Imagine the PR nightmare if Nike inserts a set of ads with some sports star who gets busted for dope, accused of rape or overdoses yet millions of games are heading to stores too late to recall and repress.
Or if, say, someone were to create a boxing game with Mike Tyson as the title character. Think of how bad it would look if he then went to jail or bit someone's ear off or something. Err, nevermind.
As long as the endorsement celebrity doesn't do anything incredibly stupid shortly *before* the game is released, it shouldn't matter. In fact, I'd wager that even if they did, the game publisher would love the free extra publicity. And unless the celebrity was caught on video biting the heads off of kittens or raping babies, I highly doubt that the buying public would even care.
Giving up mod points to respond to this, but this point could not be left unaddressed...
The designer for it passed away. He personally will not be around to make that mistake.
Don't *ever* knock Gunpei Yokoi. He's the fucking MAN.
Sure, he was responsible for the VirtualBoy... But if he were alive today, I'd still buy anything with his name attached to it. Why? He was also responsible for Nintendo's R&D1 -- you know, the group that designed the GameBoy. And R&D1 games like Kid Icarus and, you know, only quite possibly the best video game franchise in history, Metroid.
I realize that you probably know all of this, since you at least know that he died (killed in a car accident) -- but to me it is still unacceptable that anyone should ever think that it's in any way a blessing that Yokoi died. The man was a huge positive influence on the video game industry.
The really sad thing is that, even with the bold tags, I just read right over every one of those mistakes without noticing. I must need to get away from Slashdot...
Dunno, Pac Man Vs. gets regular play at my place when people come over. Crystal Chronicles took quite a bit of work to get set up, but was still a lot of fun.
I think the next generation will work a lot better in this regard. Wireless will really add a lot to the appeal, for both the Wii/DS and PS3/PSP.
The phenomenon of launch titles sucking is relatively new. Just think back to:
Super Mario World Super Mario 64
Arguably, two of the best games ever. It used to be that a new system brought with it amazing new games. Recently, new systems have just brought... new systems.
Just because you found a quote that can be attributed to Seamus Blackley does not mean that Sony didn't say it first.
I remember, very clearly, when the PS2 tech demos (remember the rubber duck?) came out, about boasts of Toy Story graphics by Sony. I also remember the post by a Pixar employee refuting the claim.
Unfortunately, it's gotten so buried in the 'net by trolling fanboys playing he-said-she-said that it's impossible to find a link anymore. Closest I can come with a quick search is:
Even at 480i, the 360 and Ps3 are going to be able to pull off effects and realism the Wii can't come close to. We may not see this at launch, but it's definitely coming.
Unfortunately, the 360 and PS3 games will still have to support high-def resolutions. Do you really think developers will spend a lot of extra time with NTSC resolution to add extra polish when running on a non-HD screen? My bet is "no". All this extra potential will most likely go to improved framerates, at best -- and any game that has framerate problems to begin with is of questionable quality already.
I quit because I had played the solo game to death, but couldn't commit the time necessary to join a raiding guild. I was also incredibly disappointed that the only new content that Blizzard added was new places to farm for gear/reputation/whatever. They completely forgot about the solo game, and once you hit 60 there's really no point in playing any more unless you want to farm the same raid instances for months to get your better gear to enable you to move on to farming the next raid instance for months.
I had more fun tooling around with friends and trying to 2- or 3-man the level 55-60 instances than I ever did waiting around in raids. Unfortunately, even pushing the limits gets boring when there's nothing new to do.
A couple of people have already responded along these lines, but... Re: Storyline
Yeah, I always find myself wishing for a better story when I'm playing a game of 9-ball. I mean, the game would be so much more compelling if I had a *reason* for wanting to pocket the 9-ball. Is it some sort of kingpin mafia boss, and you have to knock out all of the underlings before you get to take it on? Maybe it's a genetic mutant (hey, it's the only striped one on the table!) that must be destroyed.
Or bridge -- why do the aces always win? Or chess -- where did the queen get her super powers?
