Well, it could be legit. I mean, as the other AC said, those are all valid points for Sony's and against Microsoft's online plan. I actually didn't know some of that, if true (does Microsoft really have no dedicated servers? That seems like quite the cheesy deal to me, when you're paying for the online service), so it's interesting to read.
Actually - that is true. All Live connections are peer-to-peer. Which is cheesy in a for-pay service, I agree. Supposedly Halo 3 will be the first to have dedicated servers but that's just a rumour at this point.
On the other hand, you could be right, too. I imagine that the low player counts of GoW and Halo 2/3 are deliberate, and not a technical limitation, and I certainly think that invoking Home makes you a raving fanboy, at least. Home doesn't really have anything to do with gaming, imo.
Well yes and no. You can ostensibly use Home as a lobby system - the people in your "room" can all connect seamlessly to the same multiplayer game, assuming they all have copies. They did demo that at E3.
No comment on the fanboy, though.:)
N certainly earned its share of negative karma. You're dead on about the SNES CD with Sony, but they also broke the cardinal rule of Japanese business and partnered with Phillips (a non-Japanese company) as a 2nd try to not be caught with their pants down on the transition to CD games.
I don't quite understand what you mean - Sony co-invented the CD format with Philips, did they not? Why didn't this hurt the Playstation then?
What are you talking about? The Gamecube controller was certainly better than the PS2 or Xbox controllers, and far and away superior to the controllers of preceding consoles.
Get over yourself, not everyone thinks the way you do.
Can you tell us a little more about gathering a group of friends and matchmaking outside of Home? I saw the other two icons underneath the main app in the demo, one was for trophies but I couldn't make out the other. Will I be able to simply connect to friends and fire up games (ala Xbox Live) without going through all the Virtual shenanigans?
I'd like to start it playing music and display a series of pictures and/or videos. It would be useful at parties.
You can. Go into your music column, select what you want and play it, then instead of cancelling it with circle, simple press the PS button and navigate on to Photos. Set up your show, voila.
I'd like to start it playing background music, turn off the music in a game and play a game, without listening to "call to battle" or whatever the track is, over and over and over.
If you are talking about custom in-game music like the X360 has, I think they said that was coming. A nice feature, I agree.
Great post, thanks for that. I would only quibble with one point - "it is impossible to execute even some of the simpler forms of cinema without the budget of a small country". That used to be true, but ever since that kid won a Sundance award for something edited in iMovie, that notion is probably out the window. Cheers.
Oh man, where to start, where to start. HDMI? This provides very little advantage over component connections, and as most people on this planet have NO HDTV, let alone one with HDMI, this is pretty irrelevant.
Arguing that an HDTV plug has no use on a regular TV is pointless.
User replacable hard drive, that's a nice touch. But 99% of everyone doesn't give a shit.
I doubt that - do you think 99% of Xbox360 owners with an HDD are perfectly happy to be stuck at 20GB? Or do you think they'd like an option to buy a bigger drive for all those movies and games on Live? (for a reasonable HDD price, no less?)
No manufacturing defects? tee hee hee. There's been overheating issues and the HDMI timeout issue. That's not strictly sony's fault, but it is their responsibility to test their device with the most common output devices, and this is something they clearly did not do.
Considering the climate of Sony PR these days, I'd say its safe to assume that if there were any significant issues with PS3 manufacturing, Digg and Slashdot and Kotaku would be all over it. It hasn't happened. As you point out the HDCP handshake issue is a compatibility one but not a manufacturing issue. There is no overheating issue, you pulled that out of your arse.
Anyway it's not worth anything like $800 to me.
$700 CDN.
For one, I don't want or need blu-ray. Its primary effect is making games more expensive.
Last I checked bluray was outselling hd-dvd 3:1. I don't hear devs complaining about it (quite the contrary, some have mentioned even bumping up against 50GB).
I don't have an HDTV and probably won't have one any time soon because they are seriously fucking expensive, at least anything worth owning. I'm not going to buy some 720p shit unless it's incredibly cheap. And 1080p definitely isn't cheap.
It may interest you to know that a 720p set is usually also a 1080i set, but since you aren't in the market for an HDTV or a HD console, I don't know why the fuck you are spraying this drek all over the fora.
