I agree the UI for this menu is terrible, but the options aren't. The solution I believe is to allow all options. Go with the simple menu and you get the three primary options. If you are a power user or admin you get the whole list. Choices are good.
Choices AREN'T good if you don't know what the choices mean. I'd go with Joel on this - slash the choices down to the 2 or 3 that the majority of people actually use. For anybody who really cares to restart instead of shutdown, implement a power user feature where holding the shift key shows an alternate to "Shutdown" labelled "Restart". XP already does something similar with Standby & Hibernate.
DLP implies having a honking great big set in the room or an overhead projector of some kind. I suspect LCD is most often compared to plasma because the form factor is more comparable.
"It was not meant to be a Jenny Craig supplement," she says. "If people are finding themselves sore, they may need to exercise more."
Or perhaps Jenny Craig of Nintendo is trying to pass the buck. If some games are requiring players to make unnatural, rapid, or exaggerated movements then perhaps it isn't the user's fault at all when they end up hurting themselves.
The above is true, with the exception that the sensor bar tells the system what relation to the screen you are. It doesn't use the sensor bar all the time--such as when you swing the controller off the screen, for example.
Doesn't matter. A mouse doesn't know where the edge of the screen is either. Besides, having a controller which requires you constantly point it at the screen to use a cursor is tiring and very clumsy.
But you DO need to point it at the screen so that the camera in the front of the wiimote can see the IR beams to know how to translate the sensor data received from the wiimote into movement in the screen.
Again, doesn't matter. All the driver would require is to know when you swing it left, right up or down and translate that into the appropriate movement of the pointer. You don't even need to point the thing at the screen to move the pointer. That's exactly what existing gyroscopic mice do.
Let me put it another way: The wiimote doesn't know which way is up if you don't point it at the sensor bar. If you don't know up, how are you going to translate changes in G forces (which is what the accelerometers measure) into movement of a pointer? You wouldn't be able to know what the data you were receiving meant, without a point of reference--and that is what the sensor bar provides.
The driver makes the assumption that people hold the remote in a horizontal fashion and swing it left or right, or tilt it up or down to move the mouse. You can refine this I'm sure and even offer left / right handed behaviour but those are the basic requirements. I expect a peek at the driver for a gyro mouse would offer likely other enhancements.
And if by chance someone does want to implement the sensor bar, the thing is just a dumb strip with LEDs that and it might even be possible to jury rig it to work from a USB port.
You don't need the sensor bar functionality as the thing is armed with gyroscopes and accelerometers, which are more than enough to control a cursor on an overhead projector. All those buttons could be mapped as mouse buttons and the D-Pad as a scroll wheel. Gyroscopic mice have been available for quite a while now that do just that, but they cost far more than a Wii remote.
If it uses Bluetooth as it is supposed to, what is to stop the Wii remote being used on a PC or even a PS3 if you wanted to? What's the point you may ask - well it would make for useful mouse replacement for presentations, or just for couch surfing.
Re:Look at the "revolutionary" technology
on
The Wii Disassembled
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· Score: 2, Informative
The sensor is in the wiimote. It probably has some kind of low-res ccd that detects the light from the sensor bar and uses it to figure out its orientation. Pretty clever stuff though I expect it would be easy to confuse the hell out of it with strip lighting or sunlight.
Point taken with the upscaling, and I will double check the 360's abilities, but my understanding was that it couldn't upscale to 1080p. As for old TVs, while I think the PS3 should support them, they really are non-standard to support 1080i only. In Europe TVs tagged as HD Ready have to cope with 720p and 1080i and scale between either mode for themselves.
As for networking, I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare the PS3's networking to the PS2. The PS3 offers live chat (text, audio & video) for nothing, a web browser for nothing, downloadable content such as demos for nothing, buddy lists for nothing, matchmaking for nothing, multiplayer games hosting for nothing (e.g. Resistance). Sure it's a little rough around the edges (e.g. some games are using their own buddy lists, store downloads occur in the foreground and so on) but I really see nothing that can't be incrementally improved. And since its free it really isn't that bad.
