Tell me what an emotion engine is, exactly, and why anyone should care? It's a processor. Woopty doo, you gave your video game machine a processor.
Unprecidented.
The PS3 will not be a supercomputer. The PS3 will cost $300 - $500. When an IBM workstation with dozens of PowerPC cores costing half a million dollars can only do 40 or so GigaFLOPs, there's no way in hell that the PS3 (based on the same basic Power Processor architecture) can do 2 TeraFLOPs. Not if they're measuring the same thing anyway. Otherwise, why doesn't IBM just use those in it's big iron instead of Power PCs, and market themselves as offering "A Gazillion YottaFLOPs!!!!"
Because IBM has a reputation to uphold, and they market to people who aren't teenagers dazzled by the biggest number they can think of. The people they market to will hold them to their promises.
Sony is just hype.
Yes, digital convergance. Yes, bringing it all together. Blah blah blah. Sony, you're not the only one working toward this goal, and frankly, you're not NEARLY in the position MS is in to offer it. Their market penetration on the desktop PC gives them a powerful edge, as does the fact that they started doing it in the last generation, so people who were looking for that kind of convergance already found a good thing with the X-Box.
Every console launch sells out. (Well, except the PSP). The colsole manufacturers know this, and take it for granted.
If they know for a fact that the next generation console will sell out at $199.99, then why not up the price?
Will it still sell out at $299.99? Yep. So what's it hurt to up it some more? Will it still sell out at $399.99? Yep. How about $499.99?
They extimate how high a yield they'll have for the initial shippments, and what demand will be. Then they price it as high as they think it'll sell out with the early adopters.
Once they start shipping them in more massive quantities, prices will drop, as the early adopters who are willing to pay $500 each will have all been sold a console or two.
Bottom line is, if the initial release is only 50,000 units, what does it hurt to launch at $400 and stay there? If it'll sell out, then they'd be foolish not to.
This is the most simple form of supply and demand, people. Come on!
I've not known that to be the case either. Most places keep close tabs on their girls because they don't want to get shut down for anything illegal.
That said, the girls make next to nothing dancing. Going up on stage a few times, perhaps 5 minutes out of an hour and dancing for a few dollars in your g-string? That's just what gets people into the club, bud. The money they make is by hustling people. Private dances and VIP stuff. It's not prostitution, but I know I wouldn't want to have to give lap dances for a living. Clothes on or not, giving lap dances to strangers for $20 at a time is a bit of a turnoff for me. I dated a stripped briefly (she started dancing after we were together) she hated it. But $20 a dance (a dance lasts one song, so three to five minutes) + tips beats the $5 or $10 you're going to make on stage. By a long shot.
The girls have to tip out at the end of the night. Bouner gets his cut, DJ theirs, bartenders theirs, and the club itself usually gets a cut. If there's anything left, that's what they bring home. Usually that's good money. If it's a slow night, or they overschedule (or both), they can wind up bringing home nothing, or loosing money. But even if they do, it all evens out on weekends when they bring make most of their money. Just like any tip based job.
Does shady stuff happen? Sure. Lots of people are corrupt. But to assert that it happens all the time or all over the place is just plain wrong.
1) Atari 2600, clones, competition (I'm a bit too young to have much memory of this era).
2) The 8 Bit era (Atari's failed 8-bit, Sega Master System, NES)
3) 16 Bit era, Mainly the Sega Genesis and SNES, though the 16 / 8 bit "hybrid" TurboGraphix 16 (AKA PC Engine) helped transition to this era, though some may not sonsider it part of it.
4) Generation 4. Most consoles released during this era were, predictibly 32 bit (Playstaton, Sega Saturn, Virtual Boy, Phillip's CD-i), however there were a couple of notable standouts. Both Atari, and later Nintendo would release systems touted as 64 bit. Many still dismiss the Atari Jaguar as not being "true" 64 bit (though what "true" is supposed to mean is anyone's guess.) as it had a strange hybrid architecture using everything from 16 - 64 bit pipelines. And the N64 itself has sometimes been criticized, though not as freequently.
