Sony (more specifically, Ken Kutaragi, head of SCEI) has been talking about this. They think that some people might want an all-in-one settop box, while others just want games. So they talk about releasing strictly a console version at a cheaper price as well as releasing a settop box at a full price. It doesn't sound like a good plan to me, nobody would see value in the console if it were priced too closely with the settop, and at any rate it would potentially cause a split market. Bad.
You can imagine how many man hours it takes to keep an MMORPG going smoothly, and this might hurt the game's reputation so much for cheating that it may hurt future sales and subscriptions. Not to mention the cost of PR with angry customers, angry stockholders, and, oh yeah, fixing this shit while having customers flood your inbox with the same complaints over and over and investers wondering if their money is safe.
Enough - just because Sony happens to sell more than Sega in terms of consoles does not mean it is only because of it going totally for mainstream.
Sega did itself in with horrible marketing. Anybody remember that "surprise launch" of teh Saturn? People who were saving for a Saturn and were expecting to have the money by the official launch date were caught off guard by the console being launched the same day as the PSX, a few months beforehand. What the hell? How am I going to buy the Saturn now when it is $300 and I only saved $150?
Let us not forget the 32X and the SegaCD. How many Sega fans bought the equipment expecting a whole new world of gaming, only to be left in the dust?
Meanwhile, the other consoles had Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, EA Sports, Parappa, Gran Turismo, etc - in other words, the other consoles delivered bigger games, some being mostly derivative (ie Final Fantasy, EA Sports), but the others breaking ground whenever they were released. Meanwhile, Sega's line-up, while having a few gems here and there, couldn't compete, mainly because of Sega's earlier mistakes, not because Sega's titles were original and nobody plays original games. Who wants to develop for a console maker with such a shady record?
From personal experience, if you take a support job your love of computers might stay the same but your hatred of people will skyrocket. Especially at a university.
Nothing like walking 15 minutes to a student's dorm due to complaints of sound not working, only to find the speakers aren't on. Especially after asking the student countless times if they were on, getting 'Yes' each time.
Or helping a student get back on the network after they were cut off for running a DoS attack on one of the campus servers. Thanks, in part, to IIS being turned on by default...
It's true - you become a "computer janitor," and you eventually turn into "Nick Burns, the company's computer guy."
...doesn't mean you're gonna be a good programmer.
A friend of mine is in CS, because he loves computers and he loves programming. He isn't any good at it though, he's failed freshman intro classes, and not because he doesn't try. His eyes glaze over when he asks me for help and I start asking him why he's doing so-and-so when he could be doing this-and-that.
In short, people should do the things they love, but it doesn't mean quality when they do it.
The GameCube controller is actually very well suited for console FPSs. Just look at Metroid. Once you get used to using a controller in a FPS, Samus glides around at your whim.
I hope Doom III's AI is as good as the space pirates' - at least they knew how to sneak up on someone.
The thing works by you using some off-colored item plugged into the PS2.
You could create a little wand, for example, that you would wave in the air, and the software would use the camera to see if the wand was being waved in any specific gesture, to cast a certain spell for example.
One of the demos had a man using an orange-ish stick to draw a fairy toward it and towards "him," while a blue-ish stick made the fairy fly away from "him." ("him" in quotes because it would obviously only show up on television - and I am probably wrong about what color those sticks were, but you get the point).
This could actually make its way to some future game.
Dude, read the post. He doesn't think a 3D accelerated desktop is required to accelerate 2D graphics. And 15 windows on different levels is not a 3D desktop. I can cascade 15 IE Windows and the way the human brain interprets them they are on different levels, one on top of the other, yet they are still 2D.
The Playstation 2 has been able to do progressive scan for awhile now, but only for games. This update will allow DVD playback in progressive scan mode (this is assumed by how the story is wording it, as it mentions the upgrades are mostly for DVD playback - it never specifically says "for DVD playback" but hell Sony demoed progressive scan mode on a PS2 years ago). Sony didn't want the PS2 cutting into its high-end DVD players' sales at the beginning of the PS2's lifespan. Now that it is very cheap to produce, selling more PS2s could probably bring in more net profit.
For reference, I believe The Getaway, SOCOM: US Navy Seals, and Guitly Gear X2 are examples of games that do prog scan output. And only in 480p.
