There's going to be at least one more original Zelda game for GameCube - it will be to Wind Waker what Majora's Mask was to Ocarina Of Time, I'd expect. That gives them a nice opportunity to release yet another pre-order disc with Link To The Past, Link's Awakening, Oracle Of Seasons and Oracle Of Ages on it. I'm indulging in pure speculation here of course.
The disc announced today has "Not For Resale" clearly printed on the packaging but that's unlikely to deter anyone. The Wind Waker pre-order disc was on sale in my local Best Buy several weeks before the game shipped.
Yes, I should've mentioned that GameCube also does 480p. You are also correct that support for this varies a lot from game to game on GameCube. This is for multiple reasons, some technical and some process/testing related. On Xbox you get 480p support basically for free since there's no extra game UI, you're already spending the memory and fillrate for full-height framebuffers and the video circuit setup automatically engages 480p (as long as it's valid and enabled in the dashboard) unless your code specifically tells it not to. As a result there are only a handful of Xbox games which do not run in 480p.
It's fun to show Star Fox Adventures on GameCube and Panzer Dragoon Orta on Xbox to people who don't appreciate how much widescreen and HDTV adds to the gaming experience.
1080i and/or 720p HDTV at 60Hz will be the standard for all games on the next generation of consoles. You can do HDTV on Xbox now but going beyond 480p mostly precludes anti-aliasing and limits scene complexity because you only have about 1.2GTexel/sec of raw fillrate. Right now this isn't too big a deal because HDTV has limited market penetration but HDTV is definitely the future.
Global illumination will be a big differentiator too - Doom 3 is the first glimpse of this, but with more powerful hardware lighting will get really compelling. Games like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame will be able to crank up the tension a few more notches.
Procedural geometry and animation through shaders will also add to gameplay. A lush, dense forest with waving branches that have collision with the player and can be broken off or set on fire could provide a bunch of interesting gameplay in a game like Counterstrike.
More memory and more horsepower will allow game worlds to be more interactive. Games like Red Faction and Otogi are a good start but there's a lot more that can be done especially when you add in a good physics engine. You could make a pretty cool demolition derby motocross game where bomb-cratering the track changes the racing line and sets you up to make jumps to new areas of the course, not to mention spattering nearby cars with mud to reduce their visibility.
Gamers want compelling and intensely involving experiences. Presentation is part of how you achieve that involvement. If you're willing to make your game world's representation more abstract you can cut back on the amount of computing power needed to express it, but that isn't what gamers pay for.
From what I had read elsewhere (IGN perhaps) the GBA game, Chain of Memories, is a direct sequel and picks up the story right after the end of the first game. Kingdom Hearts 2 on PS2 is set several months after the events in Chain of Memories.
SKU means 'stock keeping unit'
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Myst Online Trailer
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's a retail industry term for a physical item. After all, you have 1 game on multiple platforms and sometimes multiple versions per platform (PAL vs NTSC, original vs greatest hits reissue and so on) but it's likely they all have the same general description or title but each would be considered a distinct SKU for inventory tracking and so on.
According to their site, Zoonami (www.zoonami.com) has some ex-Rare guys. They're working on some big GameCube project but I don't know exactly what.
Nintendo know that Rare's GBA titles will be profitable and as such make money for them too so there's no reason to cut them off. Hiroshi Yamauchi was the big grudge holder if the rumours are to be believed, and he's since retired to leave Satoru Iwata in charge.
The "It's Mr Pants" game is pretty mind-boggling to me. I'll certainly be interested to see what they come up with...
I don't think it got released in North America, but they made a PS2, PC and Xbox game called Battle Engine Aquilla fairly recently. www.eurogamer.net just listed it as one of their favourite games that nobody bought.
Not to take anything at all away from the people working on this, because it certainly looks pretty cool, but when I read the headline I was thinking someone had made a side-scroller using Half-Life itself (like Pandemonium, for example). A modern 3D game provides a lot of stuff that is useful for making 2D games too. Maybe when Half-Life 2 comes out someone will make a killer side-scroller using all the animation and lighting and physics systems of the core game?
Disagree all you like. The fact is that unless your game has high visibility with end users in the three months before it launches, it has at best a slim chance of selling well. There's actually a pretty easy way to measure this. Looking at how many hits per day a given game gets at gamespot.com in those three months will give you a clear idea of whether the game is positioned for success.
