It is, I think, impossible for a game to be art, in the abstract sense we're talking about. Entirely because of the nature of the media. It's interactive. When you think about great works of art, and the genres where they dwell, they're all passive(film, painting, literature, theatre, etc.). This is the craft of blah blah blah, enjoy.
Games are more like being given a costume and shoved up on stage. The costume can be great, but the experience, and any artistry beyond the crafting of that costume, comes from the person wearing it. And it can change from instance to instance. When people rant and rave about a game, do they typically go on about the game, or their own accomplishments within it's framework?
Then of course, in another sense, all games are art. All crafts are, even fishing. But that's not what we're talking about here, and not what Ebert is talking about.
Yea, it'll be my first non-inflamatory JE in a while too, unless I dig up the link to target's typoed $99 DS advert. Which they're supposedly honoring if you can show them a copy of it. And if they don't circuit-city/the other price-matching places will.
Yea, they were $20. It was part of a big retro-kick. You could buy an NES themed GBA and then NES games on it(in approximations of the original packaging). The packaging thing was directed at a specific audience, and they actually bought the things at the $20 price point. With a ROM download, you don't get the pretty packaging, so you can't charge as much for it.
They frequently use older-games as a value add. Ala Metroid with Prime/Fusion. Punch Out in Fight Night. All of the NES titles in Animal Crossing. They also gave out all of the Zeldas bar Link to the Past and Wind Waker for free with a Gamecube at one point.
I(and I'm not sure if I'm alone on this) view these ROM downloads as a value-add, not an additionally significant revenue source, and I'm sure Nintendo does so as well. So I would expect them to price them at a pretty sweet spot. Free - $5 depending upon the game for NES titles. The majority(not stuff like Super Mario 1-3 and Legend of Zelda) between $1-$2. And third parties charging their own amount, probably something similar, with product-tie ins when you nab a title. Get Metroid Prime 3? Get Super Metroid and Metroid for free. Stuff like that.
Atari was huge. Over it's lifetime the Atari 2600 shipped a total of 25 million units. That's hardly a nascent market. From 1979-1982 their sales consistantly doubled every year. They made headlines. They had mainstream bands named after them. They were un-fucking stoppable. It was the second major era of consoles(we're now in the third) and it was hardly a nascent market.
Then, the crash hit in '83. Perception swung from there's no end to the video game boom to the boom has busted almost overnight. To think it can't happen again is incredibly naive. The influx of new gamers has slowed, while what new gamers there are play games less. Penetration remains at the same level it was when the NES recreated the market. And Sony/MS are set to largely follow Atari's model in the upcoming slugfest.
Read the article. It's dead on with it's parallels, and they do exist.
Nintendo, remember, the company that recreated the market you probably enjoy(and to which every non-PC gamer owes a life-debt to as a result), and has been in it the longest has been wary of this. They've been harping on this for a while, particularly about Japan. That's why they're going into this wierd new place with the rev. Even MS has sensed this and opened up a form of home/indy brew for the 360. It may not be enough.
Sony can not afford to lose this console generation. It would more than likely sink the company firmly into the red. Add into this that you'd have to be a fool to buy the PS3 at launch, and things don't look so rosy for our favorite shitty hardware outsourcing to china at war-with-itself corporation.
Or maybe I'm just bitter that I blew threw 3 PS2s in 3 years.
I uhh, never said they made more. The assertion(which is correct btw) is that Sony in no way made between 4 and 7.5 billion dollars(the amount of liquid assets Nintendo possesses) more than Nintendo did this generation. They didn't. Not even close.
Ehh... I think they'd be best off doing a PAL convert on the US localization for the UK/Australia, while keeping the rest of Europe on the longer schedule. You crazy Europeans and your different standards for everything.
Simultaneous release outside that simply isn't going to happen w/o significant delays to US/Japanese releases solely to do that. When hitting the US/Japan they only need to localize for 2 cultures/languages. There are how many languages/dialects in Europe? And how many major languages for a similarly sized population? And how many different cultures/nations/laws?
Uhh no. You are VERY, VERY wrong. The differences in net profit(the figure that matters) between Nintendo(as a company) and Sony(as a company, all divisions) have been within 10-20 billion yen(within around $100 million at today's exchange rates) for this entire generation. Sony's operation isn't nearly as streamlined as Nintendo's, they make more money, but they spend a lot more money as well.
At that difference, it would take sony several decades to out-profit Nintendo's multi-billion dollar warchest.
