It looks like they filed for the patent because of Eternal Darkness, which, while it had an extremely unique sanity system was basically an exceptionally nice VG version of the Call of Cthulhu RPG sanity system.
See a monster, lose sanity. Kill a monster, get sanity back. See something fucked up, lose san.
The kicker was the immersive effects that occured when you lost san.
Functioned just like Chaosium's old CoC system. Pretty much. Can't remember anything that did it as well as ED did though.
One. Viewtiful Joe. Third party game at that. Followup game was kinda weak and may have killed the franchise. I sorta blame it being ported to the PS2 for that. Well that and Capcom kinda got tinges of Megaman syndrome(beating a franchise to death: see Capcom) with the sequel.
Cartoon mascots mainly form brand loyalty. Adults come back to the Zeldas, and Samuses, and Marios partly due to nostalgia and partly because the brands are strong. The average fans of those franchises are either young and thus idenitifying with the cartoon or in their mid-late 20s at this point.
Ehhh... the XBox kinda proved one thing to me. Third party devs make or break a system and they go to where the money is(either players or cash incentives). So the smart move is to buy at launch based on 1st party dev houses or wait for the market to crystalize.
Which pretty much puts Sony and MS out of the running for me, at least for the first year. But then again, I don't see anything special about Halo.
1. Riiggghhhttt. Because times were so damn awful for gaming when Nintendo ruled the roost. The NES/SNES/Genesis generation isn't considered the golden age of gaming or anything. I mean, the primary purpose of a PSP ISN'T playing decade old Nintendo games from this period.
Nintendo got the nigh-monopoly they have on handhelds by making systems and games perfectly catered to the market. Every other system that came in did the same thing Sony is doing, and like Sony, it failed. The one system that ever made any headway was the Wonderswan, and that was just in Japan, because it also got it right.
Seriously, Sony made the inferior(as judged by the market) product. Supporting that simply because the "virtual monopoly" made a better product is idiocy. We don't use Linux out of sheer spite towards Microsoft.
2. And Nintendo will instantly replace your unit if you have a single dead pixel(you call, give a CC for security and they ship you out a new one and EVEN pay for return postage). Their customer service and build quality is unrivaled in the gaming industry(Gameboys, Gamecubes and DSes can take ONE hell of a fischer-price style beating). It really is. Sony would only replace PSPs with 10+ dead pixels, or you had to take it up with the retailers. Who may or may not have allowed an exchange. It was/is a night and day difference.
3. The two screens allow the clamshell design, which serves as a built in screen protector. It also lets you cut down on vertical/horizontal height by adding a bit of width to it. Merging those into a single screen would've increased the bulk of the already bulky unit(compared to the GBA SP anyway) and given the same kind of screen scratching problems you see in the original GBA and PSP.
4. Nintendogs, Meteos, Kirby: Canvas Curse, and Advance Wars: DS basically JUST hit. There's a lot more wierd stuff coming down the pipe as well(surgery games, lawyer games, adventure games, some PC Sim games). The PSP has Lumines and console-style games(worked great for the Nomad!). It's big title in the pipe is GTA.
It doesn't matter. You have no other options atm, so an XBox 360 HDD is $100 for 20GB. That may or may not be a rip-off. Doesn't matter.
Doesn't influence my decision one way or another whether or not MS is overcharging. I'm not nabbing either the 360 or PS3 at launch because the pricing model for the consoles and games makes me balk, not because it's a bad deal(Ok, I guess I'm saying I percieve it to be a bad deal in essence, but hey I'm a cheapskate). I wouldn't even buy a Nintendo console at launch if it were priced the way these 2 next gen systems are and I know pretty much what I'm getting with a Nintendo system(in a general way anyway), while the 360/PS3 are up in the air for their first year of existance.
