Actually it depends... the main problem mario 64 had was simple, the crosshair which was the only trigger of the
analog movement, that was too problematic for my taste, newer 3d titles utilize the touchpad way better.
It is a matter of getting a hang of it, but I can understand that some people hat the pad in analog games.
The formfactor and the weight do not blend in too well with the pad controls, you get cramps very easily.
I recently found out that for action games the thumbpad works way better than the stylus due to cramp avoidance.
The pad however blends in perfectly for slower types of games like strategy games and adventure games, they are a match made in heaven. Wheather you like the analog controls in action games or not is a matter of taste, I like them, but I either use the straps, or I simple place the ds in a way that I do not have its weight in my hands.
The controls itself work very well after getting used to, even in fast paced action games. Basically every game which works well with a mouse also works well with a pad scheme.
The first titles using the touchpad were a hit and miss situations, the controls even nintendo with its mario 64 port sometimes were out of being playable to a good degree, the situation now is way better, most games are very playable and there are 3-4 standard schemes how the touchpad is utilized.
History seems to repeat itself with the wii. It will be interesting to see how the system will be used in the future.
If it really is similar to a mouse pointer, adventures and goot strategy titles can arise form it like they did with the ds...
Also the ds could function as a mouse for the screen in the long run.
Basic math... if you have n units of a console in fluctuation then you basically get an average of m percent into the resale channels.
Not lets assume that the percentage of the units being pushed into resale channels being dependend on the i want to keep it value...
Now we have about 3-4 times the delivered units of wii compared to ps3s, and only slightly 40% more absolute units on ebay. Starting from this assumption the relative percentage of resold wii is much less.
But lets assume the truth, a lot of ps3s simply were bought due to get rich quick reasons why a lot of wii were bought because people actually wanted to play the games.
I assume the wii is quite popular, contrary to the conclusions of the original poster. You can also see that at the number of games being sold additionally!
Actually the semi official numbers for the wii for now are worldwide around 600.000 shipped and all sold more or less....
Quite what you can expect for a major console launch.
I neither see any problem for the ps3 nor for the wii to sell the first million units, there are enough fanboys and in nintendos case they also got the parents buying a console for their kids for christmas, but 4 mio units can become a problem...
Besides that Sony has outpriced the PS3 simply in Europe with a targeted price of 700 euros (that is 1000 dollars) people simply wont buy it.
But who cares, they missed the christmas season over here already, so the spending budget is lost until december 2007.
(First PS3s in March, which is dead season, there the summer money goes towards vacation, so 1000 dollars spending budget again is there in december)
Good luck Sony over here in Europe, you will need it!
I could care less, if Nintendo can keep the prices they can come out in 1-2 years with a wii2...;-)
And yes I am one of the few with HD-TV but given the fact that you either get overscan or black borders in the standard resolutions of the thing, my mac mini now drives it in a non standard res of 1380x768 and the picture is better than anything I have yet to see in any store I visited.;-)
The Wii has been released yesterday, and already 620.000 units are sold worldwide...
No news on Slashdot?
Seems like Zonk has to get out of his PS3 bashing mode...
Well the perfect counterexample to this claim is europe mainly the chemist industry along the rhein valley, sure there has been a severe toxic accident a while ago, but mainly a huge progress has been made in this region regarding environmental standards.
And mainly due to enforcement by law, but it is possible. That companies tend to g where they easily can dump the toxic into the next lake and thus pollute the entire region is another issue, we face a situation here like in the mid 19th century.
Well the problem is less the sold PS2 numbers more, the numbers actually owned by the people, a lot of people already are at their second or third console due to the failurs the thing had.
I would wonder if more than 40 million PS2s are really owned by the people.
As for the camping, a lot of people camp there to sell of the consoles at ebay, and the camping would be unnecessary if sony would be able to produce a decend number of consoles.
Manufacturing issues, and in case of sony also a cost issue, the costs are so high that they cannot even push a high number of those machines into the markets in one region.
Besides that everything has to be manufactured in certain areas due to cost reasons as well (and environmental reasons, it is cheaper to simply dump the toxic waste into the next lake instead of adding a chemical fab to the original fab to remove the waste from the cycle before it hits nature)
Those places although quite big are limited.
The problem with the Commodore vs. Atari back then was different. The ataris were twice as fast and had a real operating system, but those were the only two real aspects they were better.
The 256 colors were a myth, because color shifting was limited to scanlines, and you could get only 4 colors per scanline with about 2 or four sprites I cannot remember exactly which only had one color.
When it came down to game graphics the C64 was way better than the ataris due to the fact of having 16 solid colors all over the screen and having more sprites.