Nintendo may take a games-centric as opposed to platform-centric approach almost all of the time, and that's why a lot of us like what they churn out, but they're still a business. They make sound business decisions, and they almost always make a profit because of that.
So let's be honest, sending the GCN off with a bang via Twilight Princess is being done as much to up the value-addedness of the rev's backwards compatability as it is being done out of any customer loyalty towards cube purchasers.
It's wrong to say it's more powerful than the XBox, it's as powerful as the XBox(at least as far as results not theory). I think the best looking cube game I've seen edges out the best looking XBox game I've seen, but the two systems have roughly comparable results in the whiz-bang graphic category, and both have load times drastically better than the PS2(for different reasons). Go fig.
Both systems are FAR better performing than the PS2 tho.
Nvidia v. ATI flameware ensure. Since each company does different things better that's basically what you're doing when you stack the XBox's graphics up against the Cube's.
1.-Even if all the ways of gameplay shown in the revolution trailer worked (most of them are just theories) it will still be tiresome trial and error before developers would (if ever) get those right and make them fun as well, meanwhile they will feel and play like experiments.
This is coming from the company that either invented or contributed something substantial to every single genre currently in existance. They perfected the 3D platformer formula for example. If any company can pull off a control change seemlessly, it's Nintendo.
2.-ITS JUST A CONTROLLER, how difficult is it for a peripheral like this to be made for the PC, the PS2 or the xbox? legally all they would have to do is to use another method for getting the signal and they wouldnt be violating the patent.
The big, and I mean the BIG patents are held by a company called Gyration. They make the low-power, small gyro/accelerometer that is in the rev controller and hold a shit ton of patents on that tech. Nintendo licensed it exclusively. Don't count on this coming anywhere else in the home console realm while those agreements are in place, it's NOT GONNA HAPPEN. For the PC OTOH, guess what, Gyration makes something very similar to the rev controller that you can already purchase. It's a mouse/wand for presenting. Kinda cool actually.
You would have to do a wand in a completely different way. Which means R&D to work out the kinks if you can even pull it off. It's not as simple as going hey cool idea and ramping up the factories to churn out clones. You have to get around the licensing of those patents in some way first.
Consider the following: Nintendo was the only company that made a true d-pad for the duration of their patent. They got burnt by Sony badly when they revealed the analog stick on the N64. If it's possible to patent or license enough patents to prevent easy copying, they've done it.
3.-It has already been done, the DS has two screens and an stylus for control, a nice novelty yes, did it changed portable gaming forever? NO, not even in the very DS the 2 screens or the stylus are not used in a significant way in most games, I mean seriously how important is to scribble spells in Castlevania to make it enjoyable? how much do you need to check the map all the time? wouldnt be the same to have a transparent overlay on top?
Yes, I can safely say it has had an impact on portable gaming now. Not every game takes full advantage of the DS featureset(Castlevania for example), but those that do are certainly novel experiences. From Pheonix Wright/Trauma Center to Kirby: Canvas Curse/Mario 64 DS Minigames/Feel the Magic to the upcoming Metroid Prime Hunters. Oh, and Nintendogs. The only other platform that those games could've come to would be the PC(because of the screen-estate and pointer interface), and PCs aren't handhelds.
The touch screen is a huge thing, and it wouldn't work for many of these games nearly as well if the system didn't also have the top screen. IE: The way Hunters approximates Mouse/Keyboard control.
Reduce the console price with the same components than competition. (a cheap ps3? count me in!)
So, clone the PS3 and sell it for an enormous loss. What excellent business. Not going to happen, and it's a stupid suggestion. If you want a PS3, buy a PS3. I'd grab a 360 first because of Live, Live Arcade and a far better hardware track record personally, but do what you want.
Cater a lot more for third party developers specially for adult/teen market. (can I play the latest GTA or FPS in it? no not halo , but at least battlefield would be nice)
Not what they're shooting for. They're not going to go balls-out against MS/Sony for that specific market, which in the case of the FPS, MS dominates due to providing the Windows platform where those games are currently BEST played(although the rev controller may change that assessment). If you need current-gen style "mature" games there will be two platfo
My launch PS2 died about 1 year in, fixed it, died again about 2 months later. My 2nd PS2 got stolen out of my appt, was replaced via renters with a 3rd which broke the same way the first did in about the same amount of time. Then I swore off on the Sony brand. I may be a smoker and thus tough on optics, but that's too much. Out of everyone I personally know who had a PS2, only one of them has a launch unit that still works for PS2 games, and it recently stopped playing DVDs. Many of those who didn't get a launch unit started getting disc read errors about 2 years in and trashed the thing rather than fixing it. Most of them went to the XBox when that happened and aren't going back.
