I agree that AAA exclusives are very important for a console. So let's look at the AAA exclusives for PS3: Resistance, Motorstorm, Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Now the AAA exclusives for PS3: Zelda, Wii Sports(!?!), Wario Ware (?????). Those last two are reaches in my opinion, especially Wii Sports which is fun but isn't a full-length game.
Motorstorm is garbage. Excite truck, for all its warts(learning curve for it's control scheme is why it's scored so low) is a better arcade racer, and it includes colors other than brown. I don't see how I can take you seriously when you left off Virtual Fighter 5 in a PS3 list(it's exclusive for now...), and included Motorstorm. Especially when you pop in Sigma and then leave off RE4.
If you look at the Wii library against the PS3 library you'll see the same number of great games, yet PS3 has a whole lot more okay to good games, and a whole lot more games period. So while people complain that the PS3 is lacking games, the Wii is starving for games. Yet people keep buying and praising the Wii, buyers don't seem to care.
23 Wii to 20 PS3 > 70% (Good->Great) for all games with over 20 reviews. 30 to 26 PS3 @ > 60% (OK), same criteria. 34 to 29 PS3 @ > 50% (Playable), same criteria.
I'll give the PS3 +1 for Sigma. So 23 to 21.
If we knock off all the sports games(many of which, like Madden, scored better with motion controls) from the PS3 lineup, we're left with 10 games. 3 of which are FPSes. 2 are arcade racers. 1 is a fighter. 1 is Oblivion. 1 is Sigma. And the other two are Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and an almost straight port with some minor enhancements of a PS2 GTA clone(which the wii version is better than).
The Wii genre coverage is RIDICULOUSLY superior(there are things in there that don't even traditionally classify, like Elebits and Trauma Center), and it has far more exclusives.
Don't forget Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters... etc. etc. etc. And PC ports, which is all the ID stuff. More recently Resistance: Fall of Man, Rainbow Sixes...
Sony's been in decline for a while. About the only thing really keeping them in good health was the release of a Spiderman movie, their gaming division, and oddly enough their financials/insurance division. Media divisions were being buyoed for a while, but I think they're in the black now.
They're getting kicked around in consumer electronics, computers, and more recently video games... and the media divisions aren't compensating for it.
The company isn't going to fold or anything, but I'd be interested in seeing the logic behind someone ranking their stock as a "BUY".
Hardcore gamers are killing the industry. Seriously. You people are fucking awful for it. Hang in there, I'll explain why. There's going to be a ton of film analogies in here, so bear with it. 99% of the 360 and PS3s lineup is a retread of a retread of a retread, with next to no refinement. The best of the best of a given years releases will incrementally improve something. Everything else is a graphics upgrade, maybe a setting that hasn't been used in a while, a character swap, some new guns, a new B-Movie level teen story. If you're really, really, really lucky, you might get a new good art direction style(but that's REALLY rare). It's all window dressing... it doesn't matter. That's fine, but it gets really old.
If you look at gaming, as a media, what you see is what basically amounts to what would happen if you took a summer action blockbuster schedule(quite popular with the 16-25 demo!) and rehashed it, year, after year, after year, only improving the CGI, and maybe the fight scenes. Anything fresh, withers and dies on the vine on the "hardcore" systems. Clover closed. Psychonauts was a commerical failure. Ico sold something like 10,000 copies. The success of anything remotely fresh is(perhaps was is better here?) a rarity, and quality has little impact on that. When something fresh IS successful, it quickly joins the rehash bandwagon. It's like 20 years of Naruto and knockoffs, 15 years of Terminator and Independence day sequels and knockoffs, with the past 5 years adding Pulp Fiction sequels and knockoffs.
The casual market, which is really better termed the mainstream market, which the Wii is reaching, has no expectations. Everything is novel to them, and judged with a completely fresh perspective. This is also why Halo is so popular incidentally, and older FPS gamers cringe at people calling it revolutionary. So yes, for a while, people will be willing to accept shovelware. This is partly(the rest being the novelty) because well, gaming media, and gaming criticism is an utterly pathetic puerile field. You don't see Roger Ebert knocking 2 stars off a film because it was made in Super 8 on a shoestring budget, because that's not the point to film, and you know what you're getting when you hear it was filmed in Super 8 on a shoestring budget. You see game critics do this all the time, and the bulk of their reviews are for an enthuisiast audience, which is an additional problem. When you give the games casual gamers like poor scores because of things they don't care about, you lose all of your credibility. Mainstream publications LOVE Wii sports, and the system has hit almost 10 million sold on the strength of largely that alone, it's doing blockbuster sales in Japan. Gaming publications scored it poorly(77%, resistence, which has had next to no market impact got an 87%). So you'll see in the growth of the industry into a casual market the emergence of a real, mainstream gaming media and review arm to cater to the mainstream. This, and time, will kill the shovelware, generate a real critical environment.
