Apple made a big song and dance of the fact that you can transfer songs, and burn them to CD. Can you burn downloaded movies to DVD or are you restricted to play them on one or two devices?
If I want nostalgia, I can fire up an emulator and play thousands of easily obtainable C64 (or Spectrum, ST, Amiga, Amstrad, BBC, Atari, Gameboy, N64, PS, SNES) games. Or I buy something like this and do the same.
In Europe, Oblivion on the PC cost 50 euros. Oblivion on the XBox 360 cost 75 euros. In other words the price of the 360 version was already 25 more than the PC counterpart. People who claim XBox 360 prices are analogous to PC or older consoles are misinformed or lying. Certainly the price might drop a bit with time and you might knock a bit off for an internet purchase, but the retail price for new titles is usually 65 euros or up. Most likely PS3 games will cost exactly the same as their 360 counterparts.
Personally I think Oblivion is a great game. Even if I bought a PS3 I don't think I want to play it again though when I think PCs are far more suitable for that kind of game. I would strongly recommend it to anyone hadn't played it before though.
Subtitles and language tracks are not features for users, they're features for the distributors to save production costs. All those extra tracks eat into the disk capacity at the expense of genuine features and movie quality. I don't know why any English speaker would care about alternative languages unless it's a foreign language and you want the choice of watching it dubbed or with subtitles.
In Europe, the likes of Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile etc. are all trying to sell people on the idea of TV on their phones. The only problem is that the implementation is atrocious, requiring people to sign up for the service via WAP, and to navigate through a maze of WAP menus to find the one that points at the RTSP feed. It's horrible, and you only have to sneeze for the connection to be broken. Want to change channels? Navigate the maze again and pick a different feed. And providers expect people to pay a not insubstantial amount of money to do this.
TV on phones is never going to work until DVB-M turns up and is built into phones. Phones can then be built with a proper UI for flipping channels and so on. Personally I don't see any technical reason why they couldn't implement analogue and DVB-T right now. It might be non-optimal (e.g. for roaming) and a bit power hungry but it would still be fine for localised viewing. Of course, the reason that they don't implement it has little to do with technical issues and more to do with selling services. No one would lock themselves into the network's shitty service plan if there free channels out there to watch.
It means all those songs I ripped with iTunes will play on the Zune. There is no way in hell that I'd buy one if I thought I had to convert to or use their crappy format. This way I can keep on using iTunes for ripping and Zune for playing. The screen also looks far more useful for video content than the iPods. Other than that, the only thing which might put me off a Zune is if I have to use special Windows-only software in order to access or copy content to the device.
1.) Why would you hold the controller out in front of you if it works with small wrist motions, ie in your lap?
Because some games either require a) you point the controller at the TV, or use b) gestures such as jabbing or up / down, or side to side motions which are not convenient if you don't hold the thing out in front of you.
2.) Obviously no one is going to practice swinging their phone around in front of themselves for ten minutes. It's not fun. Ask people to sit and stare at a tv while nothing is on and you can "prove" that no one has the ability to watch tv.
It's not meant to be fun. It's just a practical demonstration of the point I was making, namely that waving around a light weight controller through a series of gestures for a short length of time has the potential to hurt your wrists.
A Wii controller has 11 buttons (ignoring the power one but including the D-pad) and the nunchuk has 2. So 13 buttons in total, of which only the D-pad, A & B, +, -, home and nunchuk triggers are within easy reach during normal gameplay. The 1 & 2 buttons are not within easy reach and would be useless except when the remote is held sideways, e.g. for driving games, at which point the trigger and the nunchuk buttons are unusable.
The PS3 controller has 17 buttons, the XBox 360 controller has 17 buttons. Of those, 14 could be considered "action" (i.e. used frequently and not for less frequent map / inventory / pause operations) buttons compared to the 8 that could be considered so on the Wii.
So yes, the thing has fewer buttons. That naturally means it will have to rely more on gestures.
