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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.
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.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Sounds like you might be a closet Nintendo fan, as they have put out those types of games for years. And they seem to be setting up to do something amazing for the next generation.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
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.
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make install -not war
I cant play Xenogears, Xenosaga, most Final Fantasies and a whole host of other games on my PC's. You don't buy a console because of the hardware, its all about the games you can get on it. You wouldn't happen to also be the type of person who can't understand why someone would choose to run Windows over Linux when their livelihood requires they run something that only runs on Windows are you?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
There are some new and original games coming out, it's just that it's sometimes hard to find them, because the big sequels are the ones that get he majority of the hype and advertising. That's kind of a bummer, I'll agree.
I think Nintendo hears what you're saying, and tries to be creative in a lot of ways. That sort of gets overlooked, however, because they tend to then brand all of their ideas with their big franchises, Mario being the number one example. So the PS and Xbox fanboys rant about how 50% of the games available for the GC are just mario games, ignoring the fact that there's a whole lot of variety within the Mario universe.
I don't have anymore of an idea what Nintendo's big Revolution is going to be than any other random guy on the street, but I have found their games to be fairly consistently fresh and fun.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Funny, I've never understood how people think a pentium 3 733 has near as much horsepower as an athlon 64 3000+. Or that the game even looks nearly as good on the console.
As a huge fan of both consoles and PCs, they both have their place. I would never try to play an FPS on a console. I tried getting along with it for months with Halo 2, but it was like trying to ride a monkey instead of a horse. It's just not meant to be. I also would never want the "latest and greatest" cutting edge game to be on the console - why? Because the graphics aren't going to look nearly as good - how can they, when the video card is about 3 or 4 years old?
Making blanket statements isn't going to work. Consoles do some things well, PCs do some things well. Until I can treat a console like a PC (ie: hook it up to an extremely high resolution monitor and have the option to use a keyboard and mouse), for me, it's going to be my second choice system. With that said, trying to have all my friends huddle around my monitor as we play Double Dash isn't going to work either. There's certain pros and cons to each, and it's up to the individual to decide what they like more - high powered FPS games with input devices that allow for much higher response times, or something that always "just works", can be played with tons of friends, everyone sitting around the living room drinking some beers.
...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
Wow... pottymouth, yo.
Look, Dave, we all know you're the world's biggest Apple fanboy, so if it gets you excited that the Xbox 360 uses an IBM processor from the same family as the one in the G5, that's great. Seriously, why does the rest of the world care? Apple doesn't make the processors in Macs, nor does Microsoft make the processors in PCs.
Is it ironic? I guess so, but I'm not sure it's quite the watershed moment you think it is. MS went with the company that could give them the fastest multicore processor for the least money. It was IBM. The only major company using those processors is Apple. So they used Apples to develop on. End of story.
Why does everything to be some kind of schlongs-and-rulers war with Mac types?