Well, FF:CC is more the spiritual heir to Secret of Mana multiplayer(thus far) than anything else. It's the 2nd game in that franchise. Same with Dragon Quest Kenshin(Swords).
Super Mario: Galaxies is the 3rd 3D platforming Mario, Metroid Prime 3 is the 4th 3D metroid, and Zelda: Twilight Princess is the 4th 3D Zelda. At or under the anticipated releases for the other systems, in terms of sequilitis of the modern style(I mean, MGS4 is at what, #10 or something in the Metal Gear Franchise?). All of the Wii titles introduce new control-schemes though, so it may not be fair to clump them in the same category.
Personally, I like sequels, so long as they're good sequels. An example of a franchise gone to the dark side is Megaman(and possibly Viewtiful Joe), not any of the franchises listed above. I mean, yea, Mario is has a lot of games, but the franchise is like "The Godfather"(With sunshine being part 3), and there's nothing wrong with that. A sequel to a game I liked is a good thing, if done well. New stuff is cool too, it replaces the stuff that got a sequel that ended up letting me down.
Now, what I'd really like to see is a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil. Comeon Ubisoft, do it! D'oh, I think I just found the one way to get me to buy a PS3.
I'm guessing a $199 launch, mainly because at that price, there's no thought and no doubt involved in picking it up, I'll simply do it. I will walk up to the clerk and buy one for the Virtual Console alone. And I think Nintendo is gunning for that. I thought the PS3 would launch at $499(check my comment history for just before E3, I nailed it), so... I've got a good track record so far.
Max I see is $249 for the unit + a controller(at which point, all the titles I want they claimed are launch had better be launch). Maybe $299 with two controllers and a game, that's pushing it though.
Anything above $249 for the base system, and no matter how excited I am about it, I simply can't justify the expense. I like what I see so far, but my PC atm is good enough, and $249 is only ok because of how damned expensive the PS3 is going to be. I'd wager dollars to pesos it's going to be $199 or $249 and come out this summer during the duldrum season of gaming(July-ish is my guess).
Meh, I'm happy with the diversity of their lineup. Zelda and Metroid are hardly "kiddie." Mario, yea, he's got that disney-esque thing going on, but the gameplay in the games featuring him is normally pretty damn good. In the N64 days, Rare, then a second party, produced Conker, Perfect Dark Zero, and Goldeneye. This generation they had Retro, and brought a lot more anime style stuff over like Fire Emblem. I almost included Silicon Knights here, for the MGS remake and Eternal Darkness but I can't recall if they were second party or third.
The kiddie image is pretty recent actually, mainly due to the Super Mario Sunshine ads and initial color of the Gamecube.
In this upcoming generation, in house they're doing Disaster: Day of Crisis and Project HAMMER in house, with retro doing another Metroid game. Plus anime style stuff like Fire Emblem, and a darker more Ocarina of Time-esque Legend of Zelda. Third party, they have Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles(the first one being the best game in that style since Secret of Mana if you could get past GBA->GCN connectivity costs), and Dragon Quest Kenshin(Swords) in the RPG/anime style. Then of course ubisoft's Red Steel, and EA's Madden 2k6. The token kiddie title is from THQ, a Spongebob game, and then there's the family friendly Mario Galaxies and the lego-styled Wii Sports. Most of the previous ones are launch titles btw(except the two more adult Nintendo first party IIRC).
And then of course we get the best-of stuff from the NES, SNES, Genesis, Turbografx-16, N64, which should be pretty extensive since a lot of that IP isn't used too much anymore(apart from square doing remakes/ports to the GBA), plus the whole gamecube library(which includes things like the Resident Evil series up to 4 anyway).
Further down the line we have stuff like Call of Duty 3. So, it's not like there's a shortage of the stuff, it's mainly image leading to reality over the course of their console lifetime.
Yes, I have, and have concluded I lose nothing. I'm not a big realistic racing/rally fan, so no more Gran Turismo isn't a big deal.
If Sony hadn't existed this past generation, we would've lost what? 2 gran turismos, Ico, SoC, and God of War. If they succeed in continously stealing other company's ideas, and never innovating on their own from a games perspective, we lose everything.
Yea, Sony needs to die. They won't, but they should.
It's not that they took the concept of Live. I wasn't at all upset that 3rd parties and MS hopped on the wireless controller bandwagon after the Wavebird, and I wasn't at all upset about Live clones persay. It's more their history of doing this.
The playstation itself was a joint Nintendo/Sony project for an SNES CD addon. When it fell through they launched their own system.
The original PS controller basically amounted to an SNES controller with extended grips and double the shoulder buttons. When Nintendo debuted the N64 controller, Sony added in 2 analog sticks, because twice is better. It took until the PS2 for anyone to do anything with it. This is one of their only two contributions, and it wasn't motivated by any gameplay reason. It was motivated by "twice is better." The PS2 introduced backwards compatibility outside the handheld arena. Score the second thing Sony gave us. Their first-party titles were all derivative of other dev-houses genre-creations, and had nothing noteworthy until they had the cash and cache to begin absorbing developers like Verant and Polyphony Digital.
The controller they just debutted to try to take the wind out of the Revolution/Wii is a wireless version of a PC gamepad MS debuted years ago, only in a standard dual shock form-factor.
It's not that Sony rips people off, it's that that's pretty much all they do, and if it was up to them we'd never see anything new or evolutionary. They have one success that's not an accidental good side-benny from stealing ideas from the competition, and they've pretty much rode on Nintendo's coattails for the past 14 years.