Not that I would give those assholes at Sony any money after rootkits and destroying Lik-Sang, among other faux pas.
Aww. Did they nerf your wookie too?
Don't be a child. If you don't want to buy it, decide that and be done with it.
As a PS3 owner myself, none of this excites me in the least. I'm not denying there is a market out there for it. But honestly, I only bought a console to get some good single-player games up on a big TV screen in the family room. It's nice to have the ability to play "head to head" against a friend who comes over, once in a while too... and if the game is designed well enough for it, even Internet play. But wandering around in a 3D virtual world just so I can chat with people and set up multi-player games with them? No thanks. It's a big load of unnecessary extra GUI junk....
No no, you're not getting it...
The Sims style accoutrement is just window dressing. The actual point of the thing is a 3d representation of an Xfire buddy list. So you can gather your friends into your apartment, play a game, switch to another, while keeping everyone together and on the same chat, etc. It also lets you stream media from your PS3 HDD, so you can 'go over' to another apartment and watch a video or have music on. And finally its a framework for YouTube/Myspace type social interactions, all of which will have hooks back to the game community.
Its not just some dumb Sims game, its a 3D meta-game that encompasses a bunch of clan-type network features that the Xbox service has.
But you know what? I would still rather live here than some other fucked up country. At least the way our country is fucked up allows me to think and feel how I please (and in many cases, expressing it as well. Again, many people think our free speech is fucked in this country, but I have proof that it is not. Go to any street corner in the USA and shout "I hate our leader we need a new one!"
"Where else but in America - or perhaps Canada - could one do such a thing?" (Ob. Simpsons Reference)
It's not so bad when you consider that 2X Blu-ray is 9 megabytes per second and 12x DVD-ROM is about 16 megabytes per second.
Its not even as simple as that... the old DVD drives are CAV, and blu-ray is CLV. So the 12x speed for the DVD-ROM is only the outer 15% of the disc, and this rate degrades as you move towards the center down to 6-7X. The Blu-Ray is 2X (BD-ROM speed) throughout the entire surface of the disc, as the drive actually spins the disc at different velocities.
[blockquote]The Wii's styling is much more "masculine", and it's 100% backwards compatible with GC games so you can catch up on all of those great games you may have missed without worrying about a reduction in testosterone levels:).[/quote]
It's called a 'Wii'. They have a ways to go yet.:)
Sony is moving to a 65nm process for the Cell much sooner than most expected. Perhaps they plan on keeping their loss the same per-unit, and passing the new savings down to spur sales?
Here's the deal. Bev Oda, who is our Heritage Minister (in charge of cultural things like copyright) is being hammered right now from a few different sides, mostly stirred up by her arch enemy, Ottawa copyfighter Prof. Michael Geist. She's in the pocket of all five big record labels, most of her political donations come directly from them (via CRIA). So I'm guessing this story is a plant.
I mean, this statement: As much as 50 per cent of the world's pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
Worldwide?! There is just no fucking way. We don't even hold a tiny candle to what goes on in Asia.
Also, as we know, the vast majority of movies leaked do not come from camcorder screeners, they are direct rips, leaked from the studios themselves by employees or connected people.
What they are really mad about is - 1. fair use is basically intrinsically stated within Canadian law, so its almost impossible to appeal, and 2. it is actually LEGAL to bring a camcorder into a theatre in Canada. The establishment can certainly bar you from doing so - its their theatre - but there is no actual law against doing this. Its basically a FUD piece.
Its just a matter of the handshake for HDCP not waiting long enough. The PS3 expects a reply to the handshake within a certain amount of time, and some older sets or ones that cut corners (Westinghouse - why did you think it was so cheap?) take an awfully long time to say 'yes, hi, here's the signal'.
So - not Sony's fault. However, I don't see why Sony couldn't easily tell the PS3 to wait a bit longer for the handshake, which is probably what will happen.
Also - there's typically no need to re-plug the HDMI cable if you happen to have this blinking phenomenon happening to you; just cycle the video Sources on yout TV. That should force it to re-negotiate. (My TV doesn't do this but a friend's does.)
