Slashdot Mirror
Smoke and Mirrors from Sony and Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "History tells us: Don't believe what you're hearing about the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.There was a lot of hype last week about the next generation of game machines. Microsoft said the Xbox 360 will ultimately reach 1 billion consumers worldwide, while Sony gave a laundry list of features for the PlayStation 3, showing some jaw dropping footage along the way. (Nintendo promised a Revolution, but didn't go much further than that.)
I hate to be a wet blanket, but it's time to come back to reality."
I usually remembered some fantastic games coming near the end of the lifecycle, like Earthworm Jim 2 for the SNES or Return of Joker for NES. Developers learn the intricacies of what you can do, and do more amazing stuff as time goes by. Better perhaps than even these artificial demos. Respect the software.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Since when does reality have anything to do with videogames?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
History tells me that I shouldn't expect anything exciting from new consoles yet I still am intrigued by the work the marketing teams go through to bring us their latest and greatest... I am even more intrigued that we have people posting this crap (as if we didn't already know it was all bullshit) to their blogs and making themselves sound like they know something we don't.
Since so many people these days are into spouting off basically unsubstantiated rumor and making it appear legit through our "new media outlets" I'll go ahead and state what *I* believe the console makers should do!
Enjoy.
You know what I want from gaming consoles? Something *new*. When I say *new* I don't mean hi-def resolutions, better sound, faster game play, or even high density storage mediums. When I say *new* I mean I want to see something I have never in my life seen before...
Problem is that we are stuck in a loop of the same rehashed cafeteria lunches with gaming. "Green beans" slopped on my tray is the same as "Emerald Pods". HL2 and Doom3 are the same as Wolf3D and various others.
It really disappoints me when I am thrilled with simple games like Ms. Pacman, Tetris, and Bejeweled variants yet I am extremely bored with "amazing and real life AI", "hi-def graphics", etc.
Gran Turismo 1 was the end all of racing games apparently as GT2, GT3, and now GT4 (and various other similar racing variants) have all been abysmal remakes of the original. I remember saying how revolutionary Quake1 was. Everything after has been bleh. I think I have made my point...
Sony and MSFT: You want to make me excited about a console? Give me some really incredible titles that are something new and exciting rather than just renamed and rehashed green beans. I guarantee that if you can impress me with some titles you can impress all the people and even those that believe that people like me are just ignoring the "important subtle differences between similar genres". You don't even have to have fancy pre-fab rendering, lifelike graphics, or tons of CPU horsepower. All you need is a new and revolutionary idea that makes me want to play it again and again and again. You won't even have to spend millions on hardware and software research.
Hopefully this will give you a few ideas of what to do. I'll be waiting...
so what, I'll get one of each after the prices come down. at least its improvement. the article is probably correct to a degree and MS might not make their billion consumer mark, but if anyone has enough marketing power/money to shoot for a billion consoles, its M$
do you have shinyfeet?
Game console companies are playing games!
Why wouldn't a company pimp it's product? So maybe they do get carried away, but they have to generate hype somehow.
I think it is completely wrong of them to use pre-rendered images, and say it is actual gameplay footage (killzone, anyone?), but I can't imagine that this early on the developers have even gotten close to figuring out the nuances of the systems.
It all comes down to the games. If a console has powers like a supercomputer, it still won't be fun if the games are terrible.
You don't play the hardware in the console, you play the games. That's all there is to it.
Its not the platform, but the applications that make a difference ....
If a kick-ass game console has the absolute best hardware today, doesn't mean we like playing "Pong4d/v2" all day long.
then so what. and I'll probably get one of each after they have been out for a bit, more games are available (and some mod chips :-P ) - at least they are improvements compared to what we have now.
the article is probably correct to some degree and MS might not make their billion consumer mark (who cares?) but if anyone has enough marketing power/money to do it, it's M$.
do you have shinyfeet?
...I've never really understood why people (who probably have a fairly modern PC) would be interested in a console system such as an XBox or PlayStation. PCs (of whatever flavor) are so much more capable and customizable than consoles, and are much more flexible as well.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
The blurb is plagiarized from the opening of the CNN piece. I'd shrug it off as quoting rather than stealing, but if the submitter had the initiative to insert his own link, he could have made it clear that he was quoting....
That is the beauty in smoke and mirrors.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
...that ALL Xbox 360 gameplay demos were actually run on Apple Power Mac G5s.
Seems like they'd have prototypes at least stable enough to demo at the premier gaming and entertainment show of the year for something that's supposed to ship in less than a couple quarters...
In fact, I can't believe that TIME and all of the huge mainstream coverage that Xbox 360 has gotten hasn't mentioned this. All many of the articles say is that the Xbox 360 is using "a processor from IBM", something likely to not raise most anyone's eyebrows.
But to not mention that Microsoft's multi-billion dollar entry into the next generation of console gaming, heavily watched by many investors and financial sectors, uses the processor family that *Macs* have used since 1994, and most closely related to Apple's current computers, so closely, in fact, that their own Xbox 360 development and demos runs directly on Power Macs? I mean, yeah, I realize that Microsoft or anyone using the best processor architecture for a particular application isn't news; but Microsoft using *Macs* to develop AND demo their next generation console isn't worth a mention to anyone but C|Net?
"The PlayStation 2 was going to offer AOL Instant Messaging and have characters whose facial expressions were incredibly lifelike as they progressed through the game. AIM and PS2 were never again spoken in the same sentence - and the lauded "emotion engine" didn't come close to living up to its promise."
Well, AIM was never really integrated into the PS2... this much is true. However, in EA games anyway, you can sign on with your AIM account instead of creating one. Hardly global instant messaging, but at least you have one ID and password and you can IM others on in the games...
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
You know, it would be nice if you could at least tell where the submitter's comments end and where the first paragraph of the linked article begin. Quotation marks, anyone? "From the article:" perhaps?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Back to reality
Hey, those are difficult graphical effects to do right. I don't think I've ever seen realistic smoke in a console game yet.
Don't beleive the hype!
Seriously, the Sony hype puts the PS3 being close to 20 times more powerful than the best Opteron out there. It's almost like having a small Cray supercomputer in your home. Hype. Nothing else.
I beleive it when I see it!
The Xbox 360 is a new console. That's great. I'll certainly buy one shortly after launch.
But it's JUST a new console.
I saw the MTV Xbox 360 launch tv show and was amazed at how they hyped this thing up to be, gosh darn it, the next best thing since loosing my virginity. I mean, the one shot where they first reveal it to a crowd of screaming geeks, and it's up on a platform above the crowd, lit from above... that shot was nearly identical to the scene of the Jews worshiping the Golden Calf from Moses. I intoned to my husband, "We worship our new god! We worship our new god!" as the crowd screamed... he laughed, I didn't. It just pushed my awareness of hype from beyond "silly yet trying to get publicity" to "serously wierding me out".
I mean, it's just a game console. It will be a good game console. But in five years time, there will be a new game console to replace it. And so on in another five years. Technology marches on and we will continously be updating our consoles. This one is JUST a game console, heck, it won't even give me a hand job. Now if it came with a vibrator attachment... maybe I'd call it a revolution....
But seriously, game companies, lay off the insane hype. It's just a game console.
