When it comes to games the difference between a gimick and a revolution is largely dependant on execution. I have seen many of the 'greatest games of the year' be reviewed so well based on the inclusion of features which were readily availabe in a (much worse) game that was released 18 months earlier; in most of these games these features are passed off as gimmicks.
Whether the Wii ends up being as successful as it can be (both in terms of critical and ecconomical success) depends largely on whether they can convince large (high quality) third party developers to focus on their system; regardless of this I suspect that Nintendo will provide enough games that show of the potential of the system.
If you wanted Pixel Perfect Accuracy (for a light gun game as an example) it would be pretty easy to calibrate in game. Essentially all it would require would be for a person to shoot at what they thought were the corners of the screen and then at the center (like you used to with certain light gun games); from that information a game should be able to determine the size, shape and placement of your TV compared to the senser bar. It wouldn't be perfect (it would probably screw up if you moved the sensor bar mid game) but would be good enough for most situations.
But isn't the whole point that the Wii Remote doesn't have the learning curve that came with a joystick controller? Otherwise how would I convince my non-gamer relatives to pick it up as opposed to my wireless X-Box 360 controller?
That is the point, but (from what I have seen) it is not the non-gamers that have been having problems with the Wiimote; mostly I have seen hardcore gamers complain that "I used to own people in Halo 2 and I can't (automagically) own people in Red-Steel".
To be completely blunt, most of the control problems I have seen people have with the Wii have been problems with the user, not the interface. Much like the analogue stick (or the keyboard mouse before that) it will take a little time to get used to the input device.
I remember (back in the day) watching people flail around in Goldeneye or crash in Mario Kart simply by making too large of a gesture on the analogue stick; after you had a few games under your belt these problems went away. The Wii is fantastic, but it is a new way to control games; an input method that you don't have 20 years of experience using.
Re:Forgot another method of Disassembly
on
The Wii Disassembled
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· Score: 2, Insightful
On Smashmyps3.com video the people in line were horrified, they almost cried. The people in the Wii line were excited and said "Thats awesome!"
Thats because very few people who were buying a Wii were planning on spending this month's rent on a get rich quick scheme; also, as I noticed on Sunday, most of the people who didn't get a Wii were pretty optimistic about getting one before Christmas so there isn't the panic that the PS3 had about it.
RTFsummary. 1 million units IN THE U.S. Probably a lot more worldwide, especially in Japan.
The fact is that most people have claimed "1 Million Units in North America" and this is specifically about the US. The Wii was Launched in North America on Sunday with approximately 10% of the systems going to Canada; in order for 1 Million units to be sold in the United States at this ration 1.11 Million units would have to be sold in North America. If you assumed 1 Million units shipped up front, with 100,000 each following week (all of which sold out) it would be sometime in your third shipment (second restock) that you'd break 1 Million units sold in the United States; completely on track with his statement.
Nintendo has already shipped more units than the PS3 (though we don't know how many), and has now cut their estimates to 2 million by the end of the year
The only numbers Nintendo has ever claimed was 4 Million units sold worldwide by the end of 2006; North America is less than half the market yet Nintendo expects North America to sell half of their anticipated Worldwide numbers, which means either Nintendo is on track or Nintendo is being optimistic.
Yeah, we just had a giant thread with massive number of people all claiming 1 million+ launch sales for the Wii. So much for that crazy talk. Nintendo can't be anywhere near a million units sold at launch if they are a week and a half away from reaching that target.
We know that Nintendo has said that they expect to sell (not Ship) 1 Million units before early December; this would mean that Nintendo has either shipped 1 Million units already or expects to meet that number soon (say, this week). Now, it's pretty safe to assume that Nintendo is being pretty conservative on their sales because they have not recieved any confirmation on how many units have been sold so far; they know that it sold well, and is in a virtual sell-out position but don't have exact numbers yet. (You virtually sell out when 90%-95% of your systems have sold so it is unaviable in most places)
Until we have confirmation (from Nintendo or NPD) there is very little that can be said about how many units were sold yesterday; all we can say is there were far more Wii sold than PS3 sold this month.
Did he actually tell us how many units were shipped? Because I didn't see that anywhere... We did (however) hear that they intended to sell 1 Million by early December; if they had launched with more than 1 Million units already this could be trivially true. The fact is that there are reports of the Wii selling out and I have yet to hear of a store that had more PS3s than Wiis (in fact I have yet to hear of a store that had less than twice as many Wii units as PS3 units).
