I disagree on the latter. There is a reason to get the 60 gig now... They are no longer producing them. If you are someone who puts a lot of value in the EE chip, then now may be the time to buy rather than taking your chances later with emulation.
I thought it was pretty clear that there was a reason to pickup the 60GB while it was still available if you wanted to have an EE chip.
I'm not personally in that camp, my PS2 still works.
Yes, that's very foolish. Most of the PS2's appeal came from 3rd parties. Sony also doesn't have any of their 1st/2nd/3rd committed(Insomniac and Sucker punch would qualify for this particular little sub-categorization) major franchises out yet, and with their marketshare atm you'd be extremely foolish to count on the type of 3rd party committment that made the PS2 worth it.
Or in other words, I'll buy a Nintendo console secure in the knowledge that they'll release enough stuff themselves over it's lifetime for it to be worth the launch price of admission($200-$250). Sony hasn't earned that in my estimation yet, and even if they had, $300 is about my limit for a console with few to no exclusive games actually out that I'm interested in.
I'll eventually wind up with a PS3, I have no doubt of that, but not anytime soon the way things are looking. Upside of that is I'll pay a hell of a lot less for everything.
The PS3 still won't hit the value sweet spot for enough people to dig out of the market share hole it's in. There just aren't any exclusive titles comparable to what MS and Nintendo have for the holidays, $500 is still a lot of money, and quite frankly I don't see the HD media formats EVER really taking off enough for people to swarm to the PS3 en-masse because of it(I mean cult-classics like Rockula aren't even out on DVD yet), much less this holiday season being "the time".
There's also no reason to go and get the 80GB right now, like there is for the 60GB with the EE chip.
Brit refers to British, as in Great Britain, or even including the entirety of the British Islands if one wants to be pedantic(which includes all of Ireland, IIRC, I'm not from the UK, I just work with em and pronounce things like them now[Worcester = Woostah]). This includes Scotland, and arguably some parts of Ireland, as well as IIRC, the Welsh. Now, English and Scots otoh... that's different.
In the case of Metroid Prime 3. It really did lose points for controlling too well, being on the Wii, not being exceptionally frustrating, not having multiplayer, and being a franchise game. The exploration is there, the pacing is there, if not increased. It's harder then Bioshock, and it doesn't end in a let down. Having beaten both, I'd say MP3 is the better game(as it keeps getting better, whereas Bioshock just stops getting better at a certain point and gets *much* worse just after).
Once you get past a certain point, it's pure Metroid. The cons don't really apply. If you loved Prime, you'll love Prime 3. If you didn't much care for Prime, you may still love Prime 3. The only thing I'd subtract points for is the first bit of the game. Nothing else. That wasn't their gripe though.
This won't apply to Halo 3 though. That's Halo man! It's different! It has online play.
It also helps that most analog stick games "assist" you a bit. If you ever tried Halo or Halo 2 for the PC, they're retardedly easy because of that. Console FPSes though are tuned to console controls, so everyone has a fair shake, and you can get quite good at it. Just don't expect to beat a PC or Wii gamer on an absolutely even, control-wise playing field(as in no auto-assist, simple movement of cursor, they're so much faster and more precise then you... you will lose, horribly). You won't.
K/M is still the best for finate precision control. Wiimote+Nunchuck is #2(resolution is poor compared to modern mice, it's about at Quake 1/2 levels, if they upped it to modern mice level, it would be perfect). Honestly, after MP3, I'll have serious issues picking up any dual-analog FPS.
Sony themselves make few things I would like to play. Microsoft themselves make basically nothing I would care to play. Nintendo makes quite a few things I enjoy playing. I don't much care for graphical superiority, I have a PC for that.
Now, which console should I buy? Well, at this point, Microsoft has few things that interest me on their offering, Sony has absolutely nothing that interests me on their offering, and Nintendo has a few things, a cheaper price, and the guaranteed promise of franchises I enjoy, some this year. Plus, perhaps Nintendo will win and the great mass of non-first party devs will make games for their platform.
