Well, in the case of the PSP playing PS games, a lot of them are rather big, full of FMV and CD-audio, so w/o modification they take up a lot of space. You can't casually store a ton of them even on a modern harddrive, much less on any kind of flash media. There also aren't as many classics you'd still play over newer versions in that library as in the one we're talking about(you have a PS2, right? How many PS games do you pop in for a playthrough once a year? The market for this older stuff does that with a large number of titles), and it spans half the time period.
The size of the stuff is the real killer though. You don't typically download and store PS games, you burn them, pop them on a spindle and play them on a modded console, or use the original media. And it's a pain versus the older stuff or N64 everything done in code stuff which is far smaller.
The other killer is that 3D graphics don't age well compared to sprite-based stuff. All the pre-N64/PS/Saturn games look just like you remember them. The initial wow factor of the 3D graphics has long since worn off. Like Quake 2 versus Quake 4. So they look like ass. Personally, I have trouble playing through a lot of the initial 3D-era classics, including FFVII and Ocarina of Time. There are some quirky or just downright awesome games I can play, like Intelligent Cube and Vagrant Story, or Conker, but in my mind the library just isn't as big.
As an example of this, go watch Toy Story. When that movie first came out, it was incredibly impressive. Compare how well it's aged versus some of the older Disney animated film.
The other thing is the PS2 already plays PS and PS2 games, whereas the only way to be completely in the "white" with all this older stuff is to dump the ROM yourself and emulate it. No one does this, we take the grey area of going out and downloading it(obtaining a copy of something we own), or go into the illegal realm and just download it. So now you have a completely legit and relatively easy way to play 20 years of console games, including what's looking to be the entirety of what many consider to be the golden age(SNES/Genesis) because 2D hit a pinacle that's only just now starting to get surpassed with stuff like Viewtiful Joe and apparently the Zelda DS title. This is a big deal. We get 20 years of stuff, plus all the current stuff, plus new stuff.
The catch-22 being that if Sony had never had backwards compat, the PS3 having it would also be a big deal. But right now the PS2 is so ubiquitious that the PS3 playing PS2 and PS1 games just isn't noteworthy, it's expected, and the value of it is less, to me anyway, than what Nintendo is offering.
And the last thing is that the Rev controller is modular, so console-specific shells are pretty much assured. Which means original controller for the original game, something that's been traditionally tough to do outside keeping your old console around.
Re:And Sony wonders why it has problems
on
GDC - Sony Keynote
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· Score: 1
Lieberman, like Hillary Clinton and Rick Santorum, is in the Senate, not Congress.
Not that disproves your point, or validates the grandparent's point but it does prove reading comprehension and civics aren't your strong suit. And if you are one of those afforementioned red-staters, it certainly would back-up the educational statistics placing "y'all" dead last.
Perception of Sony's products... ok, you mean that they're overpriced crap and just about everyone knows this? Even their high-end stuff isn't quality any more. They're like Bose w/o the cache.
And their media empire hasn't been doing so hot lately either.
Basically, the main thing keeping Sony afloat right now is the playstation brand. They are not a healthy company.
Or you could put a quarter of those resources into a platform that's far easier to develop for and wind up with the same result. You know, like the XBox or Gamecube versus the PS2.
The only thing Sony has going for it is inertia, and everyone knows this.
PC games have gotten far less technical than they used to be. Heck, I'd wager a guess I've been playing console and PC games longer than the participants of this >800k UID party thread have been alive.
Somebody forgets the Dreamcast launch and the PS2 launch lead-up.
Sony is the worst offender when it comes to pre-launch hype. It's to the point where I don't believe anything they say anymore until it's in my hands at a store.
Neither Nintendo nor Microsoft have pushed it *that* far.
I'll believe it when I see it. Feature for feature and then some. Right. I have a bridge in NY and some beach front property in Arizona to sell you.
And the Emotion Engine is powering my workstation, Cell will dominate all electronics on the planet, the PSP will kick Nintendo out of the handheld market and beat the iPod in one fell swoop. Yada yada yada. Oh and something about incredible real-time CGI. When it all falls flat on it's face it's going to be whoever bought it's fault for not understanding the awe-inspiring vision that is exuded by the Sony corporation.
Put on your waders boys and girls, stand very still and brace yourself, the Sony people are talking and you wouldn't want to be killed by the bullshit.
