During the early '90s, all the other brands (Commodore, Atari, Apple) sort of faded away in the US. Apple being the only one who survived. I'm not sure what did it.
Definitely not quality, the macs were slower and had lesser quality than the Atari STs which also served the same markets. I personally think, that Macs could survive because of the graphics people who were so attached to their machines and they did not know the market. Apple was the cheapest page design solution when the Laser Printer hit the streets. And graphics people usually are not too much into looking outside of what works (hence the Photoshop being almost a monopoly in this area) Atari was simply too late with their ST and so did Acorn and many others fail. Atari had made some inroad in Europe in the graphics and page design area but Atari did not understand their new core market and Europe alone was not enough to make an apple like living.
Anyway Apple could simply survive because they had their nieche market and a load of technologoy unaware customers who tend to stick with what worked for them, or in other words, call it pure luck. Heck those people even went trough the note usable osx 10.x and 10.1 era and I dont know how many times being ripped off by apple with semi useless hardware designs.
Urgh, Commodore unknown, first it was an american company, secondly, the C64 was the most successful home computer in the "Pre PC" era. Amstrad Sinclair and Acorn are not too well known over the pond I agree, althugh at least in the case of the Acorn it was undeserved, one of the many better than a Mac machines which could not cope with Apple on marketing level.
Man even an Atari ST wiped the floor of every Mac and it already had major inroads in apples core domains, if it was not for the stupidity of Atari who never could figure out how to serve their customers (something which befell commodore also later in the Amiga days) Apple would be history and we probably all would be using Ataris instead. But oh well, what if games are always pointless to begin with.
Reports of the PS3s early demise are CLEARLY exaggerated.
I'm not arguing about PS3's demise, only the rubbish that it's "ahead of it's time".
Wellt, Sony marketing bullshit, can you remember the super computer thing when the PS2 was released, all the PS2 did was to pack 2 simd units onto two already out of date slow processors (which also have a superbly designed instruction set, I always loved mips for what it was) The cell is pretty similar in this regard, except for the fact that the design was not entirely outdated when the PS3 came out but it nowadays with modern gpus running circles left and right and with modern desktop processors delivering good power is. The main issue is, that consoles always have to take cost cutting measures, in the case of the PS3 we have a shitty general purpose core, and with shitty I mean shitty, and way to low ram to begin with, it was even to low when the PS3 came out.
But Sonys marketing departement probably would even brand some donkey shit super computer output (because a donkey has more logical reasoning than any computer, but that is system inherent).
Actually piracy did not kill the dreamcast, sales were quite good until the day the PS2 hit the streets. Then everything took a nosedive, so go figure how much impact piracy had in the death of the dreamcast. So far no console has been killed by piracy, in fact some have become number one by being easily piratable (PS1, Nintendo DS)
The only console I can remotely think of of might be being killed by being easily piratable is the PSP, but there are also other factores which are slowly killing the system. Heck not even the AMIGA was killed by piracy it was killed by SVGA on the PC and on that system as well as the C64 everyone and his mother was pirating games.
Actually you are somewhat right, although in case of the dreamcast the assumption is wrong, it was simply the PS2 and its dvd compatibility killing it. It probably would have been able to survive just like Nintendo did with their N64 and Cube if there was more money, but SEGA already was operating at the edge and would have risked the company if they tried to hold on the hardware business.
Anyway backwards compatibility can be a real issue, so far the only console really backwards compatible still is the PC, Nintendo at least keeps the compatibility to the last generation. As for the PS3 I personally think the missing compatibility on many of the PS3s is a real issue, more than the price ever was. I know a shitload of people who simply do not upgrade because they do not want to have two consoles in front and then having four controllers lingering around and they do not want to retire their (sometimes) big investment into the games. One of the reasons why I came back after 2 years on the Wii to PC gaming, you donÂt have to retire your games investment like you have on most consoles after a few years. Heck I even can play my old infocoms from the early eighties on my modern PC or my Ultima 7 from the early nineties (one if not the best RPG ever made)
the Dreamcast was a lot like the PS3 of this generation
I don't see how the PS3 is too ahead of this generation. It's expensive, the development kit is difficult in general and has a steep learning curve.