I was pretty careful not to say "Second Best Game of All Time" because it is difficult to really determing what is the "best" game...
I was (mostly) trying to point out that his comment about the "main system seller getting bad reviews" was false being that the lowest score is 88% from Gamespot who generally have lower scores than most sites.
Oh a forum... With such a well respected resource how could I ever doubt you...
The fact is that until a problem is reported as being a problem from a well respected resource it is probably (mostly) lies. Suppose 0.1% of Wiis have problems and that Nintendo Shipped 1 Million units (for nice round numbers), this means that 1,000 users have problems; being early adopters they are more likely to access the internet and post asking for help on a forum so there is 500 forum posts. 0.1% is an acceptable failure rate yet seems to have a lot of problems because of there are a lot of forum posts.
Nintendo planned on shipping 2 million for launch but those numbers were more than halved - with estimates so far in the 600-800k range that actually made it to launch. Nintendo hasn't made it known how many they are going to ship between launch and the end of the year.
Where is your link Mr Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll?
Nintendo had always wanted to "Sell 4 Million Units Worldwide By January 1st 2007" which would require an, estimated, 2 Million units sold in North America; there were no reports that Nintendo planned on shipping 2 Million units on the first day just that they needed to sell them in the first 6 weeks.
The PS3 has shipped 400k as of launch confirmed by Sony. And there are 600k additional units in the process of being sent by air from the Asian manufacturing plants between launch and the end of the year.
Link please?
I have seen tons of articles online talking to EB/Gamestop (and other retailers) who claimed that Sony reduced their shipment to them at the last minute and no confirmation of the sales numbers; there is also confirmation that Sony undershipped (by 12%) to Japan. There were tons of reports in October that Nintendo had millions of units ready for launch so why would they undersupply? On the other hand, there were tons of reports that Sony started to manufacture late and has been having tons of problems.
Middle of December the retail sales tracking numbers will be out and everyone will know for certain. But whatever the actual numbers are, Nintendo is not going to have any huge lead over the PS3 in US sales.
Please log in so you can be held accountable for lying.
I don't think that anyone really knows, but (as a guestimate) I would say that there were about 4 times as many Wii and PS3s.
On Friday/Saturday I called several Futureshop, Bestbuy, Toys R US, Zellers and Superstores to find out how many systems they had, how many had been pre-ordered, and how many PS3s they had (as a comparison). The Futureshop/Bestbuy stores I called had between 60 and 100 units each (compared to 12-20 PS3s), The walmarts had between 40 and 80 units (compared to 8 to 15 PS3s), the Toys R US stores had 50 to 100 units (compared to 5 to 10 PS3s) and the Zellers/Superstores had 15 to 30 units (compared to 5 to 10 PS3s).
My numbers could be off a bit (I don't exactly remember the numbers) but the message from all of the stores was the same; they had far more Wii then they had of any previous system at launch and they expected to have several early in the morning. When I started driving around at 6:00am looking for a good line I started to think that the managers underestimated the demand. I (personally) would be shocked if the Wii had less than 3 times as many units available as the PS3, and wouldn't be too suprised if they had 5 times as many units.
Third, Wii games are getting slammed in reviews. Even their main system seller game is getting so fairly negative reactions and reviews.
Yeah its only the best reviewed game of the year with an average review score of 97% after 16 reviews (gamerankings.com); if it can maintain that average over 4 more reviews it will only be the second best reviewed game of all time (second only to The Legend of Zelda:OoT).
Second, the Wii appears to be having huge numbers of problems. Not the insane failure rate/dead consoles fiasco Microsoft had with the 360s, but huge numbers of minor to medium problems. Dead/flakey controllers seem to be very common, networking problems, disc read errors, problems updating the Wii software, and a fair number of DOA Wiis.
Link?
First the number of consoles actually shipped to NA appears to be dramatically lower than promised. Nintendo gave out new estimates for NA shipment plans for up to middle of January and they sound about half of what was promised. Only about 2 million units instead of 4. The massive lead in sales people thought Nintendo would have over Sony doesn't look like it will happen with Sony at 400k with the initial shipment and 600k in the process of being air shipped by Christmas. Nintendo appears to be around 800 from estimates so far. Nowhere near the massive installed base advantage they were hoping for.
First off, Link?
