It's got the same amount of memory in total as the 360 (not counting the various little caches that both machines have dotted around). The problem is that the PS3 has it hard partitioned into 256Mb each for CPU and GPU, while the 360 has just a big fat 512Mb slab, and you can divide it up between the two as you see fit. I don't think it'll make too much difference for most multiplatform titles.
True here, but then I'd have bought the hypothetical BMW 3 Series instead of my Seat Leon if it was half the real price, too.
The exec's real point is that they're building machines that they really can't sell for $300, but most people don't want to buy their $600 even though it contains components that are 'worth' that much.
That's kind of the point of all this. Every time we normally look at PSP sales, journalists just compare with the DS, which is still absolutely kicking its backside all round the park. But at over 20 million machines, the PSP is actually doing rather well in comparison to the home console market - sales figures usually show it selling around the level the 360 does these days, or even more.
I've got a 360, and I love it for playing games, but I'm already half-regretting my purchase of the HD-DVD add-on drive; the fan noise from the thing is insane.
Umm, that's not the case, as far as I can make it work. The 360 won't even play unencrypted AAC files if it tries to read them from any device other than an iPod. Which is just plain weird. If I've got my iPod in the living room and sitting next to the 360 anyway, it might as well rest in the Dock that's right alongside and pump music straight to the amp, cutting out the middle-man.
The argument is not "look Viacom break the law too", but rather "What we're doing is a reasonable level of policing to meet DMCA requirements. Let's take another popular video hosting site to compare. See, same policing, same failure to catch every single one. Oh, look, it's owned by Viacom, and so we suggest that they themselves consider the attempts reasonable there".
So it's not so much two wrongs making a right, but an argument that neither is a wrong in the first place.
Since the PS1 and PS2 games have region encoding on them, an import PS3 is actually going to do a rather _worse_ job of playing your PAL PS2 games...
Right now, it looks like the only answer is to keep your PS2 for a while longer. I'd rather not start GT4 all over from scratch anyway, and the PS3 doesn't support my force-feedback wheel, either.
Exactly. An extra £10/$10 was slapped on the price of 360 games because the publishers (not Microsoft, the publishers) thought they coud get away with it at that stage of the game.
The vast majority of a game's expenses are on the creation of the product; R&D if you will. They're the same whether the game sells one copy or a million. So, just as we saw with the previous two generations (more? I wasn't buying console games then, as I was computers only) and indeed with DVDs, the price starts high while the people with the machines are the early adopter stage, then once the userbase is a bit bigger you can drop your prices to sell more copies.
Umm, I don't get it. What's so bad about those of us who like racing games being allowed to buy a hot new title at the same time as the people who are into FPSes? If Sony only released 12 games a year they wouldn't ship the number of PS2s they have.
Besides, if I remember rightly, Halo 2's release date was shared with a Rainbow 6, a Splinter Cell and a Call Of Duty all within a week or two of each other, and that didn't seem to come out too badly.
Blu-Ray have been very quiet about it, and it's a total bloody nightmare to get reliable answers on this, but apart from Fox who region-encode everything, and MGM who get their discs prepared by Fox, virtually all catalogue titles and some new ones are actually set for play in all regions at the moment.
So if you do buy a UK-release Blu-Ray player instead of importing a PS3 like a sensible person, it's possible to get some import discs anyway.
I know what you mean about the UK prices, though - I paid £32 for the Mission: Impossible Trilogy from Amazon, which is only £2 more than HMV want for just the third film!
Warner do indeed support both formats. Most of their line-up come out on both formats at the same time. The exception is for anything where they are using the iHD capabilities on HD-DVD. Because they don't want to provide an inferior disc on Blu-Ray, they have postponed everything that uses it until next year, when they hope the Blu-Ray group will have actually sorted out the spec on this; the previous July deadline is slipping already.
There's a reason that you can't get Warner's Potter 4 (even in the UK, where the HD-DVD is out), Batman Returns or V For Vendetta yet, among other titles.
They've been developed, but aren't on the shelves yet. I bought Superman Returns on a dual-format disc back in November, because it was only £2 more than the DVD-only version. It wasn't even close to being the first title like that, either.