Seriously, you either look at the price and go, hey it's worth it, or you don't. If you balk, wait a bit, the prices will go down and much of the war will have been waged. Do what me and my friends are doing, waiting and seeing, or just nab your system of choice. We might all be getting Revolutions at launch if they fufill certain conditions($250 or less price point, classic console gaming downloads fufill their promise, decent titles[by that meaning Nintendo titles] at launch) but even that isn't a certainty yet because no details on that console have really gelled. I've been playing consoles wayyy too long to instantly nab a system at launch w/o having a good idea what I'll be getting over the lifetime of that system and a few must-have must-play-now titles before the inevitable price drop.
That's what me and my friends are doing. We're nabbing a Revolution(launch if the classic thing pans out or it gets some good titles at launch, otherwise waiting until it does) while the 360 and PS3 duke it out, then coming in for the winner of that war once the dust settles and the prices go down to something reasonable.
If you like Nintendo games, need console gaming, and balk at the price of the new consoles/games, that seems to be the best way to go.
An SP doesn't have the horsepower to run SNES games with sound and w/o slowdown(anything pre-that it does great at though). The DS does(off a GBA flash cart via PassMe, WiFiMe or FlashMe), but the emulator is still unfinished. Super Metroid is mostly working for it though.
First off, last year the DS sold over 1 million units in japan to the PsPs 250,000(rounded down from 254 or something like that). You have to have been following the sales numbers to see the trend reverse post-holiday season however. Prior to march the PSP played catch-up to the DS(selling 700,000 or so units in those 3 months when supply finally rehit while DS sales were low), when nintendogs hit the trend reversed and has remained that way more or less ever since. The DS catching back up and keeping it's 2xlead.
You can probably retrace this by trolling through old fanboy forum posts somewhere.
What you're doing is confusing shipped(sold to retailers or in the supply chain) with sold to customers. My numbers are the number that were sold to customers as of the end of last month(minus some retailers like wal-mart we just can't track). Read sony's statements carefully(that's the source for the psp.ign article as best as I can tell). You'll get it. Basically there are 5 million PSPs out there, but only just under half of them are in customer hands.
They use the same shipped statistic for games, which I have no corrolary for when it comes to actual retail sales.
At least that's my read. Nintendo otoh(and the Japanese figures seem to bear this out) is stating how many units retailers actually sold as opposed to how many they've sent out.
If you want the US market statistics from a retail standpoint you're gonna need to get an actual report. They're horrible to track down, so we generally end up looking at the figures given by the company who produces the product. Blame wal-mart.
Quite a few engage in virtual simulations or take on responsibilities in virtual environments. Anyone in an MMORPG guild or anyone who agonized over their sims. Anyone who joins and actively participates in an online community. I mean, it's not unheard of.
Every game is to a certain extent a complete waste of time. It's a leisure pursuit.
People who live in cities and can't own a pet but want one might be interested in an excellent virtual pet simulator. If it's exceptionally good you have a perpetual virtual puppy, with ALL that entails.
Shrug, it doesn't appeal much to me because I happen not to like the genre it belongs to in general, not because it's childish, too cutesy, or anything. I still might change my mind if I ever get a crack at playing it, who knows?
The DS outsold the PSP in ALL regions by a factor of 2:1 including the US. Worldwide it was 3:1. If the PSP manages to equal DS sales in Europe when it's released it will only narrow the lead down to 2:1. Titles on the PSP simply are not moving off shelves at any real pace. Swallow the pill already Sony fans.
Can you post in a thread about a handheld game system that doesn't involve mentiong the Gizmodo? Yes, we're all happy for you that you got your own, but spamming Slashdot about it isn't going to change the fact that none of the other kids on the playground have any idea what you're talking about. That's like asking for a Transformer for your birthday and getting a Go-Bot.
Besides, the Gizmodo doesn't have that "main device functionality" you mentioned, i. e. the ability to play games outside of homebrew.
Well seeing as how you CAN'T play the latest PSP games AND run homebrew, if homebrew is what you're after then the new Gizmondo handheld does it just as well for wayyy less money. No, it has no commercial main-dev house support, but it's built and catered for small companies and homebrew. Hell dev for the thing is SIMPLE and well documented. But you bought a PSP, you're faced with a choice, don't play any game that's not out already, thus making you an overspending fool, or cripple the ability to run home-developed stuff AND play the new stuff.