5) 128 Bit. The fifth generation brought everyone back on the same page again. Dreamcast, PS2, X-Box and Gamecube were all "128 bit" systems. Some claim the Dreamcast was not of this generation. Though it's release date was closest to the current gen, it used 128 bit technology, and it competed only with PS2 / XBox / Gamecube. Yes it died early, but clearly it was just an early console of the current generation.
6) Playstation 3 / X-Box 360 / Nintendo Revolution. The "PPC / ATI Generation".
Clearly not everything can be catagorized neatly. Where does Neo-Geo fit? What about portables? The wierd stuff Sega did with the add ons for the Genesis like the 32X? The host of early PC / console hybrids from the Atari days?
It's hard to catagorize stuff, but these are your "main" generations as far as I can tell.
At the time that both machines were current hardware, I followed the SNES / Genesis battle closely in the magazines (I wish I had them to refrence her, but they are unfortunatly in a crate in my mom's attic in annother state right now).
If memory serves, the SNES / Super Famicom out sold the Genesis / Mega Drive around the same time that Ninendo's library of games grew larger than Sega's.
The only figures I could find regarding total world wide sales were here.
36 Million Confirmed SNES / Super Famicom sales (not including the redesigned SNES2)
21 Million Confiemed Genesis / Mega Drive sales.
I'm not sure where you're getting your data from, but every source I've ever seen since Saturn came out has shown Nintendo won the 16 Bit war (even if they were late to it).
Where are the Xbox and Sony games that bend my mind?
Lifeline for PS2 Katamari Damacy (as has been pointed out. Yes, I know it's slated for the DS, but it's on PS2 NOW.) Parapa the Rapper was a bit of fun for me (I only played the demo).
Microsoft has some excelent games studios, fortunatly, most of their best stuff is for the PC, not the X-Box (Close Combat, anyone?)
That's also not to say that there aren't excelent games on the X-Box too such as Crimson Skies (I love flight sims, even the more casual, non-realistic ones. Where's Pilotwings GC, Nintendo?)
But your point is correct. Most of the experimental, quirky, "mind bending" games are more likley to land on Nintendo, or just be developed by Nintendo, than any of the others out there.. It's just not that the other platforms are completly VOID of innovation.
Is it fake? Maybe, maybe not, but I can tell you that it's not recent. It really does date back to 1999, as it caused a bit of a stir on comp.graphics.rendering.renderman at the time.
I seem to recall quite a stir in the magazines way back when too.
It's interesting, you name three flops that Nintendo had, and two of them were heavily influenced by factors outside gaming.
The ROB was not envisioned as a gameplay mechanism so much as it was a mechanism for selling the NES as an "Entertainment System" (See, it's diffrent than a video game system! It does more! It has a ROBOT!) Once they got their foot in the door in Toys R Us, Sears, etc, they quickly dropped it.
The Super Scope was an attempt to bring back the Zapper, which had some modestly good game support, and tap into some of the popular shooters of the SNES era (like Lethal Enforcers), but without making the new gun look like something that could offend parrents, and present a "negative" image. Again, concession to a factor outside of pure gameplay ruins the product.
The Virtual Boy, well. I'm not going to try to defend it, I think it was just ill concieved.
For me, any game to be genre defining needs to pass a couple tests.
1) If I pick up the game a few years later, will it be hard to play, because the genre has moved on so signifigantly, that it feels wrong somehow? (controls off / genre defining things haven't appeared yet)
Super Mario Bros 1 is hard to play for me because the controls feel stiff and unresponsive now (even though they felt fine in 1986). And the inability to go back is frustrating. Contrast this with Super Mario Bros 3, which plays as well as it did the day I first picked it up. Doom is practically unplayable for me today, because the controls are simply so alien to what I'm used to in the FPS genre. No third dimmension, no mouselook, etc. If a game is prototypical enough that it's unplayable years later to a follower of that genre, I'd say that it can be said to have inspired the genre, but not defined it.
2) Do lots of games try to imitate a game after it's appearance?
