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Rumor Control on the PS3's Pricetag
Gamespot's 'Rumor Control' this week is pretty interesting, covering the topics of the PS3's supposedly high pricetag, the possibility of the 360 coming pre-loaded with games, and a confirmation of the Inquirer story we ran earlier regarding the cost of ATI's exclusivity agreement with Valve. From the article (re the 360 preloaded game): "The preloaded 'game' in question is actually an interactive application titled Neon, created by lightsynth guru Jeff Minter of Llamasoft. The program is a music visualizer, similar to that used on Apple's iTunes, in that it creates psychedelic patterns and colors based on sound that is fed through the system (which in this case will be music on the 360's 'outrigger' hard drive or a portable music device)."
"The preloaded "game" in question is actually an interactive application titled Neon, created by lightsynth guru Jeff Minter of Llamasoft.
I find the name rather funny since the last console projects to contain a Jeff Minter light show built in tanked rather hard.
Granted I can appreciate the Nuon and even the Jaguar CD slightly but I'm really hoping for the 360 to die a miserable death. I can only see Minter's VLM as being another nail in the coffin.
My apologies to Jeff Minter. I don't wish him bad, I just think he ties himself to doomed projects.
because you'd be out of your mind putting stress on your $200 game console's optical drive rather than your $20 CD player's optical drive? just a thought.
"Shame. I think the viz on my 3DO was one of the better ones to date."
Supposedly the Jaguar CD (remember,the old Atari faux 64 bit system?) had the best light synth. Interestingly enough, it was done by Jeff Minter.
"Derp de derp."
This kind of early speculation is kind of useless, because it's all PR right now. Isn't it entirely possible that Sony is using the sub-press to float around a $399 number, then later when they announce the console at $299 gamers and industry will think it's a bargain. By spreading rumors that the console is $399, they're placing a value on it higher than what the xbox is without actually committing to a price point. Hell, why wouldn't you do that?
"Uh, a year before the Dreamcast hardware hit the store shelves the president of the very large console dev house I was working at stood up in front of the entire company and, among other topics, stated we weren't going to bother wasting development money on the Dreamcast as it was a deadend platform and that we were going into an all out PS2 development ramp up."
What "big name" company are we talking about here? The only ones I could think of that would hire the likes of you would be Acclaim. You're an AC, why not drop a name?
And I seem to recall that most of the software developers that I care about were involved on the Dreamcast. For example, it looked like Konami's Castlevania game was pretty far along before the plug was pulled, well after the launch of the Dreamcast. I probably would have bought a Dreamcast if that game had made it to store shelves.
"The Dreamcast 360 is aptly named, "
The paragraph following this statement goes off on a tangent (and I'm being forgiving in calling it that) and has utterly failed to answer the question "How do you justify nicknaming the Xbox 360 as the 'Dreamcast 360?'"
"Blah,blah,blah fanboys. Same old every new console cycle. It's like the same dumb indignant fucks posting the same shit every four or five years."
Such as yourself? "Indignant" describes these past two posts of yours very well.
"Console wars are won and lost long before the hardware has hit the store shelves."
That was a decade ago. Now most games are released for all three consoles, so such "exclusive" contracts have little to no meaning in the ultimate fate of a console. "Exclusive" isn't half as exclusive as it used to be.
With all three consoles using both CPUs and GPUs from the same manufacturers, I see little reason to believe that the number of these hardware agnostic games will drop any time soon.