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Revolution Least Expensive Next-Gen Console
exdeath writes "Today, one of Nintendo's most public faces said the Revolution
will stand out from its competition for a reason besides its innovative controller: price.
Speaking to CNN/Money correspondent Chris Morris Reggie Fils-Aime, executive vice president of sales and marketing,
predicted that the Revolution would be cheaper than both the Xbox 360
and the PlayStation 3. How low will Nintendo go? It's hard to tell.
Microsoft is selling two Xbox 360 SKUs--the no-frills $299 core Xbox
and the $399 standard model with hard drive and wireless remote. In his interview with Morris, Fils-Aime also reiterated that the
Revolution will not support high-definition televisions. 'What we'll
offer in terms of gameplay and approachability will more than make up
for the lack of HD,' he said. Both Microsoft and Sony are making much
of the 360 and PS3's HD capabilities. Fils-Aime also implied that the DS will see redesigns, just as the Game Boy Advance has."
1. You are a minority.
2. Nintendo doesn't cater to the hardcore.
"When you look at the specs of the PS3 or Xbox 360, it appears to me that your money is getting you a better system."
What's funny is that I remember two of my friends using the same argument to buy a Saturn over the Playstation at launch time. Better hardware != better system. (Personally, I think the Saturn was a better system but I'm obviously in the minority.)
Also, while HD sounds nice, the majority of Americans aren't onboard yet. Nintendo is merely betting that HD won't become a big factor over the course of this console's lifespan (which will probably be 4-6 based on typcial console lifespans). I don't think that's a terrible bet given HD's slow adoption rate thus far.
But, as the article says, is that enough for Nintendo? Gamecube was/is priced considerably lower than the PS2 and Xbox, but doesn't have nearly the mindshare (not even mentioning the marketshare). I'm not planning on getting either PS3 or Xbox 360 until they reach price points comparable to what the Revolution will launch at; for me, $200 is the sweet spot. Any more and I won't buy it.
Personally, I'm most excited about the possibilities of the Revolution (the controller, download old games, internet play, Super Smash Bros. Revolution Online, etc.) but I fear that it might be too little too late.
The Kerr Divine: My wife's battle with a mysterious illness.
640x480 should be enough for anyone.
Good think you don't matter to Nintendo, then. It would have been a disaster is their business model depended entirely on you.
Most people don't even have HDTVs nor surround sound nor a computer that can handle high end games at that resolution. You're a huge minority, especially considering Nintendos "casual gamer" target demographic.
Help a student gain some exp. http://www.halovariants.com/touchup/index.php
- There are no specs release for the Revolution at all (outside of some extremely unsubstantiated rumors), and the PS3 ones are still a little vague (as is its price point)
- Outside of Sony and Nintendo, almost nobody has gotten to play a real PS3 or Revolution game yet, so it is a little hasty to make qualitative judgements (i.e. "better system") until you actually have a chance to play with them a little.
- It's definitely too early to say which gives you the most bang for your buck, since we don't know what "bang" the Revolution will give you, nor how much "buck" the PS3 will cost.
I don't want anyone to think I'm evangelizing for anyone... but calling systems "better" or "worse" based on rumors are how flame wars get started. Even if you're not saying it in a mean way, there's someone out there who will take it personally.-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Metroid Prime at 480p looks pretty darn good, GT4 for the PS2 at 1080i is ok, Halo at 480p is probably the worst out of these three examples. When you are 18" from the monitor, high resolution is important. When you're sitting 8' away from your 48" TV, higher resolutions aren't as ground breaking.
I think Nintendo will do just fine, as long as they support 16:9 mode. BTW, game developers, if you offer split mode game play, make use of the 16:9 screen and let me split the screen side by side instead of just top/bottom.
What, me worry?
This is what it really breaks down to for me:
There is the Xbox 360, which brags about it's HDD support but does not make the HDD a standard option. How many 3rd party devs are going to support a peripheral that maybe a third or less of the market has? Obviously some will, but most won't bother. Plus, it's Microsoft, and they just piss me off.
Then there's the Playstation 3. Made by Sony, a company who installs rootkits on people's PC's, settles for poorly manufactured digicam CCD's, and has generally been riding their name for the past 3 years or so (Hey, we're Sony! People will buy our crap regardless of how craptastic it is!). Sony pisses me off.
Last but not least, we have the Nintendo Revolution, which is not only the least expensive of the three, but is likely to bring about a wave of excellent new gameplay styles with their innovative new controller format (btw, for those who still complain and want their old-style controllers, Nintendo is making one). Most importantly, Nintendo hasn't done anything to piss me off lately.
Disclaimer: If a really good new Ratchet and Clank game comes out for it...I might end up with a PS3 anyway. Damn that addictive Lombax!
The Russian Mafia will mod you down just to see if the Moderate button works.
Nintendo is obviously foolish. Their biggest selling points to me was that you would be able to play their entire back catalog. Now I don't know. I can't imagine playing Mario 3 without my HD hardware.
Even if Nintendo platforms did only have brightly-colored family friendly games, it would still be a stupid argument. Games like, say, Halo aren't more "mature," they're more violent. I know the ESRB sticks an "M" on them, but it pretty obviously doesn't mean you're an older or more sophisticated person if you play them. I don't know when the two terms got equated, but it is a little bit irritating when people who just like violent games consider their pastime superior. Obviously, if I'm not shooting something, I'm engaging in some sort of absurd, childish activity. When you start spending your time sipping tea and reading classics instead of yelling "faggot" at strangers over the internet while attempting to obtain their flag, you can talk down to me.