Seems like an easy decision, doesn't it?
There remains, to this day, absolutely no reason to buy a PS3 as a gaming console... so I'd argue that those who buy / have bought it are the "fucking morons." Now, when the value proposition changes, I will probably pick one up.
I don't believe you'll have a problem with PS1 games. PS2 games otoh... hit or miss. A lot of stuff is supported, but a lot of things aren't, and unfortunately that, the last time I checked, included a lot of the PS2's good titles.
The PS2 was about 99% crap(10,000 some titles, about 100 are worthwhile), so 90% backwards compat isn't so grand unless it includes the good stuff.
Ebert is not a classically trained film critic. His background is in literature. He became a film critic in the first place by "genre hopping". So yes, I would take a critique by him about a book seriously. Hell, he's a better critic than anyone in the gaming media, so I'd take a game review by him seriously. Ebert has his critical failings, a soft spot for anything set in Chicago for one, being enormously trapped by the whole auteur thing(another reason for his stance on gaming), but he tends to judge things on their merits/audience. He isn't going to(and doesn't) pretentiously bash a summer blockbuster for being a summer blockbuster. He will give a cult classic an absolutely glowing review. He doesn't do the film-school fan-wank over a piece of art-house cinema. He is probably the single most important and influential critic out there in the real world, in any medium. And as we've seen time and time again, the internet PALES compared to the real world.
I happen to agree with him, mostly. Gaming isn't art. It's not low art and it's not high art. It's entertainment and technical achievement(and what's wrong with that anyway? Does it make you lay awake nights crying or something?). And every response just underscores WHY it isn't(although I would add the caveat YET).
For one, it has no real critical culture. Why? Well, simply put art isn't transient and isn't judged by things outside the limitations of it's media and times. It's judged in context.
If you're rating a film on a scale of 1-10, you don't knock 3 points off, right off the bat, because something was filmed in Super 8, you say it was filmed in super 8 and move on. You don't call a paleolithic cave painting crap because someone invented oil paints, canvas and brushes far later. The Taming of the Shrew isn't outdated by CATS.
Ahh, but in gaming, we do. Because there IS NO critical culture. There's a bunch of whiny puerile "gamers" who if they were within another realm, would be ranking movies by the quality of the CGI, and books by their cover-art. They also wouldn't by and large be able to judge the quality of a story EVEN if you subjected them to Jane Austin before forcing them through the classics(which after Jane Austin would seem fan-fuckingtastic imo). This is especially illustrated by the non-Ars rebuttal wherein I doubt the writer has the level of intellectual maturity of a High School grad.
Then we have the interactive nature of the medium. Interactivity is fine. There are performance arts and visual arts pieces that are both interactive and art(although I can't think of a interactive piece of fiction ala choose your own adventure that many would qualify as such). The interactive component of a video game would be the gameplay. The problem with gaming is that it tends to have defined goals. Art exists for the sake of art. Introducing a goal to it, tends to muddy the waters. Going back to the previous point, rather than judging the gameplay solely on it's own merits, we judge it by whether it helps or hinders our achievement of the games goals. In any other interactive setting we judge the impact of the interactivity on the audience. There are a few games actually I can think of that *might* qualify here, but by and large most don't. The interactive component doesn't add anything to the experience of the story, but it can detract from it.
Or another way to put it: Board games aren't art, and neither are video games that utilize that goal-oriented formula. Some non-games may qualify though.
Moving beyond the interactive into story and visual elements. Well, visual elements can certainly qualify. They're just not judged in an artistic context. For instance the visual style of Wind Waker, Okami, and Viewtiful Joe is certainly art. Doom 3 or Crysis OTOH is technical achievement. We have almost never have ANY of the visual elements of film or photography present, because of the interactive nature of the medium. And when they are there, they're either done poorly, or when d
I did. Also called the PS3 price(and it being a failure) before the E3 '06 announcement and called the success of the DS(which I was hoping would have the top screen be a sharp parallax display) before we even knew what it looked like. And the dreamcast dying. Microsoft barely beating Nintendo out last gen surprised me though.