Sony never had any intention of people being able to run unsigned code on the platform, never even hinted at any such intention and in fact has all but said they will actively destroy any exploits that allow it via future firmware upgrades. You're NOT going to run the latest games AND run any unsigned code on the thing if Sony can do anything about it.
First and foremonst, I want to play SNES games. Assuming you can get a GBA-based emulator that can play such games full speed (I have yet to see much of anything on the DS), there's still the lack of an X and Y button to deal with.
SnesDS made by loopy, the guy who created pocketNES and pocketSNES(which is buggy due to the GBAs slow processor and doesn't have sound support).
YOU just don't know where to look because you must not have gotten into the scene with the GBA.
Secondly, I already shelled out $$$ for my Super Wild Card so I can dump the SNES carts, why should I have to go through the hassle yet again of getting a similar device for the GBA so I can load these programs?
Because it's still cheaper than buying a PSP? Because it also allows you to play GBA ROMs natively? Because it lets you back up GBA games?
And how about a platform where the flash format isn't so... you know... proprietary?
Like Memory Stick Duo? Or UMD? Flash carts are made by a range of manufacturers, they're LESS proprietary. You could even get carts that read standard SD at one point. The schematics for passthrough DS adapters are FREELY available.
There aren't "legions" of homebrew for the Nintendo platforms as you sugest. Programmers are about as likely as games to buy all that extra hardware to creat and run such code, while the PSP requires no more extra proprietary, gray market hardware beyond an industry-standard USB cable.
Yes, there are. There are TONS of GBA projects done by different people. Ebook readers, movie players, home rolled games, tech demos, libraries, emulators(everything pre-genesis, there's even a port of nethack). The GBA had(has) an enormously active and mature homebrew community, much larger than the PSPs. A lot of those people moved onto the DS if the GBA couldn't float their boat btw(already had the hardware, why not?), some went onto the PSP. It's about the CHALLENGE and the featureset.
You also need to have the 1.5 firmware, a sufficient capacity proprietary memory stick, and never run a game that updates that firmware. What a deal. You're faced with a choice you don't want to make but were a fool not to expect, play the PSP the way Sony allows you to, or not play the latest games.
Seriously, is every Sony fan perpetually late to the party or something?
I would think the reason to own a console would be that it had good games not that you could pirate games from a console that WAS good and at the same time dish out a financial blow to the company that MADE those consoles in the first place.
Great idea, let's support Sony! Not Gizmondo which is built solely for homebrew, or Nintendo who has not only taken a hands-off stance towards it but actually published or developed the games you intend to play.
Oh and the Sony option is also the most expensive? Really?
Wow. Can we just all admit the PSP is Gamegear 2.0 and move on already. I know some of you stupidly got burnt for $300+ but hey, a lot of us tried to warn you.
If you want homebrew+main device functionality(playing games), the PSP is not for you. At least not until Sony seriously changes their attitude towards it.
Seriously, get a gizmondo handheld which is BUILT solely for homebrew(and cheaper) or go Nintendo + Flash(also cheaper) and join the legions of GBA hackers who moved onto the DS. Or, ya know, go back to stop caring Johnny Come Lately.
Stop being silly with too much disposable income and just go ahead and upgrade the thing already. You know you're going to anyway when GTA comes out.
What's the definition of massively multiplayer? I played MUDs with hundreds of people concurrently online(and thousands of accounts) pre-EQ/UO. I've heard of pay to play MUDs that hit thousands of subscribers on a single server pre-EQ/UO. That seems pretty massive to me, especially considering most of these games have 1-3000 people servers rather than a single persistant world.
Shrug, EA has no opposition because people care about licensed likenesses, team names and what not. Stadium names largely don't matter, just pick a random company and call it Stadium.
You could have the same stats, same teams, but have it be the Philadelphia Birds-of-Prey with white guy Don Nabb as QB. People wouldn't buy it. Personally I think every last person that cares about that is a bit on the stupid side, but hey, that's just me.