My guess is, since the hardware support is already built in, this is a dvd driver update and might become available to all of those who had already bought our PS2s. Of course, I could be wrong completely...
He mentions that free speech isn't global - it isn't. China, Cuba, a lot of countries do not allow free speech. Doesn't mean America believes it owns the patent on it.
Who even mentioned the US? You make it sound as if America believes it is the only country with free speech. In the words of Apu, "I don't even know which part of that sentence to correct first."
You give Linux waaaay too many brownie points:
1) How many newbie users do you think even know what disk partitioning is? How many newbie users have even INSTALLED Windows? They have never even seen the Windows installer, so slickness isn't even a point to them.
2) How much was installed that you WON'T use? Who the hell needs multiple browsers or packet sniffers? What the hell is a newbie user going to do with a packet sniffer, besides piss off the local admin? What the fuck is a newbie user going to do when she can't decide which "internet" she wants to use, in fear that one isn't as big as the other.
3) Last time I checked, whenever I ran a program's installer, it conveniently left shortcuts for me, and even asked if and where I wanted them. Have you seen a normal user's desktop? They are often littered with shortcuts to the user's programs.
Everybody OS programmer should become a "computer consultant" or IT for their college's dorm halls. It is probably the best study in HCI you'll ever get. I've been doing it for two semesters now and the best part is they pay me while I learn how stupid a desktop OS should assume its user is.
Even Win98 still had the DOS backbone on it - I'd say WinXP was the first "home use" Windows OS that was the first non-DOS-shell OS. Although I know a lot of people not into computers at all that use Win2k, so I guess a line can be drawn somewhere in the NT line.
I was referring to the AMD icon they had used for this news posting instead of the normal Apple icon everybody would have expected. Thus the reason you have so many posts about Apple going to AMD or Intel.
Didn't mean to imply that when a system went out of date, so did the games.
My SNES is still in working condition, albiet a tad yellow thanks to some weird effect of the plastic case aging. Super Metroid is in it right now. Punch Out is on my NES emulator a lot. Also procured a Genesis just for Gunstar Heroes. So yeah, old games aren't dead.
I just meant that these game systems go through a 5 year cycle before any pressure is put on the consumer to even consider upgrading.
...a cost analysis between buying a bleeding edge graphics card to last you 2-3 years versus upgrading cheaply to last generation's greatest for much less every year or so?
I've always wondered this, since those two patterns are the ones I've fallen in and out of for the past few years.
I still think this is why console gaming is more mainstream, either way. With a console, you might not get the best quality in graphics, but hell, you pay $200-300 and the machine lasts 5 years, and you get quite a nice selection of quality games (that's really a bias, I started out on the NES...).
I don't know, really. Pikmin is a more mixture of adventuring and real-time strategy (from what I have seen, anyways).
If we are going to generalize the puzzle genre that much, then I guess even Zelda is a puzzle game, since you do solve puzzles in dungeons, after all...
Three puzzle games for GameCube, Xbox, or PS2?
on
Top Ten Dying Game Genres
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Quick, name three puzzle games released for PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube within the past two years. Can you think of any?
1) Super Monkey Ball (NGC)
2) Super Bust-a-Move (PS2)
3) Fantavision (PS2) (come on, it was the first friggin game even released on the PS2)
It might not be a prominent genre on consoles these days, but you can't say it's been dead for two years...
P.S. If you want a good puzzler, check out Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The name might put you off, but it is probably the best two-player puzzle game I have ever played. It takes a bit from Columns but adds a "fighting game" twist on it with attacking, defending, counter-blocks, and, of course, super combos.
What's funny is that the PS2 already has a huge assortment of platformers to its library. Nintendo, of course, has the golden series, Mario. A developer making a great platformer for the Xbox could potentially clean house with less competition.
And since Zelda is coming out in a week, I am guessing comapanies might be holding back their GC products so they do not compete with the game that has gotten more presales than even Vice City ever did (food for thought: The Wind Wakers has presold 560,000+ units and it hasn't even been released yet - already a best seller).
This is how the hardware cycle goes. One, you release it for $300 at a loss, since you've just started production and it costs a lot to get started producing something new.
As time goes by you get increases in producing efficicency and an increase on output. The PS2 has already moved to a smaller micron process AND moved the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer onto one chip to reduce prices.
