It will play (insert infinite number here) more High Definition movies than any other console out of the box.
Only if an infinite number of Blu-Ray movie titles are offered for sale, which I would have to say is unlikely. If there's more than even 100 titles released on BR-ROM in the first year, I'll be surprised.
Love it or hate it, this is an integral part of the HD movement. by having an HD capable delivery platform, HD will take off.
HD broadcast and cable TV capabilities have been around for a while now, and more people watch either of those than play games. And yet, HD programming is still so rare as to be a novelty.
I wouldn't hold my breath of HD to take off just yet.
The PS3 is $400 less than a blu-ray player, and its also a next-gen game player. I can see a lot of people who want to get a blu-ray player going for the PS3 instead, and then you have $400 to spend on games or movies.
And I can see a lot of Blu-Ray player manufacturers (all three of them?) saying "O shit! The PS3 is stealing all our sales!" and reducing the MSRP of their standalone players to the $500-600 range. So much for that "value" argument -- especially since it's still to be determined whether Blu-Ray support is worth $500-1000 itself.
Microsoft and Sony lose money on their hardware, and who benefits? Us. We get fast, expensive machines for lower price because their willing to take some risks.
You know who else lost money on their consoles? Sega, Atari, SNK...
The benefit to us, the gamers, disappears if the console makers lose so much money that they have to exit the industry. Competition is good, competition is healthy; but if the companies don't take care of themselves, there will be less of it in the future.
It doesn't, though -- have you noticed the Hollywoodization of the gaming industry that's been going on for the past 5-10 years? Developers are spending more than ever on their hit games, and costs are going to rise some more before they fall again.
It may be cheaper to press a DVD than to burn and assemble a cartridge full of ROM chips in it, yes, but it doesn't follow that "making video games" as a whole is less expensive than it used to be.
In the 1980s, the NES was also using some fairly premium technology.
Mmm, I don't know about that. The North American launch of the NES circa 1986 used basically the same hardware that Nintendo of Japan designed circa 1983, so that puts it a generation or two behind "cutting edge already". Consider also that by the mid-1980's 16- and 32-bit CPUs were becoming commonplace in home PC's, yet the NES sported a customized, but still 8-bit, 6502 -- a decade-old technology by that point.
(As I understand it, the customizations consisted mainly of removing support for BCD arithmetic, and adding in a five-channel sound generator.)
It is true, however, that electronic components in 2006 are generally cheaper than they were in 1986, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Nintendo keep their traditional $199 launch price point.
I visited the area around The Pit a few weeks after the attacks, and there was no shortage of intact papers. It's entirely plausible that a passport might be among them.
* Corpse identification thanks to fingerprints in the pentagon
Not a forensic scientist, so I couldn't say whether it's plausible or not. Same is true of most people.
* Rumsfled making a lapsus about "these terrorists who pilot a plane into the WTC and a missile into this very building" while at the Pentagon
Rumsfeld didn't say those specific words, it is misleading for you to put them within quotes as though he had. And if you want to get into semantics, an airplane IS a missile: something thrown or otherwise propelled through the air.
You'd also have to explain where Flight 77 ended up instead, if you want me to believe that it didn't crash into the Pentagon.
* Tapes that would really show the pentagon plane never disclosed (3 more to go with more than one blurry frame)
? SYNTAX ERROR
* half of the presumed "hijackers" still alive in Saudi Arabia or Qatar
Rather, people with the same (or just similar) names as those given for the hijackers on the flight manifests (fake IDs? identity theft?) are living in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That's not proof, that's coincidence.
Not that the Official Story is all that airtight, but it survives an attack from Occam's Razor better than any other explanation I've heard can.
Patent law unambiguously grants owners of copyright, trademarks, etc the same rights as regular property holders, including the right to exclude others from using their property.
Which would be nonsensical, as it is clearly stated in the first word of the sentence that it is PATENT law that is being discussed, not copyright or trademark law.
