication services, as well as being one of the first devices to support a cable modem of sorts. By the end of it's life, it was going to become the center of your multimedia universe, to compete with 3DO, CDI, Pippin, Turbo Duo, and everyone else time forgot. Nintendo promised a modem and a CD player (the playstation, oddly enough), but didn't deliver. During the previous generation, the NES had the odd distinction of being the first console you could legally gamble upon, with a modem connection to a state lottery. It also had knitting machines and a whole host of useless accessories in Japan to help it become the Family Computer (FamiCom) it was named after. They also used ROB in the US to sell the machine as "more than a game machine," then promptly dumped the adorable useless thing. I don't recall any moves on the Mastersystem's part during this time, though remember that the mastersystem had games on both cards and cartridges, and nobody really discovered what they had planned for that expandability.
Before the NES, the line between consoles and computers was extremely blurry, with ATARI computers competing with ATARI consoles and Intellivisions competing with Colecovisions. Ok, I was too young to remember much of anything but Bullwinkle cartoons. But remember, back then these things basically were computers, with keyboards and recipe programs and typing applications. They were basically all omni machines, and if they weren't they promised the functionality that they could become one.
In other words, everyone is offering the omni machine. Everyone. It's marketing. Everyone knows that the PSP is about as useful as a movie player as your watch, but still they hype the possibility to sell more PSP's. Your living room monitor is a crappy screen to read text from, but people still like to hear that their console will connect to the internet and let them read their mail.
The FLOPS issue is not as big as you would think. Supercomputers are expensive primarily because they're custom, and use extra hardy equipment, not because there is a particular ops to cost ratio. Plus the PS3 is optimized to push as many FLOPS as quickly as possible through, for maximum graphics throughput, with really no eye to what to do with them. 8 chips on die with really long multiple pipelines working in tandem? Basically if this thing had to think out of order, that efficiency will quickly come crashing down, and I doubt it has a lot of registers, but on linear datasets with no dependencies this puppy will scream. My PC rates as 3 GigaFLOPS for the main CPU, and it's a few years old. And it can actually think. Add in clock cycles for the graphics processor and the other chips onboard, and I could see a modern computer with a modern graphics card ranking as 20 GigaFLOPS. Now with a few years yet to be released, and a development cycle designed almost exclusively to do ridiculous amounts of mechanical transformations to fixed data pipelines, and I could see 2 TeraFLOPS being possible. Much like Intel pushing the P4 MHz rating artificially high, this would be high for basically artificially engineered reasons, but it's definitely possible. By the time this ships, Blue Gene should have passed the PetaFLOP barrier. And as both of these are IBM's babies, they should have the technical knowhow.
When Nintendo teamed with SGI to create Project Reality, the specs they announced were truly insane. By the time they actually shipped that machine, the N64, the specs were still the same but because of the elapsed time they were just generally good.
The ______ Agenda
It's really too bad that Sony didn't come up with a name that involved some sort of spinning. Then we'd have no problem coming up for a name for this generation of consoles.
Then again, Sony seems to be the master of spinning hype and news... maybe they figured they didn't need to add it into the console's name as well -- people figured it was assumed.