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Carmack: Mobile Gaming To Surpass Current Consoles
donniebaseball23 writes "The rate at which hardware iterates in the smartphone and tablet space has allowed the technology to nearly catch up with consoles. It won't be long before we're all carrying small devices more powerful than the PS3, says Doom creator and id Software programming genius John Carmack. Speaking in an interview, he commented, 'It's unquestionable that within a very short time, we're going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles.'"
Even if that's the case, Nintendo still wants no part of it.
http://plasmaoxyd.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/reissack.jpg
...until consoles are ridiculously more powerful than the PS3. PS3's old, dude.
Regardless, Carmack's on the money. The innovation in gameplay that's going on with things like the iPad is nothing short of freaking amazing. It's like the late 80s all over again - suddenly, gameplay is king over bloated budgets and flashy graphics.
...and the same for (most of the) PC market, and given my recent first (very easy) experience with DLNA the same for most "set top" equipment in general.
...at first I was repulsed by the idea, but, while that will nearly eliminate the commodity PC market you cannot eliminate the server market. The "back end" will always need the hardware...and we'll just have to use that. It won't become unavailable, it'll just get a little more pricey...but server-grade hardware never treated me wrong, comparatively.
...and then one day that too will become an app that fits in your pocket...and then we'll revert from the cloud back to individual computing devices...give it 10-20 years and we'll be back to mainframes with a different name...democrats will become republicans will become democrats...disco will return yet again...
Except in special circumstances requiring very heavy lifting (research modeling, professional video/audio production, rendering, heavy duty compiling, etc) I'd imagine our "phones" will be picking up the slack and replacing *everything*...
Sounds funny, yes, but, as I get older this 'cyclical' thing apparently has something going for it.
Considering the current generation of consoles, it's not that hard.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
... who needs game consoles now that everybody has Farmville?
</small_dose_of_sarcasm>
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
the problem is that server hardware pricing has it's prices lowered by the commodity consumer x86 market. if that evaporates, that new core i12 will cost $10000. I dread this day when cpu time/ram/storage are all 'services' one has to rent like utilities, with a complete lack of privacy and control.
I am scared of that, but, I think the 'pro-sumer' market is big enough to prevent prices from getting that high...and some of these tasks, especially the media centric, are not a ready fit to the latency involved in a distributed type service. Of course that latency will decrease over time, but, so long as some of us know that for a small-to-medium level investment we can nearly eliminate that latency there will be a market for it.
I mean, if we as a society have the capacity to produce an SOC capable of unseating a variety of different industry leaders in a small handful of 'one fell swoops' I'd imagine it would be negligible to produce an 'old school' motherboard, north-bridge/southbridge, cpu, ram, slots, buss, etc type system....of course economies of scale (or lack thereof) would come into play...but...if a place like Guitar Center can sell a brand new Fender brand Stratocaster that to today's standard are garbage but would be a wonder of mass-production when the first Fender Stratocasters were made for $49...(once I bought a $69 case and got a Fender Stratocaster for free), well, I think we'll be okay obtaining reasonably priced PC hardware.
Because smart phone batteries are like wall sockets. Not sure if serious?
Provided we don't mind a cell phone with a 12 hour battery life.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
So, he is predicting in 5 years a phone will have the performance of a (by then) 10 year old console. When, big surprise, my current phone is about equal to a console from 10 years ago.
Did John just finally discover Moore's Law?
No, it's not, and what you're saying makes no more sense than asking, "Who needs <your OS of choice> when we all have a text editor?" You're comparing a simplistic product that runs on a platform to a platform, rather than comparing a platform to a platform. A more apt joke would have been, "Who needs game consoles now that Facebook has games?"
Really, all they're saying here is that the hardware platforms that iterate more frequently will eventually outpace the ones that hold still for the better part of a decade, which is no surprise, given advances in miniaturization and power efficiency. And that effect does matter, because contrary to your analogy, not all mobile games are simplistic and mindless click-fests. A small but increasing number of them are decent titles put out by capable teams who can produce games with solid gameplay that stand up well against their console counterparts.