Writing "Patent law unambiguously grants patent holders the same..." would have offered a slight increase in clarity, but also would have made the sentence more clumsy, from the repetition of the word 'patent' so soon after itself.
Please, give the technology editors at a prominent business publication a LITTLE bit more credit. I don't know what your copyediting credentials are, but I suspect that theirs are more impressive, and that they generally know what they are doing.
a standard NTSC or PAL television that doesn't even go that high [640x480].
Any NSTC television set should be capable of displaying ~480 visible scanlines; it's provided for in the standards. And it only takes a clock speed of a few MHz for a computer to push out 640 pixels per scanline.
So, to sum up, let's say you're designing a high profile gaming site that wants as much exposure as possible. You'll need to support:
* Resolutions: Quarter VGA (cellphones), 6x4, 8x6, 10x7, 12x10
* High DPI for high-end PC and HDTV users
With well-flowable layouts and judicious use of vector graphics, these should not present a problem.
* Input devices: traditional keyboard, number pad (cellphone), touchscreen (DS), gestures and light sabers (Wii)
As a site designer, not my problem. The interface between the user and the user agent is one that needs to be solved by the authors of the user agent.
Oh, and don't forget:
* Has to work for the def and blind (ISO)
Follow the standards for accessibility and you're golden.
* Has to be multilingual
Only if you're looking for a multinational/global audience, and most websites don't (and of those that do, most SHOULDN'T).
* Make it all standards compliant
More importantly, make it so it Works. Your site exists to please your users, not a W3C validator.
* Don't forget the AJAX
No, please DO forget the AJAX, unless you have a defensible business objective that necessitates it. And "buzzword compliance" is not a defensible business objective.
Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example.
Meh, it was just a clone of a Roland AdLib music card with a cheap 8-bit DAC slapped onto it...
The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal.
I'm lost. Are you talking about integrated sound solutions, or the Creative line of products? Nothing hums like an authentic SoundBlaster...
Start Quake3, and then try running it at 640x480 and then 1600x1200, no AA. If you think there's fewer jaggies at 640x480, you need to get your eyes checked.
"Jaggies" are largely an effect of the display itself, not the video circuitry driving it.
Fire up an NES emulator on your 1600x1200 LCD flat panel PC monitor, and check out how pixelated everything looks. It wasn't like that on your TV when you were a kid, right? Right. Your old TV had a much lower resolution, and a dot pitch wide enough that you could measure it with a ruler. The smoothing effect of those fat analog pixels smearing into each other made the jagginess less noticeable.
The sharper the picture a display is capable of producing, the more visible tiny flaws in that picture will become.
[Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US] is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you
Median income alone isn't enough information to prove or disprove that claim; one also has to look at other factors such as cost of living, purchasing power, etc.
There is no economic reason whatsoever why the average American couldn't afford a $400 console and a $500 TV today if they could afford the equivalent of an $800 console and a $1,500 TV in 1977
No ECONOMIC reason, no. But you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the consumer's PERCEPTION of value based on looking at the numerals themselves. $600 in 2006 dollars SEEMS like a lot more than $250 in 1977 dollars, especially to those gamers who were too young or unborn in 1977 to comprehend the economic situation then (which covers most of us).
There's no use crying about game consoles - work on getting some food on your table and a roof over your head first if you're poor enough that $1,000 for five years or more worth of entertainment is unaffordable.
You're still thinking in terms of COST, not in terms of VALUE. If I have $1000 available in my budget to spend on entertainment over the next 5 years, am I going to spend it on an HDTV and a PS3 and no content for it, or am I going to buy a less expensive console and a bunch of titles? Or maybe I could buy some CDs, or books, or some other thing I'm interested in.
Each person has their own perception of value, and it's awfully arrogant of you to dismiss those who don't think the PS3 offers them a good value as "whiners".
I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases.