Tepp
The reality is too, that hype is also fun.
I'm waiting for the games that are coming out, not just the console itself. I wasn't jazzed about the PS2 particularly,until I saw games I liked for it.
the MGS4 trailer has me hot in the pants.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Item! Game consoles might not change your life after all. I know, it comes as a complete shock to us at CNN as well... but after researching this report, it turns out that game console companies sometimes hype the technical potential of consoles, and those expectations are seldom realized.
... at least, if you are as incredibly fucking naive as we are.
In our next report, we will demonstrate that political candidates from both parties often fail to keep their campaign promises. We're pretty sure this one will knock your socks off as well.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
...the rehashing of what we just reiterated, we bring you this article.
-Randy
I know Santa Clause isn't real, but it's still fun to get excited about x-mas.
How can someone be taken by surprise by marketing hype anymore? Be it films, software, hardware, cars or drugs. There is an industry out there who's existence is tied to convincing you to buy someone's crap.
Generally, the more something is hyped, the less likely I am to believe the claims.
But shouldn't someone edit that to say, "The latest Game Over column at CNN Money notes, 'History tells us: Don't believe what you're hearing about the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.There was a lot of hype last week about the next generation of game machines. Microsoft said the Xbox 360 will ultimately reach 1 billion consumers worldwide, while Sony gave a laundry list of features for the PlayStation 3, showing some jaw dropping footage along the way. (Nintendo promised a Revolution, but didn't go much further than that.) I hate to be a wet blanket, but it's time to come back to reality.' Here's a link to the rest of the article." or something to that effect? It seems to me that "anonymous reader" is not giving props where props are due, bordering on plagiarizing. I know, we can all RTFA and find out he stole the paragraph verbatim, but isn't that like releasing a book called "Fahrenheit 451" and then putting a small endnote that says, "Oh, um, this was written by Ray Bradbury."?
anyone else remember before ps2 was launched? the promised 5.1 sound all over the place, like 20+ different levels of pressure for the buttons, amazing graphics, etc.
and now we all know its the weakest of all the systems, 5.1 is a roughy, and there are 2 levels of pressure (hard, and very hard). so im not getting all giddy over the specs being posted. ultimately, it boils down to who has the better games?. and right now, no one (including the developers) knows this. to assume that xbox 360 will have over a billion units out there is just insane. but hey, good luck to them.
It sounds like a big number, but factor in that the average lifespan of a unit is about 2 years under average usage. If you leave it on all the time, drop that by a third. If the lifespan is supposed to be 5 years, you have 3 units per user, some will break more. I'm on my 3rd PS2, and I play MAYBE three hours/week. So if they can sell 333 million of them, and get people to replace them when they break, they can hit a billion.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
This kind of critical reporting is the difference between journalism and PR ("public relations" or the "press releases" that are its lifeblood). But gaming journalism still has a long way to go
FTFA:
"It's not hard to forgive the hardware publishers for a little bit of hyperbole at E3, the annual trade show of the video game industry. It is, after all, their moment in the sun. But now that the crowds have gone home and the booth babes have changed back into street clothes, it's time to recognize that a fair number of the promises made last week will quietly fade away."
The best time to report critical insights, especially those counter to PR claims, is during the "moment in the sun". When everyone's paying attention. Otherwise, reporting is a footnote, and the PR floods the media. Result: most people believe the unopposed PR. Gaming coverage has been improving, as competition heats up in a bigger market of people with competing interests, not just gaming.
To see how badly "reporting" can go wrong, just look at the synthetic world of national and international affairs in the mass media, rarely insightful, and totally distorted in representing reality. With games becoming ever more realistic, and reality ever more bent to our imaginations, it's ironic that reporting on reality becoming more of a fantasy game, while gaming reporting becomes more realistic.
--
make install -not war
Amara's Law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
e ople
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adages_named_after_p
Marketing departments exaggerate! Advertising doesn't always tell the truth! Someone should post this on the Slashdot first page immediately! Spread the word!!
...of all those who haven't seen it yet;
Here is an article where the chief financial officer of nVidia confirms that the supposedly "in-game" footage from the new PS3 is a load of cobblers, cos the RSX chip isn't finished yet and doesn't exist in a workable form.
Sigh... it's the emotion engine/missile guidance systems all over again.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I've had nearly every console out there, and have never busted a single one. Maybe a controller here and there. Someone working for these companies has the real data, and I doubt they plan for more than 1/8th needing to be replaced.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
You might not, but when I see the specs for the PS3, I think desktop workstation more than video game console. I'd buy one, put Linux on it, get a nice keyboard and mouse, a HD monitor (or two) and fly.
A system far more powerful than a bleeding edge desktop with a cheaper price tag. Ya can't go wrong.
I RTFA... what a pile of fluff. Lets summarize.
Look that former two generations of console unveilings vs gameplay post-release. Imply trend will continue.
This guy got paid for that? Where the fuck do I sign up for that job?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
1 Billion? That's a little absurd. Let's put this into perspective. Selling one console per second that would put them at 30 years of selling to reach that goal. I know that they would be selling more than that per second, but it's just something to help put your mind around how large that number is.
Also, what about people the amount of people who don't have electricity, who are too young/old/whatever to play it. Those that wouldn't have the interest, those that wouldn't have the money. I just can't comprehend where someone would get the number of a billion.
fulfil the promise of the last set?
"That's not really the fault of developers. It's not hard to make early tech demos especially impressive, since you don't have to worry about including artificial intelligence or physics or any of the other resource chomping features that have to go into games to make them fun"
The PS3 and Box360 have these resources, no?
For 1080i HD as well?
"But as Sony talks of users using the PS3's optional high-def camera to launch their own broadcasts and Microsoft discusses non-gamers hopping onto Xbox Live to sell shirts or skateboards they've created for the latest "Tony Hawk" game, take it with a grain of salt."
This is not within the capabilitiy of the hardware, or the users?
The original Star Raiders for the Atari personal computers.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
All of the best games (and I use just about any definition of the word you'd care to name) are quitee simply, headed to consoles first.
The PC game market is still OK but what company is going to escape the lure of a far larger market with far fewer support hassles?
You can already hook keyboards and mice to consoles. For a while now PC gaming is going to be console hand-me-downs, and it's not going to take long to happen once the next-gen consoles are out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Look, nobody that went to E3 thinks that the xbox 360 is going to tbe the one console that's so realistic that you can stave off female companionship and copulate online.
What is true, however, is that both the xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are going to be incredible hardware-wise, and will take years to tap their full potential.
The gaming will be sweet...you can argue all you want about dropped features, but this works the other way, too... I'm sure both consoles will come with a new slew of features that haven't been planned/announced yet.
Are the comanies completely honest, no! But right now, it's a game of marketing, and in the end the gamers are the ones who will win
Because they're cheaper?
Yea, they are so advanced, they can even bake pizza for you, in an integrated stone oven! And don't forget about the huge amount of WD40 included! And if the PS3/xbox360 fusion reactor has insufficient fuel, an integrated auxiliary warp drive can move the thing into the Sun's corona, and a mini-fuel scoop can suck in truckloads of hydrogen!