Take Infinity Blade for example. It's a game with simple mechanics that doesn't succumb to being simplistic. It runs on the Unreal 3 engine, looks stunningly beautiful, and works perfectly well on both the current and last-gen iOS devices. If they're putting out stuff like that now, I can't even begin to imagine what sorts of games will be coming out in three years or five years. By then, we'll hopefully be on Generation 8 consoles, but I wouldn't bet against the mobile devices of that day being more powerful than the consoles we have now.
Hell, Data Caps by the major ISP's will prevent this from happening anytime soon...and that's with wired connections.
The wireless carriers still believe they have a right to shove a stick up your ass while they rifle through your wallet taking all the cash and credit cards.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Apart from a throwaway line at the end of the article, this has absolutely nothing to do with cloud computing, or distributed computing - at least not any more than current-gen consoles are "Cloud Computing". It's not even eliminating the commodity PC - it's wondering if it can eventually be miniaturized enough to fit it in your pocket instead of on your desk.
Personally, I think iOS and Android are going to eat the DS' lunch. All they're missing is the interface, and things like this show they're working on it. After that it gets harder. The small form-factor means that it's going to be hard to compete against games designed for large screens, but it could be done eventually - possibly as the article suggests, by having a mobile device act as a game server, to which other mobile devices and a smart TV could connect.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Mobile gaming sucks. Who wants to look at some little 4" (or even 7-10") screen and use wierdo controls. The only thing mobile gaming has going for it is..it's mobile and you can use it to waste time when you don't have access to a real game on a real system.
....while there's still a market for desktop PC/consoles as gaming devices.
Mobile devices are limited by what they are. As long as efficiency of size (mobility) is a defining feature of mobile gaming, they'll probably always be cut down versions of these bigger stationary devices.
Seen it before, I aint so tech savy, but i have yet to find a cellphone i can play heroes og might and magic 3 on.
Found alot of ok wannabe versions of it but never the real deal.
One is that he thinks current gen hardware is "good enough" that there really isn't the need to push much farther. Well if you do believe that, then when phones meet that, they'll be at the level they need to be. I mean we can disagree about what the level is, but I think we can all agree that there is a level hardware will reach that past which there isn't any real gains, for games at least. Perhaps he believes that level is what we have now.
Another is that he's kinda become a mobile fanboy, and a little over focused on them. One of the reasons iDTech 5/Rage has been so delayed is he has spent a lot of time fiddling around with making it work on mobiles. Each additional platform means more work, particularly when they are of a rather different capability like mobiles are. It seems iD show off more of it on mobile phones than they do on anything else.
Remember just because he is a brilliant programmer doesn't mean he doesn't make mistakes, that he doesn't have false beliefs, or that he isn't prone to being a fan of fads, as all the rest of us are.
I got another preduction for Carmack: More people have played MS solitaire then ALL of your games combines. So pack it in dude, you are in a dying industry!
Oh wait, several industries can exist beside each other without really impacting each other? You mean the entry of flash games did NOT kill of other forms of gaming? How odd, I was assured that X will kill Y also know as the iKiller was a sure thing!
One of the things that always suprises me about the handhelds made by Nintendo and Sony is how the games made for them are often so totally unsuitable for the platform. Early GBA games STILL came with save passwords, for those lucky enough not to know the horrors of the early consoles, that means saving your progress was NOT saving a few bits to a storage on your machine but writing down a fairly long string of random characters to be typed, oh wait no keyboard, scrolled back in when you want to resume... on a handheld...
Clearly who ever came up with that NEVER considered the game to be played in few wasted moments on the go. The 3DS is a nice device but who on earth thought this kinda 3D was useful on the go... It is already hard enough to hold the device still in a comfortable chair, in a moving bus? Forget about it.
