I hear this claim a lot, but have yet to see it substantiated. Maximum PC Magazine did a test a couple of months ago where they took audiophiles, college students, computer enthusiasts, and recording artists and did a blind test to see if they could tell the difference between MP3s of varying quality and CDs. They used music from several genres, including rock, jazz, and classical if I recall correctly. The audiophiles, surprisingly, fared the worst out of the group at being able to tell which was which. None of them were able to tell with any accuracy which one was the original material.
That's a good point. I should clarify that what I was referring to, specifically, was that watching movies on the PSP is a waste. I have no problem with using UMDs to play games, most game systems use proprietary tech for their media which is understandable. But for Sony to think that people would be lining up in droves to buy movies on the thing is/was ludicrous.
This is what happens when you try to foist a new standard upon people that already have one. Minidiscs and Memory Stick, anyone? UMD is strike three, unless I am forgetting anything.
He also clearly stated that he dislikes the platform he's working on, as well as stating that he thinks the competitor's platform is better.
No offense, but did you read the original article?
(Emphasis added) Now in my opinion it doesn't matter how good the PS3 is. If the XBOX 360 is better, then it doesn't really matter how the cell processors work or how good they say it is. Realistically one of them will be better over all. Now I've spoken with people who are on the technical side of the PS3. I've also talked with people on the technical side of the XBOX 360. The consistent comment I am hearing from people on my end is, "The XBOX 360 is better". They are saying that it is capable of just doing more. (shrugs) Now take that for what its worth.
I simply disagree with your assertion that he "clearly thinks the competitor's platform is better". After reading the entire original statement, it sounds to me like he's saying that the jury is still out, although early results seemed to indicate the PS3 was lacking in his opinion.
My personal opinion is that the two systems (360 and PS3) are going to be close enough to equal in capabilities that most people won't be able to tell the difference. I am no Microsoft apologist, but I am so tired of people zeroing in on any excuse they can to blast the 360 just because of who made it.
They just built a D&B here in Kansas City. I have to agree with the sentiment of the poster of this article, in that the experience is disappointing as a video game destination. One minor quibble though - I think the food there, while generic, is terrific. The kitchen at this particular location, at least, does an excellent job and uses good quality ingredients.
The arcade itself, though, is lacking. They can't seem to decide whether they want to be a destination for kids or adults, so they sort of half-ass both of them. I'd say a little less than 1/2 of the floor space is dedicated to "ticket games" for kids. These are of no value whatsoever to me, but I could see having a good time if you brought the kids along. They had a pretty neat trivia game that my group of friends tried out and it was the lone standout among such games.
The "video arcade" had a token cadre of "classic" arcade games, maybe 3 or 4 machines, to please the old-timers or the people that just wanted to play a game of Pac-Man. This was ok with me but I would have liked to see a few more classics in there. The most glaring omission, in my opinion, is the complete lack of pinball machines. I suspect the reason for this is pinballs require fairly regular maintenance to stay in good working order, and they are expensive. D&B probably didn't want to mess with it. This loses big points for me, since I am a big pinball fan, but they could have made up for it by having a better selection of video games.
The modern portion of the video arcade consists of a large number of what I would call "big footprint" games, i.e. two player shooters where you hold a big gun or something. These are often technically impressive, but since they simply take up so much space, they take away from the total number of games that can be put in and thus have to be more selective with what they put out there. This results in a bunch of generic semi-crappy games that I never really felt interested in.
For a franchise that bills itself as an arcade for adults, D&B sure needs some help. I've been to one in Dallas and it had the same problems. I like what they are trying to do, but I feel like the place just doesn't have any "soul", for lack of a better word, like the old arcades back in the 80s did. Maybe I'm just getting nostalgic.
The one thing that I hope comes out of this fiasco is that people will start to realize what a crappy deal pre-ordering is. Maybe when the PS3 comes out people that got burned by the 360 pre-order will start to refuse to buy bundles. Forcing people to buy bundles is the scourge of the console industry, in my opinion. I'm hoping companies like GameStop really take it in the shorts the next time a big console launches. They probably would never admit it, but I bet they knew damn well that there wouldn't be enough consoles to meet pre-order demands but they continued to take the orders anyway. Weren't they one of the companies that started taking pre-orders for DNF five years ago?
I don't know about the rest of you, but when a new device like this comes out, one of the first thing I think of is wanting to see, touch, and play with the device. Consisdering it is a portable game console and you would want a chance to check out the aesthetics before committing to a purchase.