Secondly, every store I called on Friday/Saturday (to determine where I needed to go to get my Wii) had between 3 to 8 times as many Wiis as they had PS3s (with a guestimated average of 4 times as many units); the lowest ratio of Wii to PS3 was at the store I went to which had 5 PS3s and 15 Wii. I could see that my city being a little disproportionate, but if the PS3 sold 400,000 systems I expect that Nintendo had (at least) 1.2 Million.
I have however heard the PS3 undersupplied, which would make sense if Nintendo Shipped 1 Million Wii and the PS3 only had 250,000 units shipped.
I'm actually quite curious as to who was responsible for this... whether Nintendo didn't have enough created or whether stores saw this "Optional" add on and simple didn't think that many people would want one.
What I found a little odd (in my Nunchuck hunt yesterday) was how empty the Wii sections were; there were usually 1 or 2 copies of Zelda (which I heard shiped 1 for every system, which means that some of the "Moms" who bought the system didn't buy a game) and nothing else. In contrast, last year when I checked out the XBox 360 sections (and the PS3 sections this weekend) there was (at least) one of every item/game on the shelf.
His first specific criticism is that there's no cable to hook up a PS3 to an HD TV. This is simply incorrect. Sony includes a cable that works fine. It doesn't do HD, but it does hook up and let you use the system. This kind of untruth is to be expected from the NY Times, which is more about an agenda than about accurately describing the factual situation.
I think the point was how odd of a statement Sony is making with the PS3...
"HDTV is the way of the future! there is not point in sticking with your crappy SDTV! We are so much better than the XBox 360 because we have HD-Movies out of the box and can produce better HD graphics. Included in the box is one SD cable!"
I understand why it was done (that 1/6 homes have a HDTV which could require component, DVI or HDMI input whereas every TV supports RCA input) but it seems like an odd statement.
There's a lot of "I like the Xbox360 better" in this review. Ok, great. Good luck with that. But this is supposed to be a PS3 review, not a console buying guide that compares the different features. Buy a 360 if you want one. I hear they're great. But "the PS3 is not an XBOX360" is not a valid criticism
Outside of serious artistic analysis you always will see a bit of this, with "hardware" if they can compare products they will; most Zune reviews will comment on how it stacks to the iPod, most car reviews will compare it to other cars in its class, and every electronic gadget will be compared to similar gadgets. Is it the appropriate way of doing it? No, but it is common.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is an extremely useful review and 1 is a completely false misleading and poorly written bird-cage liner, I'd give this review a 3.5. That's pretty good for the NY Times.
If you dislike the stories, why don't you find a several positive stories from major news sites and submit them... I'm certain that if you had 4 or 5 major news sites that were very positive about the PS3 it would get posted. The fact is there is a lot to criticize Sony about how they have handled the PS3 so far, and there isn't that much to congratulate them on. It doesn't mean the PS3 sucks, but if someone doesn't point out the flaws with the system Sony can't fix them.
Honestly, I expect there will be a story on the Wii today when a decent story (with more information than every gamer already has) comes up. Every gamer already knows that the Wii launced on Sunday, sold out on pre-orders and people who were outside the store when it opened, had far more units than the PS3, and that most people were buying it to play games on it.
What most people want to know is how many systems were actually sold, when there will be another shipment and when I can get some nunchucks for my wiimotes...
I admit now that Wiimote and nunchuck seperate was dumb... I need nunchucks... will kill for some nunchucks...
If you want to see someone disapointed give them exactly twice as much stuff for exactly twice the price... If you want to see someone excited give them exactly half as much stuff for half the price... I'm not sure if it is human nature, but most people think in the "Super Size It" mentality in which you pay a small ammount more (10%) for a dramatic improvement.
What this means for the Playstation is that they needed to deliver a dramatic improvement over the XBox 360 for the $100/$200 extra cost up front in order to meet people's expectations. I haven't used the PS3 yet so I don't know whether they did, but I suspect that anywhere they're lacking will be a Huge issue to many people and where they're equal to or better than the XBox 360 will be seen as a Small benefit.
I could be wrong but even if that is true, I don't think that developers would use it in the way (many) people would think that it would be used...
If there was a speed (or quality) increase by running different versions of a game (that used all the same game assets) then I'm positive that developers would produce 2 versions of the exact same game (which would involve re-writing a small portion of the engine) inorder to take advantage of the benefits.
On the other hand if there is little benefit of producing a Direct X 10 game that uses the same assets as you're currently using on the Direct X 9 version of the game I'm positive that (most) developers would stick to producing the Direct X 9 version of the game because it would be useable on the most systems.