Besides that if you look outside of the sony marketing papers, the hardware is not that powerful to begin with, it has some edge over the xbox 360 in the simd area, but compared to a modern pc it severely stinks. It was Sonys dream that the cell could do everything, a very similar design to the ps2 with 2 mips processors with attached simd units doing everything but then the xbox came and sony realized that modern gpus were more powerful for 3d so they delegated the cell down to being the multi purpose processor and sound processing engine only,however multi purpose processing is a task where the cell really stinks. However the cell can get some revival now that physics are more integrated this is one area where it again can shine. The dreamcast however had a straight forward design, it used one single processor (i still dont know what the affinity of the japanese is to get a high number of shitty processors into consoles and let everyone figure out how to use the stuff) which was a known entity, and adding to that a POWERVR chip also a known entity from the PC world, however on the PC world the graphics processor could not shine due to using a different 3d paradigm, that emulation layer could be removed for the dreamcast and it could shine.
Btw. modern handhelds like the iphone use follow up 3d chip. The design has moved from the PC area down to the handheld segment where it is used due to its low power consumption, pretty similar to arm.
Does a DVD player make the PS2 a better game system? Sony's hype machine and press ignorance made it seem far more "next-gen" than it actually was. And games like Shenmue, Metropolis Street Racer, Sonic Adventure 2, and Under Defeat show the Dreamcast could hold its own regarding quality graphics.
Well it does not make it a better game system but it helped to sell the hardware. Go to youtube and dig out the IGN dreamcast interviews, all the Sega people interviewed pretty much said that the Dreamcast sales took a nosedive the day the PS2 hit the streets, and that at least in japan the PS2 was heavily used as a DVD player also because it was the cheapest of its time. (Probably the other countries also used the PS2 heavily as a DVD player). Face it, while nowadays it is unimportant due to having DVD players left and right just like CD burners back then. The time the PS2 came out the DVD functionality was one cornerstone which sank the Dreamcast and almost sank the gamecube.
None of the interviews i have seen so far has been blaming piracy, the sales numbers are a clear indication that the dvd capabilities of the PS2 killed the dreamcast (as well as id almost killed the gamecube) I dont think piracy really was an issue, so far no console has been killed by piracy not even the ps1 which has been the most pirated console ever.
The reason was neither piracy nor bad games. Piracy existed but I rather doubt it killed the Dreamcast, what killed the dreamcast was given the existing interviews which clearly stated the sales numbers, was the PS2 and its dvd capability. If you watch the interviews then you would know one day before the PS2 was out the sales were excellent and then the day the PS2 came out the sales took a nosedive never to recover again, and the PS2 in the beginning also was used as a DVD player by a load of people.
Well I think it is not too different, the 2d games were like run as fast as possible and dont hit the obstacles in the way by jumping. Secret rings was, run as fast as it gets and dont hit the obstacles in the way by jumping and getting sideways. The reason why it feels like a racing game is, that burnout took a lesson from sonic and sonic in itself is a racing game sort of. (well it has very similar mechanics)
But I think they got the formula defintively right in that game. I still wonder why this game got mediocre scores. I guess nowadays every Sonic game does given the stinker history of the franchies.
Not really trine is 3d but in 2d/3d look like Pandemonium was. Btw. as for Sega I really liked the Nintendo DS sonics and funnily I personally loved Sonic and the Secret Rings.
Actually I really liked Sonic and the secret rings except for the pointless story and music. But the gameplay really was the 2d gameplay really well transitioned into the 3d realm. The trick simply was to push Sonic back on rails hence you could get the speed back.
Not entirely true, infocom used a vm underneath and had a lisp like language to implement their games. I also can remember a C compiler for the Atari XL not that you really could get decent programs out of it. If you wanted to get something working you had to go the assembler route!
Try and get the latest generation of coders out of uni to do something in 8K of memory and they'll probably just about manage "hello" before they complain that their favourite singleton class needs more memory to instantiate their modified string class I/O subsystem so they won't be able to print out "world" and expecting anyone to do that in 8K is clearly impossible.
I jest , but anyone who had to code a serious app in available memory measured in kilobytes knows just how bloated todays development enviroments and even compiled output is.
Well if you can spend two days on a hello world output you still can press it into a few bytes... but no one is paying for that stuff!
Those are the same people that promised that the DVD region coding and CSS system was only to protect new films from being watched in countries where they hadn't been released yet.
Where in reality, even 50 year old B/W cowboy films are region coded and copy protected when they are re-released on DVD.
You did trust them, didnÂt you. I didnt believe their bull**** from day zero. I would have been positively surprised though if they hadnÂt been lying. The media industry is like that give them a knife and they will stab you if they see they can get money out of you. Ah and yes before that they will buy a law which makes backstabbing in certain cases legal.