Also the sound processor was way more advanced.
Back then I had an atari 400 and later 800 and I always was proud to be the underdog, but looking back it somewhat was idiotic.
Actually most css projects I worked on the motivation was get the job done as soon as possible because we sold the product and promised timelines on which we never consulted anyone internally...
Actually the average code quality in most CSS projects was way worse than in the OSS stuff I have seen and worked on!
Read the entire wikipedia entry...
a) The setting was from a game
b) the so called proofs have been debunked, one being a fairly old geiger counter, the other one a badly fotographed bent, chemical light unit like they sold it on the streets around the time titor appeared...
It still might work out, the plan is to enable all this features over time and make them as ubiquous as possible.
Given the comments I earned here on slashdot warning of all this DRM mumbo jumbo in blue ray (basically: nothing changes compared to dvd was the usual tone). I have huge doubts that this stuff is bound to fail. The DRM is enforced ubiquously and with every piece of drm some sugar comes with. (Enable signal encryption on the cable, get better resolutions etc...)
The reason alone that a standalone Blue Ray/HD DVD player can be disabled by a black key list on the disk is enough to stay away from that dreck.
As I said, the ignorance most people have towards all this basically pushes my hopes of those formats being bound to fail down to zero.
With Vista this is even worse, due to the fact, that the mechanisms done for the copy protection can be used for other things, root kits, or a copy protection bound to be enforced on software.
This only shows how bad the minister really is. It is beyound his mind that someone does something for free to make the world better.
Besides that there also is a viable business model behind giving code away for free and that is support for people willing to pay for on time support.
Yes Nintendo is one of the worst companies when it comes to vendor lock in, fortunately they usually are too small to roll really their own hardware, which usually opens their consoles after a while. The ds for instance just uses SD cards with a different proprietary form factor.
The Wii finally uses a normal DVD drive and SD slots.
But the history of Nintdos attempty to bypass existing standards is endlessly and also their list of having fallen flat on their face with it.
You will not be happy with the Wii Either mostly. On Nintendo Systems most exclusive games are mostly Nintendo only games, but those are really exclusive, Nintendo while mostly having amazing gameplay and innovative ideas usually weaves its games around the marion, metroid and zelda franchises, except metroid most themes are cutified stuff. If you cannot stand that you maybe are better off with another system.
Well there are some interesting nintendo only lineups on the DS like trauma center, phoenix wright, but those really are the minority over the multi platform games.
I assume the Wii will be the same situation, many games probably will use the motion sensing in the wii mote, but many of those games will be multi platform and only nintendo games, a handful of ubisoft and capcom games will be exclusives.
Actually I am not a PS3 fan, it simply is too expensive, but you mentioned better pyhsics, that is one area where the ps3 definitely will shine, the vector units in the cell processor have two areas where they probably can shine, physics calculations and 2d/3d caluculations, all of them can be made highly parallel.
The hardware of the PS3 is really interesting, but for a console it is way too expensive. I just wonder how the general purpose computing thing, Sony has planned for the box works out. It could be that the box will replace my PC in the long run (but the most early date is likely in about two years), it really depends on how far Linux can push the hardware on this thing.
Lets bring it to the point the first million units will sell regardless of price.
But after that, if sony cannot bring down the pricepoint significantly they will be in deep trouble.
No hardware sales = third party publishers will jump the ship over time.
Sony could be in the same situation the cube has been for a while. Which means strong initial sales
due to the fans, but the average joe simply does not buy it, therefore not a good third party support.
At least the cube still had Nintendos strong lineup behind it, and one or two publishers who
hold Nintendos candle no matter what.
The term businessman is very general, what we talk here is small time crooks, probably lower end japanese mafia, who know that they can turn a 100% profit on the thing!
The give nintendo Europe this doubt as well, they let slip a lot of their major titles coming out in the other regions slip past chrismas as well, for whatever reason!
That Sony did not invent the walkman, it was a german guy and basically had trials for decade over the entire thing. He almost went bankrupt because Sony refused to pay, only after the old management left a settlement was achieved after decades of court trials and only a relatively small amount was paid.
I am not sure if the german guy really has recovered from the costs of the trials.
The first one million consoles will be an easy sell for sony all over the world, this is basically the hardcore fans who buy everything, but after that, it will be interesting how the console will sell.
You can see that with every major console, that the initial sales are high, there always is enough fanboys who dont matter how much it is for the console, they just want to have it.
The main difference between the DVD and the newer systems is, that both the blue ray and the hd-dvd units can be bricked at will by the content providers, by a blacklist of keys
which can be distributed with every new movie.