You're not serious, are you? Fixed camera angles, linear gameplay, predictable action sequences .. this is what you consider the 'best game ever'? I think we can find a few more candidates than that to fill the spot of 'best game ever'.
l +4+fixed+camera&btnG=Google+Search
Could you make it any more obvious that you haven't actually played the game?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_4
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Resident+Evi
Better luck with your next troll.
As lots of people tend to forget (even people WITH HDTVs):
* the difference between broadcast NTSC or composite NTSC and studio/dvd-quality NTSC (via s-video) is dramatic and noticeable.
* the difference between studio/dvd quality NTSC via s-video ("480i60") and 480p60 is night and day. Someone who just had PRK/LASEK the previous day could still tell the difference between the two on a 27" TV twenty feet away in a smoke-filled room.
* On a natively 720p60 set, 720p60 looks noticeably better than 480p60. On a natively 1080i60 set, 720p60 is almost indistinguishable from 480p60 because the TV downsamples to 540 scanlines, then kell-filters them to prevent flicker. The net result is almost the same amount of vertical detail as 480p60, with only slightly more horizontal detail. Meanwhile, the GPU and CPU are working almost twice as hard.
* On a natively 720p60 set, 1080i60 is nearly indistinguishable from 480p60, because the TV just throws away half of the scanlines, resamples the 540 that remain up to 720, then resamples the alleged 1920 horizontal pixels to 1280. On a natively 1080i60 set, 1080i60 COULD exhibit greater detail than 480p60... except for the tiny problems of interline twitter (requiring kell filtering), inadequate GPU/CPU power to really pull off their best work at 1920x1080, and the fact that programmers fundamentally don't understand the realities of computer-generated interlaced video and inevitably produce games that look great on the progressive-scan monitors connected to their dev boxen, but have glaring artifacts and deficiencies when viewed on a real interlaced display.
In short, 1080i60 doesn't have a whole lot to offer more than 480p60 for action-related games due to all the filtering necessary to prevent interline twitter, and inadequate raw GPU/CPU horsepower to really handle 1920x1080 properly. 720p60 has definite potential to offer better-looking games because 1280x720 is still a reasonable resolution as far as the GPU/CPU is concerned... but at the moment, natively 720p60 TVs only represent about 1/3 of the total in America (unfortunately), and 720p60 looks like $#!+ on most natively 1080i60 TVs.
At the implementation level, upgrading chips capable of 480p60 to 1080i60 is a comparatively small tweak, because most of the increased bandwidth goes into permitting faster pixel-to-pixel color changes. The actual scanrate (~33.75KHz) isn't a whole lot higher than 480p60's (~31.5kHz). Unfortunately, you can't fool Mother Nature... making the leap to 720p60 requires ~45KHz, because the real or metaphorical electron beam has a LOT more ground to cover in the same amount of time. Put another way, you can do some nasty hacks and claim that a given circuit is technically capable of "1080i", even if its REAL capabilities aren't much better than 480p because the horizontal detail will be all smeared and blurred due to inadequate bandwidth... but making the leap to 720p requires real upgrades that cost real money. And ultimately, the 2/3 majority of American HDTV owners whose sets are inherently 1080i won't see much of an improvement anyway, and will probably bitch about games that only support 480p and 720p.
The REAL surge in "HDTV" console gaming will come in another 2-4 years, once natively-720p TVs have displaced enough older 1080i TVs (at least among gamers who know the difference and care), and Nintendo's NEXT console WILL support 720p (but probably won't bother with 1080i, leading to more waves of grousing and complaining about its lack of "true" support for HDTV).
What the fuck does a game's rating have to do with who it's aimed at? Just because a game doesn't feature exploding corpses, lakes of blood, automatic weapons, random senseless violence, demonic possession, bouncing boobies, or gratuitous sex, it doesn't mean that it's "for kids". In fact, games with stuff that earns them an M rating are exactly the kind of games that are intended for kids, specifically teenagers between 13 and 18 - the hormonally imbalanced "I want to be grown up" lot, who think that playing a game where you go around beating up prostitutes makes them more of a man.
Games that are aimed exclusively at young childeren (in the way you seem to think Nintendo's games are) are extremely rare, and far more likely to be released for everything that's electronic and plays games (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, PC, GBA, DS, PSP, possibly others). Stuff like the endless stream of Spongebob Squarepants or Disney games, or whatever. These games are absolutely awful, because they're developed with the idea that kids are too stupid to know any different, and they largely sell because parents who don't know any better buy them. Anyone over the age of 6 finds them unplayable, and even then they aren't very good games.
That's not even close to what Nintendo's games are like. Nintendo's games are designed for everyone. They aren't intended to exclude everyone over a certain age as kids' games are, and they aren't intended to exclude everyone under a certain age either. In order to be playable by everyone, they need to qualify for the appropriate ratings, so that means they can't include content that would kick their rating too high.
If you thing those ratings are the same as the age ratings on a toy, or a jigsaw puzzle, or whatever (the ones that say things like "Ages 6 - 11" or "12 and up"), you're seriously deluded.