We first have to ask which analog hole they want to close. Well depends on the analog hole, but I think given their anal affection with politics the probably want to plug the rear end.
I bought a PS2 with the intent of purchasing $20 games. If I can't find them (out of print or not sold here or whatever), I'll just download them. I intend to give them my money, but if they make it impossible to do that I won't do it.
Of course, that probably means I'll stop buying console stuff and move back to computers. I feel better about giving hardware mfrs my money anyway, even though PC gaming is a constant upgrade treadmill.
Ever higher game prices are only shooting yourself in the foot.
Actually the upgrad treatmill has slowed down significantly thanks to the consoles.
We were talking about the PS3 and a shitload of games done for that console cannot be played decently on CRTs. The Wii and modern, well yes and no, the hardware specs are clearly last generation (G3 like power PC relatively low ram no hd and a graphics processing power which was more or less PC standard 5 - 7 years ago). Add to that the fact that the highest you can get from the Wii is 480p and no hdmi/dvi. (Have one myself but I would not really say it is this generation, it is a fun console though)
Anyway If someone would make a game like SMB on the PC (I am pretty sure such a game exists, I really should google for it) and you have a hdtv you easily can hook it to the TV:-) Anyway the wii is out of question here, because I was talking mostly about the PS3 and the PC here and both dont suit very well to old CRT tvs! But the PS3 or xbox360 dont have SSMB style games either, but at least the PS3 now is getting something along the lines of Mario Cart which looks very promising.
Exactly, ATI is the best to go if you never leave the windows world. However even there NVidia has made major inroads with PhysX and CUDA. I recently dropped my perfectly fine ATI 4850 and bought a inferior NVidia 9600 GT the reason the ATI Linux driver simply after 10 years still where shoddy no bsd drivers. The lesser speed I could mostly compensate buy buying a card with more ram, and additionally I got CUDA support. While badaboom is not as fast as Turbo 264 HD on my mac it is a welcome addition. Being able to encode h264 in dual speed is a really nice addition to the non working ATI me too solution ATI provides.
With HDMI the connection issue is a thing of the past, you nowadays can replace the CRT SDTV in your living room with an HDTV and then hook up a PC to a HDTV
Fixed that for you. The latest numbers state that two-thirds of TVs in U.S. living rooms don't have VGA or HDMI inputs because they were purchased before the late 2000s, when TVs with VGA or HDMI inputs became affordable.
Well those households are not really in for a modern console either, there is a load of games on new consoles which are almost unplayable on TVs because you cannot read the fonts.
But it is not as dominant on consoles either, it is mostly on sports titles and racers
Would you consider martial arts a sport? If so, what PC fighting game would you recommend for people who like the style of Super Smash Bros. series better than that of Street Fighter series?
This is not common on the consoles either, outside of Super Smash Brosh I am not really aware of a popular clones of that genre on consoles. Most fighters go the way of Street Fighter.
With HDMI the connection issue is a thing of the past, you nowadays can hook up a PC to a HDTV without quality loss and computer monitors also become bigger over time (26 inch is quite cheap nowadays) But I agree one machine multiplayer is not previvalent like it is on the console, but it exists. But it is not as dominant on consoles either, it is mostly on sports titles and racers, and if you can find those titles on the PC you have the one machine multiplayer mode as well. Most console shooters do not have split screen multiplayer either.
Nintendo ripps you off on the Wii with their accessories. Period, if you buy all the stuff needed for gaming and for a small family you are way more expensive than a PS3, on the other hand the XBOX and PS3 rip you off with games, and DLC. DLC on the wii fortunately is mostly a no go for now due to the limits of the console!
The issue is 2-3 years into a console generations lifespan this does not really work out anymore. Even new PCs which are stronger than the console generation can be bought for around 500$, people who just upgrade are even cheaper in the entry fees. With a handful of games the PC becomes cheaper with the average price difference of 10-20 bucks and the fact PC games will hit the bargain bin rather early. The worst I have seen was Bioshock 10 Euro for the PC and 70 Euro for the PS3. For 50 Euro I can get a new graphics card which is stronger than what the PS3 has to offer!
As for DLC dont expect games companies to make the actual games cheaper. The said once piracy was eliminated games could become cheaper, guess what games are cheapest on the piracy loaded pc, thd consoles which are not broken yet are the ones with the most expensive games. DLC will just be another lame excuse to charge full price and then charge extra!
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During the early '90s, all the other brands (Commodore, Atari, Apple) sort of faded away in the US. Apple being the only one who survived. I'm not sure what did it.