Excuse me for being skeptical until you actually get some factual evidence to support this. I mean, maybe I'm crazy, but I have a suspicion that Nintendo's engineers and playtesters would have noted such a problem -- if it exists -- long before the system was shown to the public.
Why do you suppose that? I have a GBA sitting gathering dust on my shelf that has an obvious design flaw. The screen is so dark that the device is unusable except in bright rooms. Naturally of course Nintendo used this flaw as a reason that people should upgrade to the SP. Do you suppose that Nintendo, just like any other manufacturer is going to focus on the highlights of their console, not the flaws?
Anyway, perhaps as an experiment you might try this. Pick up a remote control or candy bar style phone. Now hold it in front of you. Now wave it around performing these gestures - a circle, side to side, top to bottom, a jabbing motion. You can make your gestures as large or small as you like but don't do them slowly since you're playing a game. Now repeat for ten minutes. I would be surprised if a significant number of people, perhaps the majority didn't have painful wrists or tendons after that exercise.
If you think this is an unrealistic exercise, I suggest you go here, click on "Nintendo Wii Event - Hands On" and then observe the first few minutes as we watch someone playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
As I said, I'm sure it will be fine for casual gaming and games that require sedentary or deliberate actions. But as a replacement for a traditional controller? Forget it.
I am totally getting a Wii, so this is not slanted in any way, but honestly, I'm concerned about the strain that using a motion-sensitive controller for every game, every movement, etc. will have. Seriously. I'm all for getting up off the couch, interactivity, and innovation. However, when I want to do some monster gaming session on Zelda, or Metroid Prime or something, how long can I really play before my body says "sit down, and stop flailing about. Plug that GC controller in right now, young man...":)
Exactly. People think the controller is going to be some wonderful gaming device, but it is strictly for casual and brief gaming. Any more than that and you will get wrist strain. The situation is exacerbated because the thing has so few buttons that many games will have to rely on weird gestures to perform actions that you can do with a button press on another console. Not only are gestures slower than button presses, but they'll just make wrist strain even more likely than it already is. I wonder how many Wii games will bother to support the "classic" joystick seeing as it's sold separately.
Having said that, I saw a review of a game that would work great on the Wii - Okami. The game requires the user to do gestures with an analogue stick, but the Wii remote would work far better.
But I think the Wii-60 argument is really compelling. The idea that you can buy both machines for a price comparable to the PS3, and have both next-gen graphics as well as innovative gameplay... I don't really see why you wouldn't, especially as we're entering this age of multi-platform games being the norm, due publishers and devs trying to make back their high development costs.
It isn't a comparable price unless you buy the "core" XBox 360 and then you're tossing out most of the reasons for buying a 360 in the first place, such as being able to play music (from the HD), download games or episodic content. All that's left is HD games and DVD player. And if you do buy a premium Xbox 360, why not just buy a PS3 and benefit from the bluray HD player, better performance and other bits and pieces it contains. So what's the point of buying two consoles? You may as well buy a Wii or buy a PS3. I don't see any compelling reason to an XBox 360 as well.
They have screwed the homebrewers because there is a significant overlap between the homebrewers and the pirates, in the tools they develop and the sites they inhabit. I'm sure Sony have no particular beef with genuine homebrew software but they sure as hell do with pirates. Homebrewers are just caught in the crossfire, and that's just too bad. You could hardly blame Sony for wishing to protect their profits and the long term success of their system by updating their firmware to combat the various exploits to it.
The problem with the homebrew scene on the PSP is that's its basically a front for pirates. While there are people just interested in homebrew, it is quite obvious from looking at various sites that all the tools for downgrading / exploiting firmware, emulating UMDs, ripping UMDs, running isos from memory stick etc. are basically piracy tools and used as such. No wonder that Sony are updating their firmware as fast as they can. It's tough on genuine homebrewers, but what do they expect?