On the other points, the main reason for my rebuttal was simply because some AC decided to link to a bunch of negative opinion pieces even though in most cases the stories were simply wrong, fud or applied equally to other consoles.
- Poor backward compatilibity with PS1 and PS2 games (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15712585/)
A couple of hundred titles with mostly audio problems out of 8000. How many XBox titles run on the XBox 360? How many Gamecube titles run flawlessly on the Wii? Is there a compatibility database for the Wii?
Numerous high def upscaling issues including PS3 BluRay movies not appearing in high definition properly (http://loot-ninja.com/2006/11/19/ps3-hd-scaling-i ssues-other-annoyances/)
By which you mean problems with extremely old HDTVs supporting 1080i (not even 720p) being treated as 480p (well duh) and an assortment of minor issues that could be corrected by a firmware update. Does the Wii upscale anything? Do existing XBox 360 games upscale to 1080p?
A very poor online system, as compared to the Xbox Live System (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.htm l)
Online system is fine and more importantly free.
- No high definition cables ship with the system, you are stuck with a composite cable unless you pay extra (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.htm l)
So does the Wii ship with component cables? No it doesn't. Does the XBox 360 ship with component cables? Only in the premium box. Does either the Wii or XBox support HDMI? No they don't. How much would it cost to buy an HDMI cable for a PS3? $6 if buy you online.
3 words. Blame the developers. I expect Tony Hawk's Project 8 developers just ported the 360 code base ensuring those 6 SPUs spend their time twiddling their thumbs rather than doing much useful. See also Call of Duty 3, Madden etc. Does that mean the console is incapable of more doing more? No it doesn't.
- Poor framerates and "tearing" reported on multiple game titles, including Tony Hawk and Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/sim/gundamworld/revie w.html)
3 words. Blame the developers. Resistance doesn't tear and has a hell of a lot more going on on screen (and offscreen) than either of those other games. Same with Ridge Racer 7 which runs 60fps at 1080p.
- Poor buggy development tools which make development very hard as compared to other current gen systems (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=19611&he d=Atari+Founder+Likes+Xbox360%2C+Disses+PS3§or =Industries&subsector=EntertainmentAndMedia)
Nolan Bushnell's opinion and hearsay, nothing more. And considering that Nolan Bushnell is not a developer and barely involved in the video game industry at all these days it would be interesting to know if he has even clapped eyes on a PS3 SDK let alone used one.
Multiple launch titles cancelled or delayed due to development issues (http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=7200)
Three are delayed by a few months (of which two are multi-console launches) and one is a cancellation. With no reasons specified for any of these yet you blame development issues. But I can think of a more likely reason that EA Sport's NBA Live 07 was canceled - because there are already two NBA games on the PS3 already and both with far more favourable reviews than NBA Live 07 got on the 360.
With the Xbox 360 already having 7 million units sold worldwide,
Wasn't it meant to be something like 10 million by now? Didn't they revise it to be year end? Do you think they stand a chance of making that target?
Wii approximately 500,000 units, and the PS3 only having sold 200,000 units in North America and 80,000 units and none in Europe it is hard to see Sony succeeding with the PS3
How can you claim approximately for the Wii and emphatically state figure
Why can't they provide 3d? At the very least, in the form of closed binary X11/OpenGL drivers like nvidia do...
Then you could run ports of games like quake easily.
I don't know. Perhaps they will do that eventually, but the plan B if they don't is to make use of the SPUs. Even if accelerated NVidia graphics did turn up the SPUs would be useful in any library that has to deal with or produced compressed content in any form.
And there wasn't anything about the PS3 launch either. If you want to see impressions of how the Wii launch went, go over to Joystiq.com. Seems to be very positive though there are some critical comments about some of the games (especially Red Steel) and problems with the system itself (crashes, faulty discs).
What's more they'll be in stores tomorrow, the next day and so on. A slight exaggeration I'm sure but the simple fact is Sony will be pushing them into the supply chain as fast as they can from now on. With no launch there is no need to stockpile - they want to get as many PS3s as possible.