I worked as an admin for my university's camupus-wide computer lab system. While I was there, the art department bought about 40 G4 Powermacs and built their own lab. Unfortunately, they didn't hire anyone to actually maintain their lab. It quickly deteriorated to the point where only about 5 of those machines would even *boot*, let alone work well enough to do anything useful. Our Windows labs with a combined total of over 700 computers had a better than 95% uptime -- and nearly all of the downtime was caused by hardware failure.
Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux flavors all work pretty well, in the hands of a knowledgeable user. They all fail spectacularly when drooling idiots use them. If/when we see Apple take over 25% of the desktop market, we'll start seeing just as many infected and poorly maintained OSX installations as there are in the Windows world.
I've also been gaming for 25 years and have disposable income. You can pretty much negate everything you just said in that post, and that would sum up my feelings pretty well. I guess my anecdotal feelings cancel yours out, right?
Also, people like me, who want more out of a video game than a twitch reflex also want a good story with movie level production value.
Production value, or a good story? There's a huge difference. Hint: most mainstream movies don't have good stories, either. I've played maybe a handful of 'adult' games with 'mature' themes (Killer 7 comes to mind) that were any more complex, story wise, than a kids' cartoon. Hint 2: giving your story sex and blood doesn't magically make it complex.
Splinter Cell? Crap. Final Fantasy 7+? Crap. Paper Mario? Crap. Resident Evil? Crap. Sure, they're all fun games, but the stories are all inane and pretty much just get in the way. Please don't make me waste time with a story that I can guess by looking at the cover of the game.
I'm talking about MOST adults.
No, you're talking about MOST single adult males. All of the adults sitting in my living room last night (9 of us, and 5 were women) were all playing Smash Brothers Melee, Mario Golf, and Bomberman. Maybe you're content to play single-player RPGs and on-line FPSes, but some of us like to have a few friends over (especially of the female persuasion), and party games are king here.
Oh, and your willingness to spend too much money on something just to prove how awesome your home theater is really speaks far more about you than about the game industry.
The gamecube... is by far the least powerful system.
Spoken like a someone with an *excellent* grasp on computer hardware.
Tell me, where did you learn that? On PS2 and XBox forums?
Let me let you in on a secret: The Gamecube and XBox hardware are really *very* close to each other in performance, with the Gamecube having better multi-texturing and the XBox having shader support and *slightly* better polygon crunching performance. The PS2 isn't even close, hardware performance wise, to either system. If you'd like details, there are plenty of reviews out there by people more knowledgeable than yourself. If you'd like proof, LOOK AT RESIDENT EVIL 4 AND METROID PRIME, to name just two of the best looking games to come out during this console generation.
And here's where I give Nintendo props: They managed to cram an extremely elegant, efficient, powerful system into a tiny $200 box. Microsoft did produce a 'superior' system, but it's more than twice as big and 50% more expensive.
The Wii looks to be another engineering marvel, if they manage to fit the amount of power they've promised in the form factor that they've previewed. The XBox 360 is another beast, and it could probably double as a fucking hair dryer even when doing something as simple as watching a DVD.
(Note to Sony and Microsoft: The only major heat-generating component that gets into my stereo cabinet is my Denon receiver. I don't have any desire to add active cooling to cover up your engineering mistakes.)
I mean the construction work is at fault, but is the company who did it really to blame? Unless the contractor foreman sat there and watched the guy do it, then you can't really blame the company with anything other than poor managment.
Not likely. It was probably at one point a feature, and then someone thought better of it and axed it. Do you really think that it was just one guy working on this? At the very least, you've got the programmer coding it, and the artist doing the animations. A coordinated effort probably implies that management was involved somehow.
I just don't believe that this was any one person's doing. When I originally heard about this, my first thought after "I can't believe this is a big deal" was "Those dipshits at Rockstar should have known better."