Genuine homebrewers should be imploring Sony to release a Linux for the PSP and then to lock down the firmware as tightly as possible. Then they can have-at-it with Linux while not allowing the pirates to justify their actions by pretending to be homebrewers. Perhaps that is one motivation for Sony to say the PS3 would have Linux.
iTunes works okay on XP, but the UI is horrible. Scrolling through a large list is painfully slow and iTunes has a horrible non-standard UI. The last release aped Aqua, the new one apes pastel shades of grey. Either version looks and feels totally non-standard. Considering that Apple (and users) loudly beat the usability drum it's quite surprising that they feel they can get away with it on Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised if Sony PS3 Opera ships too.
The PS3 has a built-in browser already. I don't know what it's based off, but the PSP one is based off NetFront. Netfront is a very good browser, but is mostly aimed at embedded devices perhaps it isn't suitable or powerful enough for what is basically a PC. If so perhaps it will be Opera, or even a rebranded firefox browser.
And if the PS3 does offer Linux has been claimed, then perhaps you can use a real Firefox if you really want to - and the Linux version Opera assuming they rebuilt it for that architecture.
Some graphics cards consume monstrous amounts of power, probably enough to add a TCO of $30 or more per year to the actual price. It would be great to see a price comparison that took into account the cost of power the thing ate during its lifetime.
Nintendo has already confirmed you can freely re-download anything you've purchased before
But you haven't purchased it have you? You got it free on some trial offer, so why be so certain that it won't cost you money when you try to use it after it goes commercial?
Does that mean that once you download it it is yours forever, or is it yours until it becomes non-free? Does it check each time it starts or what? It's not like the Wii has a massive storage area anyway, so I can see that if helpfully decides to "make room" by deleting your browser that you are screwed.
Having tooled around in Second Life I fail to see what the attraction is. The client is dog slow, the world is ugly and it costs real money to do things. What struck me most about Second Life is that I've already seen exactly the same thing before 15 years ago - TinyMUD. While MUD stands for Multi-User-Dungeon, the only way I saw TinyMUD used was by people who wanted to craft their own objects and locations that they hanged out in to chat.
Which makes the AC even wronger. I heard it would be 50,000 yen which is around $430. So it costs approximately $180 more than the Wii. Considering what that difference pays for (HDTV, HDMI, DVD, BluRay, more memory, more CPU power, hard disk storage, web browser, music, video playback etc.) it's not that outrageous.
Anyone who buys any console at launch deserves to be fleeced as well as disappointed when the thing doesn't work properly. That goes for the Wii as well. A cold dose of reality might just lower the rabid fanboyism a notch.
I just want you all to know that I'm buying a Nintendo Wii for $250 plus three extra controllers for $180 plus the progressive output cable for $60 plus two games for $100 and I'm still spending less than the PlayStation 3 with zero games.
The baseline PS3 costs $499 so you are wrong. BTW, accessories for the Wii sound ludicrously expensive if your figures are correct.
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Apple made a big song and dance of the fact that you can transfer songs, and burn them to CD. Can you burn downloaded movies to DVD or are you restricted to play them on one or two devices?
If I want nostalgia, I can fire up an emulator and play thousands of easily obtainable C64 (or Spectrum, ST, Amiga, Amstrad, BBC, Atari, Gameboy, N64, PS, SNES) games. Or I buy something like this and do the same.
Personally I think Oblivion is a great game. Even if I bought a PS3 I don't think I want to play it again though when I think PCs are far more suitable for that kind of game. I would strongly recommend it to anyone hadn't played it before though.
Subtitles and language tracks are not features for users, they're features for the distributors to save production costs. All those extra tracks eat into the disk capacity at the expense of genuine features and movie quality. I don't know why any English speaker would care about alternative languages unless it's a foreign language and you want the choice of watching it dubbed or with subtitles.