People who buy anything at or around launch for massively inflated prices are fucking idiots. Pure and simple. Doesn't matter if its an XBox 360, a Wii or a PS3. The things aren't going to go away and it's not like there is much worth playing at launch anyway.
It is important to know what Sony have locked out and what they've enabled. I've heard some report that the 3D hardware functionality is locked out but everything else is pretty much enabled. An exact list would be nice though.
But that's plenty for running MythTV, or MAME, or any other emulator. And of course its plenty for web browsing, document writing and so on.
And even if the thing doesn't do 3D, that doesn't mean the thing has to be slow at 3D. Don't forget the SPUs are basically sitting around doing nothing here. They could be set to work inside Mesa massively speeding up transformations, shading and other calculations. It may be possible to get 3D up and running with performance comparable to IGP processors. Same for video codecs, general compression, crypto etc.
2. Textures. It takes artists more time to do a more detailed texture. So what if it is only 5 times bigger? Yes it takes more work. Does it take five times? Maybe not. Will it take at least twice as much time? Probably so.
PCs, 360s need those same textures too so any game that EA (for example) put out on every platform known to man already has that requirement. Besides when the PS2, XBox & Gamecube platforms start to wither (as they are already), the Wii will be the odd man out.
The PS3 is a lot more complex and probably doesn't have as good of development environment as the 360.
The PS3 development kit is integrated into MS Dev Studio (see here) and of course most of the code will be written against game APIs (opengl, havok, physx etc.) or generic program logic. So I doubt in practice that development is significantly different whether you're working on a 360 project or a PS3 project. Sure, SPE specific programming might be different and even hard at first, but I expect its not significantly harder than learning Altivec, SSE, COM (under DirectX), GPU shaders, DSPs or any of the other things that someone coding games would come across.
I have no idea what the refresh rate & characteristics are the display buffer, but it should possible to offload codecs, zip/bzip2 compression and even parts of Mesa (shaders, transformations, etc.) onto the SPEs. The net result would be a system which while not stellar should be able to put out reasonable 3D and video performance.
I expect a whole cottage industry will spring up to add functionality to the various libs that does just that.
I didn't say they had millions in stock, nor did I say they were withholding them indefinitely. In fact I didn't say they were doing it at all, though it wouldn't surprise if they had for launch day. You only have to look at the headlines on CNN or BBC to see why this might be in their best interest. More hype, more headlines, more near-riots == a better launch.
The PS2 Linux kit was perfectly okay, it was just by the time you added the cost of the hd, network adapter, keyboard, mouse and OS onto cost of the PS2 you were left with something that wasn't good for much and certainly far less capable than a PC.
The PS3 doesn't require you buy anything extra, or even use a specially "blessed" version of Linux. Just plug in any USB mouse and keyboard, burn any Linux for PS3 onto CD and install. I expect that Fedora, Ubuntu, YDL and specialist Myth / Mame Linuces will appear in due course. Pick your poison.
Install Linux, install Myth, plugin a Haupage WinTV USB device - the PS3 becomes a PVR, plays DiVX etc. Or install MAME, UAE, Virtual Boy, SheepShaver, QEMU, Bochs and you have a pretty decent console / arcade gaming rig. Might even be able to play those SNES / N64 titles before they turn up on the Wii...
True, it's cheaper than blu-ray but I'd ask whether blu-ray (or HD-DVD) in any way justifies spending $600 let alone $800+ on a player? Those are early adopter prices. I bet in a year from now that BD players will be selling for $200. So again patience is a blessing. It's not like BD (or HD-DVD) has titles that are worth buying unless you happen not to own them on DVD already.
Now I want the PS3 to succeed. I'm salivating over the thought of a $600 console / computer that I can whack Linux onto AND play music / videos AND play games. But I still don't see the point of being Sony's bitch. If its a great console then it will still be great when any production issues are sorted and there is a greater choice of games. Same goes for Nintendo which if anything has even less reason to justify the hype surrounding it.
