One issue is that the mac vm gives 86 MB heap size default. Java allocates only the heap it is assigned too but also uses it as much as possible so that no mem is wasted, sort of like the app behavior on macos9.
often if you have startup time problems a conservative mem setting (standard windows java assigns 32MB to my knowlege) is at fault letting the gc having kick in constantly during startup.
A different windows startup param can help here, try following java -Xmxm -jar
and see if it works.
For instance java -Xmx64m -jar netbeans.jar would start a netbeans jar with a 64MB mem boundary.
the reason for this behavior is, that it makes a lot of sense in a server context and also some sense in a client context. First the mem usage can be better, no wasted ram, secondly a haiwire going process cannot gobble up the machines ram, like it happens on Windows too often. But this feature is not advertised enough, so many people either run java with too much ram (due to extensive predefines of ides or servers) or too few ram, due to relatively low predefines of the standard vm and jdk in a default install.
And believe me, the correct mem settings can make a huge difference, also in startup times.
Another issue might be virus scanners going haiwire on the loaded jars, which are in itself nothing more than zip files.
Dont get me wrong, java has a longer startup time, and I see it as the biggest problem points, ram is not the issue anymore, speed is more than ok nowadays, sun has done a great job there and the machines have gotten faster, but for pure client apps the startup time is critical. The good thing is that java programs tend to be rock stable, and can be up for months if done well (eclipse is more the exception than the rule, by having to be restarted once a day, partially to be blamed by swt), so things might help if you adjust your usage of the programs by leaving them open. But for client side apps, I still think this is not a fully acceptable situation. For server side apps it is ok, once it is started you leave the server running, a predictable mem usage behavior and being rock solid is more important in this area.
I wonder what the issue with the shared vm is, it used to come out with JDK6 and it has been postponed again, a shared vm would resolve all of these instances sort of by preloading the vm.
ahem.. you obviously have not done java extensively, for client side apps you are set with a vm, thats it, everything else has to be bundled in the jar.
For server side apps, a jee container does it in conjunction with a vm, everything else should be bundled in the ear or war file...
seems hard?
Programming java is a different issue, if the vm and jee server do not fullfill you needs you have to go jar shopping, which is not too bad, good ides bundle most of the stuff you need and basically a webapp is a push of a button.
The main problem with most if not all pdas is, they are stylus centric, which works with certain types of games, that is one of the reasons why pdas had mediocre success as gaming consoles.
There was a time where companies namely EA tried to establish a stardom over the game designers, this period went from 1982-around 1993 or so, since then no new designer names have been pushed although lots of talented designers still live there.
But game creation is a team effort, so is game design. The list of game designers still comes from the game design stardom era, although excellent new designers and their teams have pushed excellent new games, they simply have not been brought to fame anymore.
(questionable fame anyway, since most buyers dont even know who a Dani Bunten was or a Sid Meyer is)
Well there are two things, the ds is not the fastest machine there is, it is two arm processors relatively low clocked, but its overall design is excellent, the graphics chip in there kicks ass, due to the fact that it is very easy to program and very fast. So I see that some of the emulation scene will take the route of using both processors and pushing the graphics hardware extensively in the long run. All this is in its infancy, but the DS itself from the hardware side is a very interesting machine. I looked at the 3d register mappings and the 3d part is opengl straightly mapped into registers, and overall from the number of registers, this clean design seem to go through the entire machine.
I think in the end the DS will become the c64 of the homebrew scene it definitely has the potential of being hacked apart in numerous ways for the years to come. As for the PSP, it has the currently biggest momentum, but sonys strict politics regarding firmware updates and the closing of already opened consoles via new firmware seems to kill off the momentum slowly.
Yes it will have a brighter display and its case will look different, besides that, firmware rev side etc... no difference, the hacks to open it will still work. The article is right, Nintendo does not really enforce it but also is not as strict as sony, about opening the console.
