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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.
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...
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.
...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.
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?
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.
Hey, those are difficult graphical effects to do right. I don't think I've ever seen realistic smoke in a console game yet.
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.
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."?
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
...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
"Back to reality"
Dwayne Dibbly? Oh thanks for reminding me!
"Derp de derp."
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
I know Santa Clause isn't real, but it's still fun to get excited about x-mas.
This is Slashdot, my friend.. the higher up the UID's go, the more likely there are lots of pre-teens and teens.. many of which require you to preface your comment with *SPOILER*. Poor kids.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
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.
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.
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."
...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
>> 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.
Its not the platform, but the applications that make a difference ...
True, yes... but more applications will be developed for a platform that makes it easier to write good applications. In this case, if a console maker puts out a kick-ass SDK they are more likely to have new developers making software for their system.
Free as in speech, free as in beer, or free as in lunch?
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'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.
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
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.
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!
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).
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
"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.