How many Mario clones were there in the late 80s and early 90s? How many Tetris clones? How many fighting games came out at the peak of Street Fighter II's popularity? These games defined the genre, simply by all the copycats that folowed in their wake.
3) If after a game appears, does the genre suddenly die, because those imitators can't keep up? (This can't be an instant death, this takes some time)
There are very few examples of this, but they do happen. R-Type is the best one I can think of. After it came out, it defined the genre. There have been shooters since, but few if any as good. Certainly none that managed to truly surpass it. Basicly, I'd say that R-Type was so good that it killed the genre. It killed it by perfecting it. Gamers didn't pick up new shooters much after that, because they all felt either like either inferior titles, or just like more of the same.
That's always been a sticking point for me. *ANY* red pixels = automatic "M", where as in a game like Splinter Cell, you can draw a bead on two guys having a conversation about the wife and kids of one of them, then take aim, and calmly shoot him in the head. But because there's no red, it gets away with a "T".
To me, the "gallons" of blood portrayed in Mortal Kombat are simply comical by comparison. Where Splinter Cell's violence is cold blooded and calculated execution of a human life.
I realize that there comes a line where any rating system must be arbitrary, but this seems particularly rediculous to me.
By your logic, Linux is non-standard. It doesn't exist on my machine, and it won't exist on my machine. This is intentional. So I guess Linux is non-standard, huh?
Let's be realistic. Just because you don't like something, or don't accept it, does not make it non-standard. Weather something has a standards body's seal of approval or not, it does not have to have 100% market penetration just to be standard.
Now if something is unusable by a large portion of it's target market, then that's a dumb standard. A case can certainly be made for it being non-standard.
If however, certain people simply choose not to use the standard, well, that doesn't make it any less standard. Your choice, buddy.
And here is the closest thing that I could find to an old favorite photo of mine from a wonderful book, The Illustrated History of NASA. Showing nicely how the shuttle dwarfs a Mack Truck.
Local mom and pops. Until you have a single bad experience there, then you boycot them too. Or until they go out of business. Then you just don't buy anything any more.
I don't understand why people do that. The mini would be an awesome choice if self-contained as a HT box. But once you start adding external crap, it defeats the purpose in my mind.
Since you brought it up, in the interest of full discolsure, yes, I work for Best Buy. I don't think I have any particularly fierce loyalty to them. They're just annother company. A company that I feel is making some very smart moves in this industry but that's just me. I'm not anything fancy with them, like with Best Buy corperate, or anything, I'm just a computer dept supervisor (hourly wages, no bonuses or commission anything like that).
I don't particularly like Mail In Rebates myself, just wanted to illustrate that they're not this evil thing designed to steal from you. They let us advertise lower prices, and make more money at the same time. Unfortunatly, because of the complexity of the system, sometimes people get burned. Sometimes they burn themselves by not sending the rebate in at all, and all the time, you have to wait.
It's a compromise. And apparently, BBY is deciding that it wants a diffrent compropise now.
You have somewhat of a point. It was not random in the sense that I intentionally picked a product wiht a mail-in rebate with which to illustrate my point. However, I just picked the first product with a Mail-In Rebate that I saw. Random enough for me at least. Though it makes sense that the first I saw, was the one displayed most prominently.
Slashdot Mirror
We went through this before with the PS2.
Tell me what an emotion engine is, exactly, and why anyone should care? It's a processor. Woopty doo, you gave your video game machine a processor.
Unprecidented.
The PS3 will not be a supercomputer. The PS3 will cost $300 - $500. When an IBM workstation with dozens of PowerPC cores costing half a million dollars can only do 40 or so GigaFLOPs, there's no way in hell that the PS3 (based on the same basic Power Processor architecture) can do 2 TeraFLOPs. Not if they're measuring the same thing anyway. Otherwise, why doesn't IBM just use those in it's big iron instead of Power PCs, and market themselves as offering "A Gazillion YottaFLOPs!!!!"