And I'm saying that most people DO know how to prioritize their purchases, and finding room in their budgets for a $600 gaming console isn't a high priority for most people.
Sony (ADR) 2006 Revenue (USD): 67.53B Net Profit Margin: 1.47% 2006 Employees: 152,700
Microsoft (MSFT) 2005 Revenue (USD): 39.79B Net Profit Margin: 31.59% 2005 Employees: 61,000
What do these basic, high level overviews tell me?
What they tell me is that Microsoft's revenue per employee is about 50% higher than Sony's, and that MS has a much healthier profit margin than Sony does.
That doesn't mean that Sony is on the brink of going out of business, but if I had to pick one company that will still be around in 50 years, based only on the figures listed above...?
In 1 year, in 2 years, in 3 -- the initial price of the PS3 will not be a big deal anymore.
In three years, when the PS3 price has fallen to $399 for the premium bundle, the Xbox 360 bundle will have fallen to $249, and the Wii will be selling for $149. The sword cuts both ways.
how many people wait to buy a console till a way comes out to play 'backup' games?
I dunno... two percent? Three percent?
I'll readily admit that the reason I'm looking to buy a 'classic' Xbox right now is because of all the hacks that have been done on that console to allow unsigned code like Linux, emulators, XBMC, etc. to be run on it. I'll also readily admit that I'm not normal.
From my perspective, the Xbox1 is not a gaming console, it is an affordable general-purpose computer that integrates easily into my living room. Come to think of it, isn't that Microsoft's ultimate goal for the Xbox series too?
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
Also, candy and cupcakes SHOULD be free. But that's not how it works.
An ISP's business goal is to maximize profits. If they can attract more low-bandwidth customers (and therefore bring in more money) by charging them a lower rate than they charge their high-bandwidth customers (who generally have deeper pockets anyway), compared to charging a flat fee to every customer, that is what they will do. I don't see any reason why it SHOULD be any other way.
If you're going to sell me 24/7, 6MB down/1MB up, then god damn it, I expect to get just that. If that's not what I'm getting then don't call it that, and don't promise it!
If you're on the typical residential US$40/month plan, they DON'T call it that, and they DON'T promise it.
Remember, the commercials promise UP TO one hundred times dialup speeds. And the small print on the actual agreement describes transfer rates UP TO 6MB/second. They're not exactly covering up the fact that what they advertise is essentially the burst rate, and sustained rates will vary based on a number of conditions.
If they got a mail from their "bank", telling them to send their CC number or other details, they would NEVER do that.
Oh, I don't know about that. I suspect if someone sent out notices on authentic-looking Bank of America letterhead, stuffed into authentic-looking Bank of America envelopes, informing "customers" that there was an "issue" with their accounts and they need to call an authentic-looking 800 number and provide their account information to resolve it, the phone would ring more than a few times.
So how do we make it so that phishing via SMTP carries as much risk for the scammer as phishing via USPS does?
We're talking about Nintendo, who currently resells old console games on the Game Boy for $30 each
Got a link to support that?
I've never seen the "NES Classic" series games retailing for more than $20, and that was when they were new -- the prices are down to $15 now
Still too expensive for your tastes? Maybe we should look at the release of many of those same NES launch titles in GBA e-Card format, instead. Those titles typically sold for under $5.
In any case, the Virtual Console won't have any of the brick-and-mortar distribution and sales costs that the NES Classics carts, or even the cards, had. As downloads, they'll be almost pure profit. And surely they know the lower you price something, the more sales you're likely to make.
Wii's problem is that the masses expect gorgeous next gen gaming from the new consoles and Wii simply cannot deliver it.
Please define "next gen".
I could (and will) argue that creating a new paradigm for player/game interaction is a more important indicator of "next gen-ness" than any other new feature present on the new batch of consoles, possibly excluding the maturation of online multiplayer.