The only launch unit I'll buy at this point is from Nintendo(which isn't what I did with the gamecube post-64, I didn't pick my cube up until Metroid came out). And that's because they have a good track record there, always hit a cheap price point, and I like their first party titles.
I'm waiting on the 360, but if I need to have an upgraded current-gen experience, it's definately where I'm going to. Mainly because of the online marketplace and Live.
As for market not allowing a 2 generation dominance, can you name an instance where there were two MAJOR companies, with cash resources from other divisions, were involved? I own all 3 major consoles now, and I'll eventually buy all three again.
It's not about cash. It's about botching things, as Sony is botching online play and online marketplaces. If Nintendo for example had had an optical drive on the N64 and hadn't charged ridiculous licensing costs for making carts they wouldn't have lost the devs they did to Sony and the playstation wouldn't have been the success that it was.
The input device is modular. They're coming out with a standard controller shell for it, and there doesn't seem to be stopping any third parties from making their own shells. Developers can use the wand in one of it's configurations, use two wands, use one of the standard shells or even roll out their own. All of them having access to the 6-axis information the controller spits out.
So you can get arcade style experiences out of it, or the standard console experience, or something new. The modularity of the new controller, for this reason, excites me as much as any new control methods. And since the electronics for a shell are relatively cheap and the dev costs for the rev expected to be closer to the gamecube than the PS3/XBox 360, they can probably even bundle em in w/o upping the game price. Perfect controls(and user-selectable layouts) for any game that goes for that option.
Heh. Capcom/etc. did not make the games they did because they were bribed. Had then been bribed(ala an exclusivity contract), they couldn't have put those games onto the PS2. The gamecube is a far superior bit of hardware in every way bar marketshare to the PS2. It's easier to work with, it's more powerful, and it has a better devkit.
Oh, and the gamecube had just about every genre covered and Nintendo themselves cover a wide variety of genres 1st party. Whether or not you can get past them frequently using their branding characters aside.
Ahem. EQ did come out for the PS2 as EQ online adventures. As did FFXI, which allows you to play with PC counterparts.
You were saying it's tough to equal live on the PC. It's not, the PC is and will always be better. The PC model and Sony's model aren't really comparable tho, because you can always use third party software to make up for any lack of features when you use a PC(I gave examples). Can't do that on the PS. You get what they give you. And that's why having a standard decent package is better for consoles.
SEGA also had the extremely short release cycle, half-supported add-ons, and what seemed like an allergy to money in what they let come over here(especially with the Saturn). They burnt their fans time after time again post-genesis, and there just weren't enough people left willing to trust them with the Dreamcast. Plus the Sony hype machine, which isn't going to work on gamers this time.
Until I see actual gameplay footage, I'm going on the assumption that the PS3 is the weakest system. Until it's been out for the year, I'm going on the assumption it's going to break at the drop of a hat like 2 of my PS2s did.
There were/are Dreamcast games that look better than most PS2 games, and the dreamcast predates the PS2. Sony is absolutely AWFUL in putting together a devkit that lets devs get anywhere near peak power out of their systems. And I haven't heard anything different about the PS3. If the gamecube(as an example) had had the same install base as the PS2 most if not all of the exclusives of this generation would've gone there precisely because of how badly Sony botched their devtools.
I agree on Live. It's an enormous mistake that it's not free. And I agree that MS is probably jumping the gun by at least a few months in order to make release for the holiday season.
The unified architecture isn't necessary on the PC because you can make up for any failures in support via 3rd party programs. You can use XFire to get a unified Live style friends list. You can use vent/TS for voice communication, and you can always set up your own servers. By comparison, you don't have that level of freedom on a console, so a unified service ala live is preferable. PS2 online support was like Mac gaming, you had 2 or 3 titles that did it well, and the rest didn't.
I disagree, for a number of reasons. The number of customers Sony alienated by making poor hardware is large and their response was slow and poor. The PSP, despite them leveraging the success of the PS2 to get developer support on it, hasn't taken off and a number of people feel they got burnt on it. I'm additionally certain that a number of core devs have lost money by supporting it, due to dismal game sales in their home region, and are probably bitter that they got pushed into it. The market has also traditionally not allowed a single company to maintain dominance for more than 2 generations. Sony also has weak 1st party development, so it doesn't take a lot of dev departures to sink them. The game is Sony's to lose, and I can't think of anything they're doing to keep from losing it.
Wha? Is english not your first language or something?
If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.