Because IBM has a reputation to uphold, and they market to people who aren't teenagers dazzled by the biggest number they can think of. The people they market to will hold them to their promises.
Sony is just hype.
Yes, digital convergance. Yes, bringing it all together. Blah blah blah. Sony, you're not the only one working toward this goal, and frankly, you're not NEARLY in the position MS is in to offer it. Their market penetration on the desktop PC gives them a powerful edge, as does the fact that they started doing it in the last generation, so people who were looking for that kind of convergance already found a good thing with the X-Box.
Sony should not be allowed to market.
Let me explain this the best I can.
Every console launch sells out. (Well, except the PSP). The colsole manufacturers know this, and take it for granted.
If they know for a fact that the next generation console will sell out at $199.99, then why not up the price?
Will it still sell out at $299.99? Yep. So what's it hurt to up it some more? Will it still sell out at $399.99? Yep. How about $499.99?
They extimate how high a yield they'll have for the initial shippments, and what demand will be. Then they price it as high as they think it'll sell out with the early adopters.
Once they start shipping them in more massive quantities, prices will drop, as the early adopters who are willing to pay $500 each will have all been sold a console or two.
Bottom line is, if the initial release is only 50,000 units, what does it hurt to launch at $400 and stay there? If it'll sell out, then they'd be foolish not to.
This is the most simple form of supply and demand, people. Come on!
How do you export control something made in China by companies based out of Japan?
I've not known that to be the case either. Most places keep close tabs on their girls because they don't want to get shut down for anything illegal.
That said, the girls make next to nothing dancing. Going up on stage a few times, perhaps 5 minutes out of an hour and dancing for a few dollars in your g-string? That's just what gets people into the club, bud. The money they make is by hustling people. Private dances and VIP stuff. It's not prostitution, but I know I wouldn't want to have to give lap dances for a living. Clothes on or not, giving lap dances to strangers for $20 at a time is a bit of a turnoff for me. I dated a stripped briefly (she started dancing after we were together) she hated it. But $20 a dance (a dance lasts one song, so three to five minutes) + tips beats the $5 or $10 you're going to make on stage. By a long shot.
The girls have to tip out at the end of the night. Bouner gets his cut, DJ theirs, bartenders theirs, and the club itself usually gets a cut. If there's anything left, that's what they bring home. Usually that's good money. If it's a slow night, or they overschedule (or both), they can wind up bringing home nothing, or loosing money. But even if they do, it all evens out on weekends when they bring make most of their money. Just like any tip based job.
Does shady stuff happen? Sure. Lots of people are corrupt. But to assert that it happens all the time or all over the place is just plain wrong.
This is just obligatory.
1) Atari 2600, clones, competition (I'm a bit too young to have much memory of this era).
2) The 8 Bit era (Atari's failed 8-bit, Sega Master System, NES)
3) 16 Bit era, Mainly the Sega Genesis and SNES, though the 16 / 8 bit "hybrid" TurboGraphix 16 (AKA PC Engine) helped transition to this era, though some may not sonsider it part of it.
4) Generation 4. Most consoles released during this era were, predictibly 32 bit (Playstaton, Sega Saturn, Virtual Boy, Phillip's CD-i), however there were a couple of notable standouts. Both Atari, and later Nintendo would release systems touted as 64 bit. Many still dismiss the Atari Jaguar as not being "true" 64 bit (though what "true" is supposed to mean is anyone's guess.) as it had a strange hybrid architecture using everything from 16 - 64 bit pipelines. And the N64 itself has sometimes been criticized, though not as freequently.
5) 128 Bit. The fifth generation brought everyone back on the same page again. Dreamcast, PS2, X-Box and Gamecube were all "128 bit" systems. Some claim the Dreamcast was not of this generation. Though it's release date was closest to the current gen, it used 128 bit technology, and it competed only with PS2 / XBox / Gamecube. Yes it died early, but clearly it was just an early console of the current generation.
6) Playstation 3 / X-Box 360 / Nintendo Revolution. The "PPC / ATI Generation".