Oh yes, and you can play games with it, too.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Everyone wanting something different in gaming - that's one thing technology has not caught up on. Yet.
quoted from post "Microsoft said the Xbox 360 will ultimately reach 1 billion consumers worldwide"
Actually...quoting MSFT's Peter Moore, "I think we as an industry should have the goal of touching 1 billion consumers in the next generation and that's as much a message to Sony and Nintendo." from biz.gamedaily.com
Instead of Microsoft telling us how many units they are going to sell. (GOING to sell, not MAY sell), why not give some reasons why they think that? No wonder so many people can't stand Microsoft, they seem to arrogant with their projections. To them, they're not projections, they're fact, or whatever.
Now I'm not trying to bash them or anything, but maybe not as many people would loathe them if they just started managing their PR a little better.
Its like some vacuum salesman (a younger guy) started off trying to sell me a $1799 vacuum cleaner by telling me about his opportunity to go to Mexico for a week if he sells enough units. I don't know about the general public, but telling me what YOU will get out of me buying something isn't anywhere as important as telling me what I'm going to get. (On a side note, the first time I said no, he cut the price in half, if that tells you anything about those high priced vacuums.)
And they said zombies weren't real!
While this post fails to mention the hype is derived from the recent E3 conference, observations from E3 can actually be interesting for sensible and responsible gamers and consumers.
"As I watched the bored-looking "babes" strut across the stage at the Tecmo booth, I thought about what the industry has done when fans have occasionally tried to take creative ownership of the games they adore. Recently a bunch of college kids set up a site called NinjaHackers.com, where they shared home-brewed "skins" for the players of a Tecmo volleyball game. The skins were free, and they gave players more options for dressing (or undressing) the game characters. But of course, Tecmo threatened to sue. Even though the skins were hardly a substantive replacement for the game - indeed, you'd have to buy the game to use them - the company wouldn't stand for it." ( http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/22092/ )
However, the original post by CmdrTaco merely seeks to convey rhetoric of "Warning: don't do what you already won't do" and comes off as a transparent anti-hype advertisement.
What you seek (something really new) I feel like might be delivered through really different interfaces - which is why both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have cameras.
To me the most intersting demo of all was the person from EyeToy where he manipulated virtual cups using real ones, filling them with water and pouring them out. It's sort of the next step in better physics models when we can affect the game world using real objects.
I'm not 100% sure the direction will pan out, but at least it's something kind of new (for home console gaming).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Moore's Law makes thirtyfold increases in power over less than 5 years unlikely (though not impossible - that's a misstatement of the law). I wouldn't be surprised if, like the Revolution, the other two consoles are about 2-3x more powerful than their predecessors, or perhaps slightly more, as they were released before the GameCube was.
enough of the information-less, ad-revenue seeking , spectacularly headlined articles about the XBox please. Lets just wait until there is some real news, shall we?
EVERYONE over-hypes their product during a show like that. I expected some world-shocking revelation, but this is largely a prediction that things aren't going to be as claimed during the show based on how things came along with previous models. Whoop-tee-fucking-do.
Now, if Microsoft had demoed the XBox as if it was all ready to be shipped, but actually ran the software on, say, two G5's under the table, now _that_ would be smoke and mirrors. But the article doesn't mention that, so that must not have happened.
Every Apple/Mac site that I've run across.
Personally, this is the part of the "next generation" console battle I'm curious about. A big deal was made about how badly Doom 3 performed when it was ported to OS X, of which there are two main reasons used to explain the issue:
Video card drives
Porting from the Intel to the PPC architecture
Basically, because the system was optimized for the x86 processor line, several "hacks" had to be used to get it comperable to the PPC. That's not saying "Intel good, G5 bad", just "different". Like translating between Japanese and English but still missing the localizations and other important issues, so it's not quite exactly the same - but "close enough".
Microsoft has done rather well using PC development ability and bringing them into the console side. Look at how many companies who had hardly done anything on a console were coming out with "PC/Xbox" versions of the games. Same processor, same API - just the controllers were different (and of course, on the Xbox, not nearly the OS load and a single resolution to support).
Now, things are different. On all three systems, it uses an IBM Power variant - not quite a G5, as each have been optimized in different ways, but all share some core technologies. So for a PC developer the API is the same, but now the processor is completely different. Close enough to the Mac line that there may be difficulties making a PC/Xbox 360 game - or at least the same difficulty level as going Xbox 360 -> PC as there would be going Xbox 360 -> OS X - easier in some ways, since the development boxen are modified G5 systems.
It will be curious to see if this has any impact at all upon Mac based gaming. My gut says "no, not really", but with a majority of game developers going to PPC based architectures, it does make you wonder a bit.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It's either Chris Morris, or an anonymous plagiarizer.
This is nothing more than the all too familiar battle of marketing vs. reality. I am sure that there are alot of engineers and coders at both Sony and Microsoft that are jsut shaking thier heads at what they saw at E3, but it is so typical. When a coder makes a promise the maxium is "always under promise and over deliver", for marketers I think an appropriate one is "Over promise get a lot of people to buy it, thne blame the Nerds when it doesn't meet our promos."
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
Parent is right, I'm on my third PS2 as well. Actually, I wonder what Sony and Microsoft set as their desired Mean Time Between Failure?
It would be interesting to find out if the console producers pick low MTBFs with the expectation that consumers will ultimately buy replacement consoles. While this might seem initially to be counter-intuitive since the first revision of the hardware is sold at a loss, later revisions are often sold at considerable profit.
Let see, a woman, married, talking about an Xbox on Slashdot, and mentioning a vibrator option...
Nah, never happened....
Anybody else as curious/excited as I am to find out what Nintendo's big secret is? Maybe I'm just being an overly-optimistic loyalist, but I think they have more up their sleeve than the press is giving them credit for. The Revolution is practically ignored in every article I've read, it's always "PS3 vs. Xbox 360, and oh yea, Nintendo has one too but we don't know anything about it yet so they don't count."
I've never really understood why people (who probably have a fairly modern PC) would be interested in a console system such as an XBox or PlayStation.
I used to think that, until my brother gave me his old PS2. I'm not a hardcore gamer, so I'm not too bothered about customisation and the like. I still use my PC for some games (FPS mostly), but it's just so much easier to come home from the pub with a bunch of mates, hit a switch and play.
There is nothing more practical than a good abstract theory.
Looking at each 'nextgen' console, I get the feeling that I'm not really witnessing a leap in technology on the scale of SNES -> Playstation. I'm probably going to skip this coming generation just as I did the last/current (PS2,GC,Xbox), and I know a LOT of people who are thinking on the same lines. It boils down to the simple, oft-repeated fact that the gaming industry is 90% focused on graphics/sound, 9% on the multi-player aspect, 1% gameplay.
I hate these older first-gen wireless keyboards. They seem to only be able to pick up so many keystrokes per second.. grrr..
I know it's offtopic, still have to apologize. Usually I'm a little bit better at observing what I type.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As he says in the article... only a few games have ever been offered in 1080i, "the current standard for HDTV"
True, only a few games offer 1080i or 720p... But there are multiple standards for HDTV (Not just 1080i), and the games have all look damn good in widescreen HDTV on the XBox. Halo 2 in 480p (which no standard analog telivision offers) looks quite nice.