And from a hardware standpoint this thing screams for being opened, you have everything you need for an excellent overall machine, two slots (both being very close to current memory cards so adapters exist) integrated wlan, in built micro, stereo speakers which are amazing for its size, a very good touch pad and two screens, which could be better but are good enough, for gaming.
something you cannot get fur allergys off, something you can call your pussy, and something which scratches you from time to time, get yourself a woman and save the 4000 dollars upfront (although women are more expensive in feeding, and fur cleaning costs in the long run)
Since IBM is more a service and contract company, I cannot see how the sales numbers are really that important, the big bugs for IBM are service contracts and consulting, as well as project contracts. Most of its "end" user sales stem from servers and its processor division.
But that is a mere shadow of its support and consulting money
Is a company which once was an icon of high tech has settled into printers and its overprized in and computers the dell way...
I would not say this is a big blue, this seems more like a thin ground to me.
The main problem is that all the coporate business would not even exist without consumers paying for it at the other end of the pyramid.
Sure there is more money to be made in a strike with corporate business, but the whole thing is more like a pyramid, if you constantly insult consumers like that the whole pyramid will crumble and all the corporate business will come to a standstill as well.
Even worse given all I can see what is going on in the world I am saying the entire system as we know it will come to an end within the next 15-20 years.
Currently western corporations rely on business in asia due to market saturation in the west, or on production in the east for selling expensive in the west.
Well face it, if this goes on like that, the east will surpass the west soon and the patent system we dug ourselfs will fall onto our heads, worse even worse asian companies will take the end consumer market where it starts entirely from the west and at the end all we have is thin air and then say goodbye to corporate business as well.
So given the current trent, it is either, goodbye west to our own business or goodbye west because we triggered a major economic crisis, either way, the pyramid as we know it will crumble and with that the so called corporate business, which is just the top of the pyramid within its foundation lies the consumer business.
Motorola has not been in the game for a long time, in fact Apple brought Motorola into the PPC game, and then Motorola has spun off their PPC division (now a different company name), leaving apple with IBM in the end.
The former Motorola PPC division now basically does G4s for the embedded market and do not have any interest into anything remotely desktop wise.
Their reasoning is, that those markets have higher margins and are less interested into a speed gaim but more interested into stability and power consumption, it seems to pay off, but not for Apple, now having no Motorola or whatever having any interest remotely in the pc market, and having an IBM which would have a G6 (Power5) but who are not interested to push that one into the desktop due to high server margins left them standing in the dust.
The point will happen once someone brings out a processor which can emulate the x86 faster than a native x86 can run the code.
(Well native is not the right word, even the x86 processors do not run the code natively anymore, but their main exposed instruction set still is x86)
Until now this has not happened. Even the Power5 (not the G5 the real Power5) pretty much the fastest mass processor you can get cannot do it, although in raw computing it beats everything by miles the x86 world has to offer.
If that point happens, and the company bringing out this processor is not Sony, IBM or another company with a global size, see it getting sucked up by Intel in no time and having their processor design rebranded as next big Intel x86.
x86 will survive in the long run, but it is very likely that the entire instruction set will survive sort of as a lowest common denominator software vm in the long run.
Processor strategies straight out of the applied idiocy.
Intel has excellent processor designers, but up until recently their roadmap sucked.
They overlooked the point where pushing the GHz boundary did not make sense anymore.
AMD basically gave them the first kick in their butt by extending the x86 architecture top 64 bit.
The second kick was when AMD dropped out of the real GHz game, by limiting their clock speed but still bringing out faster processors.
Intel could have coped with both. First dont play the deny everything game in case of AMD64 and then bring out the same under your own name because we fucked up big time.
Second, their israeli design team gave them the biggest kick ass processor of its generation, the pentium-m, yet intel needed another 2 years to recognize what gem they had at their hands, low power consumtion, beating their fastest ghz monsters left and right and only due to excellent design. They pushed those processors into the notebooks while they could have been AMD killers on the desktop and servers left and right.
It took them another two years to recognize that while everyone was telling them openly, to give up the P4 line and go for the -M line in the desktop as well.
Well their roadmap now shows sanity with going for extended -M processors with multiple cores, but since around 2000 until recently Intels road maps and plans were as idiotic as Sonys handling of the PS3 currently is. It is a wonder that Intel did not get kicked more than it already has.
The problem with both the N64 and the Cube simply was that the consoles provided significantly less than the others.