As a concrete example, consider Def Jam Vendetta and Wakeboarding Unleashed, both on PS2. Both scored similarly in review, are both somewhat niche interest titles and both came out at about the same time. Wakeboarding had a low interest level on gamespot and has yet to break 100,000 units sold. Def Jam had a high interest level and is well on the way to a million units.
C|Net sells this information via a service called Trax, and everybody in the biz uses it, including the big retail buyers for people like Wal*Mart. I'd always informally felt that it was important to cultivate buzz, but recently I was shown a graph of gamespot hits correlated to sales and basically it's a 70% accurate predictor across all games, with more accuracy at the low end than the high end. Games which aren't getting looked up by site visitors have a less than 10% chance of selling 250,000 copies - which is basically the bare minimum to break even.
Marketing exmployees are indeed full time but they work on multiple games. They should always be busy.
The problem with this scenario is that there are two things that need to happen for a company to make money with a videogame. First, it needs to be good. Second, people need to know about it BEFORE it hits store shelves. The industry's sales are largely driven by buzz - people like to tell other people about cool games.
You have to begin your marketing and show people why the game is cool at least 3 months before you put it on shelves, otherwise no-one will pay it a second glance. More importantly, retailers understand the importance of good buzz and if a game doesn't have it they won't take the chance to put it on shelves.
Naturally there are exceptions to this rule for really exceptionally good games, or continuations of very highly regarded franchises, but this is the general case. Unless you get both of these things right you're very likely to lose a bunch of money on the product.
There are lots of interesting, different games published. People don't buy them. On my shelf I have about 60 PS2 games and I'd say over half of them are more than just "v.X+1". According to the last USA sales figures I saw, 11 of them had sold less than 50,000 copies at retail and another 9 had sold less than 100,000 copies. While some of them are flawed I'd say any of them is at least decent and 3 of them - Rez, Ico and Fatal Frame - are truly excellent.
It costs around $4 million to make a modern videogame and therefore the game needs to sell well to recoup that cost. It's hard to convince upper management to bet that much money when the odds look to be very much against financial success.
Games generally require conflict of some sort to provide a play experience because they rely on a story at least on some superficial level. There are exceptions (Tetris would be a big example) but by and large you need a protagonist and an antagonist. It's very easy to portray this relationship through violence. There's also some amount of visceral thrill in the simulated killing of other people.
This problem, as with the me-too syndrome, is an instance of a general case of problem. Videogames are expensive to make and from a business point of view are a very risky investment. Lots of games get made and only a few of them are profitable but those few wildly so.
There are several possible solutions to this problem. They are all difficult to bring to bear and it's not clear to me which (if any) of them will happen and how much effect they'll have.
One solution is to lower the cost of development for games - this is hard, despite the growth of middleware and tools, because games are complex products and the perceived demands of gamers is ever-growing. There's also the arms race of technology.
Another solution is to spread the money around so that the market is not so feast-or-famine. This is hard because retailers don't like to see margins lowered and companies generally operate on the philosophy that they'll have the "killer" game that will take in all the money. If everyone expects to get the lion's share no-one wants to lower their prices and thus their potential profits. It's a prisoners' dilemma.
Yet another solution is to reduce the amount of games that get made. Ultimately this is the most likely to happen yet it's the one I personally like least. Niche-market games will get killed first, followed by me-too genre games and eventually you'll have a desperate struggle between 2 or 3 publishers with a small range of mass-market but uninspiring games. The same retail profit gathered for less development dollars is a business win, however.
The last solution is to expand the retail market. Make games that appeal to more people, and increase the total amount of money coming into the sector. The more individual consumers you have, the more diverse their tastes and so theoretically you spread your development risk further.
I like the last solution best of all, of course, because it results in a broad base of games and plenty of creativity. The economics of business make it a tough sell to upper management at publishers.
One interesting thing that may change the market a lot is the will of the hardware manufacturers. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have a huge ability to shape the market because they have to approve all product concepts before they get too far in development - you could make the whole game without talking to them but it would suck to find out you'd wasted $5 million when they turn round and refuse the game - so they can shape the lineup of games. What their actions will ultimately be, I cannot say.