So tell me why they should concentrate on things the majority of the buying public obviously don't care about?
Wait, what? Like some say the XBox was? It was beaten, badly AND it lost Microsoft the GDP of several african countries. The PS2 outsold it by a factor of FOUR. It outsold the Gamecube only by a slim margin. It was such a joke in Japan a good week for it was breaking 3-digit sales.
The PSP is awful for homebrew though. You're better off with other products if that's what you want to take part in. Gizmondo specifically caters to that niche and is releasing a new handheld here soon. I mean, the main reason to get a PSP is/should be PSP games, and having to kill that functionality to run homebrew just makes the whole thing overpriced and a poor value.
Most of the homebrew people want is emulation, and the old GP32 handles all of that wonderfully at less than half the price of admission.
Sony's not going to see the light and let you run your own code on the thing anytime soon.
Yes, you can flash the DS via a DS rom. In order to flash the first 512(or it might be 1024) bytes of the firmware you need to short out SL1. Which is covered by a sticker underneath the battery pack. It's called FlashMe, and is currently used to remove the warning screen(insta boot) and allow the DS to boot into DS mode off the GBA slot w/o a PassMe adapter or booting code via WiFi. It's doubtful that nintendo will reflash the firmware, but it's possible for them to do so. Us dirty device hackers already have after all. Loopy'll(PocketNES, SNESDS) figure it out if they do, and I don't expect them to do it more than once(to plug in a TCP/IP stack for their whole WiFi rollout thing in a few months would be the strongest possibility). Plus, there should be DS flash carts out in the wild sooner or later, rendering the whole thing moot.
The GBA, no idea if it has flashable firmware or not. It's never been an issue. You boot code from a link cable or cart and it runs exactly like it was from a real game cart. Touching the firmware would be kind of taboo, as one of the great things about the GBA was if you screw up while developing something and don't catch it via the emulator, you just power the thing down, no damage done. Lots and lots of cool stuff on the GBA. The huge GBA homebrew community was one of the big reasons I nabbed a DS.
It was a Senior project at a Namco sponsored university program, which he was involved in(so I guess "his" isn't entirely wrong). The models you roll up were anyway. The programming framework, level designs, music, and what not were all done by Namco proper.
Takahashi, like such designers as Miyamoto, went to an art school. He credits his senior sculpture classes for part of the idea.
Go read his GDC interviews. He goes into detail. Years of working at Namco w/o finding a project he liked so he started his own.
It's not an uncommon story in game development(or software development in general). The only odd thing is that Namco gave him the resources. A few devs do this, but Namco hasn't been known for it. So yes, it's a Namco game. Everything about it is drenched in Namco from start to finish. Thus, it isn't indy. He did not take a tech demo out there and procure funding and then find a publisher. He did it all internal to Namco.
You don't call Pikmin, Mario, Zelda, Black&White and a whole slew of games indy, do you? Of course not. Even though they're "one guy" and his ideas.
Right, right, I'm sure you've been in "the industry" for 4 years.
Keita Takahashi is the guy's name. He is a Namco employee, and was a Namco employee when he started work on Katamari. Namco employees worked on every aspect of the game, from sound to art to the box design. Hence, Katamari is from... wait for it... NAMCO. If we're going to use the "one man's idea" standard then just about EVERY game is "indy" because most of them begin as "one designers idea".
Slashdot Mirror
Wonderful refutation. Let me guess, just as new to gaming as you are to slashdot, right?
It looks like they filed for the patent because of Eternal Darkness, which, while it had an extremely unique sanity system was basically an exceptionally nice VG version of the Call of Cthulhu RPG sanity system.
See a monster, lose sanity. Kill a monster, get sanity back. See something fucked up, lose san.
The kicker was the immersive effects that occured when you lost san.
Functioned just like Chaosium's old CoC system. Pretty much. Can't remember anything that did it as well as ED did though.