What does this mean? Well, if many of the 3DS games are meant to be played at home, with some dedication, is this then hardcore gaming? Compared with Angry Birds? I haven't seen to many of the mobile games that are a bit deeper, more what we would consider a full price game (with the note that just because a game charges full price, doesn't make it a full price game). Could it possibly be that people who play mobile games want just a fun game for a few minutes at a time? That other gamers want something else and all this can exist besides each other with attention whores leaping from platform to platform claiming this to be the new king?
For anyone who wants to guess about the future, always consider WoW. An ancient game by now designed for obsolete hardware, yet there is no console equivelant and it still packs in the punters by the millions. Where is WoW in the console? On mobile devices? On handhelds? Until you can explain WoW, you can't make predictions on gaming.
Not because the game itself is so important but what happened to all the predictions for the end of PC-gaming? When everyone who wants a MMO has to have a PC? Even the new FF MMO is still only for the PC (crap as it is) despite its creator otherwise making only console games. It shows different platforms got their own capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Only a fool would declare one to rule them all.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
N-gage thought they could make a mobile phone + gaming...
There's so many features packed into phones now, maybe gaming + phone wasn't ready for the world yet.
The game maker for a cell phone game needs to rely on touch screen, and tilt, or they have no controls.
Nintendo might still go strong on D pad+ buttons, and quality sequels.
I don't see the whole of the phone market going to go D-pad +buttons, and game makers aren't likely gonna make games for a single model of phone. So it makes you wonder...
God spoke to me
The problem is everyone and their dog and their dog's fleas have bought into the Jobsean school of mobile design which means slim = sexy and iSliver batteries for everyone.
No matter how much you shrink things there are certain fundamental rules one simply can't avoid, and one of those is "you push a bunch of textures and physics and advanced 3D models around in real time you ARE gonna suck power"
Now while I'll give old Steve credit, in that he has trained his users pretty damned well to expect to carry a charger with them I really can't see the iExtension cord becoming the big item on everyone's Xmas list, can you? Sure you might eventually squeeze the vector processing and FP math engines down to that size, hell you can probably stick a chip on my pinkie nail that is faster than my 1998 gamer rig. But in the end it don't change the fact that at the end of the day these are supposed to be MOBILE devices, and not in the Alienware "Where's the outlet again?" definition of the word. I can't see folks putting up with 15 minute battery life just so they can have Halo III on their cell phone.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The screen size really doesn't have that much to do with it anymore. With quad core CPUs just about being entry level today all we need is a quick wireless interconnect for a monitor and peripheral, just keep the bad boy in your pocket the whole time. With 1080p being the mainstream standard as far as resolution goes we already have 3 year old hardware that will eat that at idle.
Now while I'll give old Steve credit, in that he has trained his users pretty damned well to expect to carry a charger with them
That's pretty absurd since Apple is the only mobile handset maker that has focused, almost to the exclusion of all else, better battery life. It's why they came out with multitasking after everyone else and even then in a more limited form.
iPhone users are some of the few smartphone users who can easily go a few days without a recharge.
Now it is true gaming sucks down a lot of power, but because the whole system is so efficient in the end the system as a whole still lasts for a long time, and someone playing at home can plug in for truly extended gaming sessions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do agree that you can't keep pushing pixels without draining batteries, but I also think that the recent iDevices have done a good job at allowing developers to push a load of pixels without draining the batteries quickly. Your analysis seems to more be based on the older models, which definitely suffered from the issues you described and did indeed seem to train their users to carry chargers and packs around. I know they certainly trained me to do so!
When I was playing Infinity Blade, which is the application I'd peg as being the biggest power hog, I recall getting around 5-7 hours of battery life on my iPhone 4, and I was never starting from a full charge (it took about an hour and a half to go from the 20% charge warning to off when I ignored it while playing one time). The batteries in iDevices have made some pretty significant leaps in the last generation or two. I routinely go 3-5 days between charges (I typically charge anytime I'm under 50%), and can easily stretch it out quite a bit longer if need be. My older iPhone 3G definitely suffered from the issues you describe, but I understand that the 3GS made some decent strides, and the iPhone 4 definitely doesn't suffer from the battery issues its predecessors did.