Except these things won't sell for $5000. Perhaps a few people struck lucky with their eBay auctions but the fact is that right now there are probably 10,000 auctions gone up for the PS3. I expect these people will be lucky if they get more than $1500. There are simply too many PS3s to justify anybody, even the more terminally stupid spending more than that. Besides, I expect Sony will be quietly releasing smaller secondary shipments between now and Christmas meaning if you really wanted one that you stand a fair chance of getting it at retail price with only a small wait.
Exactly, the launch titles aren't great, but neither are the Wii's. Or the XBox 360's when it was launched. For each you could probably pick out a couple of games worth playing with the rest being meh filler (and that includes anything made by EA). I suppose for the PS3 that would be Resistance, Ridge Racer and perhaps Tony Hawk's Project 8 & Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Reviews of the EA games and Call of Duty 3 suggest that they're either identical or sometimes inferior to the 360 - not because the 360 is superior necessarily but because the PS3 is new and not as much effort has gone into making games exploit the system.
Same goes for the Wii. A couple of good titles with the rest being filler.
While I'd love a PS3 I don't see much point in buying one at launch. Better to wait until January / February when there are more in stock, and the second generation of games starts appearing.
People see that it's going for $3,000 on ebay, and they think that it must be worth it.
Well if people are bidding $3000 on it then clearly it is worth it to them. Suckers they may be but you can't blame Sony if people are stupid enough to pay that much.
Having said that, it wouldn't surprise me if the alleged shortages of PS3s are somewhat manipulated to amp up the hysteria for launch. All those recent news stories about boxes being cut from 400,000 to 250,000. It wouldn't surprise me if Sony held back some of those to make the launch pictures all the more impressive.
I'm watching the news right now.
This is possibly the dumbest, saddest thing I've ever seen.
It is dumb and sad but even sadder is that every console needs guinea pigs to queue up for the new console in order to generate the hype needed to claim a successful launch.
Personally I'd love a PS3 but I don't see what the attraction is of owning one when there are only a dozen or so games, you're queueing all night to get one and there is a real possibility that it might flawed / broken and you have no way to replace it. Same goes for the Wii. New consoles have flaws, too much hype (and fud) is flying around, there is no way either console will meet all expectations. Calmer heads wait and see when reality has set in.
I look forward to see how the PS3 behaves in the next few months. I'm already thinking of the ways I can use a PS3 (e.g. as a Linux box when not gaming), but if the thing sucks then I can hold off. Let other people fight over something which we'll all be practically tripping over soon enough.
It looks like the going rate is anywhere from $3000-$5000...
Sure, there are a few idiots out there, but I expect that now the market is flooded with PS3s that the price is going to take a dump. PS3s might be in short supply but I expect that if you preordered one now (now that launch is over) that you'd probably have it before Christmas. For retail price.
Might I reccomend some, such as a tale in the desert or possibly eve...
Of the two, I'd say EVE is the most evolving, complex and intriguing of the two. You can either follow the missions that the game generates and progress through it treating it like a complex uber game of Elite, or immerse yourself in the player generated politics, corporations, scams, thievery and everything else going on.
I thought the grind in ATITD was abysmal and it sunk an otherwise interesting premise. While I'm sure it's realistic that you need to gather wood and slate to make a lathe to make boards to make a rack to dry out the bricks you made by collecting clay made with your jug of water just so you can build a kiln to make fired bricks to build more stuff while watering flax seeds, to gather flax, to wait for it to rot, while collecting thorns to make flax combs etc. etc., all the while replacing things that have worn out, it sure puts a dampener on game play. There are other professions but these have their own built in grind, such as running very long distances in real time. In some ways ATITD almost sits between a proper MMPORG and something like Second Life since it is possible to build things like statues in the world. It's too bad that the game makes it so tedious to get anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Choices AREN'T good if you don't know what the choices mean. I'd go with Joel on this - slash the choices down to the 2 or 3 that the majority of people actually use. For anybody who really cares to restart instead of shutdown, implement a power user feature where holding the shift key shows an alternate to "Shutdown" labelled "Restart". XP already does something similar with Standby & Hibernate.
DLP implies having a honking great big set in the room or an overhead projector of some kind. I suspect LCD is most often compared to plasma because the form factor is more comparable.