Interesting. I'm not a baseball guy so I didn't realise that season didn't cross the year. In fact I know almost nothing about US sports, being an ex-pat Brit:-)
There's certainly less reason to use the naming scheme for baseball, then. There is some merit to having all the sports have the same year designator so gamers can expect that same-year games have similar features (eg. trading cards being new for all the '03 games) but it's not "correct" like the other sports.
The games are named after the seasons for the sports. The leagues all designate the season by the year in which the 'final' is played. This september will see the start of the 2004 NFL season because the Superbowl for that season will be played in Februrary of 2004. As such the NFL videogames coming out at that time will be Madden 2004, NFL2K4 and so on.
The economics of the business don't help this. It costs a good $5 million to make a console game and that kind of money makes senior management cautious in approving original titles. Sequels don't have quite the same breakout sales potential as original things but they tend to be less risky from a project management perspective.
My personal opinion is that a standard $50 retail pricepoint has been terrible for the industry. Gamers are really gunshy about spending that much money on a game unless they have a real feeling that they'll not only enjoy the game but get their money's worth in play time. As a result the middle ground of sales for games has been basically eliminated. A few games do monster sales numbers and almost everything else completely stiffs. PSX games were often $35 and that made people much more willing to take a chance on a game and as such decreased the overall risk for a given title. An increase in one risk factor means extra pressure to limit other risk factors.
I would also say that sequels aren't inherently bad. The point of the game is to have fun. Seeing new things does have some fun factor associated with it but it's not the only way to entertain the player.
If only widescreen TVs would become more commonly available in the USA - last time I was back in Britain visiting family I found you were hard pressed even to find a 4:3 TV in stores. The little 10" TV/VCR combo units were about the only ones left, everything else was 16:9. This is because the upcoming DTV standard for Europe is 16:9.
That said, Panasonic sell a nice 30" and 34" 16:9 HDTV tube TV in this country. Movies and videogames look phenomenal those sets and they're a lot cheaper than plasma displays.
This is exactly what Microsoft were recommending at Xfest. They gave a great seminar about using stats and leaderboard rankings to influence matchmaking and one of the things they heavily suggest is that games penalise quitters and cheaters in terms of matchmaking and overall ranking.
You can easily do this for quitters by chalking a stat at game start and at game end; the difference between these numbers is how many games they bailed out of.
Now that game developers have gotten to grips with the technical issues of supporting Xbox Live you'll see much more time spent on these sort of issues as well as on user interface things like lobbies.
It's less than a month to E3 and Sony will want to make any announcement about a western version of this system there, to maximise publicity.
The SCPH-50000's big difference is that it supports progressive scan for DVD playback, has an integrated IR receiver and removes the firewire port.
Games have always been able to do 480p on all consumer PS2s. Very few games do this because you need a 720x480 framebuffer instead of the usual 640x448 or 512x448. This is because the pixel clock is 1440 units per scanline in 480p instead of 2560 in 480i - you can only set whole multiples of clocks per pixel, hence the constraints. No consumer PS2 has ever had progressive scan DVD playback. Since Xbox doesn't do progressive scan for DVDs either this is a nice little sales bullet point for Sony.
Sony absolutely will not change the CPU or GPU in any way games can detect. Their whole business model is based around games having as large a potential market as possible. As soon as you split the hardware base like that you split your market. This is also why they won't add controller ports.
The removal of the firewire port is surprising to me given that GT3 uses it for system link play (and for the cool 3-monitor single player view) but I would imagine market research told them not enough people are using it for it to be worthwhile. Either that or people are standardising on USB or Ethernet.
A late game is only late until it's released. A bad game will be bad forever. How many people remember when Super Mario 64 was supposed to be released vs when it actually shipped?
In any case if you're going to put "Forever" in your game's title you have to expect a certain amount of jokes about it.
The cards have 2 stripes, one on the long edge and one on the short edge of the card. The short one holds 1.1KB and the long one holds 2.2KB. With compression, 4 or 5 cards is definitely enough to hold a complete game of that era. They fit in 8KB or 16KB of ROM in their coin-op or NES incarnations, after all.
However, the e-Reader has 8MB of masked ROM and 128KB of flash RAM. The contents of the ROM is not disclosed but I would imagine it contains several things, namely:
Graphics for more sophisticated games Sound samples (simulating the old sound hardware is nontrivial, it may be easier to use canned samples) Canned content unlocked through single cards (eg. promotional Pokemon cards which show a simple animation)
Note that if the data for all these games was already in the e-Reader ROM there would be no need for multiple cards or multiple stripes.
