Slashdot Mirror
Playstation 2 delayed again
D4MO writes "Saw
the news that the Playstation 2 will probably be delayed. Apparently, Sony is having a really hard time getting the graphics chips right, and so they will miss their December launch, and probably be in more of a Feb/March range. Sega's Dreamcast, OTOH is out already in a lot of areas."
The proper response to statements like 'Microsoft has never made a bad product' is to burst out laughing. The more people out there 'feeding that meme' the better- it's one thing to make a big argument, but laughter is a wonderful deflator of empty hype, and it's fun, too! :) :)
Here, I'll show you: "Windows 2000 will ship in the year 2000 and deliver great benefits to IT professionals everywhere." *ROTFL*
In extreme cases you might want to go with the Daffy Duck sort of over-the-top Hysterical Laughter... it all depends on just how funny the statement really is, and how serious the person stating it seems
Prediction: the first company that allows open development for its console with make an absolute fortune. Unfortunately, I think they're all too paranoid about losing intellectual property to risk it. Sigh.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Don't you think it's odd that a couple of Japanese Analysts start talking about how the Playstation 2 will be delayed on the very day the Dreamcast comes out?
This "news" about the Playstation 2 is not from Sony. It is purely SEGA FUD.
I'd take this as speculation at best. Has anyone else noticed that Babbage's (at least those near me) have large amounts of Dreamcast stuff, right near a sign which proclaims that the Playstation II release date will be '2001?'. Somehow I smell a fish with the fact that nobody's published release dates seem to mesh at all with Sony's announced schedule.
Personally I loved the Babbage's manager who told me that 'Microsoft is backing Dreamcast, so you know it won't fail. Microsoft has never made a bad product.' I burst out laughing, purchased my copy of Kingpin and made a mental note to never ever shop there again.
Okay, so here's the real scoop on the Sega Dreamcast: it's a joke. To be honest, I was waiting patiently for the release of the Dreamcast system, and now that I've had a chance to play with it...
The system itself is not horrible. It uses a Hitachi SH-4 SuperH RISC at 200mhz, not too bad. The graphics card is a NEC Videologic PowerVR2DC capable "of rendering 3 million polygons per second." The funny part is the modem: a Rockwell HCF-based chipset. Now, don't get me wrong, for a cheap game console it's not too bad. The big problem with Rockwell HCF chipsets are that they have notorious connection problems. Connections over 43k tend to drop packets and drop connection. I hope Sega has thought ahead, because there have been all sorts of problems connecting HCF modems to USR-based modems... In the current version, there is no way to update the modem firmware or the init string.
The next, in a long list of problems, is the browser itself. The "Web Planet" browser is, quite bluntly, a piece of crap. Regardless of what Sega says, it does not handle JAVAscript. Period. And instead of a nice Javascript error, like a normal browser, it dumps raw code onto the screen, which will frighten most users. There are numerous other problems, like the inability to use redirect pages like come.to, and the lack of configurable options.
I like the idea behind Dreamcast, but after playing with one most of this week (yes, my company recieved a handful early.), I've come to the conclusion that Sega missed the mark. With all the hype, it's going to be like the first Playstation all over again, but I see a lot of disappointed users in the future.
For my money, I'll wait until Sony releases the Playstation 2. At least they're waiting and pushing back dates rather than put out a crappy product.
"137!! Why 137!"
I'm not quite sure how Sony could be compared to Microsoft. I seem to remember a time when the only big game consoles around (with regards to sheer popularity at least) were the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. The very notion that anybody would have bought a Genesis puts an interesting light on the idea that American consumers will buy just about any junky thing so long as it has a good advertising campaign (in Japan Sega wasn't even a contender.. Nintendo won hands down). Nintendo simply slipped.. it's their own fault, really. They had the lead, and then they lost it. That's what we call competition.
Sony is still a relative newcomer to the game console arena (well, in my rather skewed perception of time, that is), and Nintendo is not exactly dead. Neither, apparently, is Sega. This hardly qualifies as any kind of monopoly. Sony's in the lead, but it's still anybody's game. Microsoft, on the other hand, has no real competitors as far as the average end-user is concerned. Of course, the recent waves caused by Red Hat's splash into public view may change all that, but for now..
Also, I don't know about most people, but I'm still rather happy with PlayStation classic. It's a good system, and there a lots of good games (and hey, despite the usually horrible endings, who doesn't love the FF series?). I don't see any reason to drop more cash on a Dreamcast. I like using my money for desktop hardware, personally.
Besides, why bother wasting money on a system when it firsts comes out when a few months later the price will drop? I certainly didn't get a PSX when it first came out, and I rather doubt I'll get the sequel as soon as it hits stores. Back when we made the jump from Nintendo to Super Nintendo, that was a different story. We've gotten to a level now, however, where more eye-candy isn't as much of an attention grabber for me anymore.
As for closed consoles..? Well, why bother? If you want to make a real game, you might as well develop it for a real computer system. After all, why limit yourself to a certain hardware configuration? A lot more games are possible (not to mention more fun) with tons more RAM, faster processors, and all the other bells and whistles that are constantly being pushed past their current limits.
~ Kish
Honestly, I don't understand all these comments of "Sega Sucks, Playstation rules!", especially on a forum of "alternative OS users" as Slashdot usually is. What are you really saying? "I don't need to try out the new system, because I already believe in the brand name of the upcoming, super-duper one that has been announced to come out later." Isn't this how Microsoft and all other standard setters use their names and tactics? All this talk about FUD from Sega -- do you really think they're big enough to make up all this negative news on a system when they have enough trouble trying to hawk theirs? If anything, Sony and Nintendo are the ones this time putting the pressure on with their semi-vaporware announcements. It's almost certain that they both will release more powerful systems, but, as everyone here should know, software is the main draw. Dismissing a console because it's not popular brand-wise sounds horribly strange coming from this group. Sega this time has gotten the 3rd party support from Namco, Konami, Capcom, Bioware, Midway, and a lot of others, so the games are here this time, unlike the Saturn. Pledging loyalty to one label -- Sega, Nintendo, Sony -- is exactly why so many people got burned by the Saturn, the N64 (sorta), and so on. If there's anything that remains constant in console games, it's that what you do in the past doesn't count as much as what you do in the present and the future. Computer games follow the same credo -- look at the C&C following when it first arrived compared to its number compared to Starcraft today. This doesn't mean that you should go run out and buy the Dreamcast if there's no game that you like on the system (and I certainly plan to get the PSX2 as well, if it's got some good games), but waiting a year or more for no other reason than a company bias makes everyone a follower, and not their own judge.