Long story short, I agree that batteries are an issue, but I also don't think they're yet as much of an issue as you describe.
I tried playing Pac-Man on an iPhone and gave up in about 3 minutes because even if your thumb slips off the button a little bit you won't notice until Pac-Man refuses to move and is then gang-raped by a pack of ghosts.
Then you need the iCade.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
PC's are fastly more powerful today then any console out there AND they iterate like crazy! Hasn't helped the number of games for that platform has it?
As for looking stunning, take a GOOD hard look at the game you mentioned, visit the home page, scroll down to four screenshots on a row click on the screenshot on the right of a single guy standing in front of a grey wall. Look at the textures of the wall. My god, that is BLURRED! If that same game had appeared on a PC or even a console it would have been slammed for such obsolete rendering. But because you are thinking "oh wow, look at what my phone can do" you forgive rendering artefacts that were solved on better tech years ago.
Yes, phone hardware will continue to get faster but so will other tech. The most powerfull phones can now barely keep up with the older netbooks, except for the memory and HD IO speed and screensize and inputs... but my gaming PC is a bit more powerful then a netbook. I know because my linux desktop is an AMD APU machine and even for desktop tasks, the difference is often very clear. Not enough for me to put up with the energy slurping of a gaming rig for posting on slashdot but still, to many things at once are noticable.
Betting that future hardware will be more powerful then hardware we got now is basically what you are claiming... well, lets see, the PSP and its successor have been presented as being more powerful then their main console brethren, see how well that worked out. Not only wasn't the PSP more powerful then a PS2 its sales were far lower then a device that made no such claim of power.
The biggest gaming market out there is casual games and no, not even FarmVille. Real casual games, that are 100% free to play. Like solitaire either on your PC or phone or in a browser. So? Is Carmack going to do a solitaire game? Future predictions on the industry are near useless. And saying that in the future hardware will be more powerful barely counts even as a prediction as all.
Breaking news: Tomorrow the sun will come UP!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A more apt joke would have been, "Who needs game consoles now that Facebook has games?"
That's what I was implying. I just picked the worst example (in my opinion) of Facebook games I could find.
Really, all they're saying here is that the hardware platforms that iterate more frequently will eventually outpace the ones that hold still for the better part of a decade, which is no surprise, given advances in miniaturization and power efficiency. And that effect does matter, because contrary to your analogy, not all mobile games are simplistic and mindless click-fests. A small but increasing number of them are decent titles put out by capable teams who can produce games with solid gameplay that stand up well against their console counterparts.
I got also this gist too. But as you noted (by your reference to Gen8 console), that shouldn't be a reason to throw mud at Nintendo because still wants no part of it [it = smartphone gaming].
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Games are spread amongst an incredibly diverse range of tastes (unless you're a PC gamer, then your taste is just shoot-em-ups... ;) ), there is no 'only on smartphones' in the future of the video game market. The concept of it even becoming a majority of the marketshare is far-fetched. It's like predicting the death of pizza because cheeseburgers became available cheaply on every city block.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Games are spread amongst an incredibly diverse range of tastes (unless you're a PC gamer, then your taste is just shoot-em-ups... ;) ), there is no 'only on smartphones' in the future of the video game market. The concept of it even becoming a majority of the marketshare is far-fetched. It's like predicting the death of pizza because cheeseburgers became available cheaply on every city block.
A rendering in more serious words of what I was saying (or intended to say).
Games are spread amongst an incredibly diverse range of tastes (unless you're a PC gamer, then your taste is just shoot-em-ups... ;) )
Just finished the Endgame; singularity... but... I did notice your wink.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Power doesn't matter if the input method sucks.
Mobiles will never overtake PC/Console gaming.
Analysts and Apple can claim mobile and iOS as the biggest
gaming platform all they want, but that's like calling PS2 the
king of DVD's. Very few people bought it with that purpose in mind,
and just got it as a side bonus.