Base cost of the 360 Premium = £250 Live Silver account x 100 years = 0 (where you can still play highscore challenges, download demos and Live Arcade titles and do pretty much everything I use Live for) HD-DVD Drive = £130 (where I can play movies imported from the US at £15, rather than paying £25 a film for a UK Blu-Ray title, as the latter have region controls) Wired connection = £0 (like anyone else with Cable broadband, my STB sits next to my consoles under the TV)
Base cost of the PS3 = £425
Oh, how I envy you Americans with your 20Gb PS3s. If I could have one for £280 I'd have got one instead of the 360 despite the above.
Mind you, fast-forward to June when The Matrix is a HD-DVD exclusive, but Pirates Of The Carribbean a Blu-Ray one and only God knows what will happen on that front.
Certainly, though, you can expect a 360 price cut well before you see a PS3 one.
Did you get your PS3 near launch? Sony haven't shipped the $500 version of the PS3 since January, according to every retail store I've heard from. Maybe that's the cause of all the legendary piles of machines that the likes of Penny Arcade mocked - people don't want to pay $100 extra for an ugly bit of chrome, wireless and a bigger drive that isn't actually necessary when all you want to do is play videogames and watch Blu-Ray movies.
Altertantively, I'm just being bitter, because Sony haven't even pretended to launch the 20Gb model here in the UK, where I paid £175 less for my 360 than what the PS3 will cost in a fortnight.
The problem with Blu-Ray is that it's too early in the format's life to use for a games console. DVD had a lot longer to establish itself as a movie format, sell insanely expensive first- and second-gen machines to us eejits that wanted fancy-looking movies and then get the R&D costs out of the way and volume manufacturing stable before it turned up in the PS2 at a sensible price.
The PS3 is causing two problems. For us consumers it's contributing toward the insane price of a machine that few can justify spending that kind of money just to play videogames. And for Sony's partners in the Blu-Ray venture, standalone players have been killed stone dead by a competitor who has software sales to cover the fact that their machine is half the price and allows you to play games as a handy aside.
Blu-Ray's launch has been a real mess because they rushed it to market in a desperate attempt to stop HD-DVD building too much of a lead. The spec for a second video stream for PIP effects, the full BD-J coverage and the network layer are STILL not finalised. The format is being screwed by the PS3 far more than the PS3 is screwed because the format is expensive.
Still, provided this all gets sorted, and the competition don't get a chance to dominate too much, the PS3 will be a fine machine in 12-18 months once it has titles and a sensible price.
Blu-Ray movies don't work in my DVD player, vinyl doesn't work in my Laserdisc player, my Windows PC won't install Office For Mac, my XBox 360 can't play Wii games and I had to use legally questionable firmware hacks to get my PSP to understand my PS1 files.
While we're at it, maybe all music programs should be blocked from encoding to anything other than mp3? The 42 tracks in my iTunes library that came from the store (half of them the free ones from Single Of The Week, in case you're wondering how I ended up with so many) would have a rather smaller lock-in effect if I wanted a different brand of music player than the 50Gb of stuff I ripped to AAC from my own CDs and can't face doing all over again. Similarly, WMP defaults to WMA, for those that use that.
Fair enough, then. I just feel that now we've got ACTUAL PS1 games, rather than just overpriced remakes, I'm massively more pleased with my little machine.
Use the recent, easy peasy to install homebrew firmware to run actual PS1 games instead of warmed-over ports of them. Gran Turismo 2 has me utterly hooked all over again, and I'd forgotten just how great Tempest X is, too.
SWOS (Proper '94 SWOS, not the recent PS2 update) was a life-destroyer (and stick destroyer) of Elite proportions in the UK. It was really the first computer football game to be great, and remains the best to many. Legions of British males bought Amigas purely for the game, and those tiny characters inspire devotion that even Final Fantasy would dream of.
As for the balance of the list, the implication seems to be that everyone chose one each, without regard for what anyone else had picked.
Slashdot Mirror
If I knew how to cite the extras on the Season 1 DVD set, I'd fix that for them. But I don't.
House is great.
It's got the same amount of memory in total as the 360 (not counting the various little caches that both machines have dotted around). The problem is that the PS3 has it hard partitioned into 256Mb each for CPU and GPU, while the 360 has just a big fat 512Mb slab, and you can divide it up between the two as you see fit. I don't think it'll make too much difference for most multiplatform titles.