Nintendo is appealing to older gamers. For one, they're offering their back-catalog for download onto the rev. That has enormous appeal. Secondly, they're offering a new control scheme for all the people that want something new. Third, they're coming it at a lower price point. Fourth, they have gamecube backwards compat for all the great games you may have missed.
That same strategy(- the downloads) is certainly working quite well in the DS vs. PSP war.
- average Joe to play. No dice with PC games Raiding guilds in MMOs say differently.
- having a universal friends system. (I don't see that on the PC. And don't say GameSpy. POS) XFire. Been in use for ages. Free and works well.
- having universal voice chat. How many different voice chats do you have on the PC? A few, Ventrillo/Teamspeak being the two big ones. A lot of games are coming with comms built in tho(ALA Civ 4). Your friends/guild-members/clanmates will standardize on one of them.
- Micropayments for content. Content/mods on the PC are generally FREE.
- Authenticated content only. Let me just say goatse.... Yea and let me just say "mexican jewlizard" and verbal abuse in live. Griefers will grief regardless of authentication.
Live has a lot over the PS2's system, but it doesn't have much over the PC(at least worth paying for).
I agree. Sony is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Nintendo has the new modular wand controller, free online service, an online marketplace which includes their back catalog, and a far superior history of 1st party titles. (Additionally, their hardware is better suited to things like AI than either Sony or MSes, more cache, better branch prediction, etc.)
Microsoft has live, an online marketplace, and excellent relations with PC developers as well as strong 1st party development. Their main problem is Japan.
Both have awesome devkits(which you'd expect from two companies that have been doing software development since the 70s). Nintendo pulls ahead a *bit* here because they don't have the HD requirement so it will be cheaper to make games for the rev.
Sony has an un-unified online model, a devkit as bad as the PS2s, a bataran controller, and supposedly "better" specs. Downside is a lot of people have developed a hatred of them because their hardware is as breakable as a cracked egg.
All MS and Nintendo really need to do to put the nails in the coffin is woo Square-Enix off the PS3.
I'm waiting a bit to see how things pan out, but it's really looking like I'll wind up with a 360 and a Rev by this time next year.
It did not pioneer it's control scheme(Goldeneye effectively used the same one, WASD via C-buttons and aiming via analog stick). It was not highly-anticipated(It went from being a 3rd person thing to an FPS somewhere along the line, and when MS bought Bungie a lot of the Mac crowd that HAD been anticipating the title got upset). In fact, a lot of people dimissed it, especially the single player(oh, so I see, it's an alien scheme to bore me into suicide by making every single level look the same), even Penny Arcade. And additionally, there wasn't anything really groundbreaking, revolutionary or new about it, bar ONE thing which I'll hit in a minute.
What made Halo what it was? The LAN play. It was the first console FPS with a decent and tight-enough control scheme that could be played over LAN on multiple TVs with the barebones hardware and a hub. Everything came together and the LAN crowd ATE it up, and since it was a console, so did a large portion of the general public.
Heh. This is japan, where everywhere has the land value of manhattan(or more) and space is at a premium. Plus, a 360 is only $400. Living anywhere in the US where cost is high and space is low, that's peanuts compared to what your rent would be.
There are numerous reasons why a good month for the XBox in Japan was 4-digit sales figures, and size was one of them.
Use Famitsu ratings. They've only given 5 games a perfect score since 1986: Nintendogs, Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker, Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time, Vagrant Story, Soul Calibur.
4 reviewers have to each rate a game perfectly for that to occur. Wind Waker is probably a bit because of fanboyism, but the rest really are "perfect."
It doesn't really matter unless you're hitting someone up for something sexual. That's the nature of it, anonymous, with handles designed solely to put continuity into the communication. We're all just text, judged solely by what we say.
But yea, there are girls on the internet, girls on slashdot, girls in WoW. There seems to be a minority of them that identify themselves as such, but hey, that goes for everything: gender, race, religion, etc.
It rarely matters. I've been the only guy in guilds/clans, one of a handful, one of many, etc. Never find this out or really care until enough bonds have formed through the anonymity to actually give a rats ass about the other's actual real life personas.
And of course, the internet is also populated mostly by people that use the anonymity to be jackasses. Post your pics! Mexican Jewlizard! yada yada. You get to see people as they are, socially, with basically no consequences or prejudgements.
It's a wild, wild place, and we likes it like that.
Slashdot Mirror
It is, I think, impossible for a game to be art, in the abstract sense we're talking about. Entirely because of the nature of the media. It's interactive. When you think about great works of art, and the genres where they dwell, they're all passive(film, painting, literature, theatre, etc.). This is the craft of blah blah blah, enjoy.