Also, Technology getting better over time?
NO WAY!! CALL THE PRESS!
Yeah, but ARM-based servers will become REALLY cheap.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I don't get the point of high-end portables. They're a waste of processing power. Portables are great to kill time when you have to stay in a boring place, but they simply do not make sense as full-fledged consoles.
I mean, for example... the PS Vita, to be generous, is the portable with the largest screen. And what do you get when you cram a hundred million polygons, high-res textures, advanced lighting and shaders, and the kitchen sink, onto its 5-inch screen? Not much, because it's still a goddamn 5-inch screen. It's a waste, it's eye strain. For anything that has to fit in your pocket, highly detailed modern 3D graphics simply go to waste.
Circumcision is child abuse.
That's pretty absurd since Apple is the only mobile handset maker that has focused, almost to the exclusion of all else, better battery life. It's why they came out with multitasking after everyone else and even then in a more limited form.
That is some wacky stuff. iPhones need to be charged every night under normal use. More often than that, if you play games/watch movies/etc which is really the selling point. Whereas many cell phones will last more than a week between charges.
I'm just going by watching my uncle and cousin having to carry a charger with their iPhones because they can't stop pisslefarting around with the things. I swear with those two it is "app" this and "game' that and I don't think those phones are ever not in their hands for a good chunk of their days.
Now am I saying old Steve makes bad kit? No I'm not, I'm just stating the obvious, that if you slam the crap out of a CPU and GPU pisslefarting with the thing constantly it WILL run the batteries out. Jobs may be smart but even he can't defeat the laws of physics and 3D will ALWAYS suck more than 2D and HD will ALWAYS suck more than SD and large textures will ALWAYS suck more than cheesy games with more primitive textures.
This is just common sense folks and if they expect these things to replace portable gaming consoles then they need to be able to get a good 10-12 hours on a charge while going whole hog like the Nintendo ones can, and I just don't see how that is possible while keeping it thin and sleek.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is just common sense folks and if they expect these things to replace portable gaming consoles then they need to be able to get a good 10-12 hours on a charge while going whole hog like the Nintendo ones can, and I just don't see how that is possible while keeping it thin and sleek.
To be fair, and backing up your point, the 3DS only gets about a half dozen hours of usable time on a charge.
My old blackberry bold 9000 and my new blackberry bold 9700 have both easily gone more than a week without a charge when used as pure phones + push data, and at least a couple of days when used more intensly. AND if I wanted to, I could easily buy a bigger battery for my phone. When Apple users talk about battery life, you have to understand that for the same usage, most Blackberry users have pretty much always laughed, and keep laughing. Besides Apple only provides the battery life that fits their design. It's not like they actually care. If they cared, the 6G 160GB classic wouldn't have far superior battery life to the 6.5G 160GB classic.
People are still harping on about this, due to the media hype, but it's bullshit. Mobile phones are great for exactly one thing: mobility. For everything else, they suck. Email? Suck. Web browsing? Suck. Word processing? You're joking. Even for things they do better than the desktop computer, like book reading, the mobile phone sucks for (compared to, say, a Kindle or an actual book). Phones aren't replacing desktop or laptop computers, they're additions.
Gaming especially sucks, as even the best gaming phones have lousy controls compared to an Xbox360 or a desktop PC. There's a reason why only point-and-drool games like Angry Birds have any success on mobile (and conversely little success on the desktop): they are easy enough to play on a touch screen, but far too simple for anyone to care about on the desktop. Then consider playing a game like Assassin's Creed or GTA4 on a touch screen. No can do.
Basically, today's mobile gaming is like gaming in the 1980s on the C64 and the Amiga, just with more colour and sound, and more primitive controls. Unfortunately, good controls -- which in fact include the visuals -- take up a lot of space.
I once read a piece on "Never underestimate your competition" it can come from anywhere. I forgot the exact link, but the crux of the story was alarm clocks.