I do think this is a pretty cool little device and it would be fun to write something to be printed onto the cards. They're also a great promo tool for unlocking demos or extra content because they can be distributed with magazines or given away at retail.
The 0.18 micron GS with the extra embedded memory is for a different application. It's not going to appear in future PS2s. The 0.13 micron version is a process change and is functionality identical to the existing systems.
Sony aren't going to make a PS2 that behaves differently for games. The whole console business model is predicated around mass install base - if you change the spec you splinter the market and one of two things happens. Either developers won't support the new features because it'll mean a smaller market share for their games, or customers won't upgrade and again you have a smaller market share.
Sony are extremely picky about what they let us do, too. For example don't get to use the Playstation MDEC and GTE on the I/O processor core because they clock it faster in PS2 mode and don't test those features at the higher clock speed which means they can't guarantee they work reliably in PS2 mode.
While I'm here I might as well correct the "anti-aliasing has to be done on the CPU" comment made earlier in the thread. There are two kinds of anti-aliasing commonly used on PS2. Edge anti-aliasing and scene anti-aliasing. The former requires you to depth-sort your polys because it's an alpha blending operation (and because it uses the alpha blend ciruit in the pixel pipeline your textures can't have alpha either) and as such is basically never used. The other can be done several ways but is most commonly done by rendering at 640x448 60Hz and 50/50 blending pairs of pixel rows together using the dual output circuits. You can get the same effect by copying the back buffer to the front buffer using a bilinear filter during vblank (rather than just swapping the buffer address) - in fact if you have a 512x224 front buffer and a 768x448 back buffer you get even nicer anti-aliasing and because it's a rendering operation you can do motion blur and similar effects for no extra cost.
On a final note, I think most of the games that look bad on PS2 would look basically as bad on XBox because their aliasing problems come from poor texture mapping (too much high-contrast detail, bad/no mipmaps) and poor LOD (drawing too many sub-pixel polys) and bad colour choices (NTSC is very finicky about strong colour changes). The XBox's rasteriser is much superior but it'll only get you so far.
Ordinary TV can't display 60 frames per second, only 60 fields. Interlacing means you see half of a frame for 1/60th, then the other half, then the first half of the next frame and so on. However, this doesn't preclude games rendering at 60Hz and using the output circuitry to downsample for anti-aliasing, and this is what the games do. They render to 640x448 at 60Hz and blend the scanlines together to give 640x224 at 60Hz which is the most the TV can handle. PS2 and XBox do exactly the same thing, by the way.
With HDTV you can output 640x480 progressive scan at 60Hz. It's identical to 60Hz VGA. It looks much nicer, but rest assured the games still look great on your ordinary TV set.
The nicest part of all of this is Nintendo are mandating all games to support HDTV. PS2 can't support this - Sony won't tell us how the VESA modes of the chip work. I don't know what XBox's capability and position is on this.
Your points are correct, but you ignore one extremely important other point - Bluetooth has MUCH lower power requirements. A PDA, pager, phone or wearable computer can't maintain a reasonable battery life and use 802.11, whereas it can do Bluetooth much more feasibly. This alone is the reason Bluetooth is useful.
I attended the Nuon developer conference back in 1998 (I think, might've been 97 or 99 - whichever one was the first one, in Redwood Shores). Their hardware is focused around the pixel rather than the polygon. It's versatile enough that it can do passable polygon rendering (with bilinear filtering), realtime raytracing (for simple scenes, not too much glass or mirrored surfaces) and so on.
It's moderately non-traditional, being a VLIW architecture with 5 functional units and 4 cores on the die in SMP, but it's certainly not non-von Neumann. You can develop in C (they ported GCC) or assembler. The low (for VLIW) number of functional units makes this eminently feasible. You'd probably only want to do that for your innermost rendering loops though. The only other significant oddness is the colour space is YCrCb native instead of RGB.
All in all I thought it was a fun piece of hardware, with a lot of potential. Get 16 cores on the die, with more cache each, a better memory controller and a decent process to bring the clockspeed up and you could probably rival PS2 for overall graphical appearance, more or less. No idea what the price-performance tradeoff would be like, however.