The playstation had CDs which was a perfect timing for the multimedia hype the PS2 had dvds and was in a moderate price range.
Both consoles were easly cracked, while Nintendo relied on their own custom modules and disk formats and made breaking the console hard.
In the end piracy made the playstation1 and 2 win over the others. (one fact Sony seems to be totally angostic of)
Nowdays Sony tries to push the same game again with Blue ray, but the situation is different, no matter how much the media pushes it, there is no HDTV craze neither is a next gen DVD replacement craze due to the fact that people are not eager to move on (too little additional value, you need a new TV as well, two different formats, less money)
So given the new facts Nintendo with their next gen console, dvd able will have a good start.
I think the biggest mistake Nintendo had with the cube was simply that they tried to push it over the price alone, it was no additional value compared to the others, even less value due to the lacking dvd, and the others were not that much more expensive.
Actually the battle of Canae was a turning point in war history. The main problem was, rome was already strong, they had a stronghold over entire italy and small parts of greece already, but they relied like most ancient armies on sheer man force, their people were even in Canae well trained, but advanced strategy was not applied. Hannibal was the first to apply advanced strategy and tactics to the battles.
(Even Alexander has not applied it to that extent)
One lesson the romans ultimately learned from Hannibal, especially Scipio was advanced tactics and strategy.
Actually Nintendo like most others do not do their own hardware design, they push contracts into third companies and have a division supervising their ideas. It would have been simple to get a better processor in, to get a faster graphics hardware in.
But at what cost. You would have to add fans, which are distracting, you probably would lose backward compatibility like the PS3 and the XBox360 would, and the pricepoint would be way higher.
Nintendo would have ended up at the same pricepoint as the 360 and still would have to sell the console at a loss. Now they have their own niche and will earn from both the console sales and the game sales.
They are in a pretty good position.
Ok letzs look at the crap design, the crap design allowed nintendo to be almost half as expensive as the PSP, it allowed nintendo to be able to bring out a handheld which allowed 8 hours of straight gaming without being plugged into an electrical outlet.
If you look at the games lineup, the PSP had a clear advantage with most except than Nintendos own titles coming out for the PSP, but the thing did not sell. Reason, the advanced design caused the battery to drain, the advanced design pushed the thing into a pricepoint which did not work out. Most people, me included simply had the console in their hands and then did not buy it due to various reasons one being the huge price compared to the DS.
Sorry to say it sony blew it there. Same goes for their disk format, with movies sold for 25$ with drm enforced while you could get the same for 10$ with non enforced drm (broken drm) it is a no brainer which format to buy, and believe me it was not UMD.
Sony would have had the chance if they had sold the umd movies at the next supermarket for 2-3$ then the price of the PSP probably would not have mattered. But as is, Nintendo is currently being king of the occiasional buyers market due to their low entry prices of their consoles (the games are a different matter they are as expensive as the rest). But if you need a console for the kids or if you are tight on budget Nintendo is a no brainer while Sony more and more becomes a no buy.
Actually Nintendo is worse, I am playing the current DS lineup now, while all the games are fun, some of the Nintendo titles feel totally rehashed.
Lets face it, an rpg, while having excellent gameplay and humor, still feels rehashed if princess peach is capured the 100th time and mario and luigi set out to recapture her.
Same goes for mario cart in its 5th incarnation and the mario ds was a straight port from the N64.
It is not like the 5th rehash of the games and concepts but more like the 20th with its first incarnation being Donkey Kong.
Same goes for Castlevania which is in its 30th incarnation or so, with slight modifications from one title or the other.
While those games are fun, being used to PC gaming I constantly get the feeling that console gamers are happy to settle for less for more money.
FF7 is no comparison gamewise to the Ultima series or Gothic it simply is subpar, same goes for most other console games, but in the end they are also fun, that is what counts.
There are several factory which made the ds an instant success.
First the price, face it Sony overpriced the PSP, not in the us, but in many other areas the PSP simply was almost double as expensive as the DS. Add to that that the DS had a huge backlibrary of games ready to play and people could move on from their GBAs.