Or perhaps Jenny Craig of Nintendo is trying to pass the buck. If some games are requiring players to make unnatural, rapid, or exaggerated movements then perhaps it isn't the user's fault at all when they end up hurting themselves.
Doesn't matter. A mouse doesn't know where the edge of the screen is either. Besides, having a controller which requires you constantly point it at the screen to use a cursor is tiring and very clumsy. But you DO need to point it at the screen so that the camera in the front of the wiimote can see the IR beams to know how to translate the sensor data received from the wiimote into movement in the screen.
Again, doesn't matter. All the driver would require is to know when you swing it left, right up or down and translate that into the appropriate movement of the pointer. You don't even need to point the thing at the screen to move the pointer. That's exactly what existing gyroscopic mice do.
Let me put it another way: The wiimote doesn't know which way is up if you don't point it at the sensor bar. If you don't know up, how are you going to translate changes in G forces (which is what the accelerometers measure) into movement of a pointer? You wouldn't be able to know what the data you were receiving meant, without a point of reference--and that is what the sensor bar provides.
The driver makes the assumption that people hold the remote in a horizontal fashion and swing it left or right, or tilt it up or down to move the mouse. You can refine this I'm sure and even offer left / right handed behaviour but those are the basic requirements. I expect a peek at the driver for a gyro mouse would offer likely other enhancements.
And if by chance someone does want to implement the sensor bar, the thing is just a dumb strip with LEDs that and it might even be possible to jury rig it to work from a USB port.
You don't need the sensor bar functionality as the thing is armed with gyroscopes and accelerometers, which are more than enough to control a cursor on an overhead projector. All those buttons could be mapped as mouse buttons and the D-Pad as a scroll wheel. Gyroscopic mice have been available for quite a while now that do just that, but they cost far more than a Wii remote.
If it uses Bluetooth as it is supposed to, what is to stop the Wii remote being used on a PC or even a PS3 if you wanted to? What's the point you may ask - well it would make for useful mouse replacement for presentations, or just for couch surfing.
The sensor is in the wiimote. It probably has some kind of low-res ccd that detects the light from the sensor bar and uses it to figure out its orientation. Pretty clever stuff though I expect it would be easy to confuse the hell out of it with strip lighting or sunlight.
As for networking, I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare the PS3's networking to the PS2. The PS3 offers live chat (text, audio & video) for nothing, a web browser for nothing, downloadable content such as demos for nothing, buddy lists for nothing, matchmaking for nothing, multiplayer games hosting for nothing (e.g. Resistance). Sure it's a little rough around the edges (e.g. some games are using their own buddy lists, store downloads occur in the foreground and so on) but I really see nothing that can't be incrementally improved. And since its free it really isn't that bad.
On the other points, the main reason for my rebuttal was simply because some AC decided to link to a bunch of negative opinion pieces even though in most cases the stories were simply wrong, fud or applied equally to other consoles.
A couple of hundred titles with mostly audio problems out of 8000. How many XBox titles run on the XBox 360? How many Gamecube titles run flawlessly on the Wii? Is there a compatibility database for the Wii?
Numerous high def upscaling issues including PS3 BluRay movies not appearing in high definition properly (http://loot-ninja.com/2006/11/19/ps3-hd-scaling-i ssues-other-annoyances/)
By which you mean problems with extremely old HDTVs supporting 1080i (not even 720p) being treated as 480p (well duh) and an assortment of minor issues that could be corrected by a firmware update. Does the Wii upscale anything? Do existing XBox 360 games upscale to 1080p?
A very poor online system, as compared to the Xbox Live System (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.htm l)
Online system is fine and more importantly free.
- No high definition cables ship with the system, you are stuck with a composite cable unless you pay extra (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.htm l)
So does the Wii ship with component cables? No it doesn't. Does the XBox 360 ship with component cables? Only in the premium box. Does either the Wii or XBox support HDMI? No they don't. How much would it cost to buy an HDMI cable for a PS3? $6 if buy you online.