The playstation brand is a knock-off brand, slightly prettier of course, and they want to charge you a premium for it.
Then you factor in Sony Media, and the fact that they always seem to be calling the shots at big Sony, and torpedoing anything good Sony Electronics comes up with, plus the rootkit fiasco, and it's just not a company I want to financially support. They exemplify everything bad about Japanese corporations. And we're talking about everything percieved as bad about japanese corporations in the 50s.
Ripping off live was bad enough, but ripping off the tilt and motion sensing capabilities? AFTER calling it a gimmick. Comeon. I hope Nintendo and Microsoft have enough patents to bury Sony, because they really, freakin' deserve it. Failing that I hope people are smart enough to go with the leaders and not the followers, but I have little to no faith in that.
At the $500 launch price I thought it was going to be at, it was dead to me anyway, but now I wouldn't take it was half that. I prefer to vote with my dollars in a way that encourages innovation, not me-too copycatting.
You're right, there isn't a relation. The only real impact HD-DVD and Blu-ray will have in games, comes in terms of FMV and audio. Microsoft made the right call imo.
You'll hit a bottleneck(disk access, hdd access, memory, etc.) of some sort before the difference between 9GB and 50GB in a typical game makes any difference in visual quality or length over what we have now. At least in terms of real-time rendered content.
And for movies, well, the difference between 480p and 1080i isn't worth the insane DRM, Hardware and media costs that come with the format change. At least in my mind. I haven't bought an HDTV yet, so I don't need to worry about HDMI and most of the down-rezzing issues of the new formats(for the future, not now, since none of them will use it at first), but still. It's antiquated media interests over technology all over again.
I'll still purchase Nintendo's console at launch, always. Whether it be called wii, shitcock, or revolution("A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"[That'd be the bard, want to argue with one of the most enduring figures of the english language? you lose.]), simply because I like Nintendo's games, and they're both first party(so the console wars are irrelevant[yea, most of the games you want for the PS3 or XBox 360, 3rd party, they can fade away like the wind]), and Nintendo's core fanbase is legion enough to ensure they get made. If you enjoy the first party titles of a company, regardless of my opinion, and you have faith in the fanbase, you buy at launch. Otherwise, the prudent choice is to wait until enough games worth the price of admission crop up. Sega taught me that. People who don't meet those conditions and buy at launch are fools.
Oh, and if I'm going to rebuy my DVD collection, I want a truly future-proof media format. I want a codec that's at the peak quality level of 35mm or even 70mm film. I want what amounts to original film reals, restored, only in a digital format and with the extras that DVD provides. That should do me for 2D, it's the last step until viewing/entertainment technology matures beyond moving pictures. Until then, an upres isn't worth it, just like it wasn't worth it to the general public for laserdisc. The capability is there.
CoD III for the Wii is already confirmed in Activision's trailer for the game(which system the trailer was made on, if any[given activisions penchant for pre-rendered and misleading trailers] I leave up for debate).
So I guess that means it has number 1, number 2 and number 3 all covered. What the hell number 3 is, I leave up to the more imaginative.
Now can we cut out the scatalogical and urine jokes? They're soooo April 2006.
Meh, I'm not happy with it, but a lot of people weren't happy with the name-change from katana to dreamcast, a lot of people thought the playstation sounded like a really kiddy fischer price-style name, the XBox was ridiculous sounding(ala EXXTREEEEMMMEEE teenage bible), Atari 2600(wtf is that?), Famicom, PS2 (phoenetically "piss 2" if you say it fast enough), etc. etc. Step back a bit, and most branding sounds silly.
I don't love the name, but I no longer hate it, and by the time it launches I'm sure I won't care. I do kinda dig the visual aspects of the logo in the name change announcement, it's the vocalization that I'm not a fan of. And I'm over the urine connotation, quite a bit faster than I got over the pronunciation of the french word for yes when I was 13. It's still awkward, but you can see how much the furor has died down already, and it just doesn't bother me anymore. Few people are fans of the name, but not nearly as many are angry about it as they were when it was announced.
If they change it, alright then, but the revolution is not about the name of the console. It's about the features the Wii has and what potential the Wii has to truly revolutionize how we play games. To quote the bard, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." They could name it the Nintendo Shitcock and it wouldn't truly matter to me.
Last time I played 3e, to prove a point, I tricked a bard(by level 6) out so far the only enemies the DM could throw at us had to be lacking the senses of sight, hearing and smell. That was fun. Oh, hostile bandits, here's a joke, take 20, shifted to friendly. Here, listen to some music, bonus from instrument, bonus from feat, etc., etc. shifted from hostile to fanatically loyal. The mechanics for a lot of things are just downright screwy.
It's not cumulative damage from rockets + nigh-unlimited drones that can mount those rockets rigger from SR2 stupid(record damage output, 605,000 20-something above deadly), but it gets up there to White Wolf levels.
Say what you will about 2e, for all of it's flaws, you couldn't bend it over and break it like you can D20. Mainly because the customization aspect from feats and skills wasn't really there. You had to be all creative with what your character did, or luck out on some loot from a DM that wasn't paying attention(IE: Bow of Teleportation + Ring of X-Ray vision + Elven Ranger).
Not knowing the difference between i++ and ++i can mean buggy code, crashes, overflows, etc. It's like forgetting you need to take into account the string termination character when allocating memory, and it's not like it's C-style pointer voodoo either. We're talking order of operations, and it's pretty important.