Third sony forgot about one aspect, a handheld console is played often not connected to the next electrical outlet, while nintendos console almost can be played for a full day, the PSP even for non technical users is known to be a power drainer once in "offline" mode.
The funny thing is the games lineup for new titels is not really that important because both consoles have a strong lineup. But having a 200-250$ pricetag on the PSP and a 100-150$ pricetag on the DS simply made the difference, between a buy for the kids or just because you had the money left and looking at the console in the electronics store, almost buying it but then putting it back because of the price.
Japan is not the world, it not even is the second or third biggest market anymore, it has just a lot of developers due to having been traditionally a huge market.
The EU is the biggest, US the second biggest, and probably China and or Russia the third biggest.
But for Europe, believe me, the PS3 at the planned price point will be a non seller, people are way more price sensitive over here than they are in the USA, after all we cannot spend as much on electronics junk as the average US citizen. I talked to a lot of people over here, and most of them plan to go for the Wii instead some for the xbox 360.
Gothic... you are kicked into a slave prison and get your pants kicked within the first five minutes by the inmante committee.
Gothic2... free from prison the orc army lingers for an invasion
Ultima 4... become some kind of messiah
Ultima 5... robin hood retold
Ultima 6... false prophet, enough said
Ultima 7... The guardian an uber evil tries to enslave your world
Ultima 8... you are thrown by the guardian onto an enslaved world and by escaping you kill anyone off by freeing their old gods
Ultima 9.... garbage
Fallout 1... the water supply in your vault is damaged you have to find replacemend and you stumble into a post nuclear weird world
Fallout 2... find the garden of eden construction kit
No princess stories there, it all matters what you play
Actually the situation is similar here in europe with the PSP almost twice as expensive. Face it I had a look at the psp, and saw excellent graphics, I wanted to buy one, looked at the price, went away.
I saw the DS, not as good in graphics but excellent innovative controls, finally a touch screen which would allow decent adventures and strategy gaming, the price also was okish with 100 dollars less than the PSP and a game included.
I have not regretted the decision yet I simply love the tiny console.
Slashdot Mirror
One issue is that the mac vm gives 86 MB heap size default. Java allocates only the heap it is assigned too but also uses it as much as possible so that no mem is wasted, sort of like the app behavior on macos9. often if you have startup time problems a conservative mem setting (standard windows java assigns 32MB to my knowlege) is at fault letting the gc having kick in constantly during startup. A different windows startup param can help here, try following java -Xmxm -jar and see if it works. For instance java -Xmx64m -jar netbeans.jar would start a netbeans jar with a 64MB mem boundary.
the reason for this behavior is, that it makes a lot of sense in a server context and also some sense in a client context. First the mem usage can be better, no wasted ram, secondly a haiwire going process cannot gobble up the machines ram, like it happens on Windows too often. But this feature is not advertised enough, so many people either run java with too much ram (due to extensive predefines of ides or servers) or too few ram, due to relatively low predefines of the standard vm and jdk in a default install. And believe me, the correct mem settings can make a huge difference, also in startup times.
Another issue might be virus scanners going haiwire on the loaded jars, which are in itself nothing more than zip files.
Dont get me wrong, java has a longer startup time, and I see it as the biggest problem points, ram is not the issue anymore, speed is more than ok nowadays, sun has done a great job there and the machines have gotten faster, but for pure client apps the startup time is critical. The good thing is that java programs tend to be rock stable, and can be up for months if done well (eclipse is more the exception than the rule, by having to be restarted once a day, partially to be blamed by swt), so things might help if you adjust your usage of the programs by leaving them open. But for client side apps, I still think this is not a fully acceptable situation. For server side apps it is ok, once it is started you leave the server running, a predictable mem usage behavior and being rock solid is more important in this area.
I wonder what the issue with the shared vm is, it used to come out with JDK6 and it has been postponed again, a shared vm would resolve all of these instances sort of by preloading the vm.
ahem.. you obviously have not done java extensively, for client side apps you are set with a vm, thats it, everything else has to be bundled in the jar. For server side apps, a jee container does it in conjunction with a vm, everything else should be bundled in the ear or war file... seems hard? Programming java is a different issue, if the vm and jee server do not fullfill you needs you have to go jar shopping, which is not too bad, good ides bundle most of the stuff you need and basically a webapp is a push of a button.