Is pretty damn obvious to anyone who has had a priest for a long time.
They nerfed the class entirely too hard pre-release(particularly disc and holy, shadow is fine it just falls into the same pitfalls all other casters do), and now they're hopefully rectifying it.
Very wrong. Dragon Quest 1-4 were put out over here on the NES under the Dragon Warrior brand. We also got Dragon Quest 7 for the Playstation. The only ones that really got skipped were the SNES ones(5 and 6).
Fun Fact, IIRC Dragon Warrior 4 holds the distinction of being the largest NES ROM.
Shrug, it didn't sell well here because most PS2 gamers are nooblets.
I'm presuming they're using an off the shelf router, don't have a radius server set-up, and aren't upgraded to WPA2. Which is a pretty valid assumption, considering everyone who complains about this is complaining about it as it pertains to their home network.
Sigh. The DS has all the standard 802.11(b) hardware but it does not, natively, have anything defined inside it's firmware above level 2 of the OSI model. There's no firmware update to enable Nintendo's internet service.
Everything is done on-cart. To make, say, Mario Kart DS work with WPA would require a recall and re-release of the cartridge. It's not just updating some firmware.
And considering switching from WEP to WPA does more to increase one's feelings of security than it does their actual security(it can be cracked as easily as WEP), it shouldn't be a priority(it's also far more resource intensive than WEP). Either buy the $30 adapter, or disable WPA. Mean internet goblins are not going to leap out of the woods and pwn you, and you're router will work with a far wider variety of devices.
If you cared about security, you wouldn't be using wireless. It can not be secured. WPA has already been broken, anyone that knows what they're doing can tear through it in minutes(as they can WEP). Security in wireless(in terms of access) is about detection and response, not prevention. Security of data in wireless is done at the application level via encryption. Just like it is for everything else.
And if you're using an off-the-shelf-from-best-buy router and are complaining about a lack of WPA support, you're just trying to find a reason to complain. Oh, and probably retarded.
Not using WPA is really not a big deal at ALL. Most people don't even bother with WEP, they just filter by MAC and figure if someone cares enough to break in rather than walk 5 feet towards the nearest starbucks, they can go ahead and use their internet connection.
But if you're really, really, really worried about the lack of WPA support, buy the freakin' $30 USB adapter nintendo put out.
Only the barest handful of those are Sony(SCEA/etc.) games. Unless you have a hard-on for sony, for gods sakes don't buy the shit. Support the companies doing something useful and the third parties will follow. Blue-ray? NOT USEFUL.
WAKE UP! The playstation brand is a poorly architected piece of shit that is only in use today because Square-Enix wanted the extra space and lower royalty costs of CD-based media 10 years ago.
Sigh, the PS generation, wouldn't know quality or the importance of first-party titles if it came up and bit em on the ass. Kids, eh?
Probably not the guy who is posting on a blog, basically citing himself, and rattling off numbers above what Sony themselves have said. Ladies and gentleman, the Sony fan. Take a bow. You're killing the industry and produce nothing of value.
I was wrong earlier btw, it's not 3:1, it's a tad under 2:1(around 1.8:1). A bit under 4 million(3.6) total for the DS since it's launch late 2004, and just over 2 million(2.1) for the PSP launched just outside Q1 of this year. That's just going off NPD funworld, who are generally reliable(except they no not what happens within wal-mart, but then again NO ONE does) and above all agenda free.
Seriously, IGN, Gamespot, NPD, numerous other gaming news sites ALL have similar numbers, and your counter is a guy who happens to work for an insignificant news agency and who is basically citing himself on his blog.
Never as far as I know. Unless they saw enormous(and I mean enormous) sales numbers over the christmas holidays, it's not possible. The DS was leading the PSP by 3:1 going into that.
Why should I replace my DVD collection(some of which are older movies(particularly foreign films) that have been transfered from VHS)? It does it's job, I'm happy with it, it won't degrade. Unless there's an option to transfer my existing media over to a new digital format(as is the case with CD->digital), I'm not biting. I am not rebuying and rewaiting for the plethora of films in my DVD collection to be rereleased at a higher price than I can get them now, just for a higher resolution output, that I probably won't even really notice. Progressive scan is *good* enough.
Sorry, but fuck you Sony. Fuck you with an eight-dicked walrus. I wouldn't have a PS3 if you gave one to me, you produce nothing of value in the gaming industry, and the only value you provide there is bandwagon value. You and yours can go to hell.