Poor graphics on side to side game comparison tests: http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/sports/tonyhawksprojec t8/review.html?sid=6161341
3 words. Blame the developers. I expect Tony Hawk's Project 8 developers just ported the 360 code base ensuring those 6 SPUs spend their time twiddling their thumbs rather than doing much useful. See also Call of Duty 3, Madden etc. Does that mean the console is incapable of more doing more? No it doesn't.
- Poor framerates and "tearing" reported on multiple game titles, including Tony Hawk and Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/sim/gundamworld/revie w.html)
3 words. Blame the developers. Resistance doesn't tear and has a hell of a lot more going on on screen (and offscreen) than either of those other games. Same with Ridge Racer 7 which runs 60fps at 1080p.
- Poor buggy development tools which make development very hard as compared to other current gen systems (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=19611&he d=Atari+Founder+Likes+Xbox360%2C+Disses+PS3§or =Industries&subsector=EntertainmentAndMedia)
Nolan Bushnell's opinion and hearsay, nothing more. And considering that Nolan Bushnell is not a developer and barely involved in the video game industry at all these days it would be interesting to know if he has even clapped eyes on a PS3 SDK let alone used one.
Multiple launch titles cancelled or delayed due to development issues (http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=7200)
Three are delayed by a few months (of which two are multi-console launches) and one is a cancellation. With no reasons specified for any of these yet you blame development issues. But I can think of a more likely reason that EA Sport's NBA Live 07 was canceled - because there are already two NBA games on the PS3 already and both with far more favourable reviews than NBA Live 07 got on the 360.
With the Xbox 360 already having 7 million units sold worldwide,
Wasn't it meant to be something like 10 million by now? Didn't they revise it to be year end? Do you think they stand a chance of making that target?
Wii approximately 500,000 units, and the PS3 only having sold 200,000 units in North America and 80,000 units and none in Europe it is hard to see Sony succeeding with the PS3
How can you claim approximately for the Wii and emphatically state figure
I don't know. Perhaps they will do that eventually, but the plan B if they don't is to make use of the SPUs. Even if accelerated NVidia graphics did turn up the SPUs would be useful in any library that has to deal with or produced compressed content in any form.
And there wasn't anything about the PS3 launch either. If you want to see impressions of how the Wii launch went, go over to Joystiq.com. Seems to be very positive though there are some critical comments about some of the games (especially Red Steel) and problems with the system itself (crashes, faulty discs).
People who buy anything at or around launch for massively inflated prices are fucking idiots. Pure and simple. Doesn't matter if its an XBox 360, a Wii or a PS3. The things aren't going to go away and it's not like there is much worth playing at launch anyway.
But that's plenty for running MythTV, or MAME, or any other emulator. And of course its plenty for web browsing, document writing and so on.
And even if the thing doesn't do 3D, that doesn't mean the thing has to be slow at 3D. Don't forget the SPUs are basically sitting around doing nothing here. They could be set to work inside Mesa massively speeding up transformations, shading and other calculations. It may be possible to get 3D up and running with performance comparable to IGP processors. Same for video codecs, general compression, crypto etc.
PCs, 360s need those same textures too so any game that EA (for example) put out on every platform known to man already has that requirement. Besides when the PS2, XBox & Gamecube platforms start to wither (as they are already), the Wii will be the odd man out.
The PS3 is a lot more complex and probably doesn't have as good of development environment as the 360.
The PS3 development kit is integrated into MS Dev Studio (see here) and of course most of the code will be written against game APIs (opengl, havok, physx etc.) or generic program logic. So I doubt in practice that development is significantly different whether you're working on a 360 project or a PS3 project. Sure, SPE specific programming might be different and even hard at first, but I expect its not significantly harder than learning Altivec, SSE, COM (under DirectX), GPU shaders, DSPs or any of the other things that someone coding games would come across.
I expect a whole cottage industry will spring up to add functionality to the various libs that does just that.
I didn't say they had millions in stock, nor did I say they were withholding them indefinitely. In fact I didn't say they were doing it at all, though it wouldn't surprise if they had for launch day. You only have to look at the headlines on CNN or BBC to see why this might be in their best interest. More hype, more headlines, more near-riots == a better launch.