Clearly not everything can be catagorized neatly. Where does Neo-Geo fit? What about portables? The wierd stuff Sega did with the add ons for the Genesis like the 32X? The host of early PC / console hybrids from the Atari days?
It's hard to catagorize stuff, but these are your "main" generations as far as I can tell.
Who?
At the time that both machines were current hardware, I followed the SNES / Genesis battle closely in the magazines (I wish I had them to refrence her, but they are unfortunatly in a crate in my mom's attic in annother state right now).
If memory serves, the SNES / Super Famicom out sold the Genesis / Mega Drive around the same time that Ninendo's library of games grew larger than Sega's.
The only figures I could find regarding total world wide sales were here.
36 Million Confirmed SNES / Super Famicom sales (not including the redesigned SNES2)
21 Million Confiemed Genesis / Mega Drive sales.
I'm not sure where you're getting your data from, but every source I've ever seen since Saturn came out has shown Nintendo won the 16 Bit war (even if they were late to it).
Where are the Xbox and Sony games that bend my mind?
Lifeline for PS2
Katamari Damacy (as has been pointed out. Yes, I know it's slated for the DS, but it's on PS2 NOW.)
Parapa the Rapper was a bit of fun for me (I only played the demo).
Microsoft has some excelent games studios, fortunatly, most of their best stuff is for the PC, not the X-Box (Close Combat, anyone?)
That's also not to say that there aren't excelent games on the X-Box too such as Crimson Skies (I love flight sims, even the more casual, non-realistic ones. Where's Pilotwings GC, Nintendo?)
But your point is correct. Most of the experimental, quirky, "mind bending" games are more likley to land on Nintendo, or just be developed by Nintendo, than any of the others out there.. It's just not that the other platforms are completly VOID of innovation.
Check out this press release.
Is it fake? Maybe, maybe not, but I can tell you that it's not recent. It really does date back to 1999, as it caused a bit of a stir on comp.graphics.rendering.renderman at the time.
I seem to recall quite a stir in the magazines way back when too.
It's interesting, you name three flops that Nintendo had, and two of them were heavily influenced by factors outside gaming.
The ROB was not envisioned as a gameplay mechanism so much as it was a mechanism for selling the NES as an "Entertainment System" (See, it's diffrent than a video game system! It does more! It has a ROBOT!) Once they got their foot in the door in Toys R Us, Sears, etc, they quickly dropped it.
The Super Scope was an attempt to bring back the Zapper, which had some modestly good game support, and tap into some of the popular shooters of the SNES era (like Lethal Enforcers), but without making the new gun look like something that could offend parrents, and present a "negative" image. Again, concession to a factor outside of pure gameplay ruins the product.
The Virtual Boy, well. I'm not going to try to defend it, I think it was just ill concieved.
I'm still an Nintendo fanboy and all, but come on...
THEY'RE NAMES !
they should have a return policy that doesn't violate the laws of most states.
Can you please elaborate? I've never had to return a game before, so perhaps that's why, but I don't know what you're referring to.
For me, any game to be genre defining needs to pass a couple tests.
1) If I pick up the game a few years later, will it be hard to play, because the genre has moved on so signifigantly, that it feels wrong somehow? (controls off / genre defining things haven't appeared yet)
Super Mario Bros 1 is hard to play for me because the controls feel stiff and unresponsive now (even though they felt fine in 1986). And the inability to go back is frustrating. Contrast this with Super Mario Bros 3, which plays as well as it did the day I first picked it up. Doom is practically unplayable for me today, because the controls are simply so alien to what I'm used to in the FPS genre. No third dimmension, no mouselook, etc. If a game is prototypical enough that it's unplayable years later to a follower of that genre, I'd say that it can be said to have inspired the genre, but not defined it.
2) Do lots of games try to imitate a game after it's appearance?
How many Mario clones were there in the late 80s and early 90s? How many Tetris clones? How many fighting games came out at the peak of Street Fighter II's popularity? These games defined the genre, simply by all the copycats that folowed in their wake.
