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The Shadow of Kong
The BBC is reporting that the makers of the Kong game recommend against purchasing the 360 version of that title. The article states that an Ubisoft rep, Yves Guillemot, stated that the 360 version is just too dark to play well on a non-HD screen. However, Voodoo Extreme got in touch with Ubi for the official party line, and they had something very different to say. From the article: "Ubisoft is actively investigating isolated reports of resolution issues on specific plasma screens, which should be easily resolved by adjusting/increasing the settings. Ubisoft believes that King Kong offers one of the best gaming experiences available on the Xbox 360 and encourages gamers to check it out for themselves."
Ah well, it is a good laugh.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Although I understand your sarcasm, what I find amusing is that the "something different" that they supposedly said is little more than a claim of "out of context!", followed by "it got good reviews!" and "buy our game! (it's better than the other XBox360 ones)".
Oh yeah, and a single line acknowledging that there is an issue on some televisions.
Yves Guillemot is not just a "Ubisoft rep.", he's the CEO (being one of the Guillemot brothers, who founded Guillemot - videogames - and Hercules - hardware).
You seriously need to read news from another source besides slashdot, which is right now the only site reporting frequently on the supposed "disaster" of the 360 release.
As long as you can still see the barrels Kong throws at you, I don't see the problem.
The first is that HD will catch on, who knows how popular it'll be over the Revo's life cycle? If it becomes the standard, will the Revo's graphics start feeling dated when our eyes are spoiled by HD?
You act like people can choose to continue purchasing SD tv's indefinately. It isn't a matter of "if it catches on", it is a matter of "when does the government throw the switch?"
By the time 2007 rolls around, every TV sold in the US (by law) must be capable of receiving an hd signal.
So read from other news sites that are paid to write glowing, positive reviews of the piece of turd that is the 360?
We've had power supply problems, subpar games, and graphics that have yet to exceed the worst of the last generation of game systems. How is the XBox 360 *not* a disaster?
[Since this is obviously flamebait, I'm posting as AC. -- sc]
This is a sig. Deal with it.
Oh, never mind, since I missed checking the Post Anonymously button.
;)
Mod me down as flamebait -- unless you think it is insightful..
This is a sig. Deal with it.
The law is receiving a digital signal, not necessarily high definition signal.
In addition, these consoles are marketed worldwide. The only country with a remotely significant HDTV acceptance ratio is the US, and even here it hasn't caught on as quickly as many have expected. The "HD era" is little more than a buzzword in Japan and Europe.
I strongly suspect this issue is 99% political. I have a 360 premium, Kong and a non-HD TV. The game looks absolutely fine to me. No brightness issues at all. Got a few friends in a similar situation, one of whom has a non-HD plasma TV and none of them are having problems either.
I'd love to see Ubisoft's profit margin on each copy of the game sold for the 360, compared with the other platforms. I'm guessing one of their accountants dropped the ball big-time during contract negotiations and now they're trying to minimise the damage by blowing a bug affecting a tiny proportion of users out of all proportion.
For what it's worth, Kong's not a bad game at all for a movie tie-in, even if they complaints about it being too short are pretty much justified. I'd say that Kong, Call of Duty 2 and Project Gotham Racing 3 are the only 360 launch titles to really look like next-gen games. The first two look significantly better than their respective PC versions, in fact.
I suspect you'll find the HDTV penetration is around 10% higher in Japan than the US. Europe, yes, just a buzzword (though plenty of people with decent monitors which the 360 will output to fine)
$60, actually, for the 360 version.
The law mandates that TVs be capable of receiving an ATSC signal, which may be transmitted in any of the following horizontal resolutions/fields:
480i60, 480p24, 480p30 576i50, 576p25, 480p60, 576p50, 720i50, 720i60, 720p24, 720p25, 720p30, 720p50, 720p60, 1080i50, 1080i60, 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080p30
How the TV chooses to display those signals is up to the hardware manufacturer, but they must be capable of receiving and displaying a hidef signal.
You're arguing that people are going to shun hidef technology -- that it won't catch on. It isn't happening.
People want that fancy HDTV -- they're just waiting for the price to drop or are waiting for their current set to "expire" before replacing it. All HDTV's don't cost > $1000 either.