The PS3 doesn't require you buy anything extra, or even use a specially "blessed" version of Linux. Just plug in any USB mouse and keyboard, burn any Linux for PS3 onto CD and install. I expect that Fedora, Ubuntu, YDL and specialist Myth / Mame Linuces will appear in due course. Pick your poison.
Install Linux, install Myth, plugin a Haupage WinTV USB device - the PS3 becomes a PVR, plays DiVX etc. Or install MAME, UAE, Virtual Boy, SheepShaver, QEMU, Bochs and you have a pretty decent console / arcade gaming rig. Might even be able to play those SNES / N64 titles before they turn up on the Wii...
Now I want the PS3 to succeed. I'm salivating over the thought of a $600 console / computer that I can whack Linux onto AND play music / videos AND play games. But I still don't see the point of being Sony's bitch. If its a great console then it will still be great when any production issues are sorted and there is a greater choice of games. Same goes for Nintendo which if anything has even less reason to justify the hype surrounding it.
Except these things won't sell for $5000. Perhaps a few people struck lucky with their eBay auctions but the fact is that right now there are probably 10,000 auctions gone up for the PS3. I expect these people will be lucky if they get more than $1500. There are simply too many PS3s to justify anybody, even the more terminally stupid spending more than that. Besides, I expect Sony will be quietly releasing smaller secondary shipments between now and Christmas meaning if you really wanted one that you stand a fair chance of getting it at retail price with only a small wait.
Same goes for the Wii. A couple of good titles with the rest being filler.
While I'd love a PS3 I don't see much point in buying one at launch. Better to wait until January / February when there are more in stock, and the second generation of games starts appearing.
Well if people are bidding $3000 on it then clearly it is worth it to them. Suckers they may be but you can't blame Sony if people are stupid enough to pay that much.
Having said that, it wouldn't surprise me if the alleged shortages of PS3s are somewhat manipulated to amp up the hysteria for launch. All those recent news stories about boxes being cut from 400,000 to 250,000. It wouldn't surprise me if Sony held back some of those to make the launch pictures all the more impressive.
It is dumb and sad but even sadder is that every console needs guinea pigs to queue up for the new console in order to generate the hype needed to claim a successful launch.
Personally I'd love a PS3 but I don't see what the attraction is of owning one when there are only a dozen or so games, you're queueing all night to get one and there is a real possibility that it might flawed / broken and you have no way to replace it. Same goes for the Wii. New consoles have flaws, too much hype (and fud) is flying around, there is no way either console will meet all expectations. Calmer heads wait and see when reality has set in.
I look forward to see how the PS3 behaves in the next few months. I'm already thinking of the ways I can use a PS3 (e.g. as a Linux box when not gaming), but if the thing sucks then I can hold off. Let other people fight over something which we'll all be practically tripping over soon enough.
Sure, there are a few idiots out there, but I expect that now the market is flooded with PS3s that the price is going to take a dump. PS3s might be in short supply but I expect that if you preordered one now (now that launch is over) that you'd probably have it before Christmas. For retail price.
Of the two, I'd say EVE is the most evolving, complex and intriguing of the two. You can either follow the missions that the game generates and progress through it treating it like a complex uber game of Elite, or immerse yourself in the player generated politics, corporations, scams, thievery and everything else going on.
I thought the grind in ATITD was abysmal and it sunk an otherwise interesting premise. While I'm sure it's realistic that you need to gather wood and slate to make a lathe to make boards to make a rack to dry out the bricks you made by collecting clay made with your jug of water just so you can build a kiln to make fired bricks to build more stuff while watering flax seeds, to gather flax, to wait for it to rot, while collecting thorns to make flax combs etc. etc., all the while replacing things that have worn out, it sure puts a dampener on game play. There are other professions but these have their own built in grind, such as running very long distances in real time. In some ways ATITD almost sits between a proper MMPORG and something like Second Life since it is possible to build things like statues in the world. It's too bad that the game makes it so tedious to get anywhere.