I'm no expert HDTV, gaming, or hardware... but clearly neither is this guy... Though the overall point he makes is valid, he shouldn't blame it all on Microsoft... a good share of the "blame" rests with developers and the public... It's economics man.
Over-promise, under-deliver, but if you're the first to market, you'll probably make sacks of cash anyway...
Have the console take you to a virtual reality city...everyone who buys a PS3 is automatically given an id...the city serves as a gateway to games, including online only but also downloads and extras etc, but it is also a metagame in and of itself. Sony could award free games online play etc through the portal. Could also include movie and music download service...just some ideas...
Microsoft said the Xbox 360 will ultimately reach 1 billion consumers worldwide. They said that the game market could reach 1 billion consumers.
I was saying it in a next-gen consoles thread yesterday and I'm glad I'm not the only one who is feeling this way.
These new consoles just don't have "it". They're incredibly powerful, but what will be done with that power? Exactly the same thing that was done with less power, last generation, only this time it'll be prettier and shinier.
The market has stagnated. There aren't many new game CONCEPTS, that are appealing, that seem to require the horsepower of the new concoles. Think about it:
Katamari Damacy: new concept, but the only difference between it on PS2 and it's (potential) sequel on a next gen console would be graphics. That game is just fine as is on a PS2.
WarioWare: tons of old fashioned idiot-box games with a new package and "theme", but you couldn't make it any better with more horsepower. The appeal has nothing to do with the graphics or the sounds (obviously).
Those are just two examples of relatively new game concepts that really can't be improved by throwing horsepower at them. Heck, we're at a point where even high-speed First Person Shooters can't deliver a noticeably different experience just by throwing horsepower at them; better looking yes, but inherently different? Hardly.
This round, the console guys had better have something big up their sleeves. I'm not holding my breath for any of them. (even though I feel that Nintendo has been saying all the right things in the press, we'll see if they can actually deliver or if it's just more hype)
-- All views expressed in this post are mine and do not
-- reflect those of my employer or their clients
If they are so advanced where is my virtual reality game then? give me that helmet ...
No he/she didn't...that's cut-and-pasted from the article. Credit where it's due.
Advice: on VPS providers
The ONLY game I've ever run across for the PS2 with real multi-channel digital surround is "SSX Tricky", which you could play in DTS. Why is that? How come so many games have Dolby Pro Logic II, but not Dolby 5.1 or 7.1 or DTS or whatever?
On the flip side of the capability coin, the pressure sensitive buttons are capable of reporting 256 levels of pressure (8 bits), and are actually analog pressure buttons. They work like this:
"Each button has a tiny curved disk attached to its bottom. This disk is very conductive. When the button is depressed, the disk is pushed against a thin conductive strip mounted on the controller's circuit board. If the button is pressed lightly, the bottom part of the curved disk is all that touches the strip, increasing the level of conductivity slightly. As the button is pressed harder, more of the disk comes into contact with the strip, gradually increasing the level of conductivity. This varying degree of conductivity makes the buttons pressure-sensitive!"
With the first link, the chain is forged.
After all, these days just coming up with ideas for what you're going to do with all the excessive horsepower that anyone will (a) care about and (b) believe takes real talent.
Of course, claiming that vN+1 will do what you promised vN would do also works pretty well.
did you lose your money? or did you LOOSEn your pants?
This is the single most frustrating typo I've seen propagated over the internet during the last 15 years.
Don't learn english from high-school/college students that type on the web. They DO NOT have a firm grasp of proper grammar.
It seems like Microsoft is feeling a bit chafed about the Longhorn release date and so they're sort of overcompensating in the console market to get something, anything out before Sony. So, I wouldn't expect much from this thing beyond what's already in the X-Box and there's a lot there already so I'm not saying it's a piece of shit. It might not be a lot more than what's already in place.
The interesting one is the PS3 both in terms of the Cell and the BluRay. Now that's some real new toys. Obviously BluRay sounds rad especially since it's meant to be writeable from day one. That's a welcome change in the optical market. But what about the Cell?
Just in the last day or so there was a blurb on the Cell and Open Source over at the EETimes. Of course the announcement about opening the specs is great and welcome and exciting. But at the same time there were some things that didn't sound too hot. Or more accurately, sounded a bit too hot and power hungry.
I was excited about that new AMD Geode running at 500Mhz at one freakin watt. Now that is the kind of thing that I see as exciting. Sure, one of them might be nothing, but at one watt you could have eighty of those things running instead of a single Cell running at 3.2Ghz.
And although they said the Cell could be clocked beyond 3.2Ghz, the EETimes seemed to be suggesting that it couldn't be configured to run that fast and still be air coooled. Whoa, that doesn't sound so good.
I'd say these kinds of issues that we're seeing in the PC market about power consumption at these ultra high clock speeds are going to be the same for games. These seem to be limits to CMOS manufacturing, not some vendo specific limitations.
If that's the case, then the CNNMoney article is probably quite correct that there's going to be some disappointment in the cards. A nice little warm-up for the Longhorn debut.
You would think that by this time, I would learn to not click on any address ending in
That does not, however, negate the fact that you, sir, are a son of a bitch.
++Om
In defense of the one-billion comment, J Allard was saying the game industry in general would reach one-billion, not just the Xbox 360.
As for crack smoking, here's a quote from Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment regarding the power of the Playstation 3:
via Gamespot
More crack smoking from MS, claiming the Xbox 360 has 6x the bandwidth of the PS3 (carefully skewing numbers to favor the 360).
The only sound coverage of the new consoles so far has been this piece at Ars and hopefully, the piece Anand has been working on.
It just ain't fun anymore.
My dad has the same problem, except he puts the spurious "e" before the "s", as in "estatement" or "estore". Maybe it's his Puerto Rican lineage, or maybe he works as a secret Internet trademark lawyer...
Translation: It's Claus--and no, we shouldn't be excited about overhyped systems. If they deliver their promises, then we should be (if my Eminem memory serves me right) "bouncing off the walls" in joy.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
That's mighty ambitious when 1.6 billion people, a quarter of the earth's population don't even have electricity. We barely have more than a billion TV sets in the world. Either they're counting on a population explosion or they're using funny math, like counting anybody with a friend or FOAF who owns an Xbox360.
All the companies have done this before, but the most notable is that Sony is pulling the "look what we can do in real time!" stunt again. Remember back when they did the FF8 dance scene supposedly rendered in real time on the PS2? I think only God Of War and FF10 come close to that level of graphics. Anyone know of anything else that was that pretty for the PS2?
Oh, yeah, -1, troll.
Via Joystiq http://www.joystiq.com/ (an excellent gaming site..). MS has released "game clips". Of course not having the actual console hasn't stopped them.
see the commentary, look at the clips!
http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000767044604/
Kutaragi of Sony just announced that the PS3 isn't a game console, it's an entertainment system. From the beginning, Sony's been trying to turn the Playstation into something it's not, an all in one household entertainment system. This time around, Microsoft is making no qualms about the fact that they've designed the X-Box to be more than just a gameconsole as well.
So, we have the PS3 which isn't a game machine but just happens to play games.
The X-Box 360, which is touted as a media center that plays games.