Games are more like being given a costume and shoved up on stage. The costume can be great, but the experience, and any artistry beyond the crafting of that costume, comes from the person wearing it. And it can change from instance to instance. When people rant and rave about a game, do they typically go on about the game, or their own accomplishments within it's framework?
Then of course, in another sense, all games are art. All crafts are, even fishing. But that's not what we're talking about here, and not what Ebert is talking about.
Yea, it'll be my first non-inflamatory JE in a while too, unless I dig up the link to target's typoed $99 DS advert. Which they're supposedly honoring if you can show them a copy of it. And if they don't circuit-city/the other price-matching places will.
Yea, they were $20. It was part of a big retro-kick. You could buy an NES themed GBA and then NES games on it(in approximations of the original packaging). The packaging thing was directed at a specific audience, and they actually bought the things at the $20 price point. With a ROM download, you don't get the pretty packaging, so you can't charge as much for it.
They frequently use older-games as a value add. Ala Metroid with Prime/Fusion. Punch Out in Fight Night. All of the NES titles in Animal Crossing. They also gave out all of the Zeldas bar Link to the Past and Wind Waker for free with a Gamecube at one point.
I(and I'm not sure if I'm alone on this) view these ROM downloads as a value-add, not an additionally significant revenue source, and I'm sure Nintendo does so as well. So I would expect them to price them at a pretty sweet spot. Free - $5 depending upon the game for NES titles. The majority(not stuff like Super Mario 1-3 and Legend of Zelda) between $1-$2. And third parties charging their own amount, probably something similar, with product-tie ins when you nab a title. Get Metroid Prime 3? Get Super Metroid and Metroid for free. Stuff like that.
Atari was huge. Over it's lifetime the Atari 2600 shipped a total of 25 million units. That's hardly a nascent market. From 1979-1982 their sales consistantly doubled every year. They made headlines. They had mainstream bands named after them. They were un-fucking stoppable. It was the second major era of consoles(we're now in the third) and it was hardly a nascent market.
Then, the crash hit in '83. Perception swung from there's no end to the video game boom to the boom has busted almost overnight. To think it can't happen again is incredibly naive. The influx of new gamers has slowed, while what new gamers there are play games less. Penetration remains at the same level it was when the NES recreated the market. And Sony/MS are set to largely follow Atari's model in the upcoming slugfest.
Read the article. It's dead on with it's parallels, and they do exist.
Nintendo, remember, the company that recreated the market you probably enjoy(and to which every non-PC gamer owes a life-debt to as a result), and has been in it the longest has been wary of this. They've been harping on this for a while, particularly about Japan. That's why they're going into this wierd new place with the rev. Even MS has sensed this and opened up a form of home/indy brew for the 360. It may not be enough.
I haven't picked up mario kart yet, I'll post a JE with my friend code in it when I do.
And live!? Jebus man, hop over to the PC and use Teamspeak or Vent or one of the voice comm programs there.
Just a smoker with oil heat. Hell on optics.
Sony can not afford to lose this console generation. It would more than likely sink the company firmly into the red. Add into this that you'd have to be a fool to buy the PS3 at launch, and things don't look so rosy for our favorite shitty hardware outsourcing to china at war-with-itself corporation.
Or maybe I'm just bitter that I blew threw 3 PS2s in 3 years.
I uhh, never said they made more. The assertion(which is correct btw) is that Sony in no way made between 4 and 7.5 billion dollars(the amount of liquid assets Nintendo possesses) more than Nintendo did this generation. They didn't. Not even close.
Ehh... I think they'd be best off doing a PAL convert on the US localization for the UK/Australia, while keeping the rest of Europe on the longer schedule. You crazy Europeans and your different standards for everything.
Simultaneous release outside that simply isn't going to happen w/o significant delays to US/Japanese releases solely to do that. When hitting the US/Japan they only need to localize for 2 cultures/languages. There are how many languages/dialects in Europe? And how many major languages for a similarly sized population? And how many different cultures/nations/laws?
Uhh no. You are VERY, VERY wrong. The differences in net profit(the figure that matters) between Nintendo(as a company) and Sony(as a company, all divisions) have been within 10-20 billion yen(within around $100 million at today's exchange rates) for this entire generation. Sony's operation isn't nearly as streamlined as Nintendo's, they make more money, but they spend a lot more money as well.
At that difference, it would take sony several decades to out-profit Nintendo's multi-billion dollar warchest.