It's great that a 360 or PS3 will be able to push more polygons at higher resolutions than their predecessors ever could, but those are incremental improvements in gaming. Minor revision numbers, not major ones.
I find it funny that Xbox fanboys are litterally creaming themselves over a feature that PCs had years before that!
I find it funny that PC fanboys are ejaculating semen from their penises over a feature that people who owned actual NES, SNES, Genesis, TG-16, etc. consoles had up to a decade before they did.
Even if you had a cartridge dumper and put the output of that on your hard drive, technically even that is illegal.
Or so the cartridge publisher says; the reality is a bit more complicated. There certainly hasn't been any shortage of court rulings upholding domain-shifting for private use as legitimate, not even when involving the continued use of code written for now-obsolete hardware...
Heck, Nintendo can't even stop the bootleg Famicom makers peddling their wares in booths at every shopping mall in the country. They'd never waste their time taking an individual to court for copying carts they own to a computer.
the GB reader for N64.
Beg pardon? The SNES had the "Super Gameboy" dock, and the GameCube had the "Gameboy Player", but I don't recall any Gameboy related accessory for the 64.
Twelve publishers passed on Harry Potter! Disney passed on Lord of the Rings! Skeptics always become middle managers and when they say "it'll never work" they are ALWAYS WRONG.
That's utter bullshit.
For every Harry Potter that some publisher OUGHT to have snagged but decided not to, there's a slush pile a mile high of manuscripts that will never get published anywhere, because they're complete garbage.
Sometimes when someone says "it'll never work" it's actually because It Never Will Work. Skepticism is healthy; embrace it.
Slashdot Mirror
It will play (insert infinite number here) more High Definition movies than any other console out of the box.
Only if an infinite number of Blu-Ray movie titles are offered for sale, which I would have to say is unlikely. If there's more than even 100 titles released on BR-ROM in the first year, I'll be surprised.
Love it or hate it, this is an integral part of the HD movement. by having an HD capable delivery platform, HD will take off.
HD broadcast and cable TV capabilities have been around for a while now, and more people watch either of those than play games. And yet, HD programming is still so rare as to be a novelty.
I wouldn't hold my breath of HD to take off just yet.
The PS3 is $400 less than a blu-ray player, and its also a next-gen game player. I can see a lot of people who want to get a blu-ray player going for the PS3 instead, and then you have $400 to spend on games or movies.
And I can see a lot of Blu-Ray player manufacturers (all three of them?) saying "O shit! The PS3 is stealing all our sales!" and reducing the MSRP of their standalone players to the $500-600 range. So much for that "value" argument -- especially since it's still to be determined whether Blu-Ray support is worth $500-1000 itself.
Microsoft and Sony lose money on their hardware, and who benefits? Us. We get fast, expensive machines for lower price because their willing to take some risks.
You know who else lost money on their consoles? Sega, Atari, SNK...
The benefit to us, the gamers, disappears if the console makers lose so much money that they have to exit the industry. Competition is good, competition is healthy; but if the companies don't take care of themselves, there will be less of it in the future.
now that it costs them less to make them.
It doesn't, though -- have you noticed the Hollywoodization of the gaming industry that's been going on for the past 5-10 years? Developers are spending more than ever on their hit games, and costs are going to rise some more before they fall again.
It may be cheaper to press a DVD than to burn and assemble a cartridge full of ROM chips in it, yes, but it doesn't follow that "making video games" as a whole is less expensive than it used to be.
In the 1980s, the NES was also using some fairly premium technology.
Mmm, I don't know about that. The North American launch of the NES circa 1986 used basically the same hardware that Nintendo of Japan designed circa 1983, so that puts it a generation or two behind "cutting edge already". Consider also that by the mid-1980's 16- and 32-bit CPUs were becoming commonplace in home PC's, yet the NES sported a customized, but still 8-bit, 6502 -- a decade-old technology by that point.