Definitely not quality, the macs were slower and had lesser quality than the Atari STs which also served the same markets.
I personally think, that Macs could survive because of the graphics people who were so attached to their machines and they did not know the market. Apple was the cheapest page design solution when the Laser Printer hit the streets. And graphics people usually are not too much into looking outside of what works (hence the Photoshop being almost a monopoly in this area)
Atari was simply too late with their ST and so did Acorn and many others fail. Atari had made some inroad in Europe in the graphics and page design area but Atari did not understand their new core market and Europe alone was not enough to make an apple like living.
Anyway Apple could simply survive because they had their nieche market and a load of technologoy unaware customers who tend to stick with what worked for them, or in other words, call it pure luck. Heck those people even went trough the note usable osx 10.x and 10.1 era and I dont know how many times being ripped off by apple with semi useless hardware designs.
Urgh, Commodore unknown, first it was an american company, secondly, the C64 was the most successful home computer in the "Pre PC" era.
Amstrad Sinclair and Acorn are not too well known over the pond I agree, althugh at least in the case of the Acorn it was undeserved, one of the many better than a Mac machines which could not cope with Apple on marketing level.
Man even an Atari ST wiped the floor of every Mac and it already had major inroads in apples core domains, if it was not for the stupidity of Atari who never could figure out how to serve their customers (something which befell commodore also later in the Amiga days) Apple would be history and we probably all would be using Ataris instead. But oh well, what if games are always pointless to begin with.
I'm not arguing about PS3's demise, only the rubbish that it's "ahead of it's time".
Wellt, Sony marketing bullshit, can you remember the super computer thing when the PS2 was released, all the PS2 did was to pack 2 simd units onto two already out of date slow processors (which also have a superbly designed instruction set, I always loved mips for what it was)
The cell is pretty similar in this regard, except for the fact that the design was not entirely outdated when the PS3 came out but it nowadays with modern gpus running circles left and right and with modern desktop processors delivering good power is.
The main issue is, that consoles always have to take cost cutting measures, in the case of the PS3 we have a shitty general purpose core, and with shitty I mean shitty, and way to low ram to begin with, it was even to low when the PS3 came out.
But Sonys marketing departement probably would even brand some donkey shit super computer output (because a donkey has more logical reasoning than any computer, but that is system inherent).
Actually piracy did not kill the dreamcast, sales were quite good until the day the PS2 hit the streets.
Then everything took a nosedive, so go figure how much impact piracy had in the death of the dreamcast.
So far no console has been killed by piracy, in fact some have become number one by being easily piratable
(PS1, Nintendo DS)
The only console I can remotely think of of might be being killed by being easily piratable is the PSP, but there are
also other factores which are slowly killing the system.
Heck not even the AMIGA was killed by piracy it was killed by SVGA on the PC and on that system as well as the C64
everyone and his mother was pirating games.
Actually you are somewhat right, although in case of the dreamcast the assumption is wrong, it was simply the PS2 and its dvd compatibility killing it. It probably would have been able to survive just like Nintendo did with their N64 and Cube if there was more money, but SEGA already was operating at the edge and would have risked the company if they tried to hold on the hardware business.
Anyway backwards compatibility can be a real issue, so far the only console really backwards compatible still is the PC, Nintendo at least keeps the compatibility to the last generation. As for the PS3 I personally think the missing compatibility on many of the PS3s is a real issue, more than the price ever was. I know a shitload of people who simply do not upgrade because they do not want to have two consoles in front and then having four controllers lingering around and they do not want to retire their (sometimes) big investment into the games.
One of the reasons why I came back after 2 years on the Wii to PC gaming, you donÂt have to retire your games investment like you have on most consoles after a few years. Heck I even can play my old infocoms from the early eighties on my modern PC or my Ultima 7 from the early nineties (one if not the best RPG ever made)
I don't see how the PS3 is too ahead of this generation. It's expensive, the development kit is difficult in general and has a steep learning curve.
Besides that if you look outside of the sony marketing papers, the hardware is not that powerful to begin with, it has some edge over the xbox 360 in the simd area, but compared to a modern pc it severely stinks.
