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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...
You know, after the release of the Wii, I will never look at the acronym for the Pentium II the same way again.
I wasn't aware that Star Fox, Mario Party, Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, and F-Zero had been ported?
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I think /. as a whole tends to agree with Trépanier. Don't FORCE proprietary media formats at us through a console. In the end it comes down to what the consumer spends their money on. A good percent of people know they're getting a Blu-Ray player and that it's non-gaming functionality directly competes with HD-DVD if they purchase a PS3. I'm sure a lot of them see the Blu-Ray as a bonus. But I'd say even more people are outraged that Sony is offering them a product that is overpriced because of functionality they don't want or need. The consumer has a right to be angry, too. I know I wanted to play the next Gran Turismo, but now I doubt I ever will.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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"?
.. and here was me thinking this was news that there was a PS3 of the Smacktalk being released. Which is, for anyone who's not heard of it, a device that sits between the 360's headset and console and lets you assign swearing and sound samples to various buttons. I'd buy one to assign a bunch of Dr Weird voice samples to if they weren't so expensive, and if they were actually available in the UK.
Wii and a 25$ divx player.
/.'s opinion on this, I'd love to know.
:)
I mean, c'mon guys. I know the next-gen storage format war is important to movie enthusiasts and people who have huge storage needs, but the rest of us are still happy with our "old" technology, and don't see (or care about) the artifacts or "bad quality" of the image. I mean, there's being interested in bleeding-edge, and then there's being anal about a percent performance increase.
I thought we geeks cared about content, low prices, and squeezing the most life out of any piece of kit, however old it may be. What's the rest of
And on the upcoming games front? Personally, I am not interested by either the Xbox 360's or the PS3's offerings, even though I enjoyed the main franchise games on both consoles' predecessors. We have already witnessed how the cheaper, innovative console is more fun in many ways to the expensive, state-of-the-art piece of hardware that "isn't a console". (yes, I am in eternal love with the DS)
You may now post your best "Wii is barely powerful enough to run MARIO PONG : kidz version" flames...
I bought Paper Mario a while back and I just have to say that I loath that game despite all the rav reviews I saw for it. It's boring with lame puzzles that require mostly trial and error or repetitive tasks than actual thought or skill and the dialog is so lame as to be a crime. I love the Mario family of games and RPG style games but Paper Mario is just a mockery of both.
I do like the Skies of Arcadia remake for Gamecube (a bit better than the Dreamcast version) and the Gamecube I think is the choice platform for party games. I think Nintendo is making a mistake by choosing a design for the Wii that looks more like the PlayStation instead of keeping the easily portable little cube design of the Gamecube.
I'd like to see Nintendo shrink the form factor of the Gamecube further and bring it's price down to around $50 as I think they could really hit the market for younger kids and party players if they did. Maybe add some Wii-like controllers while their at it. I think a smaller, cheaper, and improved Gamecube could sell better than the Wii. The Gameboy isn't all bells and whistles like the PSP but it consistantly sells better than the PSP and similar expensive rivals. I think the Wii price is to high for the market it's going after.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Correct, Microsoft has nothing to do with the HD-DVD standard. HD-DVD is largely a Toshiba endevour. Microsoft did, however, throw themselves entirely behind Toshiba in this, so they have quite a bit to lose if it doesn't pan out.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
What it really comes down to is:
IF Blu-Ray is successful, then the PS3 has a big leg up, as it already includes the means to play Blu-ray movies.
IF, on the other hand, Blu-Ray is not successful, Sony must still support it for the PS3, just as Sony must still support UMD for the PSP because both mediums didn't just play movies, but are used for software (the games) as well.
Sony is gambling that the higher prices NOW will pay off in the future by launching Blu-ray into millions of homes, striking a large blow against HD-DVD.
As for games, it's yet to be shown how Blu-Ray adds anything to them, other than providing tons of extra space for those long, beautifully rendered, non-interactive CGI movies Square so loves using in their Final Fantasy games and other RPGs. I've not heard of any game filling a Blu-Ray disc. Supposedly the developers of 'Resistance...' were claiming each level was going to use up 4GB of space on the Blu-Ray disc, but later it was shown the entire game fit into 12GB (down from their initial claims of 24GB) While still larger than a dual-layered DVD, there's not much real information on how that space is being utilized (is it multiple versions of the cutscenes? is it uncompressed texture and graphical data? etc.)
Personally, I could care less what format the games used. And I'm not going to get interested in next-gen DVDs until the format war has gone away, or multi-format players are readily available and under $500. I figure that's a good 2 years away.
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Physics, AI, etc. have almost NOTHING to do with disc capacity. These things are dry code, which takes up an insignificant amount of drive space. A good 95% or more of a disc goes into graphics and sound. Code for most contemporary games could still fit in an N64 cartridge. Maybe this is an exaduration, but not by much. All the disc capacity is for is for "pretty". Disc capacity has NO overarching effect on gameplay, WHAT SO EVER. Now, I'm not saying that disc capacity is pointless. Graphics and sound enhance the atmosphere of the game, making it more immersive if used well (which most HD games, I would argue, do not). So if it's gameplay you are concerned about, do not worry, the Wii will probably have the best gameplay (AI, Physics, etc.) since companies are being persuaded to concentrate more on that than "oooh... pretty".
This is coming from a person who thinks that the game with the best graphics, that I've ever seen, is Okami, a PS2 game. I don't believe that most developers have come to terms with the graphical capabilities that they had with the last generation, let alone the current one. Graphics are only as good as the artistic vision of the creators. Although, I will admit that Shadow of the Collosus is one example of a game made painful because the creators surpassed the capabilities of the machine, and the game was increadibly choppy because of it.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
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.
Sony made DVD a standard and Blu-ray will, aside from an unprecedented problem occurring, be the new delivery media for high definition movies.
I definitely agree with you. In fact, so much so I'd like to subscribe to your podcast, could you ship me one on MiniDisc?
'presh.
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.
"Both cost the same" REALLY?
The cheapest standalone Blu-Ray player is $1000, or £950 if you're in the UK like me.
The cheapest standalone HD-DVD player is $500 or £430
The XBox 360 add-on is $200, or £130. The cheapest PS3 is $500, or will be £425 when it eventually turns up here next year.
That's quite extraordinarily wrong.
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