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GTAIV Dated to April 29th
Joystiq is reporting that Take-Two has nailed down a final release date for Grand Theft Auto IV . When they delayed the game last year, they said they were aiming for a February to April target, and they're making it ... barely. "If you've checked out the multitude of previews that dropped this week, you'd know that game is looking really, really awesome, so we're counting on Rockstar to hit its date this time around. What more is there to say, really? GTA IV. April 29."
...just to drive everyone insane. ;-)
And a video gamer's best friend, Jack Thompson, files suit against Take Two, Walmart, Microsoft, Sony, Best Buy, and cousin Skippy on April 30th.
In addition to what you said:
:(
1. PC Ports of the games are not only delayed, but also suffer in performance. This has been most visible with 1st gen XBOX with has been a plain PC under the hood and the Celeron 733 powering it, yet the PC ports of XBOX games required 1GHz + processors and much more RAM. Current example is Assasin's Creed which recommends 3GB of RAM!!! No console has that much, yet it work smoothly somehow...
2. They blame piracy and poor sales, but usually PC sales add profits to what's been made on a console. Usually the can be a shared development path for consoles and PC for mainstream engines like Unreal 3. Technically speaking it's more difficult to develop for PS3 and X360 rather than X360 and PC, yet no one admits that.
3. Top end PCs clearly have superior power and better input/output options.
Consoles have the advantage for publishers in the sense that they have much more control over how you use the content, they can extra for any mods or add-ons, but the net result is dumber users who play on their TV but don't know much about technology
Dedicated hardware, drivers, and optimized code make a huge difference when compared with PC games. Windows is designed to work on almost anything, and with almost anything. So you have to remember that Windows needs a LOT of resources just for it's own fat code. Also the game has to be designed to plug into all that. Think about all the 'wasted' hardware. The system bus is completely impractical for gaming because it is designed to take care of much, much more than it needs to do.
Just saying. The closest I come to being a computer engineer is being able to put them together and troubleshoot pre-Vista Windows... so, yeah.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
I think it reads as 'you-mean-due-on', as in, they haven't declared a 'release' date, they've declared an intended release date. We won't know the actual release date until it's actually been released.
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And Top end PCs cost how much?
As PCs have advanced to the latest generation, the hardware is ridiculously overpowered for what the majority of users do (Word processing, Spread sheets, email, web surfing, the occasional video).
That means that, barring mal-ware infection of the OS, most people can use a given system for longer than the old "Its good for two years". Most systems, unless you need to play the latest games, can easily last 4-5 years. So, does it make sense for people to spend money upgrading constantly for a Top End PC, or just going out and buying a console for the price of a Top End video card? (let alone a new processor, motherboard, memory, etc.)
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I think it reads as 'you-mean-due-on'
And, thanks, I was about to look Google up to find out who Ueon is.
You just got troll'd!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
What? No Wii Version? Nothing like beating a hooker by actually swinging the controller.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
> This has been most visible with 1st gen XBOX with has been a plain PC under the hood and the Celeron 733 powering it, yet the PC ports of XBOX games required 1GHz + processors and much more RAM.
There are a few things you are forgetting about the original XBOX
- it had a Geforce 3.5 and even if games used pixel shaders, most games only used a 640x480 res. Given the old tradeoff between flexibility and speed, the console's strength is speed.
- it only had 64 megs of ram, so even with compressed textures, they were low res
- it ran a stripped down NT kernel that didn't chew up tons of megabytes like the desktop version does
- it had a small & fast directX implementation
Another thing to remember is that consoles have relatively poor graphics compared to a PC. 480p is roughly 640x480, imagine running a PC game at that resolution, it'd be awful. Even new gen games like Halo 3 have the much angered not quite 720p resolution. 1300x720 is still not the 1900x1600 or even 1280x1024 that PC games demand. It takes a lot more to push that many more pixels.
Where's the rule that says a game can't be released in April? Like you said, it's a blockbuster. A game like GTA IV will sell 10+ million copies (even in April).
And it was already delayed 6 months (it was originally going to be released in October 2007). October 2007 + 6 month delay = April 2008. My only hope is that it doesn't get delayed again.