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There's going to be at least one more original Zelda game for GameCube - it will be to Wind Waker what Majora's Mask was to Ocarina Of Time, I'd expect. That gives them a nice opportunity to release yet another pre-order disc with Link To The Past, Link's Awakening, Oracle Of Seasons and Oracle Of Ages on it. I'm indulging in pure speculation here of course.
The disc announced today has "Not For Resale" clearly printed on the packaging but that's unlikely to deter anyone. The Wind Waker pre-order disc was on sale in my local Best Buy several weeks before the game shipped.
Yes, I should've mentioned that GameCube also does 480p. You are also correct that support for this varies a lot from game to game on GameCube. This is for multiple reasons, some technical and some process/testing related. On Xbox you get 480p support basically for free since there's no extra game UI, you're already spending the memory and fillrate for full-height framebuffers and the video circuit setup automatically engages 480p (as long as it's valid and enabled in the dashboard) unless your code specifically tells it not to. As a result there are only a handful of Xbox games which do not run in 480p.
It's fun to show Star Fox Adventures on GameCube and Panzer Dragoon Orta on Xbox to people who don't appreciate how much widescreen and HDTV adds to the gaming experience.
1080i and/or 720p HDTV at 60Hz will be the standard for all games on the next generation of consoles. You can do HDTV on Xbox now but going beyond 480p mostly precludes anti-aliasing and limits scene complexity because you only have about 1.2GTexel/sec of raw fillrate. Right now this isn't too big a deal because HDTV has limited market penetration but HDTV is definitely the future.
Global illumination will be a big differentiator too - Doom 3 is the first glimpse of this, but with more powerful hardware lighting will get really compelling. Games like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame will be able to crank up the tension a few more notches.
Procedural geometry and animation through shaders will also add to gameplay. A lush, dense forest with waving branches that have collision with the player and can be broken off or set on fire could provide a bunch of interesting gameplay in a game like Counterstrike.
More memory and more horsepower will allow game worlds to be more interactive. Games like Red Faction and Otogi are a good start but there's a lot more that can be done especially when you add in a good physics engine. You could make a pretty cool demolition derby motocross game where bomb-cratering the track changes the racing line and sets you up to make jumps to new areas of the course, not to mention spattering nearby cars with mud to reduce their visibility.
Gamers want compelling and intensely involving experiences. Presentation is part of how you achieve that involvement. If you're willing to make your game world's representation more abstract you can cut back on the amount of computing power needed to express it, but that isn't what gamers pay for.
From what I had read elsewhere (IGN perhaps) the GBA game, Chain of Memories, is a direct sequel and picks up the story right after the end of the first game. Kingdom Hearts 2 on PS2 is set several months after the events in Chain of Memories.
It's a retail industry term for a physical item. After all, you have 1 game on multiple platforms and sometimes multiple versions per platform (PAL vs NTSC, original vs greatest hits reissue and so on) but it's likely they all have the same general description or title but each would be considered a distinct SKU for inventory tracking and so on.
Hope that helps explain it.
According to their site, Zoonami (www.zoonami.com) has some ex-Rare guys. They're working on some big GameCube project but I don't know exactly what.
Nintendo know that Rare's GBA titles will be profitable and as such make money for them too so there's no reason to cut them off. Hiroshi Yamauchi was the big grudge holder if the rumours are to be believed, and he's since retired to leave Satoru Iwata in charge.
The "It's Mr Pants" game is pretty mind-boggling to me. I'll certainly be interested to see what they come up with...
Hmm, so it is. I stand corrected.
I don't think it got released in North America, but they made a PS2, PC and Xbox game called Battle Engine Aquilla fairly recently. www.eurogamer.net just listed it as one of their favourite games that nobody bought.
Not to take anything at all away from the people working on this, because it certainly looks pretty cool, but when I read the headline I was thinking someone had made a side-scroller using Half-Life itself (like Pandemonium, for example). A modern 3D game provides a lot of stuff that is useful for making 2D games too. Maybe when Half-Life 2 comes out someone will make a killer side-scroller using all the animation and lighting and physics systems of the core game?
Disagree all you like. The fact is that unless your game has high visibility with end users in the three months before it launches, it has at best a slim chance of selling well. There's actually a pretty easy way to measure this. Looking at how many hits per day a given game gets at gamespot.com in those three months will give you a clear idea of whether the game is positioned for success.