One. Viewtiful Joe. Third party game at that. Followup game was kinda weak and may have killed the franchise. I sorta blame it being ported to the PS2 for that. Well that and Capcom kinda got tinges of Megaman syndrome(beating a franchise to death: see Capcom) with the sequel.
Cartoon mascots mainly form brand loyalty. Adults come back to the Zeldas, and Samuses, and Marios partly due to nostalgia and partly because the brands are strong. The average fans of those franchises are either young and thus idenitifying with the cartoon or in their mid-late 20s at this point.
Ehhh... the XBox kinda proved one thing to me. Third party devs make or break a system and they go to where the money is(either players or cash incentives). So the smart move is to buy at launch based on 1st party dev houses or wait for the market to crystalize.
Which pretty much puts Sony and MS out of the running for me, at least for the first year. But then again, I don't see anything special about Halo.
1. Riiggghhhttt. Because times were so damn awful for gaming when Nintendo ruled the roost. The NES/SNES/Genesis generation isn't considered the golden age of gaming or anything. I mean, the primary purpose of a PSP ISN'T playing decade old Nintendo games from this period.
Nintendo got the nigh-monopoly they have on handhelds by making systems and games perfectly catered to the market. Every other system that came in did the same thing Sony is doing, and like Sony, it failed. The one system that ever made any headway was the Wonderswan, and that was just in Japan, because it also got it right.
Seriously, Sony made the inferior(as judged by the market) product. Supporting that simply because the "virtual monopoly" made a better product is idiocy. We don't use Linux out of sheer spite towards Microsoft.
2. And Nintendo will instantly replace your unit if you have a single dead pixel(you call, give a CC for security and they ship you out a new one and EVEN pay for return postage). Their customer service and build quality is unrivaled in the gaming industry(Gameboys, Gamecubes and DSes can take ONE hell of a fischer-price style beating). It really is. Sony would only replace PSPs with 10+ dead pixels, or you had to take it up with the retailers. Who may or may not have allowed an exchange. It was/is a night and day difference.
3. The two screens allow the clamshell design, which serves as a built in screen protector. It also lets you cut down on vertical/horizontal height by adding a bit of width to it. Merging those into a single screen would've increased the bulk of the already bulky unit(compared to the GBA SP anyway) and given the same kind of screen scratching problems you see in the original GBA and PSP.
4. Nintendogs, Meteos, Kirby: Canvas Curse, and Advance Wars: DS basically JUST hit. There's a lot more wierd stuff coming down the pipe as well(surgery games, lawyer games, adventure games, some PC Sim games). The PSP has Lumines and console-style games(worked great for the Nomad!). It's big title in the pipe is GTA.
5. And yet you express extreme ignorance. Go fig.
It doesn't matter. You have no other options atm, so an XBox 360 HDD is $100 for 20GB. That may or may not be a rip-off. Doesn't matter.
Doesn't influence my decision one way or another whether or not MS is overcharging. I'm not nabbing either the 360 or PS3 at launch because the pricing model for the consoles and games makes me balk, not because it's a bad deal(Ok, I guess I'm saying I percieve it to be a bad deal in essence, but hey I'm a cheapskate). I wouldn't even buy a Nintendo console at launch if it were priced the way these 2 next gen systems are and I know pretty much what I'm getting with a Nintendo system(in a general way anyway), while the 360/PS3 are up in the air for their first year of existance.
Seriously, you either look at the price and go, hey it's worth it, or you don't. If you balk, wait a bit, the prices will go down and much of the war will have been waged. Do what me and my friends are doing, waiting and seeing, or just nab your system of choice. We might all be getting Revolutions at launch if they fufill certain conditions($250 or less price point, classic console gaming downloads fufill their promise, decent titles[by that meaning Nintendo titles] at launch) but even that isn't a certainty yet because no details on that console have really gelled. I've been playing consoles wayyy too long to instantly nab a system at launch w/o having a good idea what I'll be getting over the lifetime of that system and a few must-have must-play-now titles before the inevitable price drop.