When you need to, you cut the price of the console to $200, but at this point your factories are producing these things for a LOT less.
By the end of the console's life, you sell for $100, but by then the thing is so cheap it can be put into your PS3. This is exactly what happened with the PSOne - by the time the PS2 was being planned, the PSOne cores cost Sony about $2-4 to produce and were bringing in $99 a sale. So really, profits come from the console as well as the software licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony (more specifically, Ken Kutaragi, head of SCEI) has been talking about this. They think that some people might want an all-in-one settop box, while others just want games. So they talk about releasing strictly a console version at a cheaper price as well as releasing a settop box at a full price. It doesn't sound like a good plan to me, nobody would see value in the console if it were priced too closely with the settop, and at any rate it would potentially cause a split market. Bad.
You can imagine how many man hours it takes to keep an MMORPG going smoothly, and this might hurt the game's reputation so much for cheating that it may hurt future sales and subscriptions. Not to mention the cost of PR with angry customers, angry stockholders, and, oh yeah, fixing this shit while having customers flood your inbox with the same complaints over and over and investers wondering if their money is safe.
Sega did itself in with horrible marketing. Anybody remember that "surprise launch" of teh Saturn? People who were saving for a Saturn and were expecting to have the money by the official launch date were caught off guard by the console being launched the same day as the PSX, a few months beforehand. What the hell? How am I going to buy the Saturn now when it is $300 and I only saved $150?
Let us not forget the 32X and the SegaCD. How many Sega fans bought the equipment expecting a whole new world of gaming, only to be left in the dust?
Meanwhile, the other consoles had Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, EA Sports, Parappa, Gran Turismo, etc - in other words, the other consoles delivered bigger games, some being mostly derivative (ie Final Fantasy, EA Sports), but the others breaking ground whenever they were released. Meanwhile, Sega's line-up, while having a few gems here and there, couldn't compete, mainly because of Sega's earlier mistakes, not because Sega's titles were original and nobody plays original games. Who wants to develop for a console maker with such a shady record?
Nothing like walking 15 minutes to a student's dorm due to complaints of sound not working, only to find the speakers aren't on. Especially after asking the student countless times if they were on, getting 'Yes' each time.
Or helping a student get back on the network after they were cut off for running a DoS attack on one of the campus servers. Thanks, in part, to IIS being turned on by default...
It's true - you become a "computer janitor," and you eventually turn into "Nick Burns, the company's computer guy."
A friend of mine is in CS, because he loves computers and he loves programming. He isn't any good at it though, he's failed freshman intro classes, and not because he doesn't try. His eyes glaze over when he asks me for help and I start asking him why he's doing so-and-so when he could be doing this-and-that.
In short, people should do the things they love, but it doesn't mean quality when they do it.
I hope Doom III's AI is as good as the space pirates' - at least they knew how to sneak up on someone.
You could create a little wand, for example, that you would wave in the air, and the software would use the camera to see if the wand was being waved in any specific gesture, to cast a certain spell for example.
One of the demos had a man using an orange-ish stick to draw a fairy toward it and towards "him," while a blue-ish stick made the fairy fly away from "him." ("him" in quotes because it would obviously only show up on television - and I am probably wrong about what color those sticks were, but you get the point).
This could actually make its way to some future game.
I must be very smarty with my 1350. A friggin jeenius. 100 points more than 1250, so 132 + 100 = 232 IQ. Very jeeniousy of me.
Dude, read the post. He doesn't think a 3D accelerated desktop is required to accelerate 2D graphics. And 15 windows on different levels is not a 3D desktop. I can cascade 15 IE Windows and the way the human brain interprets them they are on different levels, one on top of the other, yet they are still 2D.
Assuming there are such, as it's currently being hit with a DoS. I think it's the first time a website has deserved a /.'ing.
For reference, I believe The Getaway, SOCOM: US Navy Seals, and Guitly Gear X2 are examples of games that do prog scan output. And only in 480p.
My guess is, since the hardware support is already built in, this is a dvd driver update and might become available to all of those who had already bought our PS2s. Of course, I could be wrong completely...
"I call it the Hawkings Vortex!"
He mentions that free speech isn't global - it isn't. China, Cuba, a lot of countries do not allow free speech. Doesn't mean America believes it owns the patent on it.