Only people that hate gaming and hate themselves buy Sony.
WoW crashes when it gets only a few hundred people doing anything meaningful inside a zone. In total it handles a few thousand people connected to any given server at any given time, with some of those a sizeable portion of those people off-loaded onto other servers via instances most of the time.
In addition, they're well aware of their scaling problems, and have added things in to prevent the type of occurances that caused crashes(City Raids), as well as scaling back the max server populations(hence queues). So not having prepped properly for a World Event of this magnitude, especially given their revenues is inexcusable.
My guess is the situation at blizzard is the following: Most of the core devs went onto other projects Like most MMOs their network code is laughable. Their code doesn't parallellize well, so they can't just toss more hardware at the problem They can't fix the above without a drastic redesign, and by the time they did that it would probably cease to matter.
And yes, it's doable, I've seen MUDs/MUSHs written as hobbies that handled several hundred concurrent users on hardware from the mid-90s. An MMO doesn't push *that* much more traffic than a text-game that saturates a 56k connection(as many did), and it certainly doesn't do many more back-end calculations. Considering how much hardware has scaled and how much further we've gotten in various areas, there just isn't any excuse for several hundred people in a single world-segment causing the server(not the client) to go OMG and crap out.
No web-based business craps out under that kind of traffic. How to cope with it is well-known at this point. I mean shit, this is the type of crap DIKU's massive list of socket descriptors did under load, and that was written over 10 years ago!
Imagine a phone switch doing this! That's tech from the 70s that handles waaayyyy more traffic than one of blizzard's servers. Google easily copes with orders of magnitude more traffic every moment of every day, and holds up like a champ. Stop being an apologist for a drastic lack of planning and poor engineering.
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The PS2 has PS1 hardware in it, for I/O processing IIRC. There's not really any emulation involved.
Well, in the case of the PSP playing PS games, a lot of them are rather big, full of FMV and CD-audio, so w/o modification they take up a lot of space. You can't casually store a ton of them even on a modern harddrive, much less on any kind of flash media. There also aren't as many classics you'd still play over newer versions in that library as in the one we're talking about(you have a PS2, right? How many PS games do you pop in for a playthrough once a year? The market for this older stuff does that with a large number of titles), and it spans half the time period.
The size of the stuff is the real killer though. You don't typically download and store PS games, you burn them, pop them on a spindle and play them on a modded console, or use the original media. And it's a pain versus the older stuff or N64 everything done in code stuff which is far smaller.
The other killer is that 3D graphics don't age well compared to sprite-based stuff. All the pre-N64/PS/Saturn games look just like you remember them. The initial wow factor of the 3D graphics has long since worn off. Like Quake 2 versus Quake 4. So they look like ass. Personally, I have trouble playing through a lot of the initial 3D-era classics, including FFVII and Ocarina of Time. There are some quirky or just downright awesome games I can play, like Intelligent Cube and Vagrant Story, or Conker, but in my mind the library just isn't as big.
As an example of this, go watch Toy Story. When that movie first came out, it was incredibly impressive. Compare how well it's aged versus some of the older Disney animated film.
The other thing is the PS2 already plays PS and PS2 games, whereas the only way to be completely in the "white" with all this older stuff is to dump the ROM yourself and emulate it. No one does this, we take the grey area of going out and downloading it(obtaining a copy of something we own), or go into the illegal realm and just download it. So now you have a completely legit and relatively easy way to play 20 years of console games, including what's looking to be the entirety of what many consider to be the golden age(SNES/Genesis) because 2D hit a pinacle that's only just now starting to get surpassed with stuff like Viewtiful Joe and apparently the Zelda DS title. This is a big deal. We get 20 years of stuff, plus all the current stuff, plus new stuff.
The catch-22 being that if Sony had never had backwards compat, the PS3 having it would also be a big deal. But right now the PS2 is so ubiquitious that the PS3 playing PS2 and PS1 games just isn't noteworthy, it's expected, and the value of it is less, to me anyway, than what Nintendo is offering.
And the last thing is that the Rev controller is modular, so console-specific shells are pretty much assured. Which means original controller for the original game, something that's been traditionally tough to do outside keeping your old console around.
Lieberman, like Hillary Clinton and Rick Santorum, is in the Senate, not Congress.