One person that gets left out of these discussions frequently is American McGee. I think that the combination of the three is really what did it. Look at their releases since breaking up:
Daikatana -- ambitious design goals, no direction American McGee's Alice -- Cookie-cutter Q3 engine game in an unimaginative Alice in Wonderland setting, fantastic production value Quake 2/3, Doom 3 -- Minor evolutionary steps, amazing technology, but absolutely nothing new in terms of game design
If you go back and read a lot of the id software communication running up to the release of Quake, you'll see a *lot* of promises coming from John Romero about what the game was going to do. In the end, practically none of it made it into the game, and there are things he promised that haven't been done (to my knowledge) to this day -- such as tumbling head over heels when you get shot off a ledge, or 'webs' of servers that could conceivably make up a huge persistent-ish world.
The common opinion in my circle is that id was a combination of 3 great talents -- Carmack's coding genius, Romero's creativity, and McGee's ability to reign the other two in and channel them toward shipping a game. It's really too bad that Quake turned out to be such a disappointment (yes, I said it) to those waiting for the promises Romero made, and that, in all likelihood, that's the reason for his departure from id.
Dunno, the sprite for Kefka was obviously stubby and super-deformed like all of the other characters, but in the final battle with him he's basically a lot like Sephiroth, except that he's got golden hair and looks like an angel or something from the ceiling of Sisteen Chapels... When you finally fight Sephiroth, he's angelic but pretty mutated and grotesque, IIRC. (Haven't played 7 since I beat it the first time, almost 10 years ago...)
So Dal, in your world I am an arrogant asshole who should be blackballed and cut off and I'm an idiot.
Actually, no, Dal never said that.
He said, very clearly, that the customers who call up fully intending to pick a fight, regardless of the quality of their service, are the idiots that should be blackballed and cut off.
And I pity all of the people who've responded with things like Crawl under a rock and die of cancer.. How empty must your lives be to have time to wish death on someone just because they think that people's interactions should begin with civility?
I care about the games, the GC was lacking seriously in that department.
I'm a picky gamer. The 85 GC titles I have sitting on my shelf say otherwise.
A few I bought for novelty purposes (BMX XXX for $5, Turok Evolution for $5...), but I can confidently state that at least 50 of them are titles that I would have absolutely no problem with recommending to other people, depending on their tastes.
I also don't own all of the games that I'd like to -- things like Goblin Commander, that I didn't pick up right away and haven't been able to find since. I also don't have many games that are popular, but I consider crap -- think Splinter Cell 2 and beyond.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you think the GC library is inadequate, you're either too picky, or you just haven't looked hard enough (or, in many peoples' cases, at all).
Can you point out where in the GP post that he called games with fantastic production values 'terrible'? Or where he claimed that "great looking, great sounding" equals 'crap game'?
I can't put words in GP's mouth, but my understanding was that he believes that the problem with games today is that they *need* these ridiclous Hollywood-like budgets.
but to date no GameCube game has ever impressed me with its graphics compared to the shiniest PS2 and Xbox games.
That's amusing, because if you're impressed with the graphics of PS2 games, you must be fairly easily impressed. I can't think of a single PS2 game that pushed the envelope in terms of graphics, whereas I can list a dozen or more each from the Gamecube and XBox libraries.
The Gamecube hardware is far superior to that of the PS2, no matter how much Sony kool-aid you've been drinking.
The 360 (and PS3) is also using a PowerPC architecture chip, but architecture does not inherently impact IPC.
Holy cow... someone modded this informative.
If architecture does not inherently impact IPC, then what, pray tell, does?
I'll be the first to admit that I've only taken 2 semesters of computer architecture classes, and designed and implemented a pipelined, data-forwarding CPU in verilog for those classes... But seriously, AFAIK, architecture and instruction scheduling are the ONLY things that affect IPC (assuming, obviously, that you're always reading instructions from an on-chip cache, which any reasonably well optimized game engine would maximize)
Oh, and if you've found a way to achieve linear performance improvements for general-purpose tasks by simply adding more processing units (as your 1/6 the power estimate asserts), please go to your nearest university and explain it to their computer science department. They would *love* to hear it. Seriously.