Well, all TES games are buggy. It goes hand in hand with Bethesda.
And Daggerfall was a lot more ambitious than Oblivion or Morrowind. I wish Oblivion had kept what was good about Morrowind, added in a bit of direction for the main quest, and gone more towards the daggerfall skill/etc. systems.
so then going by your brilliant logic here, people are fools for wanting an Xbox 360 aswell?
At the moment, yes. Or consumer whores(should be johns, but whatever). The only compelling reason to own a 360 atm is Live Arcade or to put off a PC upgrade. Neither is worth the premium they're charging for it at the moment, now in a year or two, I'll pick up a 360 for live and live arcade no matter what Sony does, because MS actually *gasp* innovated, and Sony just ripped them off(as opposed to Nintendo who announced similar things at similar times but didn't gel everything up until later), like they always do.
Or are you one of those people that go "Fuck sony! they always suck!" and that's just it, you just hate sony because they installed a rootkit on your PC without your knowladge?
It's spelled knowledge. But anyway yes, Sony sucks, and I've held this opinion since shortly after my 3rd PS2 broke due to cheap-ass optics. The root-kit being done by Sony Media, who, unless you're ignorant of the past 15 years, call the shots at big Sony, was just another nail into the coffin of condemning them. The only relatively clean console maker atm is Nintendo, and that's relatively, because they haven't misbehaved in the past decade. Hell, until recently with IE7 it even looked like MS had turned over a new leaf.
also where is it said that sony will in fact charge $500 for the ps3? Microsoft was the first one to start charging more then $300 for a system, shouldn't the blame of expensive consoles rest on their shoulders since they proved people were willing topay that much?
Current analyst estimations are at > $500, in the $600-$700 range. Too expensive. PERIOD. When the real-time videos don't significantly exceed the visual ability of my complimentary corporate laptop, and certainly don't significantly exceed a typical viewing arrangement of current gen top of the line stuff(ala RE4) on an SDTV(5 feet, 22-27" screen), it's not worth it. Unfortunately, if enough people succumb to the shiny, I'll have to eventually shell out a shitton of cash for a PS2.5 or XBox 1.5, but hopefully enough people wake up and find more useful things to do with their money.
better yet why aren't you bitching at the people on eBay? You know those nice people (you're probably one of them) who goes out on launch day, buys 3 or 4 systems, comes hom and sets them up for sale on eBay for people to buy at the low low price of $600 starting.
Are you convinently forgeting Gamestop in you "$500 fucking toy" rant? They were charging upto $10,000 for "Package" deals that included all kinds of useless shit, some stores wouldn't even sell people the system UNLESS they had one of these package deals.
Hell yea, if I knew there was demand I'd pull some strings and rape some fanboys out of their cash, they deserve it for being impatient(never done it, but see nothing wrong with it) and foolish(You're a fool to buy a console at launch... PERIOD. The only exception is made for Nintendo, and that's just a slight downward adjustment of the value fool). But neither Sony nor Microsoft nor Nintendo are to blame for that(and they don't profit from it), except for the fact that they failed to meet demand. Or were trying to generate launch hype. But then again, every console sells out at launch(except the 360/Xbox in Japan).
Next time you decide to blame a company because they are charging a huge ammount for a "fucking toy" you should remember to look into other factors aswell.
Which would those be? Oh, you mean trying to foist a media format 95% of the country doesn't have any use for onto us, so they can combat piracy in their media divisions(same thing behind the rootkit)? WOOT! SIGN ME UP! Idiot.
oh and some people might consider that PC you are using a fucking toy that cost you quite a bit (or if you were given it it cost someone else quite a bit).
The IRS would disagree. As a computing profession my laptop or PC are legitimate
McDonalds is using their unfair advantage of selling bad hamburgers to now sell side salads! The world is coming to an end!
Actually McDonalds is selling salads to try to revamp their image away from being "that unhealthy restaurant." Ya know, so they don't get sued like the tobaccy companies and our health-obsessed society can still get 5 kcals from a salad while feeling good and still being obese. Now an appropriate analogy would be Philip Morris(forget the name of the actual parent company atm, starts with an A, owns kraft foods/etc.) coming up with a highly effective cancer treatment/preventative and putting it in cigarettes ala Transmetropolitan.
I only make $28,000 a year.
So sorry. Perhaps you should upskill or move depending upon the situation.
I'm not rich by any means
Don't sell yourself short, in Burundi you could live like a king!
I've owned two HDTVs for quite some time.
To old for HDMI input? If not, you're boned. Find out why in a minute, and join the haters.
No one complained that Sony pushed the DVD format with PS2, so I don't understand why everyone is up in arms about Blu-Ray.
DVD offered considerable advantages over VHS. VHS degrades per play, DVD doesn't. VHS requires rewinding/fastwording, DVD can insta seek. Etc. Etc. All the next gen media types do is up the resolution. Which, apart from view-distance/apparent quality/etc., can still be upped further in the future because it's still not at the resolution of film.
Getting a cheap hi-def player bundled with a great gaming console is a GOOD thing.
Cheap!? $400-$500+ is not cheap. If it hits @ $200, I'll swallow my Sony dislike and buy one, but at the price range we've been seeing speculated($500+), it's just not worth it.
And in case you missed it, if you go HD-DVD you may not get a HD picture because the player can opt to downsample to a lower resolution.