Not that disproves your point, or validates the grandparent's point but it does prove reading comprehension and civics aren't your strong suit. And if you are one of those afforementioned red-staters, it certainly would back-up the educational statistics placing "y'all" dead last.
I didn't say they were dying, I said they weren't very healthy. You can go look over their quarterlies if you want. It's an absolutely true statement.
Perception of Sony's products... ok, you mean that they're overpriced crap and just about everyone knows this? Even their high-end stuff isn't quality any more. They're like Bose w/o the cache.
And their media empire hasn't been doing so hot lately either.
Basically, the main thing keeping Sony afloat right now is the playstation brand. They are not a healthy company.
Or you could put a quarter of those resources into a platform that's far easier to develop for and wind up with the same result. You know, like the XBox or Gamecube versus the PS2.
The only thing Sony has going for it is inertia, and everyone knows this.
Ehh, I prefer the old way.
Snap a shot of your screen with an actual camera, send it into a magazine, are in the top X and it gets published.
Or arcades. There's no real achievement here. It's more like Ikaruga's web-codes than anything else.
that get posted to the front page of slashdot.
In other news, earth is round.
PC games have gotten far less technical than they used to be. Heck, I'd wager a guess I've been playing console and PC games longer than the participants of this >800k UID party thread have been alive.
You do realize that Katamari Damacy is pac-man with a twist right?
Somebody forgets the Dreamcast launch and the PS2 launch lead-up.
Sony is the worst offender when it comes to pre-launch hype. It's to the point where I don't believe anything they say anymore until it's in my hands at a store.
Neither Nintendo nor Microsoft have pushed it *that* far.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Until then I'm working under the impression that the PS3 will be as disappointing as the PS2, it's one positive quality being sheer market inertia.
Only a fool or an idiot believes what Sony says during their pre-launch period.
There's no need for prejudice.
I'll believe it when I see it. Feature for feature and then some. Right. I have a bridge in NY and some beach front property in Arizona to sell you.
And the Emotion Engine is powering my workstation, Cell will dominate all electronics on the planet, the PSP will kick Nintendo out of the handheld market and beat the iPod in one fell swoop. Yada yada yada. Oh and something about incredible real-time CGI. When it all falls flat on it's face it's going to be whoever bought it's fault for not understanding the awe-inspiring vision that is exuded by the Sony corporation.
Put on your waders boys and girls, stand very still and brace yourself, the Sony people are talking and you wouldn't want to be killed by the bullshit.
Is pretty damn obvious to anyone who has had a priest for a long time.
They nerfed the class entirely too hard pre-release(particularly disc and holy, shadow is fine it just falls into the same pitfalls all other casters do), and now they're hopefully rectifying it.
Very wrong. Dragon Quest 1-4 were put out over here on the NES under the Dragon Warrior brand. We also got Dragon Quest 7 for the Playstation. The only ones that really got skipped were the SNES ones(5 and 6).
Fun Fact, IIRC Dragon Warrior 4 holds the distinction of being the largest NES ROM.
Shrug, it didn't sell well here because most PS2 gamers are nooblets.
I'm presuming they're using an off the shelf router, don't have a radius server set-up, and aren't upgraded to WPA2. Which is a pretty valid assumption, considering everyone who complains about this is complaining about it as it pertains to their home network.
Sigh. The DS has all the standard 802.11(b) hardware but it does not, natively, have anything defined inside it's firmware above level 2 of the OSI model. There's no firmware update to enable Nintendo's internet service.
Everything is done on-cart. To make, say, Mario Kart DS work with WPA would require a recall and re-release of the cartridge. It's not just updating some firmware.
And considering switching from WEP to WPA does more to increase one's feelings of security than it does their actual security(it can be cracked as easily as WEP), it shouldn't be a priority(it's also far more resource intensive than WEP). Either buy the $30 adapter, or disable WPA. Mean internet goblins are not going to leap out of the woods and pwn you, and you're router will work with a far wider variety of devices.
If you cared about security, you wouldn't be using wireless. It can not be secured. WPA has already been broken, anyone that knows what they're doing can tear through it in minutes(as they can WEP). Security in wireless(in terms of access) is about detection and response, not prevention. Security of data in wireless is done at the application level via encryption. Just like it is for everything else.
And if you're using an off-the-shelf-from-best-buy router and are complaining about a lack of WPA support, you're just trying to find a reason to complain. Oh, and probably retarded.