-and-
The Revolution, the console that Nintendo company big wigs say is designed to play games, games, and more games. In fact, 5 generations of games all under one roof, most of which will be instantly accessible over the internet at little or, in some cases, no cost.
I don't know, I've got media center and powerful computer covered. I have a 7 disc DVD changer, so no console is going to replace that. I have a ReplayTV. I also have a stereo that I stream audio from my computer and the internet to, so I can't see myself using any of the music functions on any of these consoles. What I want, to complement all of this, is a game console. Do Sony and MS actually expect me to toss out my entire entertainment system to replace it with their all in one box? Heck no...I don't want to pay extra cash for things I already have.
Looks like I'm going to be buying the Revolution this time around, the only console without an inflated price and an identity crisis.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...to plagerize directly from the CNN writer in one's submission. Sure cuts down on the writing.
I can understand why it was anonymous.
On the other hand, the cynic in me says that the CNN writer himself submitted the article anonymously to drive traffic to cnn.com...
-LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
You mean none of the next gen consoles will let me make a woman with magic powers out of a barbie and some magazine pictures?
That's it! I'm selling all my Sony and Nintendo stock.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
This guy says that it was smoke and mirrors because some possibilities were under-served on the current generation?
It was production-grade hardware, running demos. "Smoke and mirrors" is faking it. Sure some suggestions might be made about applications, but there's nothing keeping those things from happening on the hardware.
This guy is indeed a wet blanket, a wet blanket of abject stupidity.
...and in fact, I *still* play Mario Kart (and a few others) on my SNES from time to time. And everyone that comes by the house that I can convince to play it with me agrees, it has a lot of gameplay value and stays fun for hours.
-Valiss
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hype is why the same exact thing everyone lusted over for weeks before Christmas is found sitting in the bargain bin the week after.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
and when it will be possible to play it effectively without a keyboard+mouse combo.
This is the first MMPORG I've ever played in my life and it's insanely fun, and there's no way I could ever play anything like this on a console.
-- the cake is a lie
If it was rendered with the in-game engine it probably rendered at 5 fps. The output was recorded and then payed back in realtime.
Think back to trying to play glquake with the software opengl renderer.
Pacman probably ran in that.
Im not shelling out for a games console, or funding slave gamers to work at ea making less than they could do if they had jobs at McDonalds.
Send Peter Clifford Francis Macrae comdoms to 23 Bedford St, St.Neots, PE19 1AX, England
>> Funny, I've never understood why people will pay $x000 for a tricked-out gaming PC when they can get the same performance from a $x00 console.
>>
Well personally, I'd never buy a console. One, games are tertiary to me, and were, even when I was a kid. And while I do enjoy the occasional FPS (Halflife and its decendants, especially), my favorite genres of games are 4X and wargames, followed by adventure games (which have lamentably disappeared over the past 10 years.) Civilzation I,II, & III, Master of Orion I&II, Master of Magic, etc, and all the classic Sierra adventure games, for some examples.
I have a high-end PC that I use for everything from programming to 3d modeling which, consequently, I can use as a gaming system. And while many of the titles that I mentioned are now a bit long in the tooth, some aren't. Civ III might not require the latest video card, but man can it suck up CPU time. Try a gigantic map with max opponents...
The PC just fits my user-case better than a console.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
PS3 and XBOX gave us something we always wanted: VIRTUAL FEATURES! :D
1 billion consumers? Isn't that more than 1 per every household on the planet?
--Jim (me)
There go the insecure xbox fanboys, they must really feel threatened.
he was commenting on the supposed speed of the ps3, not the cartoon. you're fucking slow not to notice that the cartoon does not mention teraflops at all. the post you replied to was commenting on another unrealistic claim unrelated to the comic strip.
is a cartoon strip (i.e. humorous, funny) that panders to the techtv group any different than a website that panders to IT whiners and open-source nazis? i'm not trying to troll, i'm trying to prove a point here.
oh, and if you've ever seen a picture of the two guys who are PA you will notice that they look nothing like the cartoon characters. tycho is in fact bald and not skinny. oh yeah, his name isn't tycho either. you do understand the difference between actors and the characters they portray?
Is this footage downloadable anywhere? I've been following the stories (too poor to buy any next-gen systems, so admittedly only half-assedly), but not seen any links to it :/
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
this guys signature is a picture of a "man" with no penis
mod parent troll please
To confirm you're not a script, please piss in my ear.
Home come no one is talking about the Amiga yet?
the ones actually being developed.
All the rest is immaterial.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Drat, so the Flashback 2 won't have the long-awaited 16-bit addressing enhancement? I guess we'll just be stuck with 12 bits for another 30 years.
HL2 and Doom3 are the same as Wolf3D
If you seriously believe that, you need to step away from the keyboard and go outside. Reality must look like Wolf3D to you by now.
Most titles offering advanced graphics stick with 480p resolution, which is lower than high definition. And PCs had nVidia's GeForce 3 (which featured a graphics chip comparable to that found in the Xbox) months before the console launched.
The resolution that a developer creates their game at is based on development cycle, financing, and genre. If it's just not financially prudent to make a game in HD, because most gamers don't have an HDTV - no studio is going to waste cycles on. That is no the console developers fault. If the console makers wanted to enforce some ridiculously high graphics standard to pass their approval process, 3rd party game developers will jump ship. As far as the graphics processor goes - designing a NON-Plug and Play piece of hardware like a game console requires you to make some decisions and stick with them. If you choose a graphics chipset, you have to stick with it - or risk missing release date due to redesigns. A PC card maker only has to make sure that it fits and has ample software that utilizes it. PC makers didn't ramp up the graphics of PC's, third party hardware developers did.
Bill Gates, meanwhile, spoke of "incredible, persistent, online worlds" that would be created because of what the Xbox hard drive could do. Only one - "True Fantasy Live Online" - was started, and it never materialized.
Once again, 3rd party developers and the market. The console market didn't have enough demand for these persistent worlds to make it financially viable. EQ for the PS2 lost money, and it was a huge success on the PC. Why is this viewed as hype by the console makers? The market couldn't support the projects, so the projects didn't get done.
Let's not forget online, either. Sony, back before the PS2's launch, said gamers would be able to download titles from existing PlayStation and PS2 libraries via broadband. Harrison (sounding a lot like Microsoft's J. Allard did earlier this year) encouraged developers to think of episodic games, which could be downloaded chapter by chapter.Phil Harrison, an executive vice president at Sony, talked highly of software that would incorporate visual imaging, saying it would enable users to import photographs from a digital camera, then "animate these in 3D, add sounds, and email them to their family or friends, just like a greeting card."
Can you say picture phone? This made doing this with a console obsolete.
Gates, meanwhile, told gamers they would be able to download trial versions of games to their Xbox's hard drive to help them decide whether to buy a retail copy. The same promise is being made with Xbox 360.
Jeez, I feel like a broken record! SOCOM released levels. Time Splitters 3 allows you to make maps and share them. This only began happening recently because the PS2's hard drive penetration became large enough to justify doing it.
Xbox on the other hand already had a hard drive, so why didn' they all do it? Well cause this was a first release system from Microsoft, and no one in their right mind would plan to develop such an aspiring game for an untested system. Now that Xbox has proven it's here to stay, you will see much more of it.