As a concrete example, consider Def Jam Vendetta and Wakeboarding Unleashed, both on PS2. Both scored similarly in review, are both somewhat niche interest titles and both came out at about the same time. Wakeboarding had a low interest level on gamespot and has yet to break 100,000 units sold. Def Jam had a high interest level and is well on the way to a million units.
C|Net sells this information via a service called Trax, and everybody in the biz uses it, including the big retail buyers for people like Wal*Mart. I'd always informally felt that it was important to cultivate buzz, but recently I was shown a graph of gamespot hits correlated to sales and basically it's a 70% accurate predictor across all games, with more accuracy at the low end than the high end. Games which aren't getting looked up by site visitors have a less than 10% chance of selling 250,000 copies - which is basically the bare minimum to break even.
Marketing exmployees are indeed full time but they work on multiple games. They should always be busy.
The problem with this scenario is that there are two things that need to happen for a company to make money with a videogame. First, it needs to be good. Second, people need to know about it BEFORE it hits store shelves. The industry's sales are largely driven by buzz - people like to tell other people about cool games.
You have to begin your marketing and show people why the game is cool at least 3 months before you put it on shelves, otherwise no-one will pay it a second glance. More importantly, retailers understand the importance of good buzz and if a game doesn't have it they won't take the chance to put it on shelves.
Naturally there are exceptions to this rule for really exceptionally good games, or continuations of very highly regarded franchises, but this is the general case. Unless you get both of these things right you're very likely to lose a bunch of money on the product.
There are lots of interesting, different games published. People don't buy them. On my shelf I have about 60 PS2 games and I'd say over half of them are more than just "v.X+1". According to the last USA sales figures I saw, 11 of them had sold less than 50,000 copies at retail and another 9 had sold less than 100,000 copies. While some of them are flawed I'd say any of them is at least decent and 3 of them - Rez, Ico and Fatal Frame - are truly excellent.
It costs around $4 million to make a modern videogame and therefore the game needs to sell well to recoup that cost. It's hard to convince upper management to bet that much money when the odds look to be very much against financial success.
Games generally require conflict of some sort to provide a play experience because they rely on a story at least on some superficial level. There are exceptions (Tetris would be a big example) but by and large you need a protagonist and an antagonist. It's very easy to portray this relationship through violence. There's also some amount of visceral thrill in the simulated killing of other people.
This problem, as with the me-too syndrome, is an instance of a general case of problem. Videogames are expensive to make and from a business point of view are a very risky investment. Lots of games get made and only a few of them are profitable but those few wildly so.
There are several possible solutions to this problem. They are all difficult to bring to bear and it's not clear to me which (if any) of them will happen and how much effect they'll have.
One solution is to lower the cost of development for games - this is hard, despite the growth of middleware and tools, because games are complex products and the perceived demands of gamers is ever-growing. There's also the arms race of technology.
Another solution is to spread the money around so that the market is not so feast-or-famine. This is hard because retailers don't like to see margins lowered and companies generally operate on the philosophy that they'll have the "killer" game that will take in all the money. If everyone expects to get the lion's share no-one wants to lower their prices and thus their potential profits. It's a prisoners' dilemma.
Yet another solution is to reduce the amount of games that get made. Ultimately this is the most likely to happen yet it's the one I personally like least. Niche-market games will get killed first, followed by me-too genre games and eventually you'll have a desperate struggle between 2 or 3 publishers with a small range of mass-market but uninspiring games. The same retail profit gathered for less development dollars is a business win, however.
The last solution is to expand the retail market. Make games that appeal to more people, and increase the total amount of money coming into the sector. The more individual consumers you have, the more diverse their tastes and so theoretically you spread your development risk further.
I like the last solution best of all, of course, because it results in a broad base of games and plenty of creativity. The economics of business make it a tough sell to upper management at publishers.
One interesting thing that may change the market a lot is the will of the hardware manufacturers. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have a huge ability to shape the market because they have to approve all product concepts before they get too far in development - you could make the whole game without talking to them but it would suck to find out you'd wasted $5 million when they turn round and refuse the game - so they can shape the lineup of games. What their actions will ultimately be, I cannot say.