What the hell are you smoking? PCs are the "home" of MMO, FPS, RTS, Puzzle and -real- adventure games, and probably several genres I'm forgetting.
Not so sure about that. A mouse+kb is great for RTS and FPS, I'll give you that. The MMOs we've seen so far require a lot of horsepower so naturally they land on the PC right now, but there's no reason you can't do one for a console (and has been - FF XI).P.
But every other genre I can think of, a console controller is way better. Racing, fighting, flying, yes 'real adventure' (Oblivion for Xbox360) and 'puzzle' (too numerous to count on either platform, but safe to say the Tetrises, Katamaris, UNOs and fl0ws are safe in console land). PCs are very powerful and I am not commenting on the quality issue, but specifically the control scheme. The fact that you can plug in a kb+mouse to an X360 or a PS3 blurs the line even more.
I haven't had this issue with my PS3 (hooked via HDMI to a Samsung HDTV) but a friend of mine has. However he has been able to resolve it by simply pressing the 'source' button and cycling back around to the PS3 input. You don't need to power down. Re-selecting the video input seems to initiate the handshake again.
In this case the issue isn't the PS3 but rather however your television handles the HDCP handshake. As I said, mine doesn't have an issue, but I do see a brief burst of noise when a game handshakes.
Its too bad, because HDMI is a really nice connection. But HDCP is just ass. I hope Sony can do something with the firmware to alleviate the issue on these sets that 'blink'.
(I'm sorta throwing my hat in with the Wing Commander folks in essence.)
Where have all the space games gone?
All I want is a cockpit-view starfighter type thing where I can attack huge capital ships in an online multiplayer setting. It doesn't even have to be a Massive one, just me and a few friends with headsets doing strafing runs. That would be great fun.
It seems like, apart from the odd star wars franchise game, the whole 'starfighter' thing has become passé in games... even though we finally have online consoles that are perfect for it...
Colony Wars had great art direction and an interesting, BSG-like (branching) plotline... loved it. Good ol' Psygnosis.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't quite understand what you mean - Sony co-invented the CD format with Philips, did they not? Why didn't this hurt the Playstation then?
Ha! You are a piece of work dude, that's the best you can do?! Thanks for proving my point, twice over. Now please die in a fire.
I stopped reading your posts when you declared that 'every single X360 user was happy with a 20GB drive'. Shows what you know.
Can you tell us a little more about gathering a group of friends and matchmaking outside of Home? I saw the other two icons underneath the main app in the demo, one was for trophies but I couldn't make out the other. Will I be able to simply connect to friends and fire up games (ala Xbox Live) without going through all the Virtual shenanigans?
You can. Go into your music column, select what you want and play it, then instead of cancelling it with circle, simple press the PS button and navigate on to Photos. Set up your show, voila.
If you are talking about custom in-game music like the X360 has, I think they said that was coming. A nice feature, I agree.What about a political attack ad? The purpose is to get you to vote a specific way, yet it uses emotion to try and achieve this. Art?
Great post, thanks for that. I would only quibble with one point - "it is impossible to execute even some of the simpler forms of cinema without the budget of a small country". That used to be true, but ever since that kid won a Sundance award for something edited in iMovie, that notion is probably out the window. Cheers.
Arguing that an HDTV plug has no use on a regular TV is pointless.
I doubt that - do you think 99% of Xbox360 owners with an HDD are perfectly happy to be stuck at 20GB? Or do you think they'd like an option to buy a bigger drive for all those movies and games on Live? (for a reasonable HDD price, no less?)
Considering the climate of Sony PR these days, I'd say its safe to assume that if there were any significant issues with PS3 manufacturing, Digg and Slashdot and Kotaku would be all over it. It hasn't happened. As you point out the HDCP handshake issue is a compatibility one but not a manufacturing issue. There is no overheating issue, you pulled that out of your arse. $700 CDN.Last I checked bluray was outselling hd-dvd 3:1. I don't hear devs complaining about it (quite the contrary, some have mentioned even bumping up against 50GB).
It may interest you to know that a 720p set is usually also a 1080i set, but since you aren't in the market for an HDTV or a HD console, I don't know why the fuck you are spraying this drek all over the fora.