If your going to criticise an Industry, know what your talking about. Jackass.
I don't even own a console anymore but I bought into the PS3 hype briefly. I watched that killzone video and thought "wow maybe they really are going to surpass the PC for once". Then like the author I remembered that they are just tech demos or maybe better described as "scene renditions" and you shouldn't expect anything like that the day the console arrives.
I know they need to wow users to get them excited but I almost wish they weren't even allowed to do "demos" until the hardware was actually done and you could see actual gameplay. Remembering the tech demos from right before the PS2 came out and then comparing it to how shitty GTA SA looks on a PS2 just makes me mad. Face it they lie. The problem is people like to be lied to.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
oh, and if you've ever seen a picture of the two guys who are PA you will notice that they look nothing like the cartoon characters.
You mean like this and this?
Despite what you hear from Gamespot and the like, the Killzone 2 trailer was NOT of actual gameplay and was created in the 3 months before E3. This is supposed to be "an accurate representation of what [we] want it to be". This goes to show that publishers will go to any lengths to make their game (and also their console, the makers of Killzone 2 are funded by Sony). If you watch G4TV at all, there is an interview with a top sony guy with Morgan Webb and he repeatably dodged the prerendered question until he finally admitted that it was a video(aka prerendered).
I'll tell you why I got involved with consoles: Upgrade hell. I have a boatload of games on perfectly good media that I can't play anymore because my computer no longer supports whatever odd hardware requirements that game had. Every upgrade I've done has killed some of my games. Soundcards, video cards, motherboards, processors, RAM (yes, Virginia, having more than the recomended amount of RAM has killed some of my games), Windows service packs, etc....
And I'm sick to death of it.
My copy of Tomb Raider for the PC doesn't run on anything I own. My copy for my Playstation still runs just fine. The same can be said for every other Playstation, Dreamcast, and XBox game I own. As long as the console itself works and the media isn't damaged the games keep working.
Add to that the fact that I know that the game will work out of the box. I don't have to worry about downloading a driver update that kills other games, nor that my video card is one generation too old or some other BS.
I remember the days of farting around with memory configs and creating boot floppies to get various games running under DOS and I don't miss those days at all.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The point wasn't about the CPU, but the GPU.
I loathe the console. Maybe I'm ignorant, but when I played the PS/2 console at my friend's place, I almost instantly upon first use and then continually during subsequent sessions was frustrated with the limited number of buttons.
s .asp?NewsNum=203
I watch him play, and he purportedly is an avid player, having Nintendo AND hexx boxx, with speakers and dozends of titles for almost each of the 3 platforms.
Now, when I watched him play, and he had to pick up some tool or change some feature, he had to press some combination that seemed to pause the game, stop action, and interrupt the smooth-play I was accustomed to with HL/CS/SOF.
Granted, it's been quite a year or more that I've played on my PC for a few minutes, and been since early 2001 that I played for hours-long sessions, but I find the keyboard (I'm a speed-typist most of my time behind the keyboard, or when I'm not surfing/reading or making database forms...) much more efficient for my own use. I can set up key combinations, and once I successfully or accurately recall the combo/keystroke I need, my game play improves dramatically and to a level I find thrilling and ecstatic.
I don't like pistols except at stand-up stations in arcades. I don't like consoles, unless I end up moving torpedoes or overhead dollies with a tethered remote control. Consoles, for now, just frustrate the hell out of me. I even tested out a floor demo in Ginza in Tokyo in December (or, maybe it was January... memory fades...) and after a few minutes, I was utterly stressed out. I couldn't WAIT to put the damn controller down and return the demo disk to the girl manning the check-in station. I wondered the hell why they didn't seem to offer the same title on a PC platform for those stubbornly resisting the console.
The only way I might accept a console is if it is integrated into a sort of (updated, faster, sturdy, and smarter) moving floor:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-New
(actually, what may be better is a VERY large arc-or ball-like integrated surface having bearings, wheels, gears, or pinions/etc inside so that a computer can track the participants and move individul "skins"/"floors" to bring the players closer or farther... a holoprojector could impose visual/"physical" obstacles and visual/"physical" aids so the players can "run"; climbing and scaling and rappelling would be hard to simulate, tho, except with time and other "delays" to simulate negotiating objects and obstacles while an "enemy" might pursue, evade or camouflage him/herself from another player...)
, a 3-D goggle set, and some sort of life-like rifle that has optically/IR-mated grenades, compasses and other equipment that requires me to simulate whipping out field equipment as I play or sim the software actions.
But, the keyboard does fall short in one area for me:
I love helicopter sims, particularly Longbow Apache from Janes, one that is out of circulation. If only someone makes a cheap, commercial-quality collective and stick assembly with foot pedals AND programs the sim to enable single and dual engine startup, failure, fire, stall, shutdown restart, and so on, as well as NOE flight, landing, left/right brakes, and so on... fuel management...
SONY! You better jump on this because I am NOT typing this here for mshaft's benefit!! De-smoke and overhaul the compartment smoke and deliver a product! Restore all casualties; restow all gear!
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
So, will Serenity jab Fox in the side for more episodes? My wife and I just got done renting the DVD's, and were shattered when we realized it's abrupt end.
There's a 3 issue comic from Dark Horse coming this summer and a movie by Universal released sept.30, though some lucky browncoats got to see it already in preview screenings.
The future will be decided when the movie is out.
You can't take the sky from me...
No, the specific quote from the article is "Burkett has commented that the visuals had been created on current nVidia hardware of roughly the same power as the RSX." That is, they don't have the RSX done, but they have hardware that's more or less equivalent to the specification in some form (maybe not on a single chip or card).
I hope so, because after some investigation, it appears Sony delivered on their promises.
For instance, one current myth is the FF8 tech demo was faked. Anyone who has played a modern PS2 game will not be impressed by those screenshots: the FFX engine was more impressive years ago (more colors, more textures, more geometry).
Another myth is Sony claiming that the PS2 can produce Toy Story level graphics. The original claim was the ability to render Toy Story in realtime, without shaders/T&L, and at a lower resolution. This is mostly a measure of the raw polycount the PS2 can push, not doing realtime Renderman in hardware. If you don't believe this, I suggest you go find a quote that claims anything more and is straight from the horse's mouth (a Sony press release or Sony spokesman). You won't. Everyone claiming anything else are either news media misunderstanding, or people in forums misquoting.
The PS2 has delivered quite a bit. Compare what it's been capable of over the past few years to what was available at the time (PS1, N64), and it was a pretty big leap. It's not hard to imagine people seeing original demos and overglamourizing, remembering things being a bit more than they were. We'll probably look at the PS3 demos someday and realize they're not all that great, when compared to the PS4 and other next-next-gen consoles. That's technological advance for you.
Give someone something unbelievable, and the first thing they'll do is not believe it. ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
This console war will be excellent. I don't think either Sony or Microsoft were quite expecting the amounts of bullshit the other would be spewing out. It will be fun to watch them try to undercut eachother's prices, spending billions on marketing, losing hundreds of $s per console sold. Good times.
And that did have tons of CPU power, excellent graphics, fabulous sound, modem, browser, Crazy Taxi, ChuChu Rocket AND House of the Dead 2.