Who even mentioned the US? You make it sound as if America believes it is the only country with free speech. In the words of Apu, "I don't even know which part of that sentence to correct first."
You give Linux waaaay too many brownie points: 1) How many newbie users do you think even know what disk partitioning is? How many newbie users have even INSTALLED Windows? They have never even seen the Windows installer, so slickness isn't even a point to them. 2) How much was installed that you WON'T use? Who the hell needs multiple browsers or packet sniffers? What the hell is a newbie user going to do with a packet sniffer, besides piss off the local admin? What the fuck is a newbie user going to do when she can't decide which "internet" she wants to use, in fear that one isn't as big as the other. 3) Last time I checked, whenever I ran a program's installer, it conveniently left shortcuts for me, and even asked if and where I wanted them. Have you seen a normal user's desktop? They are often littered with shortcuts to the user's programs. Everybody OS programmer should become a "computer consultant" or IT for their college's dorm halls. It is probably the best study in HCI you'll ever get. I've been doing it for two semesters now and the best part is they pay me while I learn how stupid a desktop OS should assume its user is.
Even Win98 still had the DOS backbone on it - I'd say WinXP was the first "home use" Windows OS that was the first non-DOS-shell OS. Although I know a lot of people not into computers at all that use Win2k, so I guess a line can be drawn somewhere in the NT line.
For more information on pendulum clocks, check out A HREF="http://science.howstuffworks.com/clock.htm"> this site :P
I was referring to the AMD icon they had used for this news posting instead of the normal Apple icon everybody would have expected. Thus the reason you have so many posts about Apple going to AMD or Intel.
My SNES is still in working condition, albiet a tad yellow thanks to some weird effect of the plastic case aging. Super Metroid is in it right now. Punch Out is on my NES emulator a lot. Also procured a Genesis just for Gunstar Heroes. So yeah, old games aren't dead.
I just meant that these game systems go through a 5 year cycle before any pressure is put on the consumer to even consider upgrading.
I've always wondered this, since those two patterns are the ones I've fallen in and out of for the past few years.
I still think this is why console gaming is more mainstream, either way. With a console, you might not get the best quality in graphics, but hell, you pay $200-300 and the machine lasts 5 years, and you get quite a nice selection of quality games (that's really a bias, I started out on the NES...).
I don't know, really. Pikmin is a more mixture of adventuring and real-time strategy (from what I have seen, anyways).
If we are going to generalize the puzzle genre that much, then I guess even Zelda is a puzzle game, since you do solve puzzles in dungeons, after all...
1) Super Monkey Ball (NGC)
2) Super Bust-a-Move (PS2)
3) Fantavision (PS2) (come on, it was the first friggin game even released on the PS2)
It might not be a prominent genre on consoles these days, but you can't say it's been dead for two years...
P.S. If you want a good puzzler, check out Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo . The name might put you off, but it is probably the best two-player puzzle game I have ever played. It takes a bit from Columns but adds a "fighting game" twist on it with attacking, defending, counter-blocks, and, of course, super combos.
It's a good thing slashdot never posts anything that may cause sensational rumors and misinformation :P
What's funny is that the PS2 already has a huge assortment of platformers to its library. Nintendo, of course, has the golden series, Mario. A developer making a great platformer for the Xbox could potentially clean house with less competition. And since Zelda is coming out in a week, I am guessing comapanies might be holding back their GC products so they do not compete with the game that has gotten more presales than even Vice City ever did (food for thought: The Wind Wakers has presold 560,000+ units and it hasn't even been released yet - already a best seller).
This is how the hardware cycle goes. One, you release it for $300 at a loss, since you've just started production and it costs a lot to get started producing something new.
As time goes by you get increases in producing efficicency and an increase on output. The PS2 has already moved to a smaller micron process AND moved the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer onto one chip to reduce prices.
When you need to, you cut the price of the console to $200, but at this point your factories are producing these things for a LOT less.
By the end of the console's life, you sell for $100, but by then the thing is so cheap it can be put into your PS3. This is exactly what happened with the PSOne - by the time the PS2 was being planned, the PSOne cores cost Sony about $2-4 to produce and were bringing in $99 a sale. So really, profits come from the console as well as the software licensing.