Have much fun having a 600 dollars player and then having it bricked by the latest movie you just bought!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it depends... the main problem mario 64 had was simple, the crosshair which was the only trigger of the analog movement, that was too problematic for my taste, newer 3d titles utilize the touchpad way better. It is a matter of getting a hang of it, but I can understand that some people hat the pad in analog games. The formfactor and the weight do not blend in too well with the pad controls, you get cramps very easily. I recently found out that for action games the thumbpad works way better than the stylus due to cramp avoidance. The pad however blends in perfectly for slower types of games like strategy games and adventure games, they are a match made in heaven. Wheather you like the analog controls in action games or not is a matter of taste, I like them, but I either use the straps, or I simple place the ds in a way that I do not have its weight in my hands. The controls itself work very well after getting used to, even in fast paced action games. Basically every game which works well with a mouse also works well with a pad scheme.
The first titles using the touchpad were a hit and miss situations, the controls even nintendo with its mario 64 port sometimes were out of being playable to a good degree, the situation now is way better, most games are very playable and there are 3-4 standard schemes how the touchpad is utilized. History seems to repeat itself with the wii. It will be interesting to see how the system will be used in the future. If it really is similar to a mouse pointer, adventures and goot strategy titles can arise form it like they did with the ds... Also the ds could function as a mouse for the screen in the long run.
Basic math... if you have n units of a console in fluctuation then you basically get an average of m percent into the resale channels. Not lets assume that the percentage of the units being pushed into resale channels being dependend on the i want to keep it value... Now we have about 3-4 times the delivered units of wii compared to ps3s, and only slightly 40% more absolute units on ebay. Starting from this assumption the relative percentage of resold wii is much less. But lets assume the truth, a lot of ps3s simply were bought due to get rich quick reasons why a lot of wii were bought because people actually wanted to play the games. I assume the wii is quite popular, contrary to the conclusions of the original poster. You can also see that at the number of games being sold additionally!
Actually the semi official numbers for the wii for now are worldwide around 600.000 shipped and all sold more or less.... Quite what you can expect for a major console launch. I neither see any problem for the ps3 nor for the wii to sell the first million units, there are enough fanboys and in nintendos case they also got the parents buying a console for their kids for christmas, but 4 mio units can become a problem...
Besides that Sony has outpriced the PS3 simply in Europe with a targeted price of 700 euros (that is 1000 dollars) people simply wont buy it. But who cares, they missed the christmas season over here already, so the spending budget is lost until december 2007. (First PS3s in March, which is dead season, there the summer money goes towards vacation, so 1000 dollars spending budget again is there in december) Good luck Sony over here in Europe, you will need it!
I could care less, if Nintendo can keep the prices they can come out in 1-2 years with a wii2... ;-)
And yes I am one of the few with HD-TV but given the fact that you either get overscan or black borders in the standard resolutions of the thing, my mac mini now drives it in a non standard res of 1380x768 and the picture is better than anything I have yet to see in any store I visited. ;-)
The Wii has been released yesterday, and already 620.000 units are sold worldwide... No news on Slashdot? Seems like Zonk has to get out of his PS3 bashing mode...
Well the perfect counterexample to this claim is europe mainly the chemist industry along the rhein valley, sure there has been a severe toxic accident a while ago, but mainly a huge progress has been made in this region regarding environmental standards. And mainly due to enforcement by law, but it is possible. That companies tend to g where they easily can dump the toxic into the next lake and thus pollute the entire region is another issue, we face a situation here like in the mid 19th century.
Well the problem is less the sold PS2 numbers more, the numbers actually owned by the people, a lot of people already are at their second or third console due to the failurs the thing had. I would wonder if more than 40 million PS2s are really owned by the people. As for the camping, a lot of people camp there to sell of the consoles at ebay, and the camping would be unnecessary if sony would be able to produce a decend number of consoles.
Manufacturing issues, and in case of sony also a cost issue, the costs are so high that they cannot even push a high number of those machines into the markets in one region. Besides that everything has to be manufactured in certain areas due to cost reasons as well (and environmental reasons, it is cheaper to simply dump the toxic waste into the next lake instead of adding a chemical fab to the original fab to remove the waste from the cycle before it hits nature) Those places although quite big are limited.
The problem with the Commodore vs. Atari back then was different. The ataris were twice as fast and had a real operating system, but those were the only two real aspects they were better. The 256 colors were a myth, because color shifting was limited to scanlines, and you could get only 4 colors per scanline with about 2 or four sprites I cannot remember exactly which only had one color. When it came down to game graphics the C64 was way better than the ataris due to the fact of having 16 solid colors all over the screen and having more sprites. Also the sound processor was way more advanced. Back then I had an atari 400 and later 800 and I always was proud to be the underdog, but looking back it somewhat was idiotic.