True here, but then I'd have bought the hypothetical BMW 3 Series instead of my Seat Leon if it was half the real price, too.
The exec's real point is that they're building machines that they really can't sell for $300, but most people don't want to buy their $600 even though it contains components that are 'worth' that much.
That's kind of the point of all this. Every time we normally look at PSP sales, journalists just compare with the DS, which is still absolutely kicking its backside all round the park. But at over 20 million machines, the PSP is actually doing rather well in comparison to the home console market - sales figures usually show it selling around the level the 360 does these days, or even more.
I've got a 360, and I love it for playing games, but I'm already half-regretting my purchase of the HD-DVD add-on drive; the fan noise from the thing is insane.
Umm, that's not the case, as far as I can make it work. The 360 won't even play unencrypted AAC files if it tries to read them from any device other than an iPod. Which is just plain weird. If I've got my iPod in the living room and sitting next to the 360 anyway, it might as well rest in the Dock that's right alongside and pump music straight to the amp, cutting out the middle-man.
The argument is not "look Viacom break the law too", but rather "What we're doing is a reasonable level of policing to meet DMCA requirements. Let's take another popular video hosting site to compare. See, same policing, same failure to catch every single one. Oh, look, it's owned by Viacom, and so we suggest that they themselves consider the attempts reasonable there".
So it's not so much two wrongs making a right, but an argument that neither is a wrong in the first place.
Since the PS1 and PS2 games have region encoding on them, an import PS3 is actually going to do a rather _worse_ job of playing your PAL PS2 games...
Right now, it looks like the only answer is to keep your PS2 for a while longer. I'd rather not start GT4 all over from scratch anyway, and the PS3 doesn't support my force-feedback wheel, either.
Exactly. An extra £10/$10 was slapped on the price of 360 games because the publishers (not Microsoft, the publishers) thought they coud get away with it at that stage of the game.
The vast majority of a game's expenses are on the creation of the product; R&D if you will. They're the same whether the game sells one copy or a million. So, just as we saw with the previous two generations (more? I wasn't buying console games then, as I was computers only) and indeed with DVDs, the price starts high while the people with the machines are the early adopter stage, then once the userbase is a bit bigger you can drop your prices to sell more copies.
Right, so instead of the Japanese price of £200 you now expect the British to spend £525 on our PS3s? And people wonder why we try to import.
But Sony told me that being outsold at a ratio of 2:1 for a month meant the losing platform was dead and buried!
Or does that only apply to the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight?
Umm, I don't get it. What's so bad about those of us who like racing games being allowed to buy a hot new title at the same time as the people who are into FPSes? If Sony only released 12 games a year they wouldn't ship the number of PS2s they have.
Besides, if I remember rightly, Halo 2's release date was shared with a Rainbow 6, a Splinter Cell and a Call Of Duty all within a week or two of each other, and that didn't seem to come out too badly.
Blu-Ray have been very quiet about it, and it's a total bloody nightmare to get reliable answers on this, but apart from Fox who region-encode everything, and MGM who get their discs prepared by Fox, virtually all catalogue titles and some new ones are actually set for play in all regions at the moment.
So if you do buy a UK-release Blu-Ray player instead of importing a PS3 like a sensible person, it's possible to get some import discs anyway.
I know what you mean about the UK prices, though - I paid £32 for the Mission: Impossible Trilogy from Amazon, which is only £2 more than HMV want for just the third film!
Warner do indeed support both formats. Most of their line-up come out on both formats at the same time. The exception is for anything where they are using the iHD capabilities on HD-DVD. Because they don't want to provide an inferior disc on Blu-Ray, they have postponed everything that uses it until next year, when they hope the Blu-Ray group will have actually sorted out the spec on this; the previous July deadline is slipping already.
There's a reason that you can't get Warner's Potter 4 (even in the UK, where the HD-DVD is out), Batman Returns or V For Vendetta yet, among other titles.
They've been developed, but aren't on the shelves yet. I bought Superman Returns on a dual-format disc back in November, because it was only £2 more than the DVD-only version. It wasn't even close to being the first title like that, either.