It was Sonys dream that the cell could do everything, a very similar design to the ps2 with 2 mips processors with attached simd units doing everything but then the xbox came and sony realized that modern gpus were more powerful for 3d so they delegated the cell down to being the multi purpose processor and sound processing engine only,however multi purpose processing is a task where the cell really stinks. However the cell can get some revival now that physics are more integrated this is one area where it again can shine. The dreamcast however had a straight forward design, it used one single processor (i still dont know what the affinity of the japanese is to get a high number of shitty processors into consoles and let everyone figure out how to use the stuff) which was a known entity, and adding to that a POWERVR chip also a known entity from the PC world, however on the PC world the graphics processor could not shine due to using a different 3d paradigm, that emulation layer could be removed for the dreamcast and it could shine.
Btw. modern handhelds like the iphone use follow up 3d chip. The design has moved from the PC area down to the handheld segment where it is used due to its low power consumption, pretty similar to arm.
Does a DVD player make the PS2 a better game system? Sony's hype machine and press ignorance made it seem far more "next-gen" than it actually was. And games like Shenmue, Metropolis Street Racer, Sonic Adventure 2, and Under Defeat show the Dreamcast could hold its own regarding quality graphics.
Well it does not make it a better game system but it helped to sell the hardware. Go to youtube and dig out the IGN dreamcast interviews, all the Sega people interviewed pretty much said that the Dreamcast sales took a nosedive the day the PS2 hit the streets, and that at least in japan the PS2 was heavily used as a DVD player also because it was the cheapest of its time.
(Probably the other countries also used the PS2 heavily as a DVD player). Face it, while nowadays it is unimportant due to having DVD players left and right just like CD burners back then. The time the PS2 came out the DVD functionality was one cornerstone which sank the Dreamcast and almost sank the gamecube.
None of the interviews i have seen so far has been blaming piracy, the sales numbers are a clear indication that the dvd capabilities of the PS2 killed the dreamcast (as well as id almost killed the gamecube)
I dont think piracy really was an issue, so far no console has been killed by piracy not even the ps1 which has been the most pirated console ever.
The reason was neither piracy nor bad games. Piracy existed but I rather doubt it killed the Dreamcast, what killed the dreamcast was given the existing interviews which clearly stated the sales numbers, was the PS2 and its dvd capability.
If you watch the interviews then you would know one day before the PS2 was out the sales were excellent and then the day the PS2 came out the sales took a nosedive never to recover again, and the PS2 in the beginning also was used as a DVD player by a load of people.
Well I think it is not too different, the 2d games were like run as fast as possible and dont hit the obstacles in the way by jumping.
Secret rings was, run as fast as it gets and dont hit the obstacles in the way by jumping and getting sideways.
The reason why it feels like a racing game is, that burnout took a lesson from sonic and sonic in itself is a racing game sort of.
(well it has very similar mechanics)
But I think they got the formula defintively right in that game. I still wonder why this game got mediocre scores. I guess nowadays every Sonic game does given the stinker history of the franchies.
Not really trine is 3d but in 2d/3d look like Pandemonium was. Btw. as for Sega I really liked the Nintendo DS sonics and funnily I personally loved Sonic and the Secret Rings.
Actually I really liked Sonic and the secret rings except for the pointless story and music.
But the gameplay really was the 2d gameplay really well transitioned into the 3d realm. The trick simply was to push Sonic back on rails hence you could get the speed back.
There has been a load of 2d sonics, but they were only released on the handheld consoles, needless to say they were quite good.
Expects their customers to run Visual Sourcesafe, I hope they expect the same from their engineers.
Not entirely true, infocom used a vm underneath and had a lisp like language to implement their games.
I also can remember a C compiler for the Atari XL not that you really could get decent programs out of it.
If you wanted to get something working you had to go the assembler route!
Try and get the latest generation of coders out of uni to do something in 8K of memory and they'll probably just about manage "hello" before they complain that their favourite singleton class needs more memory to instantiate their modified string class I/O subsystem so they won't be able to print out "world" and expecting anyone to
do that in 8K is clearly impossible.
I jest , but anyone who had to code a serious app in available memory measured in kilobytes knows just how bloated todays development enviroments and even compiled output is.
Well if you can spend two days on a hello world output you still can press it into a few bytes... but no one is paying for that stuff!
Those are the same people that promised that the DVD region coding and CSS system was only to protect new films from being watched in countries where they hadn't been released yet.
Where in reality, even 50 year old B/W cowboy films are region coded and copy protected when they are re-released on DVD.
You did trust them, didnÂt you. I didnt believe their bull**** from day zero. I would have been positively surprised though if they hadnÂt been lying. The media industry is like that give them a knife and they will stab you if they see they can get money out of you. Ah and yes before that they will buy a law which makes backstabbing in certain cases legal.