25% of the TV's sold in the US were hidef in 2004. Estimates for 2005 are roughly 50% of the TVs sold. And it is looking like sales of hidef TV's will reach critical mass in 2006.
I can't see what universe someone can argue that HDTV is just a "fad" that is going to go away.
There are roughly 100 million households in the US. Using your 2004 penetration estimate of 10%, that means 10 million households have hdtvs. Nearly 25 million tv's are sold in this country every year. If we assume 50% of the hidef TVs sold make it into "new" households, penetration during 2005 will reach 16%. By the end of 2006 we're looking at 25%. By the end of 2007, penetration should be at around 36%.
One in every 3 customers will have a hidef tv in their house when the Revolution sees it's first Christmas in the states. And this is completely ignoring the demongraphic data (which would suggest that the consumers being targeted are more likely to have a hidef set than not).
I can't see how anyone can argue that it is an advantage to be selling a new console that doesn't support hidef when 1 in 3 possible customers could take advantage of it -- especially when your competition supports it.
I was going to ask if anyone knew why it was called *Donkey* Kong. Then I googled "name donkey kong", and it pointed to the Wikipedia entry where it explains that
Many TVs that display HDTV don't suppert the full resolution, they simply downscale it to something that isn't much better then SDTV. HDTV will for sure catch on, but TV that really can display the full resolution are still very expensive and will probally stay so for quite a while. So till real HDTV is available on a large scale will take at least some years.
### And this is completely ignoring the demongraphic data
Nintendo is targeting the families, children and non-gamer, folks that most likly will not have HDTV anytime soon, especially children will be the very last to get access to a HDTV in their rooms.
In the end it simply doesn't matter anyway, games are what matters not the technology.
> You seriously need to read news from another source besides slashdot, which is right now the
o x-cx_cn_1214autofacescan02.html
> only site reporting frequently on the supposed "disaster" of the 360 release.
You need to learn how to use a search engine:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4525318.stm
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3146387
http://www.forbes.com/2005/12/14/gates-jackson-xb
http://news.com.com/2061-10797_3-5995807.html
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/675/675720p1.html
25% of the TV's sold in the US were hidef in 2004. Estimates for 2005 are roughly 50% of the TVs sold. And it is looking like sales of hidef TV's will reach critical mass in 2006.
Percent of sales of TVs means nothing, because people do not buy a new TV every year. Hell, most peopole buy a big TV maybe once every 15 years.
Every single person who came of age in the 90s and spent $500 or more on a 32+ inch TV is *not* going to rush out and replace it with an HDTV until absoltely necessary. Why? Theres a multitude of reasons. First of all, they're 40-some years old now with kids to feed, and don't have thousands of dollars of disposable income to drop on a luxury item. Second, they dont give a shit, to them their current TV is just fine.
Main point - the percent of TV sales in any given year is an infentessimal amount compared to the number of TVs in current use. Hell, I have two 14 inch TVs in my house from 1982-1984 with cable boxes, one on the porch and one downstairs. Why should I have go out and blow $800 bucks on two HDTV-compat. models of simmilar size? You think twice the res makes a huge difference on a 13" screen? You think I can fit a TV any larger on my porch? Think again.
One in every 3 customers will have a hidef tv in their house
I would like to know what this statistic is based on - but even if it is true, it still means that 66% of households will *not* have an HDTV. You think any government will piss off 66% of its voting base to push some technology they are not ready for down their throats? It would be political suicide.
And one more point - all those people in that 66 percent,the ones who wont have HDTVs when the Revolution comes out? All the ones with kids to feed, middle class, etc? Thats the Revolution's target market - cheaper console, lots of kids. Nintendo has never marketed to the 16-24 year old market like the Xbox, they target the 6-18 year old market. You still think it's such a bad move?
Why in the world are so many claimed tech-heads fighting against HD? I've had my set for a couple years and that was years after sets had already been available. People will buy $500 video cards or better yet 2 of them for SLI or they'll buy whatever handheld gadget is on the market, but balk at the thing they probably spend most of their time watching. You can't play most new PC games on a 10 year old PC and you can't play Xbox 360 games on a Colecovision. You paid $400 for a game console, buy a halfway decent TV to play it on.
