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PS4: What Sony Should and Shouldn't Do
donniebaseball23 writes "As a follow-up to his piece on Xbox 720, veteran games journalist Chris Morris has put together some thoughtful advice on what Sony needs to do (and needs to avoid) to ensure that the next generation PlayStation is a success. In particular, Morris notes that Sony must 'look beyond games' to create a fully fledged entertainment hub: 'Nintendo has been pretty adamant that it has little interest in content beyond games. Microsoft seems to be rushing to embrace the set top box world. Sony, though, seems a bit confused about what it wants.'"
Which quite ironically, is pretty much just a snes pad with one extra l/r button with a knee jerk reaction to the n64's analog stick.
Interestingly enough, the PS controllers look like that because before Sony released the PSX, they were working with Nintendo to create a CD-ROM addon for the SNES (much like the Sega CD for the Genesis). Near the end of the project's completion, Nintendo decided to abandon the idea, when infuriated the president of Sony. Not too long afterwards, Sony came out with the PlayStation to rival Nintendo.
Sony released audio CDs that put rootkits on consumer's PCs, without informing them. After being sued for this, they did it again. They also failed their due diligence on security, causing their entire client base to have private data stolen. Combine this with their habit of selling features and then subsequently removing those very features, and I don't understand why *anybody* buys products form Sony.
I will never trust Sony again.
Nice attempt to frame the argument.
But the Wii has sold a lot more consoles then Sony and Microsoft. Also remember that Sony had to significantly redesign it's console to stop it haemorrhaging money and Microsoft has also redesigned it's console as well as various versions (Arcade, Elite).
Wii, 1 production model: 90 million sold.
Xbox360, 4 production models: 66 million sold.
PS3, 2 production models: 55 million sold.
Telling me that sales of the Wii has dropped is simply saying they aren't selling as phenomenally well as they were when it was released, the same thing happened with the Xbox360. This simply indicates it's reached it's saturation point, not an indication of product failure. A slow down in sales after 5 years is normal. The PS3 on the other hand did not experience the majority of its sales after it's redesign.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The reason they abandoned it was because after looking at the fine print all game related profits where the media used was a cd would be going to sony... the profit from games was nintendo's bread and butter income.
Are there any good games for the Wii? I own one but have probably spent less than 4 hours playing on it.
Not sure if trolling, but let me list a few;
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword
Metroid Prime Trilogy
Metroid: Other M
Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure
Rayman Origins
WarioWare: Smooth Moves
All the Mario Parties
Resident Evil 4
Donkey Kong Country Returns
Goldeneye 007
Kirbys Return to Dreamland
Madworld
Muramasa: The Demon Blade
New Super Mario Bros
No More Heroes 1/2
And that's only the stuff I could think off the the top of my head.
> The big joke of the last 3 generations is that Nintendo has put together under-performing hardware
You're overlooking the 400-ton elephant wearing a pink tutu standing over in the corner -- 1080i60. As much as we'd like for it to be true, native 1080pAnything is far from universal. You'd be horrified if you saw the architectural mess inside most mass-market sub-$400 LCD TV controller ASICs -- it makes the parallelport-semi-SCSI-kludged-to-USB trainwreck that evolved with scanners look downright elegant by comparison.
The raw panels themselves can do 24p, 30p, and 60p without drama, but the brain-damaged controllers driving them were value-engineered to just kludge anything besides 720p60 the same way they always have -- they bob it (ie, they treat 1920x1080 16:9 interlaced video as 1920x540 16:9 progressive video, then resample it to 1366x768).
When presented with 1080p24, instead of just natively showing it at 24fps, they stupidly apply 3:2 pulldown to emulate 1080i60 and pass it to the same braindamaged controller. I've seen cheap LCD TVs that somehow managed to end up with weave artifacts out of 1080p30 source. And today's Walmart crap is the semi-high-end from 5 years ago.
Put another way, it's going to be at least another 10 years before you can confidently throw out 1080p60 video and expect butter-smooth artifact-free rendering on the TVs in most living rooms. With current TVs out "in the wild", modes like 1080p24 and 1080p30, let alone 1080p60, are too inconsistently-implemented to risk depending on... and true 1080i60 looks like crap on anything besides a 240hz set that uses oversampling to emulate interlace fade. So we get the least common denominator -- 1080p30 pretending to be 1080i60, that 10-20% of TVs still manage to screw up and butcher.
Of course, 720p60 works well on just about everything. Unfortunately, 720p60 isn't sexy enough for the marketing department. So instead of getting judder-free butter-smooth 1280x720 60fps video without glitches, and with enough filtering to be almost indistinguishable from real-life, we end up with 1080i60 video that looks like crap.
That's the sad truth. 720p60 isn't good enough for the marketing department, 1080i60 rendered AS 1080i60 looks like crap on most TVs. 1080p60 is a fantasy in 94% of the homes in America, 1080p24 is badly-implemented in at least a quarter of the TVs out there, and 5-10% somehow manage to even screw up 1080p30 encoded as fake 1080i60.