Remember where I said I hope you have HDMI inputs on your HD-TVS? Yea, here's why. They BOTH do this. It's part of the standards. Both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD backers say they won't use this feature(at first), but it's there. In both standards. Because they care about DRM and DVD is getting just too cheap and easy to burn. Plus, if it catches on, the majority of the market(who don't own HDTVs yet), won't get burned. It's all about screwing *YOU* the early adopter. If you're not mad about the rootkit, or MS's predatory practices, you should be mad about that.
Why pay $1,500 for a HD player and not get HD resolutions? I can get a $30 DVD player. That my friend, is evil.
Exactly, why bother? Sony and Microsoft have all the first party appeal of a meth-addict. If we don't buy their new stuff, the 3rd parties will release things for the old stuff or the cheaper, stupidly named, Wii. I'm perfectly happy with DVD, and I've yet to see a next-gen screen shot that looks $300+ for the console and $10+ per game(over my PC which I can write off on my taxes as a work-expense and looks as good if not better) better on a typical setup(being a 24-27" SDTV viewed from 5-6 feet) than the current gen.
You hold to the seperate division "theory" because you're a fool. A company does not leverage a position of strength in one industry to break into another industry out of niceness. They do it to make money for their existing divisions. In Sony's current case, it's using the PS3 to get blu-ray into homes for the DRM advantages this gives to Sony Media.
See a pattern here?
Sony Media repeatedly gimps Sony Electronics.
The playstation itself was originally an SNES-CD addon until the two companies had a falling out, Sony decided to launch it anyway, and the playstation brand owes it's strength to cheaper media costs and the coup that was getting square during the N64/Saturn/PSX era. They've been riding on what Nintendo(who due to not being number one for a while have been rather well-behaved for the past 10 years) taught them ever since. And i wouldn't be surprised if they delayed the PS3 to rip Nintendo off yet again.
You want a PS3 because you're a fool as well. It's produced by a me-too company whose last iota of unrestrained talent faded ages ago, and whose sad fanboys(not fans, apple, nintendo, and star wars have fans, short for fanatic) roam the wilds of the internet acting juvenile and lowering the common denominator. And it's one saving grace atm is that it'll have sequels to games I like on it, with a slightly shinier coating which has thus far completely failed to impress upon me the desire to spend > $500 for a fucking toy.
And Katamari is a pacman derivative(differences = objects instead of pellets, no ghosts, and a different level design), what's your point? That there's nothing truly new under the sun?
And yes, they(Mario themed sports games) are derivative, *EVERYTHING IS* but they take the concept somewhere else. These games bring the rules of a sport into an alternate world and add in stuff not possible within a realistic setting. There used to be quite a bit more of this(Mutant League Football etc.), but Nintendo are pretty much the only ones doing it anymore outside Kart Racers.
It's not Madden. It's baseball, or golf, or soccer set in the Mario universe, and that universe plays by different rules.
And if we're to use the Mario series as a benchmark, just about every modern platformer has it's genesis in that franchise. Every modern 3D platform up to Daxter for the PSP is the same exact game as Mario 64 by your criteria, no one has innovated in something like 10 years because everything is derivative of everything else. Claiming all the Mario games are the same is a downright stupid assertion, because you're nitpicking THEME and STORY, not gameplay, and ignoring gameplay improvements and innovations. It's like me tracing the lineage of any given game back through it's derivations, or going into the whole I'm an english major there are only 50 stories in the wolrd and we keep telling them in different ways rant, it's sophomoric idiocy. Perfect for an internet forum like slashdot where trolling is a sport, but beneath serious contemplation.
You can take issue with the theme, you can take issue with the ever-present general stories found in the main games, but you can't claim they're all the same, because they aren't. Just like Katamari isn't Pacman, Mario X isn't Mario Y, Madden 200X isn't Madden 199Y, etc.
And yea, Katamari wouldn't have been possible without the dual-shock, which wouldn't exist if it weren't for the analog thumbstick on the N64 multiplied by 2 because 2 is twice one. Hell, here, let me make a stupid assertion, sink to that level, almost everything we have in the game market today is either derivative of Nintendo or owes the possibility of it's existance to Nintendo.
I think Sony needs to change their strategy fast or loose ground to Nintendo fast.
In the handheld market? They were up against the juggernaut that is the gameboy, which neither the DS or the PSP have put a dent in, and the PSP is performing poorly compared to the DS.
You have to have ground before you can lose it.
The DS vs. PSP thing and what all the Sony people said before they got their now worthless but shiny dust-collecting Gamegear v.2 is a source of much amusement to me.
Hardware sales aside, here's a software sale analogy for you: The DS is a big 600 pound olympic weightlifter named bubba with a penchant for violence and a belly full of hooch, the PSP is a skinny 100 pound effeminate white guy. The setting is the HBO series oz.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess would be that any bundle would be with Wii Sports. Which, while it looks interesting isn't in my must-have-worth > $249 list.
Well, FF:CC is more the spiritual heir to Secret of Mana multiplayer(thus far) than anything else. It's the 2nd game in that franchise. Same with Dragon Quest Kenshin(Swords).
Super Mario: Galaxies is the 3rd 3D platforming Mario, Metroid Prime 3 is the 4th 3D metroid, and Zelda: Twilight Princess is the 4th 3D Zelda. At or under the anticipated releases for the other systems, in terms of sequilitis of the modern style(I mean, MGS4 is at what, #10 or something in the Metal Gear Franchise?). All of the Wii titles introduce new control-schemes though, so it may not be fair to clump them in the same category.