(As I understand it, the customizations consisted mainly of removing support for BCD arithmetic, and adding in a five-channel sound generator.)
It is true, however, that electronic components in 2006 are generally cheaper than they were in 1986, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Nintendo keep their traditional $199 launch price point.
Anyone remember Merril Lynch's $900 ps3?
So they overestimate everything by 50 percent and the Wii is actually going to launch at $135 or so? YAY!
* Intact hijacker passport found in the WTC ruins
I visited the area around The Pit a few weeks after the attacks, and there was no shortage of intact papers. It's entirely plausible that a passport might be among them.
* Corpse identification thanks to fingerprints in the pentagon
Not a forensic scientist, so I couldn't say whether it's plausible or not. Same is true of most people.
* Rumsfled making a lapsus about "these terrorists who pilot a plane into the WTC and a missile into this very building" while at the Pentagon
Rumsfeld didn't say those specific words, it is misleading for you to put them within quotes as though he had. And if you want to get into semantics, an airplane IS a missile: something thrown or otherwise propelled through the air.
You'd also have to explain where Flight 77 ended up instead, if you want me to believe that it didn't crash into the Pentagon.
* Tapes that would really show the pentagon plane never disclosed (3 more to go with more than one blurry frame)
? SYNTAX ERROR
* half of the presumed "hijackers" still alive in Saudi Arabia or Qatar
Rather, people with the same (or just similar) names as those given for the hijackers on the flight manifests (fake IDs? identity theft?) are living in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That's not proof, that's coincidence.
Not that the Official Story is all that airtight, but it survives an attack from Occam's Razor better than any other explanation I've heard can.
Patent law unambiguously grants owners of copyright, trademarks, etc the same rights as regular property holders, including the right to exclude others from using their property.
Which would be nonsensical, as it is clearly stated in the first word of the sentence that it is PATENT law that is being discussed, not copyright or trademark law.
Writing "Patent law unambiguously grants patent holders the same..." would have offered a slight increase in clarity, but also would have made the sentence more clumsy, from the repetition of the word 'patent' so soon after itself.
Please, give the technology editors at a prominent business publication a LITTLE bit more credit. I don't know what your copyediting credentials are, but I suspect that theirs are more impressive, and that they generally know what they are doing.
a standard NTSC or PAL television that doesn't even go that high [640x480].
Any NSTC television set should be capable of displaying ~480 visible scanlines; it's provided for in the standards. And it only takes a clock speed of a few MHz for a computer to push out 640 pixels per scanline.
So, to sum up, let's say you're designing a high profile gaming site that wants as much exposure as possible. You'll need to support:
* Resolutions: Quarter VGA (cellphones), 6x4, 8x6, 10x7, 12x10
* High DPI for high-end PC and HDTV users
With well-flowable layouts and judicious use of vector graphics, these should not present a problem.
* Input devices: traditional keyboard, number pad (cellphone), touchscreen (DS), gestures and light sabers (Wii)
As a site designer, not my problem. The interface between the user and the user agent is one that needs to be solved by the authors of the user agent.
Oh, and don't forget:
* Has to work for the def and blind (ISO)
Follow the standards for accessibility and you're golden.
* Has to be multilingual
Only if you're looking for a multinational/global audience, and most websites don't (and of those that do, most SHOULDN'T).
* Make it all standards compliant
More importantly, make it so it Works. Your site exists to please your users, not a W3C validator.
* Don't forget the AJAX
No, please DO forget the AJAX, unless you have a defensible business objective that necessitates it. And "buzzword compliance" is not a defensible business objective.
Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example.
Meh, it was just a clone of a Roland AdLib music card with a cheap 8-bit DAC slapped onto it...
The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal.
I'm lost. Are you talking about integrated sound solutions, or the Creative line of products? Nothing hums like an authentic SoundBlaster...
Start Quake3, and then try running it at 640x480 and then 1600x1200, no AA. If you think there's fewer jaggies at 640x480, you need to get your eyes checked.