We first have to ask which analog hole they want to close.
Well depends on the analog hole, but I think given their anal affection with politics the probably want to plug the rear end.
I bought a PS2 with the intent of purchasing $20 games. If I can't find them (out of print or not sold here or whatever), I'll just download them. I intend to give them my money, but if they make it impossible to do that I won't do it.
Of course, that probably means I'll stop buying console stuff and move back to computers. I feel better about giving hardware mfrs my money anyway, even though PC gaming is a constant upgrade treadmill.
Ever higher game prices are only shooting yourself in the foot.
Actually the upgrad treatmill has slowed down significantly thanks to the consoles.
We were talking about the PS3 and a shitload of games done for that console cannot be played decently on CRTs.
The Wii and modern, well yes and no, the hardware specs are clearly last generation (G3 like power PC relatively low ram no hd and a graphics processing power which was more or less PC standard 5 - 7 years ago). Add to that the fact that the highest you can get from the Wii is 480p and no hdmi/dvi. (Have one myself but I would not really say it is this generation, it is a fun console though)
Anyway :-)
If someone would make a game like SMB on the PC (I am pretty sure such a game exists, I really should google for it) and you have a hdtv you easily can hook it to the TV
Anyway the wii is out of question here, because I was talking mostly about the PS3 and the PC here and both dont suit very well to old CRT tvs!
But the PS3 or xbox360 dont have SSMB style games either, but at least the PS3 now is getting something along the lines of Mario Cart which looks very promising.
Exactly, ATI is the best to go if you never leave the windows world. However even there NVidia has made major inroads with PhysX and CUDA.
I recently dropped my perfectly fine ATI 4850 and bought a inferior NVidia 9600 GT the reason the ATI Linux driver simply after 10 years still where shoddy no bsd drivers.
The lesser speed I could mostly compensate buy buying a card with more ram, and additionally I got CUDA support. While badaboom is not as fast as Turbo 264 HD on my mac it is a welcome addition.
Being able to encode h264 in dual speed is a really nice addition to the non working ATI me too solution ATI provides.
With HDMI the connection issue is a thing of the past, you nowadays can replace the CRT SDTV in your living room with an HDTV and then hook up a PC to a HDTV
Fixed that for you. The latest numbers state that two-thirds of TVs in U.S. living rooms don't have VGA or HDMI inputs because they were purchased before the late 2000s, when TVs with VGA or HDMI inputs became affordable.
Well those households are not really in for a modern console either, there is a load of games on new consoles which are almost unplayable on TVs because you cannot read the fonts.
But it is not as dominant on consoles either, it is mostly on sports titles and racers
Would you consider martial arts a sport? If so, what PC fighting game would you recommend for people who like the style of Super Smash Bros. series better than that of Street Fighter series?
This is not common on the consoles either, outside of Super Smash Brosh I am not really aware of a popular clones of that genre on consoles. Most fighters go the way of Street Fighter.
With HDMI the connection issue is a thing of the past, you nowadays can hook up a PC to a HDTV without quality loss and computer monitors also become bigger over time (26 inch is quite cheap nowadays)
But I agree one machine multiplayer is not previvalent like it is on the console, but it exists.
But it is not as dominant on consoles either, it is mostly on sports titles and racers, and if you can find those titles on the PC you have the one machine multiplayer mode as well. Most console shooters do not have split screen multiplayer either.
Nintendo ripps you off on the Wii with their accessories.
Period, if you buy all the stuff needed for gaming and for a small family you are way more expensive than a PS3, on the other hand the XBOX and PS3 rip you off with games, and DLC.
DLC on the wii fortunately is mostly a no go for now due to the limits of the console!
The issue is 2-3 years into a console generations lifespan this does not really work out anymore. Even new PCs which are stronger than the console generation can be bought for around 500$, people who just upgrade are even cheaper in the entry fees.
With a handful of games the PC becomes cheaper with the average price difference of 10-20 bucks and the fact PC games will hit the bargain bin rather early. The worst I have seen was Bioshock 10 Euro for the PC and 70 Euro for the PS3. For 50 Euro I can get a new graphics card which is stronger than what the PS3 has to offer!
As for DLC dont expect games companies to make the actual games cheaper. The said once piracy was eliminated games could become cheaper, guess what games are cheapest on the piracy loaded pc, thd consoles which are not broken yet are the ones with the most expensive games.
DLC will just be another lame excuse to charge full price and then charge extra!