The amusing thing about it, though, is that Nintendo and SK still parted ways on good terms -- with both parties speaking highly of each other, and simply acknowledging their differing visions.
Square, on the other hand, royally screwed Nintendo, and people seem to forget that Nintendo actually played the 'mature' role by not publicly bad-mouthing Square. Then, somehow, people like the grandparent poster to this day believe that Nintendo did something to alienate Square other than not provide enough storage space for their games.
(Which, by the way, was probably where I started falling out-of-love with Square. Good games. Horrible load-times in nearly every one of them.)
Many of the better games for the consoles are also out for the PC
There are tons of examples from other consoles as well, but I'll stick with Gamecube games since I'm most familiar with them:
Metroid Prime Resident Evil 4 Zelda: Wind Waker Super Smash Brothers Super Monkey Ball Paper Mario F-Zero GX Animal Crossing
None of these excellent games are available on the PC, and this is just a few 'Cube games and by no means an exhaustive list. If they don't float your boat, then don't buy a Gamecube. If you don't understand why they're fun, well, then that's your loss. But to go so far as to say that there's no justification to buy one is incredibly narrow-minded.
You probably don't like golf or bridge either, but those are two of my favorite games. Should I give those up just because you don't see the justification? I probably don't like half of what you like either, but I'm not going to try to justify my own preferences by saying yours are useless.
And, to top it all off -- I've already spent upwards of $6000 on my HDTV/HT setup. Why the fuck wouldn't I want to plug in to that to enjoy my games as well, when it's such a marginal additional cost? I have a PC for PC games and consoles for everything else. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine the PR nightmare if Nike inserts a set of ads with some sports star who gets busted for dope, accused of rape or overdoses yet millions of games are heading to stores too late to recall and repress.
Or if, say, someone were to create a boxing game with Mike Tyson as the title character. Think of how bad it would look if he then went to jail or bit someone's ear off or something. Err, nevermind.
As long as the endorsement celebrity doesn't do anything incredibly stupid shortly *before* the game is released, it shouldn't matter. In fact, I'd wager that even if they did, the game publisher would love the free extra publicity. And unless the celebrity was caught on video biting the heads off of kittens or raping babies, I highly doubt that the buying public would even care.
--Jeremy
Giving up mod points to respond to this, but this point could not be left unaddressed...
The designer for it passed away. He personally will not be around to make that mistake.
Don't *ever* knock Gunpei Yokoi. He's the fucking MAN.
Sure, he was responsible for the VirtualBoy... But if he were alive today, I'd still buy anything with his name attached to it. Why? He was also responsible for Nintendo's R&D1 -- you know, the group that designed the GameBoy. And R&D1 games like Kid Icarus and, you know, only quite possibly the best video game franchise in history, Metroid.
I realize that you probably know all of this, since you at least know that he died (killed in a car accident) -- but to me it is still unacceptable that anyone should ever think that it's in any way a blessing that Yokoi died. The man was a huge positive influence on the video game industry.
--Jeremy
The really sad thing is that, even with the bold tags, I just read right over every one of those mistakes without noticing. I must need to get away from Slashdot...
--Jeremy
Dunno, Pac Man Vs. gets regular play at my place when people come over. Crystal Chronicles took quite a bit of work to get set up, but was still a lot of fun.
I think the next generation will work a lot better in this regard. Wireless will really add a lot to the appeal, for both the Wii/DS and PS3/PSP.
--Jeremy
The phenomenon of launch titles sucking is relatively new. Just think back to:
... new systems.
Super Mario World
Super Mario 64
Arguably, two of the best games ever. It used to be that a new system brought with it amazing new games. Recently, new systems have just brought
--Jeremy
Just because you found a quote that can be attributed to Seamus Blackley does not mean that Sony didn't say it first.
I remember, very clearly, when the PS2 tech demos (remember the rubber duck?) came out, about boasts of Toy Story graphics by Sony. I also remember the post by a Pixar employee refuting the claim.