"Jaggies" are largely an effect of the display itself, not the video circuitry driving it.
Fire up an NES emulator on your 1600x1200 LCD flat panel PC monitor, and check out how pixelated everything looks. It wasn't like that on your TV when you were a kid, right? Right. Your old TV had a much lower resolution, and a dot pitch wide enough that you could measure it with a ruler. The smoothing effect of those fat analog pixels smearing into each other made the jagginess less noticeable.
The sharper the picture a display is capable of producing, the more visible tiny flaws in that picture will become.
[Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US] is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you
Median income alone isn't enough information to prove or disprove that claim; one also has to look at other factors such as cost of living, purchasing power, etc.
There is no economic reason whatsoever why the average American couldn't afford a $400 console and a $500 TV today if they could afford the equivalent of an $800 console and a $1,500 TV in 1977
No ECONOMIC reason, no. But you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the consumer's PERCEPTION of value based on looking at the numerals themselves. $600 in 2006 dollars SEEMS like a lot more than $250 in 1977 dollars, especially to those gamers who were too young or unborn in 1977 to comprehend the economic situation then (which covers most of us).
There's no use crying about game consoles - work on getting some food on your table and a roof over your head first if you're poor enough that $1,000 for five years or more worth of entertainment is unaffordable.
You're still thinking in terms of COST, not in terms of VALUE. If I have $1000 available in my budget to spend on entertainment over the next 5 years, am I going to spend it on an HDTV and a PS3 and no content for it, or am I going to buy a less expensive console and a bunch of titles? Or maybe I could buy some CDs, or books, or some other thing I'm interested in.
Each person has their own perception of value, and it's awfully arrogant of you to dismiss those who don't think the PS3 offers them a good value as "whiners".
I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases.
And I'm saying that most people DO know how to prioritize their purchases, and finding room in their budgets for a $600 gaming console isn't a high priority for most people.
Sony (ADR)
2006 Revenue (USD): 67.53B
Net Profit Margin: 1.47%
2006 Employees: 152,700
Microsoft (MSFT)
2005 Revenue (USD): 39.79B
Net Profit Margin: 31.59%
2005 Employees: 61,000
What do these basic, high level overviews tell me?
What they tell me is that Microsoft's revenue per employee is about 50% higher than Sony's, and that MS has a much healthier profit margin than Sony does.
That doesn't mean that Sony is on the brink of going out of business, but if I had to pick one company that will still be around in 50 years, based only on the figures listed above...?
In 1 year, in 2 years, in 3 -- the initial price of the PS3 will not be a big deal anymore.
In three years, when the PS3 price has fallen to $399 for the premium bundle, the Xbox 360 bundle will have fallen to $249, and the Wii will be selling for $149. The sword cuts both ways.
if they pull off the PS3 thing well enough to set blu-ray as the new hd standard (who cares about the games?)
The same way they pulled off establishing UMD was the new mobile video standard?
Or Memory Stick, SACD, MiniDisc, Beta in their respective markets?
Sony's track record for media format acceptance is dismal, and I'm already ready to write off BluRay as yet another dud.
Every action and apparent mistake is actually a carefully planned plot to make us eat Dorittos.
Ha ha, you missepelled "Doritos"!
Man, I sure could go for a bag of Doritos right now, though...
how many people wait to buy a console till a way comes out to play 'backup' games?
I dunno... two percent? Three percent?
I'll readily admit that the reason I'm looking to buy a 'classic' Xbox right now is because of all the hacks that have been done on that console to allow unsigned code like Linux, emulators, XBMC, etc. to be run on it. I'll also readily admit that I'm not normal.
From my perspective, the Xbox1 is not a gaming console, it is an affordable general-purpose computer that integrates easily into my living room. Come to think of it, isn't that Microsoft's ultimate goal for the Xbox series too?