As much as I enjoy my Nintendo games, this is really narrow thinking. Some people like Xbox games and I'm sure some people are enjoying the 360 games on the market.
Now the question of whether those same games would be just as enjoyable on a regular old Xbox is another matter... The jump from N64/PS1 to GC/PS2/XBox seemed to have a little more impact on actual gameplay compared to what I'm seeing from the 360, but I suppose lots of number crunching comes in helpful on certain genres.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Yes, I mean they'll have to include a whole new control on the options screen to select from a couple of gamma profiles. Or tell people to turn up the brightness.
Oh noes! Development costs will skyrocket!
"Buy it for one of the other three current consoles, preferably all three."
...I have to buy an Xbox 360 because my TV is capable of recieving its signal. But under my logic, I don't, so I'm not buying one.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
So... So far we have a company which didn't test its console as well as it should have and now game developers who didn't test their games on normal TVs... Nice!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You were paid off by Microsoft.
Do you have any legit posters?
See? Baseless claims work both ways.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is Ubisoft. When they realize something is too dark that means you're in deep shit. Even "bright" games like Beyond Good & Evil and Rayman 2 are unplayable without turning up the brightness a lot, their definition of "dark" must be close to Doom 3.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yeah, it's really a disaster when it's impossible to find a new Xbox 360 except on ebay. I think you need to be reminded about what a "complete and total disaster" actually is.
Let me put something in perspective for you. I was playing a Half Life mod called The Specialists a few days ago. My roomate looked up at what I was playing and asked me if I was playing Halo. How is that for brand recognition...and in only a few years no less. The only complete and total disaster here is your mind when you finally realize that Micorosft is making waves in their gaming division, and they're not going away anytime soon.
So read from other news sites that are paid to write glowing, positive reviews of the piece of turd that is the 360?
How is this better than the page after page of Linux-is-awesome, Micorosft-sodomized-my-firstborn-son morons who couldn't string together a constructive argument to save their life getting modded +5 insightful's left and right with rhetoric and terrible arguments. That's just as deceptive, if not moreso because their opinions are being "validated" by invisible moderators who are all drawn from the same crowd. Just because the mainstream press's bias towards Micorosft is bad doesn't mean that Slashdot's anti-Microsoft bias is any better.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I got to see the 360 for the first time the other day at CompUSA and it had this game on a small HD TV display. It is funny reading this article because I thought it was a horrible game to showcase in public since the game looked so dark. Shortly after I saw COD2 at Walmart and also thought it was a horrible game to showcase because it looked like an average game I play on my PC. I would suggest showing DOA4, or at least an exclusive game to the system.
They rolled the date back 3 or 4 times already. It'll be pushed back again. The vast majority of existing hardware does not support it. As such, they can't throw the switch. It will be at least a decade before they do.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm guessing you've never played Kameo or PGR3 on XBox360? They are hardly "graphics that have yet to exceed the worst of the last generation of game systems." Call of Duty 2 looks gorgeous as well. I'm sure we haven't even begun to fully tap the capabilities of the system, either (same goes for any new console launch.)
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
I have a standard TV. I actually rented both the Xbox and 360 versions of the game to see the graphical differences. I ended up buying the 360 version. The graphics are night and day - this is THE game I suggest to show off the graphical power of the 360. I don't think the game is too dark. Granted, it IS a tad darker, but nothing that affects gameplay. In fact, the slightly darker graphics bring out the brighter effects like fire and sunlight much better. The Xbox version is a bit lighter but has a washed-out look compared to the more saturated colours of the 360 version. The framerate is also considerably worse in the Xbox version.
I agree; the lack of HD support, in and of itself, is a marketing disadvantage. However, the direct results of that decision are big advantages, namely low price and easier development. A low price -- predictions are placing the Revolution at around $150 at launch -- is a huge advantage. Since the competition is selling at a higher price point than past consoles, a budget price will be very helpful. Developer support is a requirement for the Revolution's success. If the controller is ignored by key third parties, the Revolution will fail. Nintendo needs to make Revolution development as risk-free as possible, and encouraging low-budget games is a good way to do that.