Aww. Did they nerf your wookie too?
Don't be a child. If you don't want to buy it, decide that and be done with it.
No no, you're not getting it... The Sims style accoutrement is just window dressing. The actual point of the thing is a 3d representation of an Xfire buddy list. So you can gather your friends into your apartment, play a game, switch to another, while keeping everyone together and on the same chat, etc. It also lets you stream media from your PS3 HDD, so you can 'go over' to another apartment and watch a video or have music on. And finally its a framework for YouTube/Myspace type social interactions, all of which will have hooks back to the game community.
Its not just some dumb Sims game, its a 3D meta-game that encompasses a bunch of clan-type network features that the Xbox service has.
A 'silver account' is barely an account at all; all they give you for 'silver' is the ability to walk into the store. Awfully kind of them.
And very telling that they don't bust out the number of Gold subscribers vs Silver.
"Where else but in America - or perhaps Canada - could one do such a thing?"
(Ob. Simpsons Reference)
Its not even as simple as that... the old DVD drives are CAV, and blu-ray is CLV. So the 12x speed for the DVD-ROM is only the outer 15% of the disc, and this rate degrades as you move towards the center down to 6-7X. The Blu-Ray is 2X (BD-ROM speed) throughout the entire surface of the disc, as the drive actually spins the disc at different velocities.
It's called a 'Wii'. They have a ways to go yet. :)
Sony is moving to a 65nm process for the Cell much sooner than most expected. Perhaps they plan on keeping their loss the same per-unit, and passing the new savings down to spur sales?
Someone mentioned a huge throbbing joke in there somewhere, but I'm boned if I can find it.
I mean, this statement:
As much as 50 per cent of the world's pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
Worldwide?! There is just no fucking way. We don't even hold a tiny candle to what goes on in Asia.
Also, as we know, the vast majority of movies leaked do not come from camcorder screeners, they are direct rips, leaked from the studios themselves by employees or connected people.
What they are really mad about is - 1. fair use is basically intrinsically stated within Canadian law, so its almost impossible to appeal, and 2. it is actually LEGAL to bring a camcorder into a theatre in Canada. The establishment can certainly bar you from doing so - its their theatre - but there is no actual law against doing this. Its basically a FUD piece.
So - not Sony's fault. However, I don't see why Sony couldn't easily tell the PS3 to wait a bit longer for the handshake, which is probably what will happen.
Also - there's typically no need to re-plug the HDMI cable if you happen to have this blinking phenomenon happening to you; just cycle the video Sources on yout TV. That should force it to re-negotiate. (My TV doesn't do this but a friend's does.)
Not so sure about that. A mouse+kb is great for RTS and FPS, I'll give you that. The MMOs we've seen so far require a lot of horsepower so naturally they land on the PC right now, but there's no reason you can't do one for a console (and has been - FF XI).P. But every other genre I can think of, a console controller is way better. Racing, fighting, flying, yes 'real adventure' (Oblivion for Xbox360) and 'puzzle' (too numerous to count on either platform, but safe to say the Tetrises, Katamaris, UNOs and fl0ws are safe in console land). PCs are very powerful and I am not commenting on the quality issue, but specifically the control scheme. The fact that you can plug in a kb+mouse to an X360 or a PS3 blurs the line even more.
In this case the issue isn't the PS3 but rather however your television handles the HDCP handshake. As I said, mine doesn't have an issue, but I do see a brief burst of noise when a game handshakes.
Its too bad, because HDMI is a really nice connection. But HDCP is just ass. I hope Sony can do something with the firmware to alleviate the issue on these sets that 'blink'.
Where have all the space games gone?
All I want is a cockpit-view starfighter type thing where I can attack huge capital ships in an online multiplayer setting. It doesn't even have to be a Massive one, just me and a few friends with headsets doing strafing runs. That would be great fun.
It seems like, apart from the odd star wars franchise game, the whole 'starfighter' thing has become passé in games... even though we finally have online consoles that are perfect for it... Colony Wars had great art direction and an interesting, BSG-like (branching) plotline... loved it. Good ol' Psygnosis.