Nintendo may take a games-centric as opposed to platform-centric approach almost all of the time, and that's why a lot of us like what they churn out, but they're still a business. They make sound business decisions, and they almost always make a profit because of that.
So let's be honest, sending the GCN off with a bang via Twilight Princess is being done as much to up the value-addedness of the rev's backwards compatability as it is being done out of any customer loyalty towards cube purchasers.
Yea, yea, yea. Can't play DVDs. Not a big deal.
It's wrong to say it's more powerful than the XBox, it's as powerful as the XBox(at least as far as results not theory). I think the best looking cube game I've seen edges out the best looking XBox game I've seen, but the two systems have roughly comparable results in the whiz-bang graphic category, and both have load times drastically better than the PS2(for different reasons). Go fig.
Both systems are FAR better performing than the PS2 tho.
Nvidia v. ATI flameware ensure. Since each company does different things better that's basically what you're doing when you stack the XBox's graphics up against the Cube's.
1.-Even if all the ways of gameplay shown in the revolution trailer worked (most of them are just theories) it will still be tiresome trial and error before developers would (if ever) get those right and make them fun as well, meanwhile they will feel and play like experiments.
This is coming from the company that either invented or contributed something substantial to every single genre currently in existance. They perfected the 3D platformer formula for example. If any company can pull off a control change seemlessly, it's Nintendo.
2.-ITS JUST A CONTROLLER, how difficult is it for a peripheral like this to be made for the PC, the PS2 or the xbox? legally all they would have to do is to use another method for getting the signal and they wouldnt be violating the patent.
The big, and I mean the BIG patents are held by a company called Gyration. They make the low-power, small gyro/accelerometer that is in the rev controller and hold a shit ton of patents on that tech. Nintendo licensed it exclusively. Don't count on this coming anywhere else in the home console realm while those agreements are in place, it's NOT GONNA HAPPEN. For the PC OTOH, guess what, Gyration makes something very similar to the rev controller that you can already purchase. It's a mouse/wand for presenting. Kinda cool actually.
You would have to do a wand in a completely different way. Which means R&D to work out the kinks if you can even pull it off. It's not as simple as going hey cool idea and ramping up the factories to churn out clones. You have to get around the licensing of those patents in some way first.
Consider the following: Nintendo was the only company that made a true d-pad for the duration of their patent. They got burnt by Sony badly when they revealed the analog stick on the N64. If it's possible to patent or license enough patents to prevent easy copying, they've done it.
3.-It has already been done, the DS has two screens and an stylus for control, a nice novelty yes, did it changed portable gaming forever? NO, not even in the very DS the 2 screens or the stylus are not used in a significant way in most games, I mean seriously how important is to scribble spells in Castlevania to make it enjoyable? how much do you need to check the map all the time? wouldnt be the same to have a transparent overlay on top?
Yes, I can safely say it has had an impact on portable gaming now. Not every game takes full advantage of the DS featureset(Castlevania for example), but those that do are certainly novel experiences. From Pheonix Wright/Trauma Center to Kirby: Canvas Curse/Mario 64 DS Minigames/Feel the Magic to the upcoming Metroid Prime Hunters. Oh, and Nintendogs. The only other platform that those games could've come to would be the PC(because of the screen-estate and pointer interface), and PCs aren't handhelds.
The touch screen is a huge thing, and it wouldn't work for many of these games nearly as well if the system didn't also have the top screen. IE: The way Hunters approximates Mouse/Keyboard control.
Reduce the console price with the same components than competition. (a cheap ps3? count me in!)
So, clone the PS3 and sell it for an enormous loss. What excellent business. Not going to happen, and it's a stupid suggestion. If you want a PS3, buy a PS3. I'd grab a 360 first because of Live, Live Arcade and a far better hardware track record personally, but do what you want.
Cater a lot more for third party developers specially for adult/teen market. (can I play the latest GTA or FPS in it? no not halo , but at least battlefield would be nice)
Not what they're shooting for. They're not going to go balls-out against MS/Sony for that specific market, which in the case of the FPS, MS dominates due to providing the Windows platform where those games are currently BEST played(although the rev controller may change that assessment). If you need current-gen style "mature" games there will be two platfo
Personally, I'd take F-zero over Wipeout. GX was fantastic. But that's me.
My launch PS2 died about 1 year in, fixed it, died again about 2 months later. My 2nd PS2 got stolen out of my appt, was replaced via renters with a 3rd which broke the same way the first did in about the same amount of time. Then I swore off on the Sony brand. I may be a smoker and thus tough on optics, but that's too much. Out of everyone I personally know who had a PS2, only one of them has a launch unit that still works for PS2 games, and it recently stopped playing DVDs. Many of those who didn't get a launch unit started getting disc read errors about 2 years in and trashed the thing rather than fixing it. Most of them went to the XBox when that happened and aren't going back.