The average household income of your typical wii-owning household is the highest, it exceeds 100k.
According to nielson, Wii owning households have the most disposable income, and play the console the 2nd least, just ahead of the PS3(but still frequently, it's not that big a difference).
They also trend towards older singles and families. With all members of a given family finding time for the console.
It's also the significant favorite(with the 360 just behind) of every gaming forum that doesn't have playstation or sony in the name.
I'm a gamer. Played on an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and such when they were new and shiny and cost an insane amount of money. I progressed through NES, Genesis, SNES, N64, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube. On the PC front I went from a 286 to a 486DX2, through the Pentiums, to an Athlon, and now to a Intel Core 2.
I was one of the 500 people in the US to buy Ico when it came out. I have a copy of various and sundry rare, and old games in storage or on my shelf, including a copy of LORD 1.x signed by Seth Robinson. I have all of the original Ultima games, complete with cloth maps. Infocom stuff. Cartridges galore. If it was good, prior to this generation, and you could pick it up at a store, I probably either own or at one point owned it.
I view review sites as shit. They rate games based largely upon shit no one should care about, like graphics(compared to state of the art on ALL consoles, but not including PCs), voice acting, and orchestrated music. Resistance is a dull, humdrum shooter which combines the same tired gameplay and FPS cliches we've had for over a decade. It scores 10 percentage points higher than Wii sports, which is a far more successful, original, and enjoyable title.
At some point I can't precisely pinpoint, the media surrounding gaming got taken over by a certain subtype you certainly identify with. But as an old hand, with more experience than the majority of the so-called "hardcore", and most of the enthuisiast media... Zack and Wiki interests me more than any exclusive PS3 or 360 title coming out this year, and Space Station Tycoon gives me nostalgic golden-era PC vibes.
Well, PC is generally WASD + pointer. An analog stick is better than WASD. So, the Wii could actually control a little better than standard PC controls.
If you didn't pick up Trauma Center on the DS, definately get it for the Wii. It's a fantastic, downright odd and quirky, game.
You need a fast enough cpu and other components to be able to feed the GPU. Even an 8800 GTS needs a pretty beefy CPU and some good memory to feed it fast enough. Get up into stuff like SLIed 8800GTX-ULTRAs and you need some really beefy equipment to keep up.
Actually, they both suck for AI. Piss-poor branch prediction and a number of other factors would make that very, very hard, and quite frankly the top talent in those fields doesn't typically(ever?) wind up in game development.
Now, if you mean AI as in convincing AI, well, the pinacle of that in a game has to be offline bots, and those can be perfectly functional on either system.
So, if they manage to sell 145k systems in the July NPD report, that's selling like it should? Yea, big improvement over the 80k they normally do, but still pathetic and still way under what the PS2 did and the Wii is doing.
Meanwhile, if I invested in entertainment I'd be dumping the stock of any 3rd party dumb enough to give the PS3 an exclusive w/o serious cash incentives from Sony. It's business, Sony is so far behind now that the cycle has already started. They're fucked. It's a failure.
The bright bit is that even the failures get a decent library, so it'll probably still end this as a good or great gaming system, but there's no huge turnaround coming, no when this game comes out it'll push the PS3 to number 1. It's an also ran. Live with it.
Slashdot Mirror
A bad car analogy on slashdot!? Why I'd never thought I'd see the day.
Welcome to Slashdot. Digg not treating you well? Poor guy, here, have a complimentary tinfoil hat.
I'll have you know I've bought plenty of MMOs on release day!
I disagree on the latter. There is a reason to get the 60 gig now... They are no longer producing them. If you are someone who puts a lot of value in the EE chip, then now may be the time to buy rather than taking your chances later with emulation.
I thought it was pretty clear that there was a reason to pickup the 60GB while it was still available if you wanted to have an EE chip.
I'm not personally in that camp, my PS2 still works.