Personally, I like sequels, so long as they're good sequels. An example of a franchise gone to the dark side is Megaman(and possibly Viewtiful Joe), not any of the franchises listed above. I mean, yea, Mario is has a lot of games, but the franchise is like "The Godfather"(With sunshine being part 3), and there's nothing wrong with that. A sequel to a game I liked is a good thing, if done well. New stuff is cool too, it replaces the stuff that got a sequel that ended up letting me down.
Now, what I'd really like to see is a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil. Comeon Ubisoft, do it! D'oh, I think I just found the one way to get me to buy a PS3.
I'm guessing a $199 launch, mainly because at that price, there's no thought and no doubt involved in picking it up, I'll simply do it. I will walk up to the clerk and buy one for the Virtual Console alone. And I think Nintendo is gunning for that. I thought the PS3 would launch at $499(check my comment history for just before E3, I nailed it), so... I've got a good track record so far.
Max I see is $249 for the unit + a controller(at which point, all the titles I want they claimed are launch had better be launch). Maybe $299 with two controllers and a game, that's pushing it though.
Anything above $249 for the base system, and no matter how excited I am about it, I simply can't justify the expense. I like what I see so far, but my PC atm is good enough, and $249 is only ok because of how damned expensive the PS3 is going to be. I'd wager dollars to pesos it's going to be $199 or $249 and come out this summer during the duldrum season of gaming(July-ish is my guess).
Go here. Show her the video. Promise to help her with her golf swing.
Failing that, beg or promise to brownbag lunch and squirrel away the savings until it comes out.
Surely the woman is reasonable!
Meh, I'm happy with the diversity of their lineup. Zelda and Metroid are hardly "kiddie." Mario, yea, he's got that disney-esque thing going on, but the gameplay in the games featuring him is normally pretty damn good. In the N64 days, Rare, then a second party, produced Conker, Perfect Dark Zero, and Goldeneye. This generation they had Retro, and brought a lot more anime style stuff over like Fire Emblem. I almost included Silicon Knights here, for the MGS remake and Eternal Darkness but I can't recall if they were second party or third.
The kiddie image is pretty recent actually, mainly due to the Super Mario Sunshine ads and initial color of the Gamecube.
In this upcoming generation, in house they're doing Disaster: Day of Crisis and Project HAMMER in house, with retro doing another Metroid game. Plus anime style stuff like Fire Emblem, and a darker more Ocarina of Time-esque Legend of Zelda. Third party, they have Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles(the first one being the best game in that style since Secret of Mana if you could get past GBA->GCN connectivity costs), and Dragon Quest Kenshin(Swords) in the RPG/anime style. Then of course ubisoft's Red Steel, and EA's Madden 2k6. The token kiddie title is from THQ, a Spongebob game, and then there's the family friendly Mario Galaxies and the lego-styled Wii Sports. Most of the previous ones are launch titles btw(except the two more adult Nintendo first party IIRC).
And then of course we get the best-of stuff from the NES, SNES, Genesis, Turbografx-16, N64, which should be pretty extensive since a lot of that IP isn't used too much anymore(apart from square doing remakes/ports to the GBA), plus the whole gamecube library(which includes things like the Resident Evil series up to 4 anyway).
Further down the line we have stuff like Call of Duty 3. So, it's not like there's a shortage of the stuff, it's mainly image leading to reality over the course of their console lifetime.
I thought Assassin's Creed was hitting the PC as well(I remember reading that somewhere, may be rumor, meh). That would imply an eventual 360 port.
It's a traditional-style ubi game, so, I doubt any exclusivity is permanent.
Yes, I have, and have concluded I lose nothing. I'm not a big realistic racing/rally fan, so no more Gran Turismo isn't a big deal.
If Sony hadn't existed this past generation, we would've lost what? 2 gran turismos, Ico, SoC, and God of War.
If they succeed in continously stealing other company's ideas, and never innovating on their own from a games perspective, we lose everything.
Yea, Sony needs to die. They won't, but they should.
It's not that they took the concept of Live. I wasn't at all upset that 3rd parties and MS hopped on the wireless controller bandwagon after the Wavebird, and I wasn't at all upset about Live clones persay. It's more their history of doing this.
The playstation itself was a joint Nintendo/Sony project for an SNES CD addon. When it fell through they launched their own system.
The original PS controller basically amounted to an SNES controller with extended grips and double the shoulder buttons.
When Nintendo debuted the N64 controller, Sony added in 2 analog sticks, because twice is better. It took until the PS2 for anyone to do anything with it. This is one of their only two contributions, and it wasn't motivated by any gameplay reason. It was motivated by "twice is better."
The PS2 introduced backwards compatibility outside the handheld arena. Score the second thing Sony gave us.
Their first-party titles were all derivative of other dev-houses genre-creations, and had nothing noteworthy until they had the cash and cache to begin absorbing developers like Verant and Polyphony Digital.
The controller they just debutted to try to take the wind out of the Revolution/Wii is a wireless version of a PC gamepad MS debuted years ago, only in a standard dual shock form-factor.
It's not that Sony rips people off, it's that that's pretty much all they do, and if it was up to them we'd never see anything new or evolutionary. They have one success that's not an accidental good side-benny from stealing ideas from the competition, and they've pretty much rode on Nintendo's coattails for the past 14 years.