The problem with the PSP, at least for me, is that out of all the stores I have been to that sell it - Best Buy, Circuit City, EB Games, Target, Wal Mart, etc. etc. - there have been a grand total of ZERO "display models" for you to touch and otherwise interact with. To me, this is a deal breaker. If I can't get the PSP experience in the store, I am not going to buy one sight unseen.
I wonder how much this is hurting the sales of the PSP. It's hard to hype up a machine sitting in a cardboard box in a locked cage that you can't play with in the store. The commercials on TV don't do anything for me either since they don't show much about the PSP other than "wow, it's a portable!"
I'd just like to point out that the D-Pad as well as all of the buttons on the DS2 controller are pressure sensitive. I don't know about you guys but I would rather take advatage of pressure sensitivity than use an analog stick. I absolutely detest games that REQUIRE you to use the analog and relagate the D-Pad to some stupid function like switching weapons or something. Pressure sensitivity alone is enough to elevate the DS2 controller to a higher standard of excellence.
How about just making a cell phone that makes calls? Who cares it if plays MP3s or can hook into iTunes, or whatever? I don't mind a few extra features on a phone but I sometimes feel like marketing droids feel the need to integrate unneeded or unwanted features into tech just because they can.
Is the lockout stored on the HDD controller board or is it actually written to the disk? If it's stored in the controller board on the disk, there might be an alternative.
If that was the case, you could, in theory, buy a brand new, identical hard drive to the one that was "HAXX0R3D" and swap out the controller boards.
I did this a long time ago with an IBM 10 Gig drive when the controller board died on it. It's kind of a delicate procedure but if you are careful you should be able to unscrew the board and replace it with a new one.
I didn't see anything in the article that addressed this so I'm not sure if it would work, but it's worth a try!
This is exactly the point. It's easy for "The Experts" to predict that DVD is dead, but there isn't a set top box or distribution system in place that you can even buy, let alone that has a prayer of being as ubiquitous and cheap as a DVD player. Sure, you can build one yourself but people willing to do that represent a fraction of the market. Even a DVR built into your cable/satellite reciever isn't going to get the job done with today's storage limits (namely the cost of a substantial number of 8.4 Gigabyte chunks of space to hold a DVD's worth of information).
Then you have the HDTV factor. Today's DVD players output 480 lines of resolution, and tomorrow's HDTV movie distribution system are going to deliver 1920x1080! I don't know what that is going to do to the storage needs but I assume it will be quite a difference!
Bottom line here is that we have a long way to go until something like this comes to fruition. I doubt it will be in the next 5 years. Maybe not even in the next 10.
Why not add the additional RAM in and sell the consoles at a slight loss until manufacturing costs go down, due to cheaper RAM and such? As I understand it, the PS2 was originally sold at a loss due to low chip yields until its design could be optimized in later hardware revisions while at the same time the cost of manufacturing went down since component parts were cheaper. After that happened, they started to break even and/or profit from the sale of consoles.
Sound a LOT like the way Enron tried to "explain" how their business worked.
If you can't explain what you do in a way a 10 year old can understand, your business will probably fail.
From Grand Theft Auto 2. It had some pretty good stuff, as far as I can tell it was mostly original.
For what it's worth, I have the GTA1 CD-rom in my car as its music is all CD-Audio. I still listen to it every once in a while, when I get the urge to hear "The Ballad Of Chapped Lips Calhoun, by the late Sideways Hank O'Malley and the Alabama Bottle Boys"
You gotta give the guys at Rockstar credit for having good soundtracks long before they had mega-hits like GTA3 under their belt and could license music people had heard of (A la Vice City). The best track on Vice City is definitely Maurice Chavez on VCPR, and any time you hear the Degenatron commercial.
Favorite commercial - probably on GTA2 for the Enduro-dong(?) condom.
-End of incoherent rambling about the GTA series.
Mainly because no company has been willing to operate at a loss the likes of which Microsoft is currently seeing
I have been hearing this line of reasoning bandied about for some time now and I have two questions:
Has anyone actually proven that Microsoft is taking a loss on each console sold? It seems to me that especially by now the hardware (P-III 733 Mhz, Nvidia Geforce graphics, cheap motherboard) is probably pretty inexpensive. Everyone takes this for granted but has it ever actually been proven that MS takes a loss on each console?