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
Also, candy and cupcakes SHOULD be free. But that's not how it works.
An ISP's business goal is to maximize profits. If they can attract more low-bandwidth customers (and therefore bring in more money) by charging them a lower rate than they charge their high-bandwidth customers (who generally have deeper pockets anyway), compared to charging a flat fee to every customer, that is what they will do. I don't see any reason why it SHOULD be any other way.
If you're going to sell me 24/7, 6MB down/1MB up, then god damn it, I expect to get just that. If that's not what I'm getting then don't call it that, and don't promise it!
If you're on the typical residential US$40/month plan, they DON'T call it that, and they DON'T promise it.
Remember, the commercials promise UP TO one hundred times dialup speeds. And the small print on the actual agreement describes transfer rates UP TO 6MB/second. They're not exactly covering up the fact that what they advertise is essentially the burst rate, and sustained rates will vary based on a number of conditions.
If they got a mail from their "bank", telling them to send their CC number or other details, they would NEVER do that.
Oh, I don't know about that. I suspect if someone sent out notices on authentic-looking Bank of America letterhead, stuffed into authentic-looking Bank of America envelopes,
informing "customers" that there was an "issue" with their accounts and they need to call an authentic-looking 800 number and provide their account information to resolve it, the phone would ring more than a few times.
So how do we make it so that phishing via SMTP carries as much risk for the scammer as phishing via USPS does?
We're talking about Nintendo, who currently resells old console games on the Game Boy for $30 each
Got a link to support that?
I've never seen the "NES Classic" series games retailing for more than $20, and that was when they were new -- the prices are down to $15 now
Still too expensive for your tastes? Maybe we should look at the release of many of those same NES launch titles in GBA e-Card format, instead. Those titles typically sold for under $5.
In any case, the Virtual Console won't have any of the brick-and-mortar distribution and sales costs that the NES Classics carts, or even the cards, had. As downloads, they'll be almost pure profit. And surely they know the lower you price something, the more sales you're likely to make.
Wii's problem is that the masses expect gorgeous next gen gaming from the new consoles and Wii simply cannot deliver it.
Please define "next gen".
I could (and will) argue that creating a new paradigm for player/game interaction is a more important indicator of "next gen-ness" than any other new feature present on the new batch of consoles, possibly excluding the maturation of online multiplayer.
It's great that a 360 or PS3 will be able to push more polygons at higher resolutions than their predecessors ever could, but those are incremental improvements in gaming. Minor revision numbers, not major ones.
I find it funny that Xbox fanboys are litterally creaming themselves over a feature that PCs had years before that!
I find it funny that PC fanboys are ejaculating semen from their penises over a feature that people who owned actual NES, SNES, Genesis, TG-16, etc. consoles had up to a decade before they did.
Even if you had a cartridge dumper and put the output of that on your hard drive, technically even that is illegal.
Or so the cartridge publisher says; the reality is a bit more complicated. There certainly hasn't been any shortage of court rulings upholding domain-shifting for private use as legitimate, not even when involving the continued use of code written for now-obsolete hardware...
Heck, Nintendo can't even stop the bootleg Famicom makers peddling their wares in booths at every shopping mall in the country. They'd never waste their time taking an individual to court for copying carts they own to a computer.
the GB reader for N64.
Beg pardon? The SNES had the "Super Gameboy" dock, and the GameCube had the "Gameboy Player", but I don't recall any Gameboy related accessory for the 64.
Twelve publishers passed on Harry Potter! Disney passed on Lord of the Rings! Skeptics always become middle managers and when they say "it'll never work" they are ALWAYS WRONG.
That's utter bullshit.
For every Harry Potter that some publisher OUGHT to have snagged but decided not to, there's a slush pile a mile high of manuscripts that will never get published anywhere, because they're complete garbage.
Sometimes when someone says "it'll never work" it's actually because It Never Will Work. Skepticism is healthy; embrace it.