The playstation brand is a knock-off brand, slightly prettier of course, and they want to charge you a premium for it.
Then you factor in Sony Media, and the fact that they always seem to be calling the shots at big Sony, and torpedoing anything good Sony Electronics comes up with, plus the rootkit fiasco, and it's just not a company I want to financially support. They exemplify everything bad about Japanese corporations. And we're talking about everything percieved as bad about japanese corporations in the 50s.
Ripping off live was bad enough, but ripping off the tilt and motion sensing capabilities? AFTER calling it a gimmick. Comeon. I hope Nintendo and Microsoft have enough patents to bury Sony, because they really, freakin' deserve it. Failing that I hope people are smart enough to go with the leaders and not the followers, but I have little to no faith in that.
At the $500 launch price I thought it was going to be at, it was dead to me anyway, but now I wouldn't take it was half that. I prefer to vote with my dollars in a way that encourages innovation, not me-too copycatting.
You're right, there isn't a relation. The only real impact HD-DVD and Blu-ray will have in games, comes in terms of FMV and audio. Microsoft made the right call imo.
You'll hit a bottleneck(disk access, hdd access, memory, etc.) of some sort before the difference between 9GB and 50GB in a typical game makes any difference in visual quality or length over what we have now. At least in terms of real-time rendered content.
And for movies, well, the difference between 480p and 1080i isn't worth the insane DRM, Hardware and media costs that come with the format change. At least in my mind. I haven't bought an HDTV yet, so I don't need to worry about HDMI and most of the down-rezzing issues of the new formats(for the future, not now, since none of them will use it at first), but still. It's antiquated media interests over technology all over again.
I'll still purchase Nintendo's console at launch, always. Whether it be called wii, shitcock, or revolution("A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"[That'd be the bard, want to argue with one of the most enduring figures of the english language? you lose.]), simply because I like Nintendo's games, and they're both first party(so the console wars are irrelevant[yea, most of the games you want for the PS3 or XBox 360, 3rd party, they can fade away like the wind]), and Nintendo's core fanbase is legion enough to ensure they get made. If you enjoy the first party titles of a company, regardless of my opinion, and you have faith in the fanbase, you buy at launch. Otherwise, the prudent choice is to wait until enough games worth the price of admission crop up. Sega taught me that. People who don't meet those conditions and buy at launch are fools.
Oh, and if I'm going to rebuy my DVD collection, I want a truly future-proof media format. I want a codec that's at the peak quality level of 35mm or even 70mm film. I want what amounts to original film reals, restored, only in a digital format and with the extras that DVD provides. That should do me for 2D, it's the last step until viewing/entertainment technology matures beyond moving pictures. Until then, an upres isn't worth it, just like it wasn't worth it to the general public for laserdisc. The capability is there.
CoD III for the Wii is already confirmed in Activision's trailer for the game(which system the trailer was made on, if any[given activisions penchant for pre-rendered and misleading trailers] I leave up for debate).
So I guess that means it has number 1, number 2 and number 3 all covered. What the hell number 3 is, I leave up to the more imaginative.
Now can we cut out the scatalogical and urine jokes? They're soooo April 2006.
Meh, I'm not happy with it, but a lot of people weren't happy with the name-change from katana to dreamcast, a lot of people thought the playstation sounded like a really kiddy fischer price-style name, the XBox was ridiculous sounding(ala EXXTREEEEMMMEEE teenage bible), Atari 2600(wtf is that?), Famicom, PS2 (phoenetically "piss 2" if you say it fast enough), etc. etc. Step back a bit, and most branding sounds silly.
I don't love the name, but I no longer hate it, and by the time it launches I'm sure I won't care. I do kinda dig the visual aspects of the logo in the name change announcement, it's the vocalization that I'm not a fan of. And I'm over the urine connotation, quite a bit faster than I got over the pronunciation of the french word for yes when I was 13. It's still awkward, but you can see how much the furor has died down already, and it just doesn't bother me anymore. Few people are fans of the name, but not nearly as many are angry about it as they were when it was announced.
If they change it, alright then, but the revolution is not about the name of the console. It's about the features the Wii has and what potential the Wii has to truly revolutionize how we play games. To quote the bard, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." They could name it the Nintendo Shitcock and it wouldn't truly matter to me.
Last time I played 3e, to prove a point, I tricked a bard(by level 6) out so far the only enemies the DM could throw at us had to be lacking the senses of sight, hearing and smell. That was fun. Oh, hostile bandits, here's a joke, take 20, shifted to friendly. Here, listen to some music, bonus from instrument, bonus from feat, etc., etc. shifted from hostile to fanatically loyal. The mechanics for a lot of things are just downright screwy.
It's not cumulative damage from rockets + nigh-unlimited drones that can mount those rockets rigger from SR2 stupid(record damage output, 605,000 20-something above deadly), but it gets up there to White Wolf levels.
Say what you will about 2e, for all of it's flaws, you couldn't bend it over and break it like you can D20. Mainly because the customization aspect from feats and skills wasn't really there. You had to be all creative with what your character did, or luck out on some loot from a DM that wasn't paying attention(IE: Bow of Teleportation + Ring of X-Ray vision + Elven Ranger).
Not knowing the difference between i++ and ++i can mean buggy code, crashes, overflows, etc. It's like forgetting you need to take into account the string termination character when allocating memory, and it's not like it's C-style pointer voodoo either. We're talking order of operations, and it's pretty important.