Interesting. I'm not a baseball guy so I didn't realise that season didn't cross the year. In fact I know almost nothing about US sports, being an ex-pat Brit :-)
There's certainly less reason to use the naming scheme for baseball, then. There is some merit to having all the sports have the same year designator so gamers can expect that same-year games have similar features (eg. trading cards being new for all the '03 games) but it's not "correct" like the other sports.
Thanks for the info.
The games are named after the seasons for the sports. The leagues all designate the season by the year in which the 'final' is played. This september will see the start of the 2004 NFL season because the Superbowl for that season will be played in Februrary of 2004. As such the NFL videogames coming out at that time will be Madden 2004, NFL2K4 and so on.
The economics of the business don't help this. It costs a good $5 million to make a console game and that kind of money makes senior management cautious in approving original titles. Sequels don't have quite the same breakout sales potential as original things but they tend to be less risky from a project management perspective.
My personal opinion is that a standard $50 retail pricepoint has been terrible for the industry. Gamers are really gunshy about spending that much money on a game unless they have a real feeling that they'll not only enjoy the game but get their money's worth in play time. As a result the middle ground of sales for games has been basically eliminated. A few games do monster sales numbers and almost everything else completely stiffs. PSX games were often $35 and that made people much more willing to take a chance on a game and as such decreased the overall risk for a given title. An increase in one risk factor means extra pressure to limit other risk factors.
I would also say that sequels aren't inherently bad. The point of the game is to have fun. Seeing new things does have some fun factor associated with it but it's not the only way to entertain the player.
If only widescreen TVs would become more commonly available in the USA - last time I was back in Britain visiting family I found you were hard pressed even to find a 4:3 TV in stores. The little 10" TV/VCR combo units were about the only ones left, everything else was 16:9. This is because the upcoming DTV standard for Europe is 16:9.
That said, Panasonic sell a nice 30" and 34" 16:9 HDTV tube TV in this country. Movies and videogames look phenomenal those sets and they're a lot cheaper than plasma displays.
This is exactly what Microsoft were recommending at Xfest. They gave a great seminar about using stats and leaderboard rankings to influence matchmaking and one of the things they heavily suggest is that games penalise quitters and cheaters in terms of matchmaking and overall ranking.
You can easily do this for quitters by chalking a stat at game start and at game end; the difference between these numbers is how many games they bailed out of.
Now that game developers have gotten to grips with the technical issues of supporting Xbox Live you'll see much more time spent on these sort of issues as well as on user interface things like lobbies.
It's less than a month to E3 and Sony will want to make any announcement about a western version of this system there, to maximise publicity.
The SCPH-50000's big difference is that it supports progressive scan for DVD playback, has an integrated IR receiver and removes the firewire port.
Games have always been able to do 480p on all consumer PS2s. Very few games do this because you need a 720x480 framebuffer instead of the usual 640x448 or 512x448. This is because the pixel clock is 1440 units per scanline in 480p instead of 2560 in 480i - you can only set whole multiples of clocks per pixel, hence the constraints. No consumer PS2 has ever had progressive scan DVD playback. Since Xbox doesn't do progressive scan for DVDs either this is a nice little sales bullet point for Sony.
Sony absolutely will not change the CPU or GPU in any way games can detect. Their whole business model is based around games having as large a potential market as possible. As soon as you split the hardware base like that you split your market. This is also why they won't add controller ports.
The removal of the firewire port is surprising to me given that GT3 uses it for system link play (and for the cool 3-monitor single player view) but I would imagine market research told them not enough people are using it for it to be worthwhile. Either that or people are standardising on USB or Ethernet.
A late game is only late until it's released. A bad game will be bad forever. How many people remember when Super Mario 64 was supposed to be released vs when it actually shipped?
In any case if you're going to put "Forever" in your game's title you have to expect a certain amount of jokes about it.
The cards have 2 stripes, one on the long edge and one on the short edge of the card. The short one holds 1.1KB and the long one holds 2.2KB. With compression, 4 or 5 cards is definitely enough to hold a complete game of that era. They fit in 8KB or 16KB of ROM in their coin-op or NES incarnations, after all.
However, the e-Reader has 8MB of masked ROM and 128KB of flash RAM. The contents of the ROM is not disclosed but I would imagine it contains several things, namely:
Graphics for more sophisticated games
Sound samples (simulating the old sound hardware is nontrivial, it may be easier to use canned samples)
Canned content unlocked through single cards (eg. promotional Pokemon cards which show a simple animation)
Note that if the data for all these games was already in the e-Reader ROM there would be no need for multiple cards or multiple stripes.