3) If after a game appears, does the genre suddenly die, because those imitators can't keep up? (This can't be an instant death, this takes some time)
There are very few examples of this, but they do happen. R-Type is the best one I can think of. After it came out, it defined the genre. There have been shooters since, but few if any as good. Certainly none that managed to truly surpass it. Basicly, I'd say that R-Type was so good that it killed the genre. It killed it by perfecting it. Gamers didn't pick up new shooters much after that, because they all felt either like either inferior titles, or just like more of the same.
Actually, they still do.
That's always been a sticking point for me. *ANY* red pixels = automatic "M", where as in a game like Splinter Cell, you can draw a bead on two guys having a conversation about the wife and kids of one of them, then take aim, and calmly shoot him in the head. But because there's no red, it gets away with a "T".
To me, the "gallons" of blood portrayed in Mortal Kombat are simply comical by comparison. Where Splinter Cell's violence is cold blooded and calculated execution of a human life.
I realize that there comes a line where any rating system must be arbitrary, but this seems particularly rediculous to me.
Most pedantic, head-in-the-sand post ever.
CSS is "standard" in the sense that the majority of the DVDs / DVD players in the world use it.
Less than one percent (I'd say a whole lot less than 1 percent) of people who use DVDs would be able to do so without CSS.
This is like saying that gasoline is not a standard auto fuel, because some people have alternative fueld cars.
By your logic, Linux is non-standard. It doesn't exist on my machine, and it won't exist on my machine. This is intentional. So I guess Linux is non-standard, huh?
Let's be realistic. Just because you don't like something, or don't accept it, does not make it non-standard. Weather something has a standards body's seal of approval or not, it does not have to have 100% market penetration just to be standard.
Now if something is unusable by a large portion of it's target market, then that's a dumb standard. A case can certainly be made for it being non-standard.
If however, certain people simply choose not to use the standard, well, that doesn't make it any less standard. Your choice, buddy.
The above poster pointed out that you're wrong with some facts and figures, but how about some pictures for comparison's sake?
Here's the shuttle durring recovery operations. Note the relative size of the stairs, and how it dwarfs the RV, the van, and the truck near it's rear.
And here is the closest thing that I could find to an old favorite photo of mine from a wonderful book, The Illustrated History of NASA. Showing nicely how the shuttle dwarfs a Mack Truck.
I would mind giving you one.
Valve, however, can have one. The invitation stands.
There's your diffrence.
Local mom and pops. Until you have a single bad experience there, then you boycot them too. Or until they go out of business. Then you just don't buy anything any more.
I don't understand why people do that. The mini would be an awesome choice if self-contained as a HT box. But once you start adding external crap, it defeats the purpose in my mind.
You realize that it's both developed and poublished by Namco, right?
You know, the Namco of Pac Man fame?
And Soul Caliber II fame? (You know, the game, where Nintendo granted them the rights to use Link from The Zelda series in it?)
Check out Nintendo.com's master games list.
Also there are dual analogs. One's called a C stick. It might be a tad more awkward due to the non symatry, but it's entirly doable.
Since you brought it up, in the interest of full discolsure, yes, I work for Best Buy. I don't think I have any particularly fierce loyalty to them. They're just annother company. A company that I feel is making some very smart moves in this industry but that's just me. I'm not anything fancy with them, like with Best Buy corperate, or anything, I'm just a computer dept supervisor (hourly wages, no bonuses or commission anything like that).
I don't particularly like Mail In Rebates myself, just wanted to illustrate that they're not this evil thing designed to steal from you. They let us advertise lower prices, and make more money at the same time. Unfortunatly, because of the complexity of the system, sometimes people get burned. Sometimes they burn themselves by not sending the rebate in at all, and all the time, you have to wait.
It's a compromise. And apparently, BBY is deciding that it wants a diffrent compropise now.
You have somewhat of a point. It was not random in the sense that I intentionally picked a product wiht a mail-in rebate with which to illustrate my point. However, I just picked the first product with a Mail-In Rebate that I saw. Random enough for me at least. Though it makes sense that the first I saw, was the one displayed most prominently.