Well, all TES games are buggy. It goes hand in hand with Bethesda.
And Daggerfall was a lot more ambitious than Oblivion or Morrowind. I wish Oblivion had kept what was good about Morrowind, added in a bit of direction for the main quest, and gone more towards the daggerfall skill/etc. systems.
But hey, always mods, right?
Morrowind? What about daggerfall, ya young whippersnapper?
so then going by your brilliant logic here, people are fools for wanting an Xbox 360 aswell?
At the moment, yes. Or consumer whores(should be johns, but whatever). The only compelling reason to own a 360 atm is Live Arcade or to put off a PC upgrade. Neither is worth the premium they're charging for it at the moment, now in a year or two, I'll pick up a 360 for live and live arcade no matter what Sony does, because MS actually *gasp* innovated, and Sony just ripped them off(as opposed to Nintendo who announced similar things at similar times but didn't gel everything up until later), like they always do.
Or are you one of those people that go "Fuck sony! they always suck!" and that's just it, you just hate sony because they installed a rootkit on your PC without your knowladge?
It's spelled knowledge. But anyway yes, Sony sucks, and I've held this opinion since shortly after my 3rd PS2 broke due to cheap-ass optics. The root-kit being done by Sony Media, who, unless you're ignorant of the past 15 years, call the shots at big Sony, was just another nail into the coffin of condemning them. The only relatively clean console maker atm is Nintendo, and that's relatively, because they haven't misbehaved in the past decade. Hell, until recently with IE7 it even looked like MS had turned over a new leaf.
also where is it said that sony will in fact charge $500 for the ps3? Microsoft was the first one to start charging more then $300 for a system, shouldn't the blame of expensive consoles rest on their shoulders since they proved people were willing topay that much?
Current analyst estimations are at > $500, in the $600-$700 range. Too expensive. PERIOD. When the real-time videos don't significantly exceed the visual ability of my complimentary corporate laptop, and certainly don't significantly exceed a typical viewing arrangement of current gen top of the line stuff(ala RE4) on an SDTV(5 feet, 22-27" screen), it's not worth it. Unfortunately, if enough people succumb to the shiny, I'll have to eventually shell out a shitton of cash for a PS2.5 or XBox 1.5, but hopefully enough people wake up and find more useful things to do with their money.
better yet why aren't you bitching at the people on eBay? You know those nice people (you're probably one of them) who goes out on launch day, buys 3 or 4 systems, comes hom and sets them up for sale on eBay for people to buy at the low low price of $600 starting.
Are you convinently forgeting Gamestop in you "$500 fucking toy" rant? They were charging upto $10,000 for "Package" deals that included all kinds of useless shit, some stores wouldn't even sell people the system UNLESS they had one of these package deals.
Hell yea, if I knew there was demand I'd pull some strings and rape some fanboys out of their cash, they deserve it for being impatient(never done it, but see nothing wrong with it) and foolish(You're a fool to buy a console at launch... PERIOD. The only exception is made for Nintendo, and that's just a slight downward adjustment of the value fool). But neither Sony nor Microsoft nor Nintendo are to blame for that(and they don't profit from it), except for the fact that they failed to meet demand. Or were trying to generate launch hype. But then again, every console sells out at launch(except the 360/Xbox in Japan).
Next time you decide to blame a company because they are charging a huge ammount for a "fucking toy" you should remember to look into other factors aswell.
Which would those be? Oh, you mean trying to foist a media format 95% of the country doesn't have any use for onto us, so they can combat piracy in their media divisions(same thing behind the rootkit)? WOOT! SIGN ME UP! Idiot.
oh and some people might consider that PC you are using a fucking toy that cost you quite a bit (or if you were given it it cost someone else quite a bit).
The IRS would disagree. As a computing profession my laptop or PC are legitimate
McDonalds is using their unfair advantage of selling bad hamburgers to now sell side salads! The world is coming to an end!
Actually McDonalds is selling salads to try to revamp their image away from being "that unhealthy restaurant." Ya know, so they don't get sued like the tobaccy companies and our health-obsessed society can still get 5 kcals from a salad while feeling good and still being obese. Now an appropriate analogy would be Philip Morris(forget the name of the actual parent company atm, starts with an A, owns kraft foods/etc.) coming up with a highly effective cancer treatment/preventative and putting it in cigarettes ala Transmetropolitan.
I only make $28,000 a year.
So sorry. Perhaps you should upskill or move depending upon the situation.
I'm not rich by any means
Don't sell yourself short, in Burundi you could live like a king!
I've owned two HDTVs for quite some time.
To old for HDMI input? If not, you're boned. Find out why in a minute, and join the haters.
No one complained that Sony pushed the DVD format with PS2, so I don't understand why everyone is up in arms about Blu-Ray.
DVD offered considerable advantages over VHS. VHS degrades per play, DVD doesn't. VHS requires rewinding/fastwording, DVD can insta seek. Etc. Etc. All the next gen media types do is up the resolution. Which, apart from view-distance/apparent quality/etc., can still be upped further in the future because it's still not at the resolution of film.
Getting a cheap hi-def player bundled with a great gaming console is a GOOD thing.
Cheap!? $400-$500+ is not cheap. If it hits @ $200, I'll swallow my Sony dislike and buy one, but at the price range we've been seeing speculated($500+), it's just not worth it.
And in case you missed it, if you go HD-DVD you may not get a HD picture because the player can opt to downsample to a lower resolution.