I do think this is a pretty cool little device and it would be fun to write something to be printed onto the cards. They're also a great promo tool for unlocking demos or extra content because they can be distributed with magazines or given away at retail.
The 0.18 micron GS with the extra embedded memory is for a different application. It's not going to appear in future PS2s. The 0.13 micron version is a process change and is functionality identical to the existing systems.
Sony aren't going to make a PS2 that behaves differently for games. The whole console business model is predicated around mass install base - if you change the spec you splinter the market and one of two things happens. Either developers won't support the new features because it'll mean a smaller market share for their games, or customers won't upgrade and again you have a smaller market share.
Sony are extremely picky about what they let us do, too. For example don't get to use the Playstation MDEC and GTE on the I/O processor core because they clock it faster in PS2 mode and don't test those features at the higher clock speed which means they can't guarantee they work reliably in PS2 mode.
While I'm here I might as well correct the "anti-aliasing has to be done on the CPU" comment made earlier in the thread. There are two kinds of anti-aliasing commonly used on PS2. Edge anti-aliasing and scene anti-aliasing. The former requires you to depth-sort your polys because it's an alpha blending operation (and because it uses the alpha blend ciruit in the pixel pipeline your textures can't have alpha either) and as such is basically never used. The other can be done several ways but is most commonly done by rendering at 640x448 60Hz and 50/50 blending pairs of pixel rows together using the dual output circuits. You can get the same effect by copying the back buffer to the front buffer using a bilinear filter during vblank (rather than just swapping the buffer address) - in fact if you have a 512x224 front buffer and a 768x448 back buffer you get even nicer anti-aliasing and because it's a rendering operation you can do motion blur and similar effects for no extra cost.
On a final note, I think most of the games that look bad on PS2 would look basically as bad on XBox because their aliasing problems come from poor texture mapping (too much high-contrast detail, bad/no mipmaps) and poor LOD (drawing too many sub-pixel polys) and bad colour choices (NTSC is very finicky about strong colour changes). The XBox's rasteriser is much superior but it'll only get you so far.
Ordinary TV can't display 60 frames per second, only 60 fields. Interlacing means you see half of a frame for 1/60th, then the other half, then the first half of the next frame and so on. However, this doesn't preclude games rendering at 60Hz and using the output circuitry to downsample for anti-aliasing, and this is what the games do. They render to 640x448 at 60Hz and blend the scanlines together to give 640x224 at 60Hz which is the most the TV can handle. PS2 and XBox do exactly the same thing, by the way.
With HDTV you can output 640x480 progressive scan at 60Hz. It's identical to 60Hz VGA. It looks much nicer, but rest assured the games still look great on your ordinary TV set.
The nicest part of all of this is Nintendo are mandating all games to support HDTV. PS2 can't support this - Sony won't tell us how the VESA modes of the chip work. I don't know what XBox's capability and position is on this.
Your points are correct, but you ignore one extremely important other point - Bluetooth has MUCH lower power requirements. A PDA, pager, phone or wearable computer can't maintain a reasonable battery life and use 802.11, whereas it can do Bluetooth much more feasibly. This alone is the reason Bluetooth is useful.
I attended the Nuon developer conference back in 1998 (I think, might've been 97 or 99 - whichever one was the first one, in Redwood Shores). Their hardware is focused around the pixel rather than the polygon. It's versatile enough that it can do passable polygon rendering (with bilinear filtering), realtime raytracing (for simple scenes, not too much glass or mirrored surfaces) and so on.
It's moderately non-traditional, being a VLIW architecture with 5 functional units and 4 cores on the die in SMP, but it's certainly not non-von Neumann. You can develop in C (they ported GCC) or assembler. The low (for VLIW) number of functional units makes this eminently feasible. You'd probably only want to do that for your innermost rendering loops though. The only other significant oddness is the colour space is YCrCb native instead of RGB.
All in all I thought it was a fun piece of hardware, with a lot of potential. Get 16 cores on the die, with more cache each, a better memory controller and a decent process to bring the clockspeed up and you could probably rival PS2 for overall graphical appearance, more or less. No idea what the price-performance tradeoff would be like, however.