Yes, that's very foolish. Most of the PS2's appeal came from 3rd parties. Sony also doesn't have any of their 1st/2nd/3rd committed(Insomniac and Sucker punch would qualify for this particular little sub-categorization) major franchises out yet, and with their marketshare atm you'd be extremely foolish to count on the type of 3rd party committment that made the PS2 worth it.
Or in other words, I'll buy a Nintendo console secure in the knowledge that they'll release enough stuff themselves over it's lifetime for it to be worth the launch price of admission($200-$250). Sony hasn't earned that in my estimation yet, and even if they had, $300 is about my limit for a console with few to no exclusive games actually out that I'm interested in.
I'll eventually wind up with a PS3, I have no doubt of that, but not anytime soon the way things are looking. Upside of that is I'll pay a hell of a lot less for everything.
The PS3 still won't hit the value sweet spot for enough people to dig out of the market share hole it's in. There just aren't any exclusive titles comparable to what MS and Nintendo have for the holidays, $500 is still a lot of money, and quite frankly I don't see the HD media formats EVER really taking off enough for people to swarm to the PS3 en-masse because of it(I mean cult-classics like Rockula aren't even out on DVD yet), much less this holiday season being "the time".
There's also no reason to go and get the 80GB right now, like there is for the 60GB with the EE chip.
Brit refers to British, as in Great Britain, or even including the entirety of the British Islands if one wants to be pedantic(which includes all of Ireland, IIRC, I'm not from the UK, I just work with em and pronounce things like them now[Worcester = Woostah]). This includes Scotland, and arguably some parts of Ireland, as well as IIRC, the Welsh. Now, English and Scots otoh... that's different.
Yes. Someone has reviewed it.
In the case of Metroid Prime 3. It really did lose points for controlling too well, being on the Wii, not being exceptionally frustrating, not having multiplayer, and being a franchise game. The exploration is there, the pacing is there, if not increased. It's harder then Bioshock, and it doesn't end in a let down. Having beaten both, I'd say MP3 is the better game(as it keeps getting better, whereas Bioshock just stops getting better at a certain point and gets *much* worse just after).
Once you get past a certain point, it's pure Metroid. The cons don't really apply. If you loved Prime, you'll love Prime 3. If you didn't much care for Prime, you may still love Prime 3. The only thing I'd subtract points for is the first bit of the game. Nothing else. That wasn't their gripe though.
This won't apply to Halo 3 though. That's Halo man! It's different! It has online play.
It also helps that most analog stick games "assist" you a bit. If you ever tried Halo or Halo 2 for the PC, they're retardedly easy because of that. Console FPSes though are tuned to console controls, so everyone has a fair shake, and you can get quite good at it. Just don't expect to beat a PC or Wii gamer on an absolutely even, control-wise playing field(as in no auto-assist, simple movement of cursor, they're so much faster and more precise then you... you will lose, horribly). You won't.
K/M is still the best for finate precision control. Wiimote+Nunchuck is #2(resolution is poor compared to modern mice, it's about at Quake 1/2 levels, if they upped it to modern mice level, it would be perfect). Honestly, after MP3, I'll have serious issues picking up any dual-analog FPS.
Sony themselves make few things I would like to play. Microsoft themselves make basically nothing I would care to play. Nintendo makes quite a few things I enjoy playing. I don't much care for graphical superiority, I have a PC for that.
Now, which console should I buy? Well, at this point, Microsoft has few things that interest me on their offering, Sony has absolutely nothing that interests me on their offering, and Nintendo has a few things, a cheaper price, and the guaranteed promise of franchises I enjoy, some this year. Plus, perhaps Nintendo will win and the great mass of non-first party devs will make games for their platform.
Seems like an easy decision, doesn't it?
There remains, to this day, absolutely no reason to buy a PS3 as a gaming console... so I'd argue that those who buy / have bought it are the "fucking morons." Now, when the value proposition changes, I will probably pick one up.
Seriously, who cares about the PS3? It's an also ran console.
