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More Next-Gen Console Smack-Talk
With the PS3 now out the door in Japan, Nintendo and Microsoft are engaging in what is essentially the last moment for smack talk before everyone's cards are on the table in the U.S. On Microsoft's part, they're complaining in Europe that they want to go head-to-head with the PS3, and can't until next year. Xbox EU Boss Neil Thompson says: "In a lot of ways we'd like people to put the system side-by-side and see whether people want a platform where they're paying for Blu-ray straight away." Meanwhile, Nintendo is taking shots at both companies, saying that the next-gen DVD format war is bad for consumers. Says Nintendo Canada's Pierre-Paul Trépanier: "I think forcing a decision on consumers would certainly not be part of Nintendo's strategy, because we want to get more people into gaming and we want to make it affordable. Forcing people to adopt a technology and a model that's proprietary and still not established is unfair to gamers."
I don't see how M. Trépanier's comments qualify as "taking shots at both companies." He's saying that forcing unproven, proprietary formats on consumers is a bad decision. As far as I know, only Sony is "forcing" such a format. The HD-DVD add on to the 360 is just that, an add on, and won't even be used for game content (unless there's been news to the contrary that I've missed...?). So the 360 is using DVD as the medium for its core functionality (games), just like the Wii is.
(Or is it "Wii are"?)
Either way, I'm going to be one of the losers in line hoping for a Wii this weekend. Hopefully, the combination of deer season and a Wisconsin November will keep them short for me.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Nintendo is a great gaming company, and I'm excited about their resurgence with the DS and the Wii, but it will be a long time before I'm willing to hear someone from Nintendo lecture the industry about a "proprietary model." The Wii's support for DVD is one of very few times that the big N has strayed from its defining "not made here" syndrome. Have we already forgotten Nintendo's numerous examples of proprietary lock-in—one example that comes to mind being the GBA-SP's notorious "headphone jack"?
So the PS3 has enough room to provide massive content in it's games.. and XBox and Wii don't. To me that's all I need to know. What's the point of a next gen console that can't even provide more detailed and massive enviroments to game in? A graphics boost is nice as is improved controllers but I want better gameplay and that means more data available to the games, better physics, better AI, etc.
I'll get a PS3 but I have no plan at all to upgrade my movie buying to HD-DVD or Blue-Ray or to use my next gen console for playing movies. The biggest deciding factor for me as to when I will switch to a HD movie format is when the format is cracked so that the security measures no longer work. I won't buy movies I can't copy and modify (removing menus, etc).
In the previous generation (PS2/XBox/Gamecube) most of the games produced easily fit on a single layered DVD, with only a few requiring a double layered DVD and (almost) none requiring multiple dual layered DVDs; in fact, most games were easily ported to the Gamecube on its single layered (1.5GB) optical disc. The Wii (we assume) now has about 6 times as much storage as the Gamecube did without requiring much more data in game (because of it's modest graphics).
The XBox 360 may not have the storage capacity of the PS3 but that shouldn't be too big of a problem because FMV should be far less necessary on a next generation console (the few double layered DVD games for the PS2 were mostly filled with MPEG-2 encoded FMV) and the XBox 360 can handle much greater compression on FMV than the XBox could, the XBox 360 can handle greater texture compression than the XBox could, and most polygonal data can be stored as a spline on the disc and polygonalized in memory; I know someone will say that polygonalizing a spline would take longer but the reality is that (with how slow optical drives are) it is much faster to store a model as a spline and then polygonalize it then to load a polygonal model from disc.
Anyways, I'm not so sure you will see more detailed massive environments then are already being provided on the XBox 360. the more detailed the enviroment becomes, or the more massive it becomes, the more people are required to produce the content; if game budgets are already in the $20-$40 Million range (requiring 1 to 2 Million sales to break even) I doubt you will see many game budgets explode to $40-$80 Million (requiring 2 to 4 Million sales to break even) to produce your massive detailed worlds.
I cannot justify getting a Sony product, simply because most of the hardware they sell have had so many issues, I don't want to, on that alone. Nevermind the fact that I don't find the need in high resolution TVs or a RSX processor that can apparently shuffle pictures on the screen that I've been doing for years on my amiga1200. Nevermind the fact there is no game I can think of that I want on the platform, and for that obscenely high price to get the console, there better be.
I want network play, I like the idea of forming a wireless neighborhood gaming network... Not really much of a choice, but there you go.
And I'm not really a gamer, all this crap over the years I keep experiencing, from things like Steam to CD protections wrecking my DVD drives has put me off playing many games.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.