If the X-Box division of MS is operating at a loss, who's to say that it should be profitable by now? Let's be honest - if Sony wasn't such a big company in its own right it wouldn't have been able to launch a game console either if one of the requirements (as I believe your post implies) is that you have to make money from day 1. There is going to be a period of time for a new product like the X-Box where it's going to lose money as it gains traction and makes inroads into the market. They have clearly demonstrated that they have the ability to do this.
I tend to agree with the other poster - MS probably won't overtake Sony anytime soon, and maybe never will. But it's naive to think that MS is so stupid that they would sink billions into a market "just because they can".
I can remember playing online games almost as early as the original Doom's first multiplayer patches. We're talking on my Tandy 1000
I call BS. I had a Tandy 1000 back in the mid 80's. It was an 8088 4.77 Mhz processor and could be expanded to a max of 640k RAM (IIRC).
Doom required at least a 386SX to run, in fact I think it was the first major game ever to require a 32-bit processor. There is no way you could even get Doom running on a Tandy 1000, even poorly!
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I hear this claim a lot, but have yet to see it substantiated. Maximum PC Magazine did a test a couple of months ago where they took audiophiles, college students, computer enthusiasts, and recording artists and did a blind test to see if they could tell the difference between MP3s of varying quality and CDs. They used music from several genres, including rock, jazz, and classical if I recall correctly. The audiophiles, surprisingly, fared the worst out of the group at being able to tell which was which. None of them were able to tell with any accuracy which one was the original material.
That's a good point. I should clarify that what I was referring to, specifically, was that watching movies on the PSP is a waste. I have no problem with using UMDs to play games, most game systems use proprietary tech for their media which is understandable. But for Sony to think that people would be lining up in droves to buy movies on the thing is/was ludicrous.
This is what happens when you try to foist a new standard upon people that already have one. Minidiscs and Memory Stick, anyone? UMD is strike three, unless I am forgetting anything.
No offense, but did you read the original article?
I simply disagree with your assertion that he "clearly thinks the competitor's platform is better". After reading the entire original statement, it sounds to me like he's saying that the jury is still out, although early results seemed to indicate the PS3 was lacking in his opinion.My personal opinion is that the two systems (360 and PS3) are going to be close enough to equal in capabilities that most people won't be able to tell the difference. I am no Microsoft apologist, but I am so tired of people zeroing in on any excuse they can to blast the 360 just because of who made it.
The arcade itself, though, is lacking. They can't seem to decide whether they want to be a destination for kids or adults, so they sort of half-ass both of them. I'd say a little less than 1/2 of the floor space is dedicated to "ticket games" for kids. These are of no value whatsoever to me, but I could see having a good time if you brought the kids along. They had a pretty neat trivia game that my group of friends tried out and it was the lone standout among such games.
The "video arcade" had a token cadre of "classic" arcade games, maybe 3 or 4 machines, to please the old-timers or the people that just wanted to play a game of Pac-Man. This was ok with me but I would have liked to see a few more classics in there. The most glaring omission, in my opinion, is the complete lack of pinball machines. I suspect the reason for this is pinballs require fairly regular maintenance to stay in good working order, and they are expensive. D&B probably didn't want to mess with it. This loses big points for me, since I am a big pinball fan, but they could have made up for it by having a better selection of video games.
The modern portion of the video arcade consists of a large number of what I would call "big footprint" games, i.e. two player shooters where you hold a big gun or something. These are often technically impressive, but since they simply take up so much space, they take away from the total number of games that can be put in and thus have to be more selective with what they put out there. This results in a bunch of generic semi-crappy games that I never really felt interested in.
For a franchise that bills itself as an arcade for adults, D&B sure needs some help. I've been to one in Dallas and it had the same problems. I like what they are trying to do, but I feel like the place just doesn't have any "soul", for lack of a better word, like the old arcades back in the 80s did. Maybe I'm just getting nostalgic.
The one thing that I hope comes out of this fiasco is that people will start to realize what a crappy deal pre-ordering is. Maybe when the PS3 comes out people that got burned by the 360 pre-order will start to refuse to buy bundles. Forcing people to buy bundles is the scourge of the console industry, in my opinion. I'm hoping companies like GameStop really take it in the shorts the next time a big console launches. They probably would never admit it, but I bet they knew damn well that there wouldn't be enough consoles to meet pre-order demands but they continued to take the orders anyway. Weren't they one of the companies that started taking pre-orders for DNF five years ago?