I love WoW but think that the ability to be remarkably successful by using a bot demonstrates one of the biggest design flaws of the game (and the entire MMORPG genre as a whole). MMORPGs require very little thought or skill and most of the content is not worth seeing; killing 100,000 monsters that react in (pretty much) the exact same way in order to get to the point were you have 'Finished the game' only to have to kill 100,000 mosters that react in exactly the same way to get all the leet loot.
I recognize the technical difficulty of producing intelligent (or atleast different) mobs, but until you have to be reasonably intelligent to survive these encounters a bot will be successful.
I keep hearing more and more that most games are now being designed with today's $500 PC in mind rather than tomorow's $2000 PC; the reason for this is that the number of people who are spending massive ammounts of money upgrading their PC is declining (as is the rate of upgrades). I can't imagine that many developers are really all that focused on taking advantage of Shader-Model 4.0, so I don't really see that much of a push to switch to Vista.
BTW. I'm not saying that no developers are interested in the fancy new features, but that developers who can not bank on having 1 Million people upgrade their PC to play their game are not that interested in the fancy new features. The Unreal/Doom engines will probably be modified to take advantage of DirectX 10, but (many) developers will probably stick to the Unreal 2/Doom 3 engine until they can justify the upgrade.
Also I would say the extent of lines are an indicator as well - when you have 1000+ people lined up at a Sony store, that indicates a greater demand among the general populace as you take those numbers as a percentage of interest.
Just as a hypothetical situation, do you think those 1000 people would have still been interested in the PS3 had Sony had released a much larger supply (say 2 Million units as an number)?
Personally, I think 1/4 of those people would have still shown up because they wanted a PS3 and were willing to pay $600 for one; the rest of the people were there because they could spend $600 today and sell the PS3 for $2,500 tomorow (or at least that is what they think).
Tremendous demand is better reflected in eBay prices than in it being sold out (which means nothing because they are so few in number).
I do think that there are tons of people want a PS3, and some people are willing to pay anything to get one, but I also think that there is a lot of dishonesty on eBay right now.
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to games the difference between a gimick and a revolution is largely dependant on execution. I have seen many of the 'greatest games of the year' be reviewed so well based on the inclusion of features which were readily availabe in a (much worse) game that was released 18 months earlier; in most of these games these features are passed off as gimmicks.
Whether the Wii ends up being as successful as it can be (both in terms of critical and ecconomical success) depends largely on whether they can convince large (high quality) third party developers to focus on their system; regardless of this I suspect that Nintendo will provide enough games that show of the potential of the system.
If you wanted Pixel Perfect Accuracy (for a light gun game as an example) it would be pretty easy to calibrate in game. Essentially all it would require would be for a person to shoot at what they thought were the corners of the screen and then at the center (like you used to with certain light gun games); from that information a game should be able to determine the size, shape and placement of your TV compared to the senser bar. It wouldn't be perfect (it would probably screw up if you moved the sensor bar mid game) but would be good enough for most situations.
But isn't the whole point that the Wii Remote doesn't have the learning curve that came with a joystick controller? Otherwise how would I convince my non-gamer relatives to pick it up as opposed to my wireless X-Box 360 controller?
That is the point, but (from what I have seen) it is not the non-gamers that have been having problems with the Wiimote; mostly I have seen hardcore gamers complain that "I used to own people in Halo 2 and I can't (automagically) own people in Red-Steel".
To be completely blunt, most of the control problems I have seen people have with the Wii have been problems with the user, not the interface. Much like the analogue stick (or the keyboard mouse before that) it will take a little time to get used to the input device.
I remember (back in the day) watching people flail around in Goldeneye or crash in Mario Kart simply by making too large of a gesture on the analogue stick; after you had a few games under your belt these problems went away. The Wii is fantastic, but it is a new way to control games; an input method that you don't have 20 years of experience using.
On Smashmyps3.com video the people in line were horrified, they almost cried. The people in the Wii line were excited and said "Thats awesome!"
Thats because very few people who were buying a Wii were planning on spending this month's rent on a get rich quick scheme; also, as I noticed on Sunday, most of the people who didn't get a Wii were pretty optimistic about getting one before Christmas so there isn't the panic that the PS3 had about it.
I'd mod you up if I had points ...
RTFsummary. 1 million units IN THE U.S. Probably a lot more worldwide, especially in Japan.