The article was India specific.
Till around 1999, mobile phones were a rarity, and tariffs were very expensive, and mobiles were expensive too.
People used to buy cheap alarm clocks(working of AA batteries lasting a month or 2).
These used to cost 300-400 INR (8$) and had brisk sales.
Then mobile tariffs well, and so did cost of mobile phones. Everyone had a mobile. At 20$ it was affordable, and even people in lower middle income groups had one.
The alarm clock became obsolete. Nobody wanted an alarm clock, and most companies had to downsize, reduce production, close factories. Many companies even closed down.
These companies competed with each other, and tried to outdo competition.
But suddenly, they faced with a competitor with whom they could not compete.
So is history repeating itself. 5 years down the line your mobile phone costing same as a handheld console, will perform equally, if not better. Only the loyalists will still buy a console.
Its high time console companies realize that they are not just competing with other mobile companies. Its the age of integration. Computers have a big screen, which in current tech is not possible in a mobile, so they are still safe, but as far as handheld consoles go, they are on the road to extinction.
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GSMarena.com has a few battery tests that suggest you're wrong. Examples: Samsung Galaxy S (1 and 2): 82 hours. iPhone4: 68 hours (it does score better in some areas, like web browsing (also video playback, but the comparison is broken due to the iPhone using a reencoded video file)). The Bada powered Samsung Wave gets even better battery life.
One genre of gaming that has been almost exclusively PC is turn based strategy (the empire games like Civilization) but I don't think that its much of a stretch to presume that these touch devices (phones and tablets) will completely take them over.
For this genre a mouse is better than a console controller, but touch is even better than a mouse.
"His name was James Damore."
When will we see augmented reality?
It seems like we should have the technology now but no one is really working on it as far as i've seen, im talking glasses with transparent displays, 3d cameras, gps, motion tracking etc, hooked up to one of these powerful phones by wireless, we can then project information and games onto our surroundings, this will be the next big thing i suspect.
Before we are carrying around mobile devices that are as powerful as the PS3, it's more likely that we're carrying around mobile devices that are slightly more powerful than the ones we currently have at a greatly reduced cost. There's no reason to have a phone as powerful as the PS3. Couple that with the costs and technical challenges of cramming the technology into a phone without becoming hotter than the sun, it really just isn't worth it. It's not that I don't believe it can be done, I just don't see a reason for it.
Who needs the best physics effects for their cellphone video games? Nobody. Carmack's overlooking the fact that mobile gaming -- even in the cases of the DS/PSP offerings -- usually depend more on puzzle games and whatnot. The screens aren't big enough to justify PS3-level processing power even when they go full-blown 3D. At this point better battery life is more important than increased processing power.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Maybe on a big tablet, but Civilization on a touchscreen phone would be painful - who wants to micromanage units and production while stabbing away with a finger and dealing with screen smudges etc? A stylus interface might make it more attractive, and I have to admit when I'm buying mobile games (for the NDS) this is the type I prefer (Might and Magic, 40k Squad Command, Civ, etc), but given the choice of a big screen and a better control interface I'll always go for a PC/console version over the mobile (case in point, this week I've played Might and Magic Clash of Heroes and Civ Rev on the 360 and Dawn of War 2 on the PC even though I own the mobile equivalent of all three).
The problem is everyone and their dog and their dog's fleas have bought into the Jobsean school of mobile design which means slim = sexy and iSliver batteries for everyone.
No matter how much you shrink things there are certain fundamental rules one simply can't avoid, and one of those is "you push a bunch of textures and physics and advanced 3D models around in real time you ARE gonna suck power"
Now while I'll give old Steve credit, in that he has trained his users pretty damned well to expect to carry a charger with them I really can't see the iExtension cord becoming the big item on everyone's Xmas list, can you? Sure you might eventually squeeze the vector processing and FP math engines down to that size, hell you can probably stick a chip on my pinkie nail that is faster than my 1998 gamer rig. But in the end it don't change the fact that at the end of the day these are supposed to be MOBILE devices, and not in the Alienware "Where's the outlet again?" definition of the word. I can't see folks putting up with 15 minute battery life just so they can have Halo III on their cell phone.