The other thing about casual and new gamers. They're more willing to experiment, because they have no biases. The hardcore audience has proven themselves adverse to this. Even a change in art direction can bring calls of derision(see "Cellda!"). This is good for the long term health of the industry, because believe me, most people will eventually grow out of(kids, additional responsibilities, whatever) or get sick of the blockbuster model. It happened to me, and there are countless other ex-hardcore gamers on this very forum in the same boat. If they buy 5 games a year, it's more likely that those will be in 5 different genres than all in the same genre, until they transition into a genre enthuisiast, at which point, they're "hardcore" anyway. If you have one FPS to play through, you don't need 4 more. You're already seeing this with the Wii release schedule this year. The genre coverage is missing VERY few things, the 360 and PS3 are chock full of hol
Goldeneye. It's still the best selling console FPS of all time(8 million units), and I think it might even be the best selling FPS of all time(half-life might edge it out... not sure, PC sales are tough to track down reliably).
I agree on the 360 selection. I have one in my appt(one of my roommates has one)... so cost of entry isn't a concern. The only things really interesting to me there are Dead Rising, Viva Pinata, Eternal Sonata and Blue Dragon.
I tried Gears and Forza 2... no real interest there.
Multi-thousand? Try multi-hundred. It doesn't take a ton of processing power to push/decode 480p and 720p movies, value parts will more than cover you, and if you have spare stuff lying around you can probably build something that will suffice. The bulk of the cost of an HTPC is storage, since you want a ton of it, and even that isn't that pricey. I have a TB of Storage, Raid 5(granted, software, but this is more for redundancy than speed/performacne), in my HTPC, it was far cheaper to acquire that than a PS3(hell my desktop has half a TB of disk space, and that was $230). Do people not know what PC parts cost anymore?
Bullshit. Unless you either sit right up next to the screen like a fucking retard or have fucking fictional cybernetic eyesight out of a Gibson novel, there's no way you can notice an appreciable difference between 720p and 1080p on a 24" set from a normal view distance of 4-8 feet, unless your display's native res is 1080p and the scaler for multi-res display is pathetically awful. If you're talking PC monitor at PC view distances of inches, get a decent one and a PC that will ACTUALLY push even higher resolutions if the relatively miniscule difference between 720 and 1080 lines is really that noticeable, and image quality is really *THAT* important, because money is evidentally no object at that point. Even acquiring a 24" display capable of HD resolutions in a normal TV capacity seems silly to me, unless space constraints mean you have to have a flat panel.
This doesn't even begin to get into how horrible the HD media library is, compared to the SD and ED library. Everyone's HD content sucks at the moment. It's all fucking crap. Absolutely pathetic selection of shitty summer blockbusters with a few ho-hum things in there. Yea, I'll pass. Hell, the original star wars will NEVER see release at a resolution higher than 480p because everything but the laserdisc masters was mysteriously lost. The best we'll ever get for a ton of old TV shows, a bunch of MST3K for example, is VHS rips. The best HD content hitting is mostly broadcast, which you can rip with a relatively cheap tuner card or ignoring the legality at the moment, download. People who buy either media formats are either resolution whores, conspicious consumers, or idiots. Take your pick. The whole fucking scene is a cultural wasteland.
Streaming to a portable!? Who cares? Seriously. Who cares? Where are you going to watch it? Can't do it from the airport, because a residential connection and airport wi-fi doesn't have the bandwidth really. Can't do it during your commute because you're not covered the whole way normally, even on commuter rail. Dentist's office? Nope. Bar? Are you that much of a geek? And anyway, see airport. This is the definition of useless gimicky feature. It sounds cool, but it's completely impractical. Hell, I'm lucky to stream a whole 30 minute TV show to my laptop with the amount of interference from all of the other access points and other devices in range in my building. I long ago gave up on that, and if I want to watch something in bed, I synch it or plug my laptop into the network.
Now we get to the library. Resistance is a ho-hum ubercliche console shooter. Motorstorm is a brown arcade racer(and Excite Truck is scarily a BETTER arcade racer!). Neither is great, acceptable, since that's all you have of note, but not omg you must play this good. Home is still in closed beta, and basically just lets you have man dates in front of posters of Spiderman 3 with other people dumb enough to buy a PS3. Ninja Gaiden Sigma is a retread of an XBOX game, which was in turn a retread of another XBox game, with no core gameplay changes except a gimmick. It's selling for shit, and there's a reason for that. Oblivion is best on