The fact is that most people have claimed "1 Million Units in North America" and this is specifically about the US. The Wii was Launched in North America on Sunday with approximately 10% of the systems going to Canada; in order for 1 Million units to be sold in the United States at this ration 1.11 Million units would have to be sold in North America. If you assumed 1 Million units shipped up front, with 100,000 each following week (all of which sold out) it would be sometime in your third shipment (second restock) that you'd break 1 Million units sold in the United States; completely on track with his statement.
Nintendo has already shipped more units than the PS3 (though we don't know how many), and has now cut their estimates to 2 million by the end of the year
The only numbers Nintendo has ever claimed was 4 Million units sold worldwide by the end of 2006; North America is less than half the market yet Nintendo expects North America to sell half of their anticipated Worldwide numbers, which means either Nintendo is on track or Nintendo is being optimistic.
Yeah, we just had a giant thread with massive number of people all claiming 1 million+ launch sales for the Wii. So much for that crazy talk. Nintendo can't be anywhere near a million units sold at launch if they are a week and a half away from reaching that target.
We know that Nintendo has said that they expect to sell (not Ship) 1 Million units before early December; this would mean that Nintendo has either shipped 1 Million units already or expects to meet that number soon (say, this week). Now, it's pretty safe to assume that Nintendo is being pretty conservative on their sales because they have not recieved any confirmation on how many units have been sold so far; they know that it sold well, and is in a virtual sell-out position but don't have exact numbers yet. (You virtually sell out when 90%-95% of your systems have sold so it is unaviable in most places)
Until we have confirmation (from Nintendo or NPD) there is very little that can be said about how many units were sold yesterday; all we can say is there were far more Wii sold than PS3 sold this month.
Did he actually tell us how many units were shipped? Because I didn't see that anywhere ... We did (however) hear that they intended to sell 1 Million by early December; if they had launched with more than 1 Million units already this could be trivially true. The fact is that there are reports of the Wii selling out and I have yet to hear of a store that had more PS3s than Wiis (in fact I have yet to hear of a store that had less than twice as many Wii units as PS3 units).
I was pretty careful not to say "Second Best Game of All Time" because it is difficult to really determing what is the "best" game ...
I was (mostly) trying to point out that his comment about the "main system seller getting bad reviews" was false being that the lowest score is 88% from Gamespot who generally have lower scores than most sites.
Oh a forum ... With such a well respected resource how could I ever doubt you ...
The fact is that until a problem is reported as being a problem from a well respected resource it is probably (mostly) lies. Suppose 0.1% of Wiis have problems and that Nintendo Shipped 1 Million units (for nice round numbers), this means that 1,000 users have problems; being early adopters they are more likely to access the internet and post asking for help on a forum so there is 500 forum posts. 0.1% is an acceptable failure rate yet seems to have a lot of problems because of there are a lot of forum posts.
So yes, I still want a REAL source.
Nintendo planned on shipping 2 million for launch but those numbers were more than halved - with estimates so far in the 600-800k range that actually made it to launch. Nintendo hasn't made it known how many they are going to ship between launch and the end of the year.
Where is your link Mr Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll?
Nintendo had always wanted to "Sell 4 Million Units Worldwide By January 1st 2007" which would require an, estimated, 2 Million units sold in North America; there were no reports that Nintendo planned on shipping 2 Million units on the first day just that they needed to sell them in the first 6 weeks.
The PS3 has shipped 400k as of launch confirmed by Sony. And there are 600k additional units in the process of being sent by air from the Asian manufacturing plants between launch and the end of the year.
Link please?
I have seen tons of articles online talking to EB/Gamestop (and other retailers) who claimed that Sony reduced their shipment to them at the last minute and no confirmation of the sales numbers; there is also confirmation that Sony undershipped (by 12%) to Japan. There were tons of reports in October that Nintendo had millions of units ready for launch so why would they undersupply? On the other hand, there were tons of reports that Sony started to manufacture late and has been having tons of problems.
Middle of December the retail sales tracking numbers will be out and everyone will know for certain. But whatever the actual numbers are, Nintendo is not going to have any huge lead over the PS3 in US sales.
Please log in so you can be held accountable for lying.
Either log in, post links, or fuck off Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll ...
...
People end up wasting their mod points on your stupidity
I don't think that anyone really knows, but (as a guestimate) I would say that there were about 4 times as many Wii and PS3s.