These are sad and dreadful times indeed...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
But the specs are impressive this time. I don't care what anyone says, a triple core 3.2Ghz PPC CPU is quite the processor. And don't tell me people were that impressed with the original Xbox hey it was a Celery 700.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Because your argument is tired.
...nevermind you said you're enthralled with Ms. Pacman, which is a slightly different version of Pacman, and Bejeweled, which is yet another puzzle game in the vein of all that came before it.
Let's never make another fucking game ever again because someone made something similar already!
Go sit in the corner with your Atari.
Look, you don't play the story, dialog, or physics. No matter how realisticly stuff falls, it's still the same old boring activity. Run around, shoot stuff, switch a button, shoot some more stuff. I mean, a great story is nice, but a generic game is still a generic game, no matter how much you care about the human-shaped masses of polygons. Had I never played Quake(and if not for the shitty and frustrating Steam dis-service), I probably would have enjoyed HL2. The only thing mentioned in your post that actually affects the game would me the level design, in which HL2 delivers nothing special.
wyzkrrn
Apparently not. I hope I won't get modded down for whining, but I submitted exactly that story to /. on Friday May 20, @03:47PM :-/
Honestly why they haven't publicised it more is beyond me, because anyone who loves those pop-caps games and solitaire games you can get online at msn.com would love XBOX Arcade. It should have been included with every XBOX Live CD... I personally love those puzzle games, and many of the older people I know will play those without batting an eye.
Later NES games, including SMB3 included extra chips to improve the NES's performance. games on CD, obviously, can't do this.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Here are pictures of the G5s in action at E3.
but "zombies" don't scream "grown up" to most people over the age of 12.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Microsoft actually stated "*Our Industry* will reach a billion people". This doesn't seem outlandish considering that interactive entertainment now includes cell phones and lots of other devices.
Unfortunately lots of journalists felt it was more of a headline to infer that Microsoft themselves felt they could reach a billion people.
Only thing is, broadband acceptance in the US is not exactly ubiquitous. Back when xbox1 and ps2 launched, how many people actually had broadband? Also, how big are those latest and greatest PC game demos? Almost as big as the full game itself!
Back then there wasn't much of a market. Now, the demos are frickin' HUGE! Maybe downloading games and demos is doable, but it's still going to take mucho bandwidth to distro a demo for Halo3 or God of War 2. They should have builtin Bittorrent support into their console. Now that would be ironic justice!
I've never really understood why people (who probably have a fairly modern PC) would be interested in a console system such as an XBox or PlayStation. PCs (of whatever flavor) are so much more capable and customizable than consoles, and are much more flexible as well.
I spend most of every day sitting in front of a computer. When I get home, the last thing I want to do is sit at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I want to kick back and lounge with a controller. Console games are designed to be playable with a handheld controller, and consoles are designed to interfaces conveniently with home electronics and not to take up a lot of space in my component cabinet.
the dreamcast...even if you don't think the dreamcast was better (alot do, including me), then you can't say what the ps2 accomplished was very remarkable, because the dreamcast was out long before and it was at the very worst close to the same quality.
"The PS2 has delivered quite a bit. Compare what it's been capable of over the past few years to what was available at the time (PS1, N64)"
PSYCHE! anyhoo - having attended E3, several workshops AND having a 360 dev kit sitting in the next room, it is known that the final hardware specs were not yet set in stone (same goes for PS3 and the common knowledge among the dev community that the GPU is NOT complete) that being said, OF COURSE THE FUCKING SUITS AND MARKETING DEPARTMENT ARE GOING TO BLOW AS MUCH SMOKE UP THE MEDIA'S ASS AS POSSIBLE... why is this even news? can someone please answer that one for me?
Nobody is using Intel processors unless they are locked into it by legacy software. All 3 new gaming consoles are using PowerPCs. Microsoft clearly thought the advantage of the PowerPC justified the extra trouble of adapting the XBox OS to a different processor, not to mention the difficulty in implementing compatibility with XBox 1.
Which is one reason why I find the suggestion that Apple will be switching to Intel CPU's laughable.
On the other hand, this could be a prelude to Microsoft switching to PowerPC. Imagine a PowerPC based PC, running PowerPC native Windows, PowerPC native MS Office, and all old Windows applications using the Virtual PC Intel emulator (which Microsoft happens to own).
Come on, don't we all know by now that prerelease console demos at E3 are just "artists conceptions" of what they hope the games will look like?
Well, the simulator proved it could anyway, as Bitboys Oy hadn't quite finished the hardware yet.
'Cept of course it was never finished - and it couldn't have anyway.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The last real PC exclusives are RTS and MMORPGs
And games published by independents, who can't license the secret bootloader used by consoles.
Strange that you should say that. My modded Xbox running XBMC full of ripped movies on a 200 GB drive (and networked to my PCs) actually replaces my DVD player rather well, and has way more than 7 movies on hand. Music too. More convenient than a PC, and my precious originals are safe from my kids. Hey, it even plays games too!
It's great you're buying a Revolution & all, best way to play Nintendo games, but some people like to buy hardware that is useful for more than just one thing, not to replace but to supplement. Seems like better value to me, but YMMV of course.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Sure [emulator] you [emulator] can [emulator] [play classic console-only games].
OK, where can I buy a copier to copy my FF1, FF4, and FF6 Game Paks into a ROM file suitable for use with an emulator? GBA copiers are easy to come by, but where are the NES and Super NES copiers?
My modded Xbox running XBMC
Is it lawful to make and possess a copy of a program linked against an unauthorized copy of XDK?
Right, and the Sinclair ZX80 could use its 1 KB of RAM to control a nuclear power station.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
When some friends come by, we play a game of Winter Games on X-Box. When I get a new DVD, I watch it on the X-Box - no matter what region the friggin disk is. When I dload something off the net in whatever format that has been used in the last 10 years, it's more often than not viewable on the X-Box.
X-Box games are a bonus - I bought X-Box to be the home entertainment center - and in that role, it rewlzors.
Unless X-Box 360 can be modded and used in this way it has absolutely no value to me. Unless PS3 can be modded and used in this way it's useless too.
PS. the script detection crap sucks.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Well, maybe compared to the days when the CPU was also rendering the gfx, but modern games are becoming more dependant on the CPU, not less - better AI, more realistic physics, more complex animation techniques etc. Hence why the next-gen consoles have not just faster CPUs, but multiple cores - looks like they'll hold their own against PCs for a while.
2. Screen resolution/Graphics card
That's a large part of what's been driving the gfx market - improved display resolution. And now that we're finally abandoning crappy 480i TVs, consoles can make a jump too.
Heck in some cases these new consoles will actually beat computers for the first time in history. 1900X1000 is definately cool for a video resolution!
I have a laptop and 3 monitors that are comfortably capable of at least 1920 x 1200, and I can (& occasionally do) play games at that resolution. Do you have a 1080p-capable TV? Can you afford one? (they cost more than a full-on PC) Can you even *buy* one? I can't, not yet.
Don't expect many console games to actually support 1080 (i or p), however. The simpler ones might, but most will be tuned to run best at the more common (and easier) resolution of 720p.
3. Controllers
Agree, different controllers for different games. However, you can use a mouse/keyboard on current & future consoles, you can use some console controllers on PCs, and this will get a lot more common (according to MS).