The main problem with most if not all pdas is, they are stylus centric, which works with certain types of games, that is one of the reasons why pdas had mediocre success as gaming consoles.
There was a time where companies namely EA tried to establish a stardom over the game designers, this period went from 1982-around 1993 or so, since then no new designer names have been pushed although lots of talented designers still live there. But game creation is a team effort, so is game design. The list of game designers still comes from the game design stardom era, although excellent new designers and their teams have pushed excellent new games, they simply have not been brought to fame anymore. (questionable fame anyway, since most buyers dont even know who a Dani Bunten was or a Sid Meyer is)
Well there are two things, the ds is not the fastest machine there is, it is two arm processors relatively low clocked, but its overall design is excellent, the graphics chip in there kicks ass, due to the fact that it is very easy to program and very fast. So I see that some of the emulation scene will take the route of using both processors and pushing the graphics hardware extensively in the long run. All this is in its infancy, but the DS itself from the hardware side is a very interesting machine. I looked at the 3d register mappings and the 3d part is opengl straightly mapped into registers, and overall from the number of registers, this clean design seem to go through the entire machine. I think in the end the DS will become the c64 of the homebrew scene it definitely has the potential of being hacked apart in numerous ways for the years to come. As for the PSP, it has the currently biggest momentum, but sonys strict politics regarding firmware updates and the closing of already opened consoles via new firmware seems to kill off the momentum slowly.
Yes it will have a brighter display and its case will look different, besides that, firmware rev side etc... no difference, the hacks to open it will still work. The article is right, Nintendo does not really enforce it but also is not as strict as sony, about opening the console. And from a hardware standpoint this thing screams for being opened, you have everything you need for an excellent overall machine, two slots (both being very close to current memory cards so adapters exist) integrated wlan, in built micro, stereo speakers which are amazing for its size, a very good touch pad and two screens, which could be better but are good enough, for gaming.
something you cannot get fur allergys off, something you can call your pussy, and something which scratches you from time to time, get yourself a woman and save the 4000 dollars upfront (although women are more expensive in feeding, and fur cleaning costs in the long run)
Monsanto: delivering quality products since agent orange....
Since IBM is more a service and contract company, I cannot see how the sales numbers are really that important, the big bugs for IBM are service contracts and consulting, as well as project contracts. Most of its "end" user sales stem from servers and its processor division. But that is a mere shadow of its support and consulting money
Is a company which once was an icon of high tech has settled into printers and its overprized in and computers the dell way... I would not say this is a big blue, this seems more like a thin ground to me.
The main problem is that all the coporate business would not even exist without consumers paying for it at the other end of the pyramid. Sure there is more money to be made in a strike with corporate business, but the whole thing is more like a pyramid, if you constantly insult consumers like that the whole pyramid will crumble and all the corporate business will come to a standstill as well. Even worse given all I can see what is going on in the world I am saying the entire system as we know it will come to an end within the next 15-20 years. Currently western corporations rely on business in asia due to market saturation in the west, or on production in the east for selling expensive in the west. Well face it, if this goes on like that, the east will surpass the west soon and the patent system we dug ourselfs will fall onto our heads, worse even worse asian companies will take the end consumer market where it starts entirely from the west and at the end all we have is thin air and then say goodbye to corporate business as well. So given the current trent, it is either, goodbye west to our own business or goodbye west because we triggered a major economic crisis, either way, the pyramid as we know it will crumble and with that the so called corporate business, which is just the top of the pyramid within its foundation lies the consumer business.
Hasnt apple been going bankrupt since 1986... (and being proud of it)
Motorola has not been in the game for a long time, in fact Apple brought Motorola into the PPC game, and then Motorola has spun off their PPC division (now a different company name), leaving apple with IBM in the end. The former Motorola PPC division now basically does G4s for the embedded market and do not have any interest into anything remotely desktop wise. Their reasoning is, that those markets have higher margins and are less interested into a speed gaim but more interested into stability and power consumption, it seems to pay off, but not for Apple, now having no Motorola or whatever having any interest remotely in the pc market, and having an IBM which would have a G6 (Power5) but who are not interested to push that one into the desktop due to high server margins left them standing in the dust.