That's what me and my friends are doing. We're nabbing a Revolution(launch if the classic thing pans out or it gets some good titles at launch, otherwise waiting until it does) while the 360 and PS3 duke it out, then coming in for the winner of that war once the dust settles and the prices go down to something reasonable.
If you like Nintendo games, need console gaming, and balk at the price of the new consoles/games, that seems to be the best way to go.
An SP doesn't have the horsepower to run SNES games with sound and w/o slowdown(anything pre-that it does great at though). The DS does(off a GBA flash cart via PassMe, WiFiMe or FlashMe), but the emulator is still unfinished. Super Metroid is mostly working for it though.
Your primary use for your PSP is to play decade-old Nintendo games?
Wow, just wow.
Yup, PSP == failure. Moving on now.
First off, last year the DS sold over 1 million units in japan to the PsPs 250,000(rounded down from 254 or something like that). You have to have been following the sales numbers to see the trend reverse post-holiday season however. Prior to march the PSP played catch-up to the DS(selling 700,000 or so units in those 3 months when supply finally rehit while DS sales were low), when nintendogs hit the trend reversed and has remained that way more or less ever since. The DS catching back up and keeping it's 2xlead.
You can probably retrace this by trolling through old fanboy forum posts somewhere.
What you're doing is confusing shipped(sold to retailers or in the supply chain) with sold to customers. My numbers are the number that were sold to customers as of the end of last month(minus some retailers like wal-mart we just can't track). Read sony's statements carefully(that's the source for the psp.ign article as best as I can tell). You'll get it. Basically there are 5 million PSPs out there, but only just under half of them are in customer hands.
They use the same shipped statistic for games, which I have no corrolary for when it comes to actual retail sales.
At least that's my read. Nintendo otoh(and the Japanese figures seem to bear this out) is stating how many units retailers actually sold as opposed to how many they've sent out.
If you want the US market statistics from a retail standpoint you're gonna need to get an actual report. They're horrible to track down, so we generally end up looking at the figures given by the company who produces the product. Blame wal-mart.
Quite a few engage in virtual simulations or take on responsibilities in virtual environments. Anyone in an MMORPG guild or anyone who agonized over their sims. Anyone who joins and actively participates in an online community. I mean, it's not unheard of.
Every game is to a certain extent a complete waste of time. It's a leisure pursuit.
People who live in cities and can't own a pet but want one might be interested in an excellent virtual pet simulator. If it's exceptionally good you have a perpetual virtual puppy, with ALL that entails.
Shrug, it doesn't appeal much to me because I happen not to like the genre it belongs to in general, not because it's childish, too cutesy, or anything. I still might change my mind if I ever get a crack at playing it, who knows?
Try 2 million PSP sales to 6 million DS sales, with DS sales outpacing PSP sales by a factor of 2:1 in Japan since March. 1 million of those DS sales were in Europe, primarily the UK. Stats posted just under a month ago when last we got a peek at financials.
The DS outsold the PSP in ALL regions by a factor of 2:1 including the US. Worldwide it was 3:1. If the PSP manages to equal DS sales in Europe when it's released it will only narrow the lead down to 2:1. Titles on the PSP simply are not moving off shelves at any real pace. Swallow the pill already Sony fans.
Only deeply immature and insecure people care if something is childish. Oh and teenagers.
Grow up already.
Correction: Was thinking of Game Park's GP32 sequel, the XGP not the gizmondo. Can't get the two straight in my head for some reason.
Sorry, thinking about the GamePark sequel to the GP32. For some reason I keep confusing it with the Gizmondo that MS supports.
Can you post in a thread about a handheld game system that doesn't involve mentiong the Gizmodo? Yes, we're all happy for you that you got your own, but spamming Slashdot about it isn't going to change the fact that none of the other kids on the playground have any idea what you're talking about. That's like asking for a Transformer for your birthday and getting a Go-Bot.
Besides, the Gizmodo doesn't have that "main device functionality" you mentioned, i. e. the ability to play games outside of homebrew.