Alternatively,
Base cost of the 360 Premium = £250
Live Silver account x 100 years = 0 (where you can still play highscore challenges, download demos and Live Arcade titles and do pretty much everything I use Live for)
HD-DVD Drive = £130 (where I can play movies imported from the US at £15, rather than paying £25 a film for a UK Blu-Ray title, as the latter have region controls)
Wired connection = £0 (like anyone else with Cable broadband, my STB sits next to my consoles under the TV)
Base cost of the PS3 = £425
Oh, how I envy you Americans with your 20Gb PS3s. If I could have one for £280 I'd have got one instead of the 360 despite the above.
Mind you, fast-forward to June when The Matrix is a HD-DVD exclusive, but Pirates Of The Carribbean a Blu-Ray one and only God knows what will happen on that front.
Certainly, though, you can expect a 360 price cut well before you see a PS3 one.
Did you get your PS3 near launch? Sony haven't shipped the $500 version of the PS3 since January, according to every retail store I've heard from. Maybe that's the cause of all the legendary piles of machines that the likes of Penny Arcade mocked - people don't want to pay $100 extra for an ugly bit of chrome, wireless and a bigger drive that isn't actually necessary when all you want to do is play videogames and watch Blu-Ray movies.
Altertantively, I'm just being bitter, because Sony haven't even pretended to launch the 20Gb model here in the UK, where I paid £175 less for my 360 than what the PS3 will cost in a fortnight.
Your memory is faulty. The Dreamcast was $199, the PS2 $299.
The problem with Blu-Ray is that it's too early in the format's life to use for a games console. DVD had a lot longer to establish itself as a movie format, sell insanely expensive first- and second-gen machines to us eejits that wanted fancy-looking movies and then get the R&D costs out of the way and volume manufacturing stable before it turned up in the PS2 at a sensible price.
The PS3 is causing two problems. For us consumers it's contributing toward the insane price of a machine that few can justify spending that kind of money just to play videogames. And for Sony's partners in the Blu-Ray venture, standalone players have been killed stone dead by a competitor who has software sales to cover the fact that their machine is half the price and allows you to play games as a handy aside.
Blu-Ray's launch has been a real mess because they rushed it to market in a desperate attempt to stop HD-DVD building too much of a lead. The spec for a second video stream for PIP effects, the full BD-J coverage and the network layer are STILL not finalised. The format is being screwed by the PS3 far more than the PS3 is screwed because the format is expensive.
Still, provided this all gets sorted, and the competition don't get a chance to dominate too much, the PS3 will be a fine machine in 12-18 months once it has titles and a sensible price.
Blu-Ray movies don't work in my DVD player, vinyl doesn't work in my Laserdisc player, my Windows PC won't install Office For Mac, my XBox 360 can't play Wii games and I had to use legally questionable firmware hacks to get my PSP to understand my PS1 files.
While we're at it, maybe all music programs should be blocked from encoding to anything other than mp3? The 42 tracks in my iTunes library that came from the store (half of them the free ones from Single Of The Week, in case you're wondering how I ended up with so many) would have a rather smaller lock-in effect if I wanted a different brand of music player than the 50Gb of stuff I ripped to AAC from my own CDs and can't face doing all over again. Similarly, WMP defaults to WMA, for those that use that.
Fair enough, then. I just feel that now we've got ACTUAL PS1 games, rather than just overpriced remakes, I'm massively more pleased with my little machine.
Use the recent, easy peasy to install homebrew firmware to run actual PS1 games instead of warmed-over ports of them. Gran Turismo 2 has me utterly hooked all over again, and I'd forgotten just how great Tempest X is, too.
SWOS (Proper '94 SWOS, not the recent PS2 update) was a life-destroyer (and stick destroyer) of Elite proportions in the UK. It was really the first computer football game to be great, and remains the best to many. Legions of British males bought Amigas purely for the game, and those tiny characters inspire devotion that even Final Fantasy would dream of.
As for the balance of the list, the implication seems to be that everyone chose one each, without regard for what anyone else had picked.
Nonsense. Sensi destroyed my A levels. Elite and Mercenary merely destroyed my 11+ exams.