There is no vast conspiracy, the thing is just unappealing and will be lucky to move N64 numbers.
I don't believe you'll have a problem with PS1 games. PS2 games otoh... hit or miss. A lot of stuff is supported, but a lot of things aren't, and unfortunately that, the last time I checked, included a lot of the PS2's good titles.
The PS2 was about 99% crap(10,000 some titles, about 100 are worthwhile), so 90% backwards compat isn't so grand unless it includes the good stuff.
Ebert is not a classically trained film critic. His background is in literature. He became a film critic in the first place by "genre hopping". So yes, I would take a critique by him about a book seriously. Hell, he's a better critic than anyone in the gaming media, so I'd take a game review by him seriously. Ebert has his critical failings, a soft spot for anything set in Chicago for one, being enormously trapped by the whole auteur thing(another reason for his stance on gaming), but he tends to judge things on their merits/audience. He isn't going to(and doesn't) pretentiously bash a summer blockbuster for being a summer blockbuster. He will give a cult classic an absolutely glowing review. He doesn't do the film-school fan-wank over a piece of art-house cinema. He is probably the single most important and influential critic out there in the real world, in any medium. And as we've seen time and time again, the internet PALES compared to the real world.
I happen to agree with him, mostly. Gaming isn't art. It's not low art and it's not high art. It's entertainment and technical achievement(and what's wrong with that anyway? Does it make you lay awake nights crying or something?). And every response just underscores WHY it isn't(although I would add the caveat YET).
For one, it has no real critical culture. Why? Well, simply put art isn't transient and isn't judged by things outside the limitations of it's media and times. It's judged in context.
If you're rating a film on a scale of 1-10, you don't knock 3 points off, right off the bat, because something was filmed in Super 8, you say it was filmed in super 8 and move on. You don't call a paleolithic cave painting crap because someone invented oil paints, canvas and brushes far later. The Taming of the Shrew isn't outdated by CATS.
Ahh, but in gaming, we do. Because there IS NO critical culture. There's a bunch of whiny puerile "gamers" who if they were within another realm, would be ranking movies by the quality of the CGI, and books by their cover-art. They also wouldn't by and large be able to judge the quality of a story EVEN if you subjected them to Jane Austin before forcing them through the classics(which after Jane Austin would seem fan-fuckingtastic imo). This is especially illustrated by the non-Ars rebuttal wherein I doubt the writer has the level of intellectual maturity of a High School grad.
Then we have the interactive nature of the medium. Interactivity is fine. There are performance arts and visual arts pieces that are both interactive and art(although I can't think of a interactive piece of fiction ala choose your own adventure that many would qualify as such). The interactive component of a video game would be the gameplay. The problem with gaming is that it tends to have defined goals. Art exists for the sake of art. Introducing a goal to it, tends to muddy the waters. Going back to the previous point, rather than judging the gameplay solely on it's own merits, we judge it by whether it helps or hinders our achievement of the games goals. In any other interactive setting we judge the impact of the interactivity on the audience. There are a few games actually I can think of that *might* qualify here, but by and large most don't. The interactive component doesn't add anything to the experience of the story, but it can detract from it.
Or another way to put it: Board games aren't art, and neither are video games that utilize that goal-oriented formula. Some non-games may qualify though.
Moving beyond the interactive into story and visual elements. Well, visual elements can certainly qualify. They're just not judged in an artistic context. For instance the visual style of Wind Waker, Okami, and Viewtiful Joe is certainly art. Doom 3 or Crysis OTOH is technical achievement. We have almost never have ANY of the visual elements of film or photography present, because of the interactive nature of the medium. And when they are there, they're either done poorly, or when d
I did. Also called the PS3 price(and it being a failure) before the E3 '06 announcement and called the success of the DS(which I was hoping would have the top screen be a sharp parallax display) before we even knew what it looked like. And the dreamcast dying. Microsoft barely beating Nintendo out last gen surprised me though.
