Do you really think that the "juvenile" games haven't done well? I would say that the biggest success of this generation of consoles is Mario Kart 64, definitely a "juvenile" game. A racing game featuring a princess, a dragon, and some plumbers outsold "edgy" games like Carmageddon et alia by far. Granted, games aimed at a more mature audience have started to catch on, but I seriously doubt that the next incarnation of Mario won't outsell anything the PSX2 offers. It's not just younger gamers that play these "juvenile" games; everyone enjoys a well-designed, inventive game like the ones that Nintendo's been putting out for 15 years. In my opinion, the gratuitous games are often, at their core, pretty shallow games, offering nowhere near the enjoyment of a good race at Wario Stadium. At my college, you'll never find "drunken lads" playing Metal Gear Solid late at night, although it is pretty common to find them playing Mario Kart battle for hours on end
I'm pretty sure that N64 came out a good deal later than the PSX; at least six months later, I think, maybe a year later.
I agree that Nintendo needs to get better game support, although they've done surprising well with the N64, considering there seem to be about three times as many PSX titles. They've done well because Rare and Nintendo's in-house team seem to be the best publishers, and they are both N64 exclusive. Tons of people bought an N64 just for MarioKart. I think that once Nintendo ships MarioCube, ZeldaCube, and MetroidCube (or whatever they call them), they'll blow DC out of the water. PSX2 will be a force because of Sony's marketing muscle, but I foresee the Cube doing much better than the N64.
I've wondered for a while when the videogame industry would eclipse the movie industry and take over the entire entertainment sector. I think that videogame sales were larger than movie revenues in 1998, but the videogame industry is still ignored, it seems, by a lot of the creative community. With specs as powerful as this, I wonder if this will persuade companies like Dreamworks to devote their attention to making videogames instead of movies? With the capabilities of this system approaching photo-realism, producing games is going to cost so much that the publishers are probably going to have to look for financial backing somewhere; I wouldn't be suprised to see some of the entertainment giants jumping into the videogame market now.
Doesn't 40+ MB seem like enough? Don't forget that, with customized hardware, tons of memory isn't all that necessary. It's not like it needs to allocate 40 MB to run Windows or something. I forget how much memory the N64 has, but it's pitifully small compared to a 128 MB, 32 MB VRAM tricked-out PC, and yet it still produces something in the same ballpark in terms of quality.
As for proprietary media, I'm sure that Nintendo didn't mind producing cartridges while watching Sony get hurt by CD-Rs and mod chips. There's no reason they shouldn't use a proprietary format. It should be something close enough to a mass standard, though, like DVD, so that manufacturing costs are lower. I don't know why they're going with a "mini DVD" instead of a normal DVD locked into a box or something, but I'm sure that they've learned their lesson about expensive media formats.
Can anyone here report on how good a DVD player the PSX2 is? There is definitely a high end and a low end when it comes to DVD players, and I would just as soon buy a PSX2 to play games and a nice DVD player to watch movies if the PSX2 DVD playback wasn't up to par. I've heard that it doesn't have a remote; that's a pretty significant drawback. What's the interface for navigating a DVD then? My DVD remote has about 50 buttons, and I'd hate to see that simplified into a few buttons on the console itself or, even worse, some kind of on-screen menu.
Why do you feel as if you have the right to decide on which OS you can watch DVDs? The studios own the rights to DVDs and the rights to their distribution. If Linux can't legally play a DVD, use a Wintel box or a Mac to watch a DVD. Otherwise, don't watch a DVD. Your argument is like saying, "If I buy a concert ticket, I should be allowed to see the concert wherever I want to. Bob Dylan should have to come to my house and play for me, since I don't want him dictating my 'choice' to me by saying that I have to go to the arena to see him."
Alright, another tech company insisting on cramming more extraneous features into its once simple products!
What I need now is for my Mead Five-Star notebook to play MP3s and my Papermate pen to run Linux. And I can't wait for the day when I can make an awesome Beowulf cluster out of my Trapper Keepers.
Someone should write an option into Mozilla to get it to load web pages without crashing my computer in the process. They could put a little checkbox in the Preferences that says "Crash Computer Frequently." If you don't want it to do that, you could simply uncheck the box. *That* would be a useful feature.