Well seeing as how you CAN'T play the latest PSP games AND run homebrew, if homebrew is what you're after then the new Gizmondo handheld does it just as well for wayyy less money. No, it has no commercial main-dev house support, but it's built and catered for small companies and homebrew. Hell dev for the thing is SIMPLE and well documented. But you bought a PSP, you're faced with a choice, don't play any game that's not out already, thus making you an overspending fool, or cripple the ability to run home-developed stuff AND play the new stuff.
Sony never had any intention of people being able to run unsigned code on the platform, never even hinted at any such intention and in fact has all but said they will actively destroy any exploits that allow it via future firmware upgrades. You're NOT going to run the latest games AND run any unsigned code on the thing if Sony can do anything about it.
First and foremonst, I want to play SNES games. Assuming you can get a GBA-based emulator that can play such games full speed (I have yet to see much of anything on the DS), there's still the lack of an X and Y button to deal with.
SnesDS made by loopy, the guy who created pocketNES and pocketSNES(which is buggy due to the GBAs slow processor and doesn't have sound support).
YOU just don't know where to look because you must not have gotten into the scene with the GBA.
Secondly, I already shelled out $$$ for my Super Wild Card so I can dump the SNES carts, why should I have to go through the hassle yet again of getting a similar device for the GBA so I can load these programs?
Because it's still cheaper than buying a PSP? Because it also allows you to play GBA ROMs natively? Because it lets you back up GBA games?
And how about a platform where the flash format isn't so... you know... proprietary?
Like Memory Stick Duo? Or UMD? Flash carts are made by a range of manufacturers, they're LESS proprietary. You could even get carts that read standard SD at one point. The schematics for passthrough DS adapters are FREELY available.
There aren't "legions" of homebrew for the Nintendo platforms as you sugest. Programmers are about as likely as games to buy all that extra hardware to creat and run such code, while the PSP requires no more extra proprietary, gray market hardware beyond an industry-standard USB cable.
Yes, there are. There are TONS of GBA projects done by different people. Ebook readers, movie players, home rolled games, tech demos, libraries, emulators(everything pre-genesis, there's even a port of nethack). The GBA had(has) an enormously active and mature homebrew community, much larger than the PSPs. A lot of those people moved onto the DS if the GBA couldn't float their boat btw(already had the hardware, why not?), some went onto the PSP. It's about the CHALLENGE and the featureset.
You also need to have the 1.5 firmware, a sufficient capacity proprietary memory stick, and never run a game that updates that firmware. What a deal. You're faced with a choice you don't want to make but were a fool not to expect, play the PSP the way Sony allows you to, or not play the latest games.
Seriously, is every Sony fan perpetually late to the party or something?
I would think the reason to own a console would be that it had good games not that you could pirate games from a console that WAS good and at the same time dish out a financial blow to the company that MADE those consoles in the first place.
Great idea, let's support Sony! Not Gizmondo which is built solely for homebrew, or Nintendo who has not only taken a hands-off stance towards it but actually published or developed the games you intend to play.
Oh and the Sony option is also the most expensive? Really?
Wow. Can we just all admit the PSP is Gamegear 2.0 and move on already. I know some of you stupidly got burnt for $300+ but hey, a lot of us tried to warn you.
Capitalization is the difference between "I had to help my Uncle Jack off a horse" and "I had to help my uncle jack off a horse."
If you want homebrew+main device functionality(playing games), the PSP is not for you. At least not until Sony seriously changes their attitude towards it.
Seriously, get a gizmondo handheld which is BUILT solely for homebrew(and cheaper) or go Nintendo + Flash(also cheaper) and join the legions of GBA hackers who moved onto the DS. Or, ya know, go back to stop caring Johnny Come Lately.
Stop being silly with too much disposable income and just go ahead and upgrade the thing already. You know you're going to anyway when GTA comes out.
What's the definition of massively multiplayer? I played MUDs with hundreds of people concurrently online(and thousands of accounts) pre-EQ/UO. I've heard of pay to play MUDs that hit thousands of subscribers on a single server pre-EQ/UO. That seems pretty massive to me, especially considering most of these games have 1-3000 people servers rather than a single persistant world.