4. Configuration. :-) I modded my Xbox because it was cool to tweak it to do more than it could.
True, but some people miss that
5. Living space.
Uh uh. While your point is valid, you could have a second console & 20" TV for a lot less than a PC - and many games are so much better on a large-screen TV (or projector) and full-size 6-channel surround system! My entertainment system is better at entertainment than my PC, so I prefer to use it for games where I can.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Gates, meanwhile, told gamers they would be able to download trial versions of games to their Xbox's hard drive to help them decide whether to buy a retail copy. The same promise is being made with Xbox 360."
This is like WinFS - which he promised ten years ago.
Guys, guys, Bill Gates is a LYING SACK OF SHIT! Period.
NOTHING that comes out of the mouth of ANYONE at Microsoft is to be taken seriously. You do NOT work at Microsoft (above peon level, that is) unless you are a liar and buy into that as a business method.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If you wait a few years, you can run these games again on emulated hardware. Almost all of the arcade machines from the 70's, 80's, and most of the 90's can be run through MAME, and similar software exists for Commodore-64, TI99-4/A, Apple ][, NES, SNES, Sega, etc. For your particular quandry, almost all MS-DOS games run on DosBox. It looks as though the next version will run Win 3.x apps as well.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
is there going to be a FF7 remake?
http://tifa.nu/tifa talks about the movie remake
"...a buff woman named Raven and her hulking robot friend showing off their martial arts form."
Surely he meant say "marital arts"?
a.c.
sig? Oh, that sig...
"What has happened is that game programmers (and game companies in general) have realized that about 90% of the code they write takes up roughly 10% of the total CPU/GPU time. In this 90%, they can be fairly wasteful with their choice of language and how tightly they bound their algorithms. (There are even game companies that write the bulk of this logic in LISP.)"
While that is technically true, I often see it become false anyway. Why? Because you can be _incredibly_ wasteful with that 90% of the code if you start with the frame of mind that it doesn't matter anyway. What _should_ have only been 10% of the CPU time can easily balloon into taking more time than that critical part.
E.g., my canonical example is a crap framework we had to use at work. Think: exercise in having every "enterprise" buzzword in the same framework. Everything went through XML, SOAP, XSLT, EJB, etc, even though it was essentially internal calls inside the same program.
But it shouldn't matter, because it's that unimportant part of the program that only takes 10% of the CPU, right? Doesn't matter if we use a few more CPU cycles for those buzzwords, right? Can be as wasteful as we want there, right?
I've actually benchmarked it: it took over a second to call an _empty_ function through that framework. On a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4. It wasn't a couple of extra CPU cycles, it was almost 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles of pure overhead.
So basically I'd say that there's a (not so) fine line between "you don't need to spend time optimizing that (but you still write clean, efficient code)", which is probably what you had in mind, and "you can be wasteful". Once you're in the frame of mind that you can be wasteful, abhominations like the above happen.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In my dorm cluster, we have an NES, two N64s, a GameCube, Dreamcast, and Playstation 2. The two that are played the most are probably the GameCube and NES. The game that is most commonly played on the NES is Super Mario/Duck Hunt. Just an interesting anecdote.
Super Mario ...
Zelda
Metroid
That's it. They keep on putting them out on new consoles without bringing anything new (appart from the move from 2D to 3D.)
I have a GBA and my house mate has a GameCube. And he is bitching about there being no game on the cube
While he buys Resident Evil 4, I get Prince Of Persia 2, GTA3 SA and GT4.
I agree that Nintendo puts out some amazing games but so is Sony. I still remember fondly when I first started playing Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider and Gran Turismo!
And I think the next generation will see Sony put MS and the big N to shame...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
the console makers spend a lot of cash and bribe the developers to make all thier best games on thier new console and the developers save thier best games for the console debut because this is the most important time. Most people buy just one console, which means if developers don't attract the people to the console they won't have people in your audience. Plus, I see all that "revolutionary" being pulled at the beginning, then a plethra of copies (remember mario and the side-scrollers)
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
True there has been alot hype around the Xbox 360 and the PS3, but I wouldnt buy a console (or anything for that matter) from Microsoft or Sony!
And Nintendo havent made so much noise, havent heard anything about them.
Good to see I'm not the only one who wishes more PC games supported a good gamepad. The gamepad is certainly no good for FPS or RTS (at least until someone makes one like the idea I posted in another thread: a gamepad with a trackball instead of the right thumbstick.) But for a lot of genres I feel it's the far more comfortable interface.
Still, I'd heartily recommend that you get a _good_ gamepad then. Or even better, one of those addapters that let you use your PS2 controller with a PC. (I've bought about two dozen PC gamepads before settling on one of those. I can honestly say that most PC gamepads royally suck, when compared to any major console controller.)
You'd be surprised how many PC games do work with a controller, or can be coaxed into working well enough.
E.g., I've even played a MMO (City of Heroes, to be precise) on a gamepad. It worked. As long as you can settle for something like 4 attacks you want to use (and maybe have a 5th set on auto), and don't mind either occasionally reaching for the keyboard for the rarely used powers or using a shoulder trigger as shift for those, it leaves you with enough buttons to move around, target prev/next enemy, jump, follow, etc.
There'll always be games who don't work like that no matter what, though, but still, it can make it more fun in those that do work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Role Playing Games
:) and love the games I have on them, but none of the RPGs come close to matching what a PC is capable of.
Due to keyboard shortcuts, mouse/keyboard combo, video cards, no or low load times, multiple save points (yeah, I know, RPGs on the console are getting better at this), the ability for player generated content (Neverwinter Nights and others) and a host of other things a console is the worst place to play RPGs - in general. I'm not talking Final Fantasy 1 through Infinity here, I'm talking Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, etc as well as RPGs and other games with open-ended or fairly open-ended content. So, until consoles can match the flexibility of my $xx00 tricked out PC then I'll continue to use it. I'm not bashing consoles as I have a PS2 and several older consoles (I still have my Atari 2600 stashed somewhere
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
AFAIK it's a modified XP that the console, or the macs used as an alpha development kit, boot.
.Net platform which (even if by virtue of being a shameless Java virtual machine clone) is designed to allow running the same program on any CPU or platform MS damn pleases.
Thing is, Windows is based on abstraction layers, to make as much of it hardware-agnostic as possible. Remember that NT used to run on Alpha, MIPS, and quite a few other architectures. So Microsoft could very easily (and in fact did for the XBox 360) port XP to Macs.
As for GCC, don't make me laugh. You do realize that Microsoft also sells some very good compilers, right? They have a whole division making compilers for any language ever invented, _and_ the
They're not some small shop that has to use GCC to get their programs compiled. They can just support any CPU ever invented themselves. They only need to tell the compiler guys to add support for it, and that's that.
If you're still not convinced, also remember the variety of hardware that Windows CE runs on. There was a Windows CE kernel available even for the Dreamcast, and a lot of the Dreamcast games were Windows game ports, using Windows CE. And the Dreamcast was some obscure 128 bit proprietary CPU that noone else used. So MS does have plenty of experience with porting their stuff -- OS, compilers, and tools included -- to any CPU or platform they damn please.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.