Unfortunately, it's gotten so buried in the 'net by trolling fanboys playing he-said-she-said that it's impossible to find a link anymore. Closest I can come with a quick search is:
here
--Jeremy
Even at 480i, the 360 and Ps3 are going to be able to pull off effects and realism the Wii can't come close to. We may not see this at launch, but it's definitely coming.
Unfortunately, the 360 and PS3 games will still have to support high-def resolutions. Do you really think developers will spend a lot of extra time with NTSC resolution to add extra polish when running on a non-HD screen? My bet is "no". All this extra potential will most likely go to improved framerates, at best -- and any game that has framerate problems to begin with is of questionable quality already.
--Jeremy
I quit because I had played the solo game to death, but couldn't commit the time necessary to join a raiding guild. I was also incredibly disappointed that the only new content that Blizzard added was new places to farm for gear/reputation/whatever. They completely forgot about the solo game, and once you hit 60 there's really no point in playing any more unless you want to farm the same raid instances for months to get your better gear to enable you to move on to farming the next raid instance for months.
I had more fun tooling around with friends and trying to 2- or 3-man the level 55-60 instances than I ever did waiting around in raids. Unfortunately, even pushing the limits gets boring when there's nothing new to do.
--Jeremy
A couple of people have already responded along these lines, but... Re: Storyline
Yeah, I always find myself wishing for a better story when I'm playing a game of 9-ball. I mean, the game would be so much more compelling if I had a *reason* for wanting to pocket the 9-ball. Is it some sort of kingpin mafia boss, and you have to knock out all of the underlings before you get to take it on? Maybe it's a genetic mutant (hey, it's the only striped one on the table!) that must be destroyed.
Or bridge -- why do the aces always win? Or chess -- where did the queen get her super powers?
--Jeremy
Warning: anecdotal evidence.
I worked as an admin for my university's camupus-wide computer lab system. While I was there, the art department bought about 40 G4 Powermacs and built their own lab. Unfortunately, they didn't hire anyone to actually maintain their lab. It quickly deteriorated to the point where only about 5 of those machines would even *boot*, let alone work well enough to do anything useful. Our Windows labs with a combined total of over 700 computers had a better than 95% uptime -- and nearly all of the downtime was caused by hardware failure.
Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux flavors all work pretty well, in the hands of a knowledgeable user. They all fail spectacularly when drooling idiots use them. If/when we see Apple take over 25% of the desktop market, we'll start seeing just as many infected and poorly maintained OSX installations as there are in the Windows world.
--Jeremy
I've also been gaming for 25 years and have disposable income. You can pretty much negate everything you just said in that post, and that would sum up my feelings pretty well. I guess my anecdotal feelings cancel yours out, right?
Also, people like me, who want more out of a video game than a twitch reflex also want a good story with movie level production value.
Production value, or a good story? There's a huge difference. Hint: most mainstream movies don't have good stories, either. I've played maybe a handful of 'adult' games with 'mature' themes (Killer 7 comes to mind) that were any more complex, story wise, than a kids' cartoon. Hint 2: giving your story sex and blood doesn't magically make it complex.
Splinter Cell? Crap. Final Fantasy 7+? Crap. Paper Mario? Crap. Resident Evil? Crap. Sure, they're all fun games, but the stories are all inane and pretty much just get in the way. Please don't make me waste time with a story that I can guess by looking at the cover of the game.
I'm talking about MOST adults.
No, you're talking about MOST single adult males. All of the adults sitting in my living room last night (9 of us, and 5 were women) were all playing Smash Brothers Melee, Mario Golf, and Bomberman. Maybe you're content to play single-player RPGs and on-line FPSes, but some of us like to have a few friends over (especially of the female persuasion), and party games are king here.
Oh, and your willingness to spend too much money on something just to prove how awesome your home theater is really speaks far more about you than about the game industry.
--Jeremy
The gamecube ... is by far the least powerful system.
Spoken like a someone with an *excellent* grasp on computer hardware.
Tell me, where did you learn that? On PS2 and XBox forums?