On Friday/Saturday I called several Futureshop, Bestbuy, Toys R US, Zellers and Superstores to find out how many systems they had, how many had been pre-ordered, and how many PS3s they had (as a comparison). The Futureshop/Bestbuy stores I called had between 60 and 100 units each (compared to 12-20 PS3s), The walmarts had between 40 and 80 units (compared to 8 to 15 PS3s), the Toys R US stores had 50 to 100 units (compared to 5 to 10 PS3s) and the Zellers/Superstores had 15 to 30 units (compared to 5 to 10 PS3s).
My numbers could be off a bit (I don't exactly remember the numbers) but the message from all of the stores was the same; they had far more Wii then they had of any previous system at launch and they expected to have several early in the morning. When I started driving around at 6:00am looking for a good line I started to think that the managers underestimated the demand. I (personally) would be shocked if the Wii had less than 3 times as many units available as the PS3, and wouldn't be too suprised if they had 5 times as many units.
Third, Wii games are getting slammed in reviews. Even their main system seller game is getting so fairly negative reactions and reviews.
Yeah its only the best reviewed game of the year with an average review score of 97% after 16 reviews (gamerankings.com); if it can maintain that average over 4 more reviews it will only be the second best reviewed game of all time (second only to The Legend of Zelda:OoT).
Second, the Wii appears to be having huge numbers of problems. Not the insane failure rate/dead consoles fiasco Microsoft had with the 360s, but huge numbers of minor to medium problems. Dead/flakey controllers seem to be very common, networking problems, disc read errors, problems updating the Wii software, and a fair number of DOA Wiis.
Link?
First the number of consoles actually shipped to NA appears to be dramatically lower than promised. Nintendo gave out new estimates for NA shipment plans for up to middle of January and they sound about half of what was promised. Only about 2 million units instead of 4. The massive lead in sales people thought Nintendo would have over Sony doesn't look like it will happen with Sony at 400k with the initial shipment and 600k in the process of being air shipped by Christmas. Nintendo appears to be around 800 from estimates so far. Nowhere near the massive installed base advantage they were hoping for.
First off, Link?
Secondly, every store I called on Friday/Saturday (to determine where I needed to go to get my Wii) had between 3 to 8 times as many Wiis as they had PS3s (with a guestimated average of 4 times as many units); the lowest ratio of Wii to PS3 was at the store I went to which had 5 PS3s and 15 Wii. I could see that my city being a little disproportionate, but if the PS3 sold 400,000 systems I expect that Nintendo had (at least) 1.2 Million.
I have however heard the PS3 undersupplied, which would make sense if Nintendo Shipped 1 Million Wii and the PS3 only had 250,000 units shipped.
I'm actually quite curious as to who was responsible for this ... whether Nintendo didn't have enough created or whether stores saw this "Optional" add on and simple didn't think that many people would want one.
What I found a little odd (in my Nunchuck hunt yesterday) was how empty the Wii sections were; there were usually 1 or 2 copies of Zelda (which I heard shiped 1 for every system, which means that some of the "Moms" who bought the system didn't buy a game) and nothing else. In contrast, last year when I checked out the XBox 360 sections (and the PS3 sections this weekend) there was (at least) one of every item/game on the shelf.
I meant to say selling them seperate ... sometimes I type faster than I think ...
His first specific criticism is that there's no cable to hook up a PS3 to an HD TV. This is simply incorrect. Sony includes a cable that works fine. It doesn't do HD, but it does hook up and let you use the system. This kind of untruth is to be expected from the NY Times, which is more about an agenda than about accurately describing the factual situation.
...
I think the point was how odd of a statement Sony is making with the PS3
"HDTV is the way of the future! there is not point in sticking with your crappy SDTV! We are so much better than the XBox 360 because we have HD-Movies out of the box and can produce better HD graphics. Included in the box is one SD cable!"
I understand why it was done (that 1/6 homes have a HDTV which could require component, DVI or HDMI input whereas every TV supports RCA input) but it seems like an odd statement.
There's a lot of "I like the Xbox360 better" in this review. Ok, great. Good luck with that. But this is supposed to be a PS3 review, not a console buying guide that compares the different features. Buy a 360 if you want one. I hear they're great. But "the PS3 is not an XBOX360" is not a valid criticism
Outside of serious artistic analysis you always will see a bit of this, with "hardware" if they can compare products they will; most Zune reviews will comment on how it stacks to the iPod, most car reviews will compare it to other cars in its class, and every electronic gadget will be compared to similar gadgets. Is it the appropriate way of doing it? No, but it is common.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is an extremely useful review and 1 is a completely false misleading and poorly written bird-cage liner, I'd give this review a 3.5. That's pretty good for the NY Times.