TV on phones is never going to work until DVB-M turns up and is built into phones. Phones can then be built with a proper UI for flipping channels and so on. Personally I don't see any technical reason why they couldn't implement analogue and DVB-T right now. It might be non-optimal (e.g. for roaming) and a bit power hungry but it would still be fine for localised viewing. Of course, the reason that they don't implement it has little to do with technical issues and more to do with selling services. No one would lock themselves into the network's shitty service plan if there free channels out there to watch.
It means all those songs I ripped with iTunes will play on the Zune. There is no way in hell that I'd buy one if I thought I had to convert to or use their crappy format. This way I can keep on using iTunes for ripping and Zune for playing. The screen also looks far more useful for video content than the iPods. Other than that, the only thing which might put me off a Zune is if I have to use special Windows-only software in order to access or copy content to the device.
Because some games either require a) you point the controller at the TV, or use b) gestures such as jabbing or up / down, or side to side motions which are not convenient if you don't hold the thing out in front of you.
2.) Obviously no one is going to practice swinging their phone around in front of themselves for ten minutes. It's not fun. Ask people to sit and stare at a tv while nothing is on and you can "prove" that no one has the ability to watch tv.
It's not meant to be fun. It's just a practical demonstration of the point I was making, namely that waving around a light weight controller through a series of gestures for a short length of time has the potential to hurt your wrists.
A Wii controller has 11 buttons (ignoring the power one but including the D-pad) and the nunchuk has 2. So 13 buttons in total, of which only the D-pad, A & B, +, -, home and nunchuk triggers are within easy reach during normal gameplay. The 1 & 2 buttons are not within easy reach and would be useless except when the remote is held sideways, e.g. for driving games, at which point the trigger and the nunchuk buttons are unusable.
The PS3 controller has 17 buttons, the XBox 360 controller has 17 buttons. Of those, 14 could be considered "action" (i.e. used frequently and not for less frequent map / inventory / pause operations) buttons compared to the 8 that could be considered so on the Wii.
So yes, the thing has fewer buttons. That naturally means it will have to rely more on gestures.
Why do you suppose that? I have a GBA sitting gathering dust on my shelf that has an obvious design flaw. The screen is so dark that the device is unusable except in bright rooms. Naturally of course Nintendo used this flaw as a reason that people should upgrade to the SP. Do you suppose that Nintendo, just like any other manufacturer is going to focus on the highlights of their console, not the flaws?
Anyway, perhaps as an experiment you might try this. Pick up a remote control or candy bar style phone. Now hold it in front of you. Now wave it around performing these gestures - a circle, side to side, top to bottom, a jabbing motion. You can make your gestures as large or small as you like but don't do them slowly since you're playing a game. Now repeat for ten minutes. I would be surprised if a significant number of people, perhaps the majority didn't have painful wrists or tendons after that exercise.
If you think this is an unrealistic exercise, I suggest you go here, click on "Nintendo Wii Event - Hands On" and then observe the first few minutes as we watch someone playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
As I said, I'm sure it will be fine for casual gaming and games that require sedentary or deliberate actions. But as a replacement for a traditional controller? Forget it.
Exactly. People think the controller is going to be some wonderful gaming device, but it is strictly for casual and brief gaming. Any more than that and you will get wrist strain. The situation is exacerbated because the thing has so few buttons that many games will have to rely on weird gestures to perform actions that you can do with a button press on another console. Not only are gestures slower than button presses, but they'll just make wrist strain even more likely than it already is. I wonder how many Wii games will bother to support the "classic" joystick seeing as it's sold separately.
Having said that, I saw a review of a game that would work great on the Wii - Okami. The game requires the user to do gestures with an analogue stick, but the Wii remote would work far better.
But I think the Wii-60 argument is really compelling. The idea that you can buy both machines for a price comparable to the PS3, and have both next-gen graphics as well as innovative gameplay... I don't really see why you wouldn't, especially as we're entering this age of multi-platform games being the norm, due publishers and devs trying to make back their high development costs.