Let me let you in on a secret: The Gamecube and XBox hardware are really *very* close to each other in performance, with the Gamecube having better multi-texturing and the XBox having shader support and *slightly* better polygon crunching performance. The PS2 isn't even close, hardware performance wise, to either system. If you'd like details, there are plenty of reviews out there by people more knowledgeable than yourself. If you'd like proof, LOOK AT RESIDENT EVIL 4 AND METROID PRIME, to name just two of the best looking games to come out during this console generation.
And here's where I give Nintendo props: They managed to cram an extremely elegant, efficient, powerful system into a tiny $200 box. Microsoft did produce a 'superior' system, but it's more than twice as big and 50% more expensive.
The Wii looks to be another engineering marvel, if they manage to fit the amount of power they've promised in the form factor that they've previewed. The XBox 360 is another beast, and it could probably double as a fucking hair dryer even when doing something as simple as watching a DVD.
(Note to Sony and Microsoft: The only major heat-generating component that gets into my stereo cabinet is my Denon receiver. I don't have any desire to add active cooling to cover up your engineering mistakes.)
I mean the construction work is at fault, but is the company who did it really to blame? Unless the contractor foreman sat there and watched the guy do it, then you can't really blame the company with anything other than poor managment.
Not likely. It was probably at one point a feature, and then someone thought better of it and axed it. Do you really think that it was just one guy working on this? At the very least, you've got the programmer coding it, and the artist doing the animations. A coordinated effort probably implies that management was involved somehow.
I just don't believe that this was any one person's doing. When I originally heard about this, my first thought after "I can't believe this is a big deal" was "Those dipshits at Rockstar should have known better."
--Jeremy
One person that gets left out of these discussions frequently is American McGee. I think that the combination of the three is really what did it. Look at their releases since breaking up:
Daikatana -- ambitious design goals, no direction
American McGee's Alice -- Cookie-cutter Q3 engine game in an unimaginative Alice in Wonderland setting, fantastic production value
Quake 2/3, Doom 3 -- Minor evolutionary steps, amazing technology, but absolutely nothing new in terms of game design
If you go back and read a lot of the id software communication running up to the release of Quake, you'll see a *lot* of promises coming from John Romero about what the game was going to do. In the end, practically none of it made it into the game, and there are things he promised that haven't been done (to my knowledge) to this day -- such as tumbling head over heels when you get shot off a ledge, or 'webs' of servers that could conceivably make up a huge persistent-ish world.
The common opinion in my circle is that id was a combination of 3 great talents -- Carmack's coding genius, Romero's creativity, and McGee's ability to reign the other two in and channel them toward shipping a game. It's really too bad that Quake turned out to be such a disappointment (yes, I said it) to those waiting for the promises Romero made, and that, in all likelihood, that's the reason for his departure from id.
--Jeremy
Dunno, the sprite for Kefka was obviously stubby and super-deformed like all of the other characters, but in the final battle with him he's basically a lot like Sephiroth, except that he's got golden hair and looks like an angel or something from the ceiling of Sisteen Chapels... When you finally fight Sephiroth, he's angelic but pretty mutated and grotesque, IIRC. (Haven't played 7 since I beat it the first time, almost 10 years ago...)
--Jeremy
So Dal, in your world I am an arrogant asshole who should be blackballed and cut off and I'm an idiot.
Actually, no, Dal never said that.
He said, very clearly, that the customers who call up fully intending to pick a fight, regardless of the quality of their service, are the idiots that should be blackballed and cut off.
And I pity all of the people who've responded with things like Crawl under a rock and die of cancer.. How empty must your lives be to have time to wish death on someone just because they think that people's interactions should begin with civility?
--Jeremy
I care about the games, the GC was lacking seriously in that department.
I'm a picky gamer. The 85 GC titles I have sitting on my shelf say otherwise.
A few I bought for novelty purposes (BMX XXX for $5, Turok Evolution for $5...), but I can confidently state that at least 50 of them are titles that I would have absolutely no problem with recommending to other people, depending on their tastes.