Remember where I said I hope you have HDMI inputs on your HD-TVS? Yea, here's why. They BOTH do this. It's part of the standards. Both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD backers say they won't use this feature(at first), but it's there. In both standards. Because they care about DRM and DVD is getting just too cheap and easy to burn. Plus, if it catches on, the majority of the market(who don't own HDTVs yet), won't get burned. It's all about screwing *YOU* the early adopter. If you're not mad about the rootkit, or MS's predatory practices, you should be mad about that.
Why pay $1,500 for a HD player and not get HD resolutions? I can get a $30 DVD player. That my friend, is evil.
Exactly, why bother? Sony and Microsoft have all the first party appeal of a meth-addict. If we don't buy their new stuff, the 3rd parties will release things for the old stuff or the cheaper, stupidly named, Wii. I'm perfectly happy with DVD, and I've yet to see a next-gen screen shot that looks $300+ for the console and $10+ per game(over my PC which I can write off on my taxes as a work-expense and looks as good if not better) better on a typical setup(being a 24-27" SDTV viewed from 5-6 feet) than the current gen.
You hold to the seperate division "theory" because you're a fool. A company does not leverage a position of strength in one industry to break into another industry out of niceness. They do it to make money for their existing divisions. In Sony's current case, it's using the PS3 to get blu-ray into homes for the DRM advantages this gives to Sony Media.
See a pattern here?
Sony Media repeatedly gimps Sony Electronics.
The playstation itself was originally an SNES-CD addon until the two companies had a falling out, Sony decided to launch it anyway, and the playstation brand owes it's strength to cheaper media costs and the coup that was getting square during the N64/Saturn/PSX era. They've been riding on what Nintendo(who due to not being number one for a while have been rather well-behaved for the past 10 years) taught them ever since. And i wouldn't be surprised if they delayed the PS3 to rip Nintendo off yet again.
You want a PS3 because you're a fool as well. It's produced by a me-too company whose last iota of unrestrained talent faded ages ago, and whose sad fanboys(not fans, apple, nintendo, and star wars have fans, short for fanatic) roam the wilds of the internet acting juvenile and lowering the common denominator. And it's one saving grace atm is that it'll have sequels to games I like on it, with a slightly shinier coating which has thus far completely failed to impress upon me the desire to spend > $500 for a fucking toy.
Revolution Revmote Axis of Control:
Revmote -
Pitch/Yaw
Spin
Forward/Back
Roll
Left/Right
Up/Down
D-Pad -
Left/Right
Up/Down
A Button
B Trigger
Nunchuck -
Left/Right
Up/Down
Dual Triggers
So, 10, plus 4 buttons.
Or 8, plus 8 buttons(depending upon how the d-pad is used)
And Katamari is a pacman derivative(differences = objects instead of pellets, no ghosts, and a different level design), what's your point? That there's nothing truly new under the sun?
And yes, they(Mario themed sports games) are derivative, *EVERYTHING IS* but they take the concept somewhere else. These games bring the rules of a sport into an alternate world and add in stuff not possible within a realistic setting. There used to be quite a bit more of this(Mutant League Football etc.), but Nintendo are pretty much the only ones doing it anymore outside Kart Racers.
It's not Madden. It's baseball, or golf, or soccer set in the Mario universe, and that universe plays by different rules.
And if we're to use the Mario series as a benchmark, just about every modern platformer has it's genesis in that franchise. Every modern 3D platform up to Daxter for the PSP is the same exact game as Mario 64 by your criteria, no one has innovated in something like 10 years because everything is derivative of everything else. Claiming all the Mario games are the same is a downright stupid assertion, because you're nitpicking THEME and STORY, not gameplay, and ignoring gameplay improvements and innovations. It's like me tracing the lineage of any given game back through it's derivations, or going into the whole I'm an english major there are only 50 stories in the wolrd and we keep telling them in different ways rant, it's sophomoric idiocy. Perfect for an internet forum like slashdot where trolling is a sport, but beneath serious contemplation.
You can take issue with the theme, you can take issue with the ever-present general stories found in the main games, but you can't claim they're all the same, because they aren't. Just like Katamari isn't Pacman, Mario X isn't Mario Y, Madden 200X isn't Madden 199Y, etc.
And yea, Katamari wouldn't have been possible without the dual-shock, which wouldn't exist if it weren't for the analog thumbstick on the N64 multiplied by 2 because 2 is twice one. Hell, here, let me make a stupid assertion, sink to that level, almost everything we have in the game market today is either derivative of Nintendo or owes the possibility of it's existance to Nintendo.
I think Sony needs to change their strategy fast or loose ground to Nintendo fast.
In the handheld market? They were up against the juggernaut that is the gameboy, which neither the DS or the PSP have put a dent in, and the PSP is performing poorly compared to the DS.
You have to have ground before you can lose it.
The DS vs. PSP thing and what all the Sony people said before they got their now worthless but shiny dust-collecting Gamegear v.2 is a source of much amusement to me.
To each their own stops when you hit the level of snuff film.
WTF is wrong with you, you anti-social sick fucker?
Hardware sales aside, here's a software sale analogy for you: The DS is a big 600 pound olympic weightlifter named bubba with a penchant for violence and a belly full of hooch, the PSP is a skinny 100 pound effeminate white guy. The setting is the HBO series oz.
Even if you could download, convert them, and/or run them from memory-stick, a lot of PS games are big, filling an entire CD(or more).