The point will happen once someone brings out a processor which can emulate the x86 faster than a native x86 can run the code. (Well native is not the right word, even the x86 processors do not run the code natively anymore, but their main exposed instruction set still is x86) Until now this has not happened. Even the Power5 (not the G5 the real Power5) pretty much the fastest mass processor you can get cannot do it, although in raw computing it beats everything by miles the x86 world has to offer. If that point happens, and the company bringing out this processor is not Sony, IBM or another company with a global size, see it getting sucked up by Intel in no time and having their processor design rebranded as next big Intel x86. x86 will survive in the long run, but it is very likely that the entire instruction set will survive sort of as a lowest common denominator software vm in the long run.
Processor strategies straight out of the applied idiocy. Intel has excellent processor designers, but up until recently their roadmap sucked. They overlooked the point where pushing the GHz boundary did not make sense anymore. AMD basically gave them the first kick in their butt by extending the x86 architecture top 64 bit. The second kick was when AMD dropped out of the real GHz game, by limiting their clock speed but still bringing out faster processors. Intel could have coped with both. First dont play the deny everything game in case of AMD64 and then bring out the same under your own name because we fucked up big time. Second, their israeli design team gave them the biggest kick ass processor of its generation, the pentium-m, yet intel needed another 2 years to recognize what gem they had at their hands, low power consumtion, beating their fastest ghz monsters left and right and only due to excellent design. They pushed those processors into the notebooks while they could have been AMD killers on the desktop and servers left and right. It took them another two years to recognize that while everyone was telling them openly, to give up the P4 line and go for the -M line in the desktop as well. Well their roadmap now shows sanity with going for extended -M processors with multiple cores, but since around 2000 until recently Intels road maps and plans were as idiotic as Sonys handling of the PS3 currently is. It is a wonder that Intel did not get kicked more than it already has.
The problem with both the N64 and the Cube simply was that the consoles provided significantly less than the others. The playstation had CDs which was a perfect timing for the multimedia hype the PS2 had dvds and was in a moderate price range. Both consoles were easly cracked, while Nintendo relied on their own custom modules and disk formats and made breaking the console hard. In the end piracy made the playstation1 and 2 win over the others. (one fact Sony seems to be totally angostic of)
Nowdays Sony tries to push the same game again with Blue ray, but the situation is different, no matter how much the media pushes it, there is no HDTV craze neither is a next gen DVD replacement craze due to the fact that people are not eager to move on (too little additional value, you need a new TV as well, two different formats, less money) So given the new facts Nintendo with their next gen console, dvd able will have a good start. I think the biggest mistake Nintendo had with the cube was simply that they tried to push it over the price alone, it was no additional value compared to the others, even less value due to the lacking dvd, and the others were not that much more expensive.
Actually the battle of Canae was a turning point in war history. The main problem was, rome was already strong, they had a stronghold over entire italy and small parts of greece already, but they relied like most ancient armies on sheer man force, their people were even in Canae well trained, but advanced strategy was not applied. Hannibal was the first to apply advanced strategy and tactics to the battles. (Even Alexander has not applied it to that extent) One lesson the romans ultimately learned from Hannibal, especially Scipio was advanced tactics and strategy.
Actually Nintendo like most others do not do their own hardware design, they push contracts into third companies and have a division supervising their ideas. It would have been simple to get a better processor in, to get a faster graphics hardware in. But at what cost. You would have to add fans, which are distracting, you probably would lose backward compatibility like the PS3 and the XBox360 would, and the pricepoint would be way higher. Nintendo would have ended up at the same pricepoint as the 360 and still would have to sell the console at a loss. Now they have their own niche and will earn from both the console sales and the game sales. They are in a pretty good position.