I also don't own all of the games that I'd like to -- things like Goblin Commander, that I didn't pick up right away and haven't been able to find since. I also don't have many games that are popular, but I consider crap -- think Splinter Cell 2 and beyond.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you think the GC library is inadequate, you're either too picky, or you just haven't looked hard enough (or, in many peoples' cases, at all).
--Jeremy
Can you point out where in the GP post that he called games with fantastic production values 'terrible'? Or where he claimed that "great looking, great sounding" equals 'crap game'?
I can't put words in GP's mouth, but my understanding was that he believes that the problem with games today is that they *need* these ridiclous Hollywood-like budgets.
--Jeremy
To put this in perspective...
The Wii will be able to output graphics 2-2.5 less 'shitty' than Resident Evil 4 or Metroid Prime.
To do some simple, non-irrefutable math:
2-2.5 * pretty fucking good = what the hell more do you want?
Seriously, you people need to listen to yourselves once in a while.
--Jeremy
but to date no GameCube game has ever impressed me with its graphics compared to the shiniest PS2 and Xbox games.
That's amusing, because if you're impressed with the graphics of PS2 games, you must be fairly easily impressed. I can't think of a single PS2 game that pushed the envelope in terms of graphics, whereas I can list a dozen or more each from the Gamecube and XBox libraries.
The Gamecube hardware is far superior to that of the PS2, no matter how much Sony kool-aid you've been drinking.
--Jeremy
Yes it is. I don't think you understand what the grandparent poster means by "permission model."
--Jeremy
The 360 (and PS3) is also using a PowerPC architecture chip, but architecture does not inherently impact IPC.
... someone modded this informative.
Holy cow
If architecture does not inherently impact IPC, then what, pray tell, does?
I'll be the first to admit that I've only taken 2 semesters of computer architecture classes, and designed and implemented a pipelined, data-forwarding CPU in verilog for those classes... But seriously, AFAIK, architecture and instruction scheduling are the ONLY things that affect IPC (assuming, obviously, that you're always reading instructions from an on-chip cache, which any reasonably well optimized game engine would maximize)
Oh, and if you've found a way to achieve linear performance improvements for general-purpose tasks by simply adding more processing units (as your 1/6 the power estimate asserts), please go to your nearest university and explain it to their computer science department. They would *love* to hear it. Seriously.
--Jeremy
The amusing thing about it, though, is that Nintendo and SK still parted ways on good terms -- with both parties speaking highly of each other, and simply acknowledging their differing visions.
Square, on the other hand, royally screwed Nintendo, and people seem to forget that Nintendo actually played the 'mature' role by not publicly bad-mouthing Square. Then, somehow, people like the grandparent poster to this day believe that Nintendo did something to alienate Square other than not provide enough storage space for their games.
(Which, by the way, was probably where I started falling out-of-love with Square. Good games. Horrible load-times in nearly every one of them.)
--Jeremy
Many of the better games for the consoles are also out for the PC
There are tons of examples from other consoles as well, but I'll stick with Gamecube games since I'm most familiar with them:
Metroid Prime
Resident Evil 4
Zelda: Wind Waker
Super Smash Brothers
Super Monkey Ball
Paper Mario
F-Zero GX
Animal Crossing
None of these excellent games are available on the PC, and this is just a few 'Cube games and by no means an exhaustive list. If they don't float your boat, then don't buy a Gamecube. If you don't understand why they're fun, well, then that's your loss. But to go so far as to say that there's no justification to buy one is incredibly narrow-minded.
You probably don't like golf or bridge either, but those are two of my favorite games. Should I give those up just because you don't see the justification? I probably don't like half of what you like either, but I'm not going to try to justify my own preferences by saying yours are useless.
And, to top it all off -- I've already spent upwards of $6000 on my HDTV/HT setup. Why the fuck wouldn't I want to plug in to that to enjoy my games as well, when it's such a marginal additional cost? I have a PC for PC games and consoles for everything else. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?
--Jeremy
Easy mistake. Most of the rest of the industry has forgotten it, too.
--Jeremy