The average household income of your typical wii-owning household is the highest, it exceeds 100k.
According to nielson, Wii owning households have the most disposable income, and play the console the 2nd least, just ahead of the PS3(but still frequently, it's not that big a difference).
They also trend towards older singles and families. With all members of a given family finding time for the console.
It's also the significant favorite(with the 360 just behind) of every gaming forum that doesn't have playstation or sony in the name.
Well fuck, I keep forgetting that Mario is always a rehash because it still stars an italian plumber instead of a portugese electrician.
If you can work in a way to hide behind the children and faith(preferably christian) as well, you'll have mastered the three dodges of the politician.
UK versus US english.
In the US we treat Nintendo as a single entity:
Nintendo IS making games.
In the UK they treat Nintendo as a collection of individuals:
Nintendo ARE making games.
I'm a gamer. Played on an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and such when they were new and shiny and cost an insane amount of money. I progressed through NES, Genesis, SNES, N64, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube. On the PC front I went from a 286 to a 486DX2, through the Pentiums, to an Athlon, and now to a Intel Core 2.
I was one of the 500 people in the US to buy Ico when it came out. I have a copy of various and sundry rare, and old games in storage or on my shelf, including a copy of LORD 1.x signed by Seth Robinson. I have all of the original Ultima games, complete with cloth maps. Infocom stuff. Cartridges galore. If it was good, prior to this generation, and you could pick it up at a store, I probably either own or at one point owned it.
I view review sites as shit. They rate games based largely upon shit no one should care about, like graphics(compared to state of the art on ALL consoles, but not including PCs), voice acting, and orchestrated music. Resistance is a dull, humdrum shooter which combines the same tired gameplay and FPS cliches we've had for over a decade. It scores 10 percentage points higher than Wii sports, which is a far more successful, original, and enjoyable title.
At some point I can't precisely pinpoint, the media surrounding gaming got taken over by a certain subtype you certainly identify with. But as an old hand, with more experience than the majority of the so-called "hardcore", and most of the enthuisiast media... Zack and Wiki interests me more than any exclusive PS3 or 360 title coming out this year, and Space Station Tycoon gives me nostalgic golden-era PC vibes.
Well, PC is generally WASD + pointer. An analog stick is better than WASD. So, the Wii could actually control a little better than standard PC controls.
If you didn't pick up Trauma Center on the DS, definately get it for the Wii. It's a fantastic, downright odd and quirky, game.
No it's not bold to say that. If anything your average Slashdoter, if an FF fan, has a preference for one of FF4, 5, or 6, and views 7 as overrated.
7 is mainly god's gift to RPGs amongst people for whom it was their first RPG. Slashdoters trend older and more geeky than that.
May was a 4-week month. June was a 5 week month. Sales actually went down...
You need a fast enough cpu and other components to be able to feed the GPU. Even an 8800 GTS needs a pretty beefy CPU and some good memory to feed it fast enough. Get up into stuff like SLIed 8800GTX-ULTRAs and you need some really beefy equipment to keep up.
Actually, they both suck for AI. Piss-poor branch prediction and a number of other factors would make that very, very hard, and quite frankly the top talent in those fields doesn't typically(ever?) wind up in game development.
Now, if you mean AI as in convincing AI, well, the pinacle of that in a game has to be offline bots, and those can be perfectly functional on either system.
Physics is kind of a wash too.
So, if they manage to sell 145k systems in the July NPD report, that's selling like it should? Yea, big improvement over the 80k they normally do, but still pathetic and still way under what the PS2 did and the Wii is doing.
Meanwhile, if I invested in entertainment I'd be dumping the stock of any 3rd party dumb enough to give the PS3 an exclusive w/o serious cash incentives from Sony. It's business, Sony is so far behind now that the cycle has already started. They're fucked. It's a failure.
The bright bit is that even the failures get a decent library, so it'll probably still end this as a good or great gaming system, but there's no huge turnaround coming, no when this game comes out it'll push the PS3 to number 1. It's an also ran. Live with it.