The only launch unit I'll buy at this point is from Nintendo(which isn't what I did with the gamecube post-64, I didn't pick my cube up until Metroid came out). And that's because they have a good track record there, always hit a cheap price point, and I like their first party titles.
I'm waiting on the 360, but if I need to have an upgraded current-gen experience, it's definately where I'm going to. Mainly because of the online marketplace and Live.
As for market not allowing a 2 generation dominance, can you name an instance where there were two MAJOR companies, with cash resources from other divisions, were involved? I own all 3 major consoles now, and I'll eventually buy all three again.
It's not about cash. It's about botching things, as Sony is botching online play and online marketplaces. If Nintendo for example had had an optical drive on the N64 and hadn't charged ridiculous licensing costs for making carts they wouldn't have lost the devs they did to Sony and the playstation wouldn't have been the success that it was.
The input device is modular. They're coming out with a standard controller shell for it, and there doesn't seem to be stopping any third parties from making their own shells. Developers can use the wand in one of it's configurations, use two wands, use one of the standard shells or even roll out their own. All of them having access to the 6-axis information the controller spits out.
So you can get arcade style experiences out of it, or the standard console experience, or something new. The modularity of the new controller, for this reason, excites me as much as any new control methods. And since the electronics for a shell are relatively cheap and the dev costs for the rev expected to be closer to the gamecube than the PS3/XBox 360, they can probably even bundle em in w/o upping the game price. Perfect controls(and user-selectable layouts) for any game that goes for that option.
Heh. Capcom/etc. did not make the games they did because they were bribed. Had then been bribed(ala an exclusivity contract), they couldn't have put those games onto the PS2. The gamecube is a far superior bit of hardware in every way bar marketshare to the PS2. It's easier to work with, it's more powerful, and it has a better devkit.
Oh, and the gamecube had just about every genre covered and Nintendo themselves cover a wide variety of genres 1st party. Whether or not you can get past them frequently using their branding characters aside.
Ahem. EQ did come out for the PS2 as EQ online adventures. As did FFXI, which allows you to play with PC counterparts.
You were saying it's tough to equal live on the PC. It's not, the PC is and will always be better. The PC model and Sony's model aren't really comparable tho, because you can always use third party software to make up for any lack of features when you use a PC(I gave examples). Can't do that on the PS. You get what they give you. And that's why having a standard decent package is better for consoles.
SEGA also had the extremely short release cycle, half-supported add-ons, and what seemed like an allergy to money in what they let come over here(especially with the Saturn). They burnt their fans time after time again post-genesis, and there just weren't enough people left willing to trust them with the Dreamcast. Plus the Sony hype machine, which isn't going to work on gamers this time.
Until I see actual gameplay footage, I'm going on the assumption that the PS3 is the weakest system. Until it's been out for the year, I'm going on the assumption it's going to break at the drop of a hat like 2 of my PS2s did.
There were/are Dreamcast games that look better than most PS2 games, and the dreamcast predates the PS2. Sony is absolutely AWFUL in putting together a devkit that lets devs get anywhere near peak power out of their systems. And I haven't heard anything different about the PS3. If the gamecube(as an example) had had the same install base as the PS2 most if not all of the exclusives of this generation would've gone there precisely because of how badly Sony botched their devtools.
I agree on Live. It's an enormous mistake that it's not free. And I agree that MS is probably jumping the gun by at least a few months in order to make release for the holiday season.
The unified architecture isn't necessary on the PC because you can make up for any failures in support via 3rd party programs. You can use XFire to get a unified Live style friends list. You can use vent/TS for voice communication, and you can always set up your own servers. By comparison, you don't have that level of freedom on a console, so a unified service ala live is preferable. PS2 online support was like Mac gaming, you had 2 or 3 titles that did it well, and the rest didn't.
I disagree, for a number of reasons. The number of customers Sony alienated by making poor hardware is large and their response was slow and poor. The PSP, despite them leveraging the success of the PS2 to get developer support on it, hasn't taken off and a number of people feel they got burnt on it. I'm additionally certain that a number of core devs have lost money by supporting it, due to dismal game sales in their home region, and are probably bitter that they got pushed into it. The market has also traditionally not allowed a single company to maintain dominance for more than 2 generations. Sony also has weak 1st party development, so it doesn't take a lot of dev departures to sink them. The game is Sony's to lose, and I can't think of anything they're doing to keep from losing it.