Not using WPA is really not a big deal at ALL. Most people don't even bother with WEP, they just filter by MAC and figure if someone cares enough to break in rather than walk 5 feet towards the nearest starbucks, they can go ahead and use their internet connection.
But if you're really, really, really worried about the lack of WPA support, buy the freakin' $30 USB adapter nintendo put out.
Only the barest handful of those are Sony(SCEA/etc.) games. Unless you have a hard-on for sony, for gods sakes don't buy the shit. Support the companies doing something useful and the third parties will follow. Blue-ray? NOT USEFUL.
WAKE UP! The playstation brand is a poorly architected piece of shit that is only in use today because Square-Enix wanted the extra space and lower royalty costs of CD-based media 10 years ago.
Sigh, the PS generation, wouldn't know quality or the importance of first-party titles if it came up and bit em on the ass. Kids, eh?
Probably not the guy who is posting on a blog, basically citing himself, and rattling off numbers above what Sony themselves have said. Ladies and gentleman, the Sony fan. Take a bow. You're killing the industry and produce nothing of value.
I was wrong earlier btw, it's not 3:1, it's a tad under 2:1(around 1.8:1). A bit under 4 million(3.6) total for the DS since it's launch late 2004, and just over 2 million(2.1) for the PSP launched just outside Q1 of this year. That's just going off NPD funworld, who are generally reliable(except they no not what happens within wal-mart, but then again NO ONE does) and above all agenda free.
Seriously, IGN, Gamespot, NPD, numerous other gaming news sites ALL have similar numbers, and your counter is a guy who happens to work for an insignificant news agency and who is basically citing himself on his blog.
Never as far as I know. Unless they saw enormous(and I mean enormous) sales numbers over the christmas holidays, it's not possible. The DS was leading the PSP by 3:1 going into that.
Why should I replace my DVD collection(some of which are older movies(particularly foreign films) that have been transfered from VHS)? It does it's job, I'm happy with it, it won't degrade. Unless there's an option to transfer my existing media over to a new digital format(as is the case with CD->digital), I'm not biting. I am not rebuying and rewaiting for the plethora of films in my DVD collection to be rereleased at a higher price than I can get them now, just for a higher resolution output, that I probably won't even really notice. Progressive scan is *good* enough.
Sorry, but fuck you Sony. Fuck you with an eight-dicked walrus. I wouldn't have a PS3 if you gave one to me, you produce nothing of value in the gaming industry, and the only value you provide there is bandwagon value. You and yours can go to hell.
Only people that hate gaming and hate themselves buy Sony.
WoW crashes when it gets only a few hundred people doing anything meaningful inside a zone. In total it handles a few thousand people connected to any given server at any given time, with some of those a sizeable portion of those people off-loaded onto other servers via instances most of the time.
In addition, they're well aware of their scaling problems, and have added things in to prevent the type of occurances that caused crashes(City Raids), as well as scaling back the max server populations(hence queues). So not having prepped properly for a World Event of this magnitude, especially given their revenues is inexcusable.
My guess is the situation at blizzard is the following:
Most of the core devs went onto other projects
Like most MMOs their network code is laughable.
Their code doesn't parallellize well, so they can't just toss more hardware at the problem
They can't fix the above without a drastic redesign, and by the time they did that it would probably cease to matter.
And yes, it's doable, I've seen MUDs/MUSHs written as hobbies that handled several hundred concurrent users on hardware from the mid-90s. An MMO doesn't push *that* much more traffic than a text-game that saturates a 56k connection(as many did), and it certainly doesn't do many more back-end calculations. Considering how much hardware has scaled and how much further we've gotten in various areas, there just isn't any excuse for several hundred people in a single world-segment causing the server(not the client) to go OMG and crap out.
No web-based business craps out under that kind of traffic. How to cope with it is well-known at this point. I mean shit, this is the type of crap DIKU's massive list of socket descriptors did under load, and that was written over 10 years ago!
Imagine a phone switch doing this! That's tech from the 70s that handles waaayyyy more traffic than one of blizzard's servers. Google easily copes with orders of magnitude more traffic every moment of every day, and holds up like a champ. Stop being an apologist for a drastic lack of planning and poor engineering.
PCs decompress things onto the HDD during the installation process.
Can't do that on a 360, a HDD isn't standard.