Ok letzs look at the crap design, the crap design allowed nintendo to be almost half as expensive as the PSP, it allowed nintendo to be able to bring out a handheld which allowed 8 hours of straight gaming without being plugged into an electrical outlet. If you look at the games lineup, the PSP had a clear advantage with most except than Nintendos own titles coming out for the PSP, but the thing did not sell. Reason, the advanced design caused the battery to drain, the advanced design pushed the thing into a pricepoint which did not work out. Most people, me included simply had the console in their hands and then did not buy it due to various reasons one being the huge price compared to the DS. Sorry to say it sony blew it there. Same goes for their disk format, with movies sold for 25$ with drm enforced while you could get the same for 10$ with non enforced drm (broken drm) it is a no brainer which format to buy, and believe me it was not UMD. Sony would have had the chance if they had sold the umd movies at the next supermarket for 2-3$ then the price of the PSP probably would not have mattered. But as is, Nintendo is currently being king of the occiasional buyers market due to their low entry prices of their consoles (the games are a different matter they are as expensive as the rest). But if you need a console for the kids or if you are tight on budget Nintendo is a no brainer while Sony more and more becomes a no buy.
Actually Nintendo is worse, I am playing the current DS lineup now, while all the games are fun, some of the Nintendo titles feel totally rehashed. Lets face it, an rpg, while having excellent gameplay and humor, still feels rehashed if princess peach is capured the 100th time and mario and luigi set out to recapture her. Same goes for mario cart in its 5th incarnation and the mario ds was a straight port from the N64. It is not like the 5th rehash of the games and concepts but more like the 20th with its first incarnation being Donkey Kong. Same goes for Castlevania which is in its 30th incarnation or so, with slight modifications from one title or the other. While those games are fun, being used to PC gaming I constantly get the feeling that console gamers are happy to settle for less for more money. FF7 is no comparison gamewise to the Ultima series or Gothic it simply is subpar, same goes for most other console games, but in the end they are also fun, that is what counts.
There are several factory which made the ds an instant success. First the price, face it Sony overpriced the PSP, not in the us, but in many other areas the PSP simply was almost double as expensive as the DS. Add to that that the DS had a huge backlibrary of games ready to play and people could move on from their GBAs.
Third sony forgot about one aspect, a handheld console is played often not connected to the next electrical outlet, while nintendos console almost can be played for a full day, the PSP even for non technical users is known to be a power drainer once in "offline" mode.
The funny thing is the games lineup for new titels is not really that important because both consoles have a strong lineup. But having a 200-250$ pricetag on the PSP and a 100-150$ pricetag on the DS simply made the difference, between a buy for the kids or just because you had the money left and looking at the console in the electronics store, almost buying it but then putting it back because of the price.
Japan is not the world, it not even is the second or third biggest market anymore, it has just a lot of developers due to having been traditionally a huge market. The EU is the biggest, US the second biggest, and probably China and or Russia the third biggest. But for Europe, believe me, the PS3 at the planned price point will be a non seller, people are way more price sensitive over here than they are in the USA, after all we cannot spend as much on electronics junk as the average US citizen. I talked to a lot of people over here, and most of them plan to go for the Wii instead some for the xbox 360.
Gothic... you are kicked into a slave prison and get your pants kicked within the first five minutes by the inmante committee.
Gothic2... free from prison the orc army lingers for an invasion
Ultima 4... become some kind of messiah
Ultima 5... robin hood retold
Ultima 6... false prophet, enough said
Ultima 7... The guardian an uber evil tries to enslave your world
Ultima 8... you are thrown by the guardian onto an enslaved world and by escaping you kill anyone off by freeing their old gods
Ultima 9.... garbage Fallout 1... the water supply in your vault is damaged you have to find replacemend and you stumble into a post nuclear weird world
Fallout 2... find the garden of eden construction kit
No princess stories there, it all matters what you play
Actually the situation is similar here in europe with the PSP almost twice as expensive. Face it I had a look at the psp, and saw excellent graphics, I wanted to buy one, looked at the price, went away. I saw the DS, not as good in graphics but excellent innovative controls, finally a touch screen which would allow decent adventures and strategy gaming, the price also was okish with 100 dollars less than the PSP and a game included. I have not regretted the decision yet I simply love the tiny console.
ahem over here in europe ist is completely different, the difference is somewhat 100 dollars...