Wha? Is english not your first language or something?
If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.
Nintendo is appealing to older gamers. For one, they're offering their back-catalog for download onto the rev. That has enormous appeal. Secondly, they're offering a new control scheme for all the people that want something new. Third, they're coming it at a lower price point. Fourth, they have gamecube backwards compat for all the great games you may have missed.
That same strategy(- the downloads) is certainly working quite well in the DS vs. PSP war.
- average Joe to play. No dice with PC games
Raiding guilds in MMOs say differently.
- having a universal friends system. (I don't see that on the PC. And don't say GameSpy. POS)
XFire. Been in use for ages. Free and works well.
- having universal voice chat. How many different voice chats do you have on the PC?
A few, Ventrillo/Teamspeak being the two big ones. A lot of games are coming with comms built in tho(ALA Civ 4). Your friends/guild-members/clanmates will standardize on one of them.
- Micropayments for content.
Content/mods on the PC are generally FREE.
- Authenticated content only. Let me just say goatse....
Yea and let me just say "mexican jewlizard" and verbal abuse in live. Griefers will grief regardless of authentication.
Live has a lot over the PS2's system, but it doesn't have much over the PC(at least worth paying for).
I agree. Sony is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Nintendo has the new modular wand controller, free online service, an online marketplace which includes their back catalog, and a far superior history of 1st party titles. (Additionally, their hardware is better suited to things like AI than either Sony or MSes, more cache, better branch prediction, etc.)
Microsoft has live, an online marketplace, and excellent relations with PC developers as well as strong 1st party development. Their main problem is Japan.
Both have awesome devkits(which you'd expect from two companies that have been doing software development since the 70s). Nintendo pulls ahead a *bit* here because they don't have the HD requirement so it will be cheaper to make games for the rev.
Sony has an un-unified online model, a devkit as bad as the PS2s, a bataran controller, and supposedly "better" specs. Downside is a lot of people have developed a hatred of them because their hardware is as breakable as a cracked egg.
All MS and Nintendo really need to do to put the nails in the coffin is woo Square-Enix off the PS3.
I'm waiting a bit to see how things pan out, but it's really looking like I'll wind up with a 360 and a Rev by this time next year.
You're wrong on every single count.
It did not pioneer it's control scheme(Goldeneye effectively used the same one, WASD via C-buttons and aiming via analog stick). It was not highly-anticipated(It went from being a 3rd person thing to an FPS somewhere along the line, and when MS bought Bungie a lot of the Mac crowd that HAD been anticipating the title got upset). In fact, a lot of people dimissed it, especially the single player(oh, so I see, it's an alien scheme to bore me into suicide by making every single level look the same), even Penny Arcade. And additionally, there wasn't anything really groundbreaking, revolutionary or new about it, bar ONE thing which I'll hit in a minute.
What made Halo what it was? The LAN play. It was the first console FPS with a decent and tight-enough control scheme that could be played over LAN on multiple TVs with the barebones hardware and a hub. Everything came together and the LAN crowd ATE it up, and since it was a console, so did a large portion of the general public.
Heh. This is japan, where everywhere has the land value of manhattan(or more) and space is at a premium. Plus, a 360 is only $400. Living anywhere in the US where cost is high and space is low, that's peanuts compared to what your rent would be.
There are numerous reasons why a good month for the XBox in Japan was 4-digit sales figures, and size was one of them.
Use Famitsu ratings. They've only given 5 games a perfect score since 1986: Nintendogs, Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker, Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time, Vagrant Story, Soul Calibur.
4 reviewers have to each rate a game perfectly for that to occur. Wind Waker is probably a bit because of fanboyism, but the rest really are "perfect."
It doesn't really matter unless you're hitting someone up for something sexual. That's the nature of it, anonymous, with handles designed solely to put continuity into the communication. We're all just text, judged solely by what we say.
But yea, there are girls on the internet, girls on slashdot, girls in WoW. There seems to be a minority of them that identify themselves as such, but hey, that goes for everything: gender, race, religion, etc.
It rarely matters. I've been the only guy in guilds/clans, one of a handful, one of many, etc. Never find this out or really care until enough bonds have formed through the anonymity to actually give a rats ass about the other's actual real life personas.
And of course, the internet is also populated mostly by people that use the anonymity to be jackasses. Post your pics! Mexican Jewlizard! yada yada. You get to see people as they are, socially, with basically no consequences or prejudgements.
It's a wild, wild place, and we likes it like that.