This is exactly what will hold it back. Until someone invents a better battery mobile gaming will always suffer a huge handicap.
until console makers put out the next-next gen, handheld phones will have gone way beyond the 'next'.
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Even when mobile devices are more powerful than the PS3, they will still have absolutely horrible controls. And because of that, they will never be good for anything more than lightweight casual games.
How come there are all these stories this week about how powerful mobile devices are? Anyone with half a brain knows that power is only part of the equation.
Yeah you hit a nerve here. I don't understand with the obsession for tiny featherweight devices that can hardly last a day under medium usage. My 2004-2008 era devices- blackberries and treos- could all last literally for days with a single charge. Now, when I wake up in the morning after forgetting to charge my iPhone, I curse myself and scramble to think about where I am going to be during the day that I can hook it to charge it.
These tiny things are ergonomic nightmares as well. I can type on my bberry all day, but tapping out more than two text messages on my iPhone makes my hands hurt. I actually bought the bulkiest protective case I could find so the iphone actually has some bulk in my hands. I get how being ultra-thin adds to the sexiness- its a damn good looking product. But at the same time, I would rather have double the thickness and more battery life.
Those using their mobile device as a gaming platform will not have a problem charging every day, if need be.
screen to small and controls suck for just about any FPS game. Now poor controls are ok to get by for TBS games but can be better.
Forget about having a good driving game with phone controls.
hell you can probably stick a chip on my pinkie nail that is faster than my 1998 gamer rig
That has already happened. (If you measure only the chip, not the package). I mean, 1998 is only the 300-550mhz era with voodoo2 graphics and maybe 128 MB of RAM. Smartphone chips are already dual core 1ghz beasties with a GPU built in. The quad core ARM supposedly coming out by the end of the year performs similarly to a desktop from 2006 (at the earliest. it might have been a year later, i forget exactly which core 2 duo it was compared to).
And the ARM chips still only draw 1 watt. You can game for a few hours on one, you're not stuck at 15 minutes.
Yeah but I predict the 3DS is this gen's virtual boy. I have several people that picked one up and they have all said after the 3D novelty wears off they turned off the 3D as keeping their heads in the right position gave them neck strain. When I heard that all I could think of was virtual boy and how it had a timer so you'd be warned to walk away!
So I don't think we should compare to the 3DS but the original DS and DSi, which IIRC was 10-12 hours on a battery. And finally lets not forget we are talking about a PHONE here, not something you want to carry around dead in your pocket. If the games kill the battery and everybody starts missing calls I can see the popularity take a nosedive but quick when it comes to gaming on the things.
But like I said while old Steve makes nice gear even he can't defeat the laws of physics, even though some here seem to think he can. Small battery+sleek and sexy design+ HD+ 3D+ pushing big textures = dead battery but quick. So unless we abandon Steve's sleek and sexy design aesthetic (doubtful) I just don't see folks willing to put up with sub 3 hour battery lives to play HD games on a phone. I mean having Halo III in your pocket would be nice, but not if it costs you your job because your boss can't call or gets your balls in a sling because your GF can't get a hold of you.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Cheap, but locked down to run only those server applications approved by the server manufacturer.
Carmack's prediction will hold true for the "current" generation of consoles ... but, the console industry isn't standing still - sure they have longer cycles, but when the next cycle comes it's normally a massive leap forward!
Gamespot lists around 15,000 titles available for PC
How many of them actually work on a modern PC, vs. games that run only in DOS, Windows 3, or Windows 98? And how many of the newer games won't run on a brand-new PC with an Intel GMA? The "PC" platform doesn't guarantee compatibility, unlike where a "DS" game will work on any DS system.
XBox/360
Likewise. I seem to remember reading that only about half of the games for the Xbox work on the Xbox 360's Xbox emulator.