The problem with the PSP, at least for me, is that out of all the stores I have been to that sell it - Best Buy, Circuit City, EB Games, Target, Wal Mart, etc. etc. - there have been a grand total of ZERO "display models" for you to touch and otherwise interact with. To me, this is a deal breaker. If I can't get the PSP experience in the store, I am not going to buy one sight unseen.
I wonder how much this is hurting the sales of the PSP. It's hard to hype up a machine sitting in a cardboard box in a locked cage that you can't play with in the store. The commercials on TV don't do anything for me either since they don't show much about the PSP other than "wow, it's a portable!"
Does anyone else agree with this?
I'd just like to point out that the D-Pad as well as all of the buttons on the DS2 controller are pressure sensitive. I don't know about you guys but I would rather take advatage of pressure sensitivity than use an analog stick. I absolutely detest games that REQUIRE you to use the analog and relagate the D-Pad to some stupid function like switching weapons or something. Pressure sensitivity alone is enough to elevate the DS2 controller to a higher standard of excellence.
How about just making a cell phone that makes calls? Who cares it if plays MP3s or can hook into iTunes, or whatever? I don't mind a few extra features on a phone but I sometimes feel like marketing droids feel the need to integrate unneeded or unwanted features into tech just because they can.
If that was the case, you could, in theory, buy a brand new, identical hard drive to the one that was "HAXX0R3D" and swap out the controller boards.
I did this a long time ago with an IBM 10 Gig drive when the controller board died on it. It's kind of a delicate procedure but if you are careful you should be able to unscrew the board and replace it with a new one.
I didn't see anything in the article that addressed this so I'm not sure if it would work, but it's worth a try!
...But come on, is there even one legitimate news story on the front page? Enough is enough, guys.
Then you have the HDTV factor. Today's DVD players output 480 lines of resolution, and tomorrow's HDTV movie distribution system are going to deliver 1920x1080! I don't know what that is going to do to the storage needs but I assume it will be quite a difference!
Bottom line here is that we have a long way to go until something like this comes to fruition. I doubt it will be in the next 5 years. Maybe not even in the next 10.
Chewbacca was a wookie, so what was he doing on Endor? That is the question you have to ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen!
I am not anti-nintendo or anything, I just don't care much for the Gamecube.
Why not add the additional RAM in and sell the consoles at a slight loss until manufacturing costs go down, due to cheaper RAM and such? As I understand it, the PS2 was originally sold at a loss due to low chip yields until its design could be optimized in later hardware revisions while at the same time the cost of manufacturing went down since component parts were cheaper. After that happened, they started to break even and/or profit from the sale of consoles.
I haven't been following too closely, what features that were promised didn't make it into the final release?
The first thing I thought of when I saw the guy's name. Still cracks me up everytime I see it. Am I the only one that thought of this sketch?
You cannot get ye flask!
It was in the conservatory, stolen by Professor Plum, using the lead pipe. Where do I collect my (insert fancy Euro symbol here)500 Reward?
I think that GTA:VC said it best:
From Grand Theft Auto 2. It had some pretty good stuff, as far as I can tell it was mostly original. For what it's worth, I have the GTA1 CD-rom in my car as its music is all CD-Audio. I still listen to it every once in a while, when I get the urge to hear "The Ballad Of Chapped Lips Calhoun, by the late Sideways Hank O'Malley and the Alabama Bottle Boys" You gotta give the guys at Rockstar credit for having good soundtracks long before they had mega-hits like GTA3 under their belt and could license music people had heard of (A la Vice City). The best track on Vice City is definitely Maurice Chavez on VCPR, and any time you hear the Degenatron commercial. Favorite commercial - probably on GTA2 for the Enduro-dong(?) condom. -End of incoherent rambling about the GTA series.
I have been hearing this line of reasoning bandied about for some time now and I have two questions:
I tend to agree with the other poster - MS probably won't overtake Sony anytime soon, and maybe never will. But it's naive to think that MS is so stupid that they would sink billions into a market "just because they can".
Hello, Chief? You're where?
I call BS. I had a Tandy 1000 back in the mid 80's. It was an 8088 4.77 Mhz processor and could be expanded to a max of 640k RAM (IIRC).
Doom required at least a 386SX to run, in fact I think it was the first major game ever to require a 32-bit processor. There is no way you could even get Doom running on a Tandy 1000, even poorly!