Shrug, EA has no opposition because people care about licensed likenesses, team names and what not. Stadium names largely don't matter, just pick a random company and call it Stadium.
You could have the same stats, same teams, but have it be the Philadelphia Birds-of-Prey with white guy Don Nabb as QB. People wouldn't buy it. Personally I think every last person that cares about that is a bit on the stupid side, but hey, that's just me.
So tell me why they should concentrate on things the majority of the buying public obviously don't care about?
I always prefered the craziness of stuff like MLF and the Nintendo sports titles to the more realistic simulations like Madden.
Just, I dunno, always seems more fun to remove the constraints of reality.
Wait, what? Like some say the XBox was? It was beaten, badly AND it lost Microsoft the GDP of several african countries. The PS2 outsold it by a factor of FOUR. It outsold the Gamecube only by a slim margin. It was such a joke in Japan a good week for it was breaking 3-digit sales.
The PSP is awful for homebrew though. You're better off with other products if that's what you want to take part in. Gizmondo specifically caters to that niche and is releasing a new handheld here soon. I mean, the main reason to get a PSP is/should be PSP games, and having to kill that functionality to run homebrew just makes the whole thing overpriced and a poor value.
Most of the homebrew people want is emulation, and the old GP32 handles all of that wonderfully at less than half the price of admission.
Sony's not going to see the light and let you run your own code on the thing anytime soon.
Yes, you can flash the DS via a DS rom. In order to flash the first 512(or it might be 1024) bytes of the firmware you need to short out SL1. Which is covered by a sticker underneath the battery pack. It's called FlashMe, and is currently used to remove the warning screen(insta boot) and allow the DS to boot into DS mode off the GBA slot w/o a PassMe adapter or booting code via WiFi. It's doubtful that nintendo will reflash the firmware, but it's possible for them to do so. Us dirty device hackers already have after all. Loopy'll(PocketNES, SNESDS) figure it out if they do, and I don't expect them to do it more than once(to plug in a TCP/IP stack for their whole WiFi rollout thing in a few months would be the strongest possibility). Plus, there should be DS flash carts out in the wild sooner or later, rendering the whole thing moot.
The GBA, no idea if it has flashable firmware or not. It's never been an issue. You boot code from a link cable or cart and it runs exactly like it was from a real game cart. Touching the firmware would be kind of taboo, as one of the great things about the GBA was if you screw up while developing something and don't catch it via the emulator, you just power the thing down, no damage done. Lots and lots of cool stuff on the GBA. The huge GBA homebrew community was one of the big reasons I nabbed a DS.
It was a Senior project at a Namco sponsored university program, which he was involved in(so I guess "his" isn't entirely wrong). The models you roll up were anyway. The programming framework, level designs, music, and what not were all done by Namco proper.
Takahashi, like such designers as Miyamoto, went to an art school. He credits his senior sculpture classes for part of the idea.
Go read his GDC interviews. He goes into detail. Years of working at Namco w/o finding a project he liked so he started his own.
It's not an uncommon story in game development(or software development in general). The only odd thing is that Namco gave him the resources. A few devs do this, but Namco hasn't been known for it. So yes, it's a Namco game. Everything about it is drenched in Namco from start to finish. Thus, it isn't indy. He did not take a tech demo out there and procure funding and then find a publisher. He did it all internal to Namco.
You don't call Pikmin, Mario, Zelda, Black&White and a whole slew of games indy, do you? Of course not. Even though they're "one guy" and his ideas.
Right, right, I'm sure you've been in "the industry" for 4 years.
Keita Takahashi is the guy's name. He is a Namco employee, and was a Namco employee when he started work on Katamari. Namco employees worked on every aspect of the game, from sound to art to the box design. Hence, Katamari is from... wait for it... NAMCO. If we're going to use the "one man's idea" standard then just about EVERY game is "indy" because most of them begin as "one designers idea".