PC's are fastly more powerful today then any console out there
My Wii handles four players at once, all on one system. (Game: Super Smash Bros. Brawl). There's something about the PC, on the other hand, that discourages developers from optimizing their code for four players.
AND they iterate like crazy!
This also has two downsides: PC game developers don't want to lose sales when the majority of the audience owns a PC too old to meet the game's system requirements, and it costs a lot of money for a small indie developer to buy several years' worth of hardware for compatibility and performance testing.
Look at the textures of the wall. My god, that is BLURRED!
</sarcasm>So is the foliage behind Josefina. It's called bokeh.</sarcasm>
The most powerfull phones can now barely keep up with the older netbooks [...] but my gaming PC is a bit more powerful then a netbook.
They make games for toys like the Nintendo DS. They make games for phones. And they make games for high-end PCs. So why don't I ever hear about games specifically designed for netbooks and the nettop HTPCs that share their chipsets?
What I'm talking about is something like [Benss BX-98 DV 8GB Mp6 Player - 4.3" Camera Mp6 Player - Beats PSP - 8gb-PMP-BX98]
MP6 player? I thought the rest of the world was still on MPEG-4 players like the iPod touch and Android-powered phones. Let me guess: they skipped the model number of a well-known submachine gun.
So I check out the specs:
This covers NES, Game Boy Advance (GBA), and Sega Genesis (SMD/BIN) games, and by extension also Game Boy, Game Gear, and ColecoVision games through FluBBa's emulators that run on GBA. But what 32/64-bit platforms are they talking about? How accurate is the emulation of the systems that are emulated? And does it let one develop and share native games? Without native games, it seems like a lot of power is being wasted.
You wrote:
a single $10 8gb MicroSD will load the thing up with literally thousands of great classics like Castlevania and Eternal Champions right in your pocket.
Say I have the lawfully made cartridges of "great classics like Castlevania and Eternal Champions". (Some people actually collect such, though not I.) What do you recommend I use to dump cartridges now that Retrode is sold out and there are no plans to make an NES adapter for it even if they do start making more units?
what with two kids BDays and my GFs next month it seems my summers are spent buying prezzies for everybody but me :-(
You could always go the Jehovah's Witnesses route: stop celebrating birthdays and instead give presents throughout the year. ;-)
If a genre is served by consoles, isn't it equally served by a PC with USB gamepads plugged in?
I understand that some games work better on a couch with a big TV and some friends
TVs made in the past five years have VGA and HDMI in. PCs made in the past twenty years have VGA and/or DVI/HDMI out. So how would a PC not work "on a couch with a big TV and some friends"?
Not really comparable. They are different games, for the most part.
It's like saying Facebook games are played ore the consoles. true, but it doesn't really mean anything.
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I would have KILLED to get my Amiga or C64 to look as good and my Nexus S.
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Or it's just a dynamic cluster of mobile devices.
IT's not cyclic, it's a pendulum slowing towards a middle ground. And the cloud has very little to do with mainframes. What we have now is decentralized storage, that can also be centralized(your PC) and it's mostly run locally.
What we have now isn't one or the other, it's some of both.
Easy access to all are data wirelessly pretty much means we won't have an app for that because it isn't needed. We will have case whey data on the cloud will need to be downloaded for a bit, but never everything.
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Those using their mobile device as a gaming platform will not have a problem charging every day, if need be.
People have to do that already. If there is to be any vast improvement in mobile games people are going to have to recharge more than once a day.
...the consoles may very well become portable. It may already be feasible to put an HDMI out on an iPad and give it wireless bluetooth controllers. On the road, just use it as a portable gaming system - no tradeoff for performance/ portability/ style of play. I'd be very surprised if that screen on the Wii U's controller, and the sheer SIZE of the thing doesn't also include at least a processor of sorts to enable this very thing.
I have never bothered to buy a console let alone play games on my phone.
I have played PC games for what must be close to 30 years now and will continue to do so.