I agree, but I have never found reviews useful.
If you dislike the stories, why don't you find a several positive stories from major news sites and submit them ... I'm certain that if you had 4 or 5 major news sites that were very positive about the PS3 it would get posted. The fact is there is a lot to criticize Sony about how they have handled the PS3 so far, and there isn't that much to congratulate them on. It doesn't mean the PS3 sucks, but if someone doesn't point out the flaws with the system Sony can't fix them.
Honestly, I expect there will be a story on the Wii today when a decent story (with more information than every gamer already has) comes up. Every gamer already knows that the Wii launced on Sunday, sold out on pre-orders and people who were outside the store when it opened, had far more units than the PS3, and that most people were buying it to play games on it.
...
... I need nunchucks ... will kill for some nunchucks ...
What most people want to know is how many systems were actually sold, when there will be another shipment and when I can get some nunchucks for my wiimotes
I admit now that Wiimote and nunchuck seperate was dumb
If you want to see someone disapointed give them exactly twice as much stuff for exactly twice the price ... If you want to see someone excited give them exactly half as much stuff for half the price ... I'm not sure if it is human nature, but most people think in the "Super Size It" mentality in which you pay a small ammount more (10%) for a dramatic improvement.
What this means for the Playstation is that they needed to deliver a dramatic improvement over the XBox 360 for the $100/$200 extra cost up front in order to meet people's expectations. I haven't used the PS3 yet so I don't know whether they did, but I suspect that anywhere they're lacking will be a Huge issue to many people and where they're equal to or better than the XBox 360 will be seen as a Small benefit.
I could be wrong but even if that is true, I don't think that developers would use it in the way (many) people would think that it would be used ...
If there was a speed (or quality) increase by running different versions of a game (that used all the same game assets) then I'm positive that developers would produce 2 versions of the exact same game (which would involve re-writing a small portion of the engine) inorder to take advantage of the benefits.
On the other hand if there is little benefit of producing a Direct X 10 game that uses the same assets as you're currently using on the Direct X 9 version of the game I'm positive that (most) developers would stick to producing the Direct X 9 version of the game because it would be useable on the most systems.
I love WoW but think that the ability to be remarkably successful by using a bot demonstrates one of the biggest design flaws of the game (and the entire MMORPG genre as a whole). MMORPGs require very little thought or skill and most of the content is not worth seeing; killing 100,000 monsters that react in (pretty much) the exact same way in order to get to the point were you have 'Finished the game' only to have to kill 100,000 mosters that react in exactly the same way to get all the leet loot. I recognize the technical difficulty of producing intelligent (or atleast different) mobs, but until you have to be reasonably intelligent to survive these encounters a bot will be successful.
I keep hearing more and more that most games are now being designed with today's $500 PC in mind rather than tomorow's $2000 PC; the reason for this is that the number of people who are spending massive ammounts of money upgrading their PC is declining (as is the rate of upgrades). I can't imagine that many developers are really all that focused on taking advantage of Shader-Model 4.0, so I don't really see that much of a push to switch to Vista.
BTW. I'm not saying that no developers are interested in the fancy new features, but that developers who can not bank on having 1 Million people upgrade their PC to play their game are not that interested in the fancy new features. The Unreal/Doom engines will probably be modified to take advantage of DirectX 10, but (many) developers will probably stick to the Unreal 2/Doom 3 engine until they can justify the upgrade.
Also I would say the extent of lines are an indicator as well - when you have 1000+ people lined up at a Sony store, that indicates a greater demand among the general populace as you take those numbers as a percentage of interest. Just as a hypothetical situation, do you think those 1000 people would have still been interested in the PS3 had Sony had released a much larger supply (say 2 Million units as an number)? Personally, I think 1/4 of those people would have still shown up because they wanted a PS3 and were willing to pay $600 for one; the rest of the people were there because they could spend $600 today and sell the PS3 for $2,500 tomorow (or at least that is what they think). Tremendous demand is better reflected in eBay prices than in it being sold out (which means nothing because they are so few in number). I do think that there are tons of people want a PS3, and some people are willing to pay anything to get one, but I also think that there is a lot of dishonesty on eBay right now.