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Do you really think that the "juvenile" games haven't done well? I would say that the biggest success of this generation of consoles is Mario Kart 64, definitely a "juvenile" game. A racing game featuring a princess, a dragon, and some plumbers outsold "edgy" games like Carmageddon et alia by far. Granted, games aimed at a more mature audience have started to catch on, but I seriously doubt that the next incarnation of Mario won't outsell anything the PSX2 offers. It's not just younger gamers that play these "juvenile" games; everyone enjoys a well-designed, inventive game like the ones that Nintendo's been putting out for 15 years. In my opinion, the gratuitous games are often, at their core, pretty shallow games, offering nowhere near the enjoyment of a good race at Wario Stadium. At my college, you'll never find "drunken lads" playing Metal Gear Solid late at night, although it is pretty common to find them playing Mario Kart battle for hours on end
I'm pretty sure that N64 came out a good deal later than the PSX; at least six months later, I think, maybe a year later.
I agree that Nintendo needs to get better game support, although they've done surprising well with the N64, considering there seem to be about three times as many PSX titles. They've done well because Rare and Nintendo's in-house team seem to be the best publishers, and they are both N64 exclusive. Tons of people bought an N64 just for MarioKart. I think that once Nintendo ships MarioCube, ZeldaCube, and MetroidCube (or whatever they call them), they'll blow DC out of the water. PSX2 will be a force because of Sony's marketing muscle, but I foresee the Cube doing much better than the N64.
I've wondered for a while when the videogame industry would eclipse the movie industry and take over the entire entertainment sector. I think that videogame sales were larger than movie revenues in 1998, but the videogame industry is still ignored, it seems, by a lot of the creative community. With specs as powerful as this, I wonder if this will persuade companies like Dreamworks to devote their attention to making videogames instead of movies? With the capabilities of this system approaching photo-realism, producing games is going to cost so much that the publishers are probably going to have to look for financial backing somewhere; I wouldn't be suprised to see some of the entertainment giants jumping into the videogame market now.
Doesn't 40+ MB seem like enough? Don't forget that, with customized hardware, tons of memory isn't all that necessary. It's not like it needs to allocate 40 MB to run Windows or something. I forget how much memory the N64 has, but it's pitifully small compared to a 128 MB, 32 MB VRAM tricked-out PC, and yet it still produces something in the same ballpark in terms of quality. As for proprietary media, I'm sure that Nintendo didn't mind producing cartridges while watching Sony get hurt by CD-Rs and mod chips. There's no reason they shouldn't use a proprietary format. It should be something close enough to a mass standard, though, like DVD, so that manufacturing costs are lower. I don't know why they're going with a "mini DVD" instead of a normal DVD locked into a box or something, but I'm sure that they've learned their lesson about expensive media formats.
Can anyone here report on how good a DVD player the PSX2 is? There is definitely a high end and a low end when it comes to DVD players, and I would just as soon buy a PSX2 to play games and a nice DVD player to watch movies if the PSX2 DVD playback wasn't up to par. I've heard that it doesn't have a remote; that's a pretty significant drawback. What's the interface for navigating a DVD then? My DVD remote has about 50 buttons, and I'd hate to see that simplified into a few buttons on the console itself or, even worse, some kind of on-screen menu.
Why do you feel as if you have the right to decide on which OS you can watch DVDs? The studios own the rights to DVDs and the rights to their distribution. If Linux can't legally play a DVD, use a Wintel box or a Mac to watch a DVD. Otherwise, don't watch a DVD. Your argument is like saying, "If I buy a concert ticket, I should be allowed to see the concert wherever I want to. Bob Dylan should have to come to my house and play for me, since I don't want him dictating my 'choice' to me by saying that I have to go to the arena to see him."
Alright, another tech company insisting on cramming more extraneous features into its once simple products! What I need now is for my Mead Five-Star notebook to play MP3s and my Papermate pen to run Linux. And I can't wait for the day when I can make an awesome Beowulf cluster out of my Trapper Keepers.
Someone should write an option into Mozilla to get it to load web pages without crashing my computer in the process. They could put a little checkbox in the Preferences that says "Crash Computer Frequently." If you don't want it to do that, you could simply uncheck the box. *That* would be a useful feature.
Put Linux on those teens and make a Beowulf cluster out of them.
This partnership brings me one step closer to my ultimate goal: making a Beowulf cluster out of my cell phones.