Actually most css projects I worked on the motivation was get the job done as soon as possible because we sold the product and promised timelines on which we never consulted anyone internally... Actually the average code quality in most CSS projects was way worse than in the OSS stuff I have seen and worked on!
Read the entire wikipedia entry... a) The setting was from a game b) the so called proofs have been debunked, one being a fairly old geiger counter, the other one a badly fotographed bent, chemical light unit like they sold it on the streets around the time titor appeared...
It still might work out, the plan is to enable all this features over time and make them as ubiquous as possible. Given the comments I earned here on slashdot warning of all this DRM mumbo jumbo in blue ray (basically: nothing changes compared to dvd was the usual tone). I have huge doubts that this stuff is bound to fail. The DRM is enforced ubiquously and with every piece of drm some sugar comes with. (Enable signal encryption on the cable, get better resolutions etc...)
The reason alone that a standalone Blue Ray/HD DVD player can be disabled by a black key list on the disk is enough to stay away from that dreck.
As I said, the ignorance most people have towards all this basically pushes my hopes of those formats being bound to fail down to zero. With Vista this is even worse, due to the fact, that the mechanisms done for the copy protection can be used for other things, root kits, or a copy protection bound to be enforced on software.
This only shows how bad the minister really is. It is beyound his mind that someone does something for free to make the world better. Besides that there also is a viable business model behind giving code away for free and that is support for people willing to pay for on time support.
Yes Nintendo is one of the worst companies when it comes to vendor lock in, fortunately they usually are too small to roll really their own hardware, which usually opens their consoles after a while. The ds for instance just uses SD cards with a different proprietary form factor. The Wii finally uses a normal DVD drive and SD slots. But the history of Nintdos attempty to bypass existing standards is endlessly and also their list of having fallen flat on their face with it.
You will not be happy with the Wii Either mostly. On Nintendo Systems most exclusive games are mostly Nintendo only games, but those are really exclusive, Nintendo while mostly having amazing gameplay and innovative ideas usually weaves its games around the marion, metroid and zelda franchises, except metroid most themes are cutified stuff. If you cannot stand that you maybe are better off with another system. Well there are some interesting nintendo only lineups on the DS like trauma center, phoenix wright, but those really are the minority over the multi platform games. I assume the Wii will be the same situation, many games probably will use the motion sensing in the wii mote, but many of those games will be multi platform and only nintendo games, a handful of ubisoft and capcom games will be exclusives.
Actually I am not a PS3 fan, it simply is too expensive, but you mentioned better pyhsics, that is one area where the ps3 definitely will shine, the vector units in the cell processor have two areas where they probably can shine, physics calculations and 2d/3d caluculations, all of them can be made highly parallel. The hardware of the PS3 is really interesting, but for a console it is way too expensive. I just wonder how the general purpose computing thing, Sony has planned for the box works out. It could be that the box will replace my PC in the long run (but the most early date is likely in about two years), it really depends on how far Linux can push the hardware on this thing.
Lets bring it to the point the first million units will sell regardless of price. But after that, if sony cannot bring down the pricepoint significantly they will be in deep trouble. No hardware sales = third party publishers will jump the ship over time. Sony could be in the same situation the cube has been for a while. Which means strong initial sales due to the fans, but the average joe simply does not buy it, therefore not a good third party support. At least the cube still had Nintendos strong lineup behind it, and one or two publishers who hold Nintendos candle no matter what.
The term businessman is very general, what we talk here is small time crooks, probably lower end japanese mafia, who know that they can turn a 100% profit on the thing!
The give nintendo Europe this doubt as well, they let slip a lot of their major titles coming out in the other regions slip past chrismas as well, for whatever reason!
That Sony did not invent the walkman, it was a german guy and basically had trials for decade over the entire thing. He almost went bankrupt because Sony refused to pay, only after the old management left a settlement was achieved after decades of court trials and only a relatively small amount was paid. I am not sure if the german guy really has recovered from the costs of the trials.
The first one million consoles will be an easy sell for sony all over the world, this is basically the hardcore fans who buy everything, but after that, it will be interesting how the console will sell. You can see that with every major console, that the initial sales are high, there always is enough fanboys who dont matter how much it is for the console, they just want to have it.
Genetically enhanced food at its best...
The main difference between the DVD and the newer systems is, that both the blue ray and the hd-dvd units can be bricked at will by the content providers, by a blacklist of keys which can be distributed with every new movie. Have much fun having a 600 dollars player and then having it bricked by the latest movie you just bought!