It isn't a comparable price unless you buy the "core" XBox 360 and then you're tossing out most of the reasons for buying a 360 in the first place, such as being able to play music (from the HD), download games or episodic content. All that's left is HD games and DVD player. And if you do buy a premium Xbox 360, why not just buy a PS3 and benefit from the bluray HD player, better performance and other bits and pieces it contains. So what's the point of buying two consoles? You may as well buy a Wii or buy a PS3. I don't see any compelling reason to an XBox 360 as well.
They have screwed the homebrewers because there is a significant overlap between the homebrewers and the pirates, in the tools they develop and the sites they inhabit. I'm sure Sony have no particular beef with genuine homebrew software but they sure as hell do with pirates. Homebrewers are just caught in the crossfire, and that's just too bad. You could hardly blame Sony for wishing to protect their profits and the long term success of their system by updating their firmware to combat the various exploits to it.
Genuine homebrewers should be imploring Sony to release a Linux for the PSP and then to lock down the firmware as tightly as possible. Then they can have-at-it with Linux while not allowing the pirates to justify their actions by pretending to be homebrewers. Perhaps that is one motivation for Sony to say the PS3 would have Linux.
iTunes works okay on XP, but the UI is horrible. Scrolling through a large list is painfully slow and iTunes has a horrible non-standard UI. The last release aped Aqua, the new one apes pastel shades of grey. Either version looks and feels totally non-standard. Considering that Apple (and users) loudly beat the usability drum it's quite surprising that they feel they can get away with it on Windows.
Because it's as good a place as any, especially when the expression of speech is passive, by means of writing on a carrier bag.
Good. The more people on the list, the less effective it will become. The sooner that happens, the sooner the thing will be dumped.
The PS3 has a built-in browser already. I don't know what it's based off, but the PSP one is based off NetFront. Netfront is a very good browser, but is mostly aimed at embedded devices perhaps it isn't suitable or powerful enough for what is basically a PC. If so perhaps it will be Opera, or even a rebranded firefox browser.
And if the PS3 does offer Linux has been claimed, then perhaps you can use a real Firefox if you really want to - and the Linux version Opera assuming they rebuilt it for that architecture.
Some graphics cards consume monstrous amounts of power, probably enough to add a TCO of $30 or more per year to the actual price. It would be great to see a price comparison that took into account the cost of power the thing ate during its lifetime.
But you haven't purchased it have you? You got it free on some trial offer, so why be so certain that it won't cost you money when you try to use it after it goes commercial?
Does that mean that once you download it it is yours forever, or is it yours until it becomes non-free? Does it check each time it starts or what? It's not like the Wii has a massive storage area anyway, so I can see that if helpfully decides to "make room" by deleting your browser that you are screwed.
I liked the rumble pack, but it's a shame that Sony didn't choose to put a speaker or something in the device instead, similar to the Wii remote.
Having tooled around in Second Life I fail to see what the attraction is. The client is dog slow, the world is ugly and it costs real money to do things. What struck me most about Second Life is that I've already seen exactly the same thing before 15 years ago - TinyMUD. While MUD stands for Multi-User-Dungeon, the only way I saw TinyMUD used was by people who wanted to craft their own objects and locations that they hanged out in to chat.
Which makes the AC even wronger. I heard it would be 50,000 yen which is around $430. So it costs approximately $180 more than the Wii. Considering what that difference pays for (HDTV, HDMI, DVD, BluRay, more memory, more CPU power, hard disk storage, web browser, music, video playback etc.) it's not that outrageous.
Anyone who buys any console at launch deserves to be fleeced as well as disappointed when the thing doesn't work properly. That goes for the Wii as well. A cold dose of reality might just lower the rabid fanboyism a notch.
The baseline PS3 costs $499 so you are wrong. BTW, accessories for the Wii sound ludicrously expensive if your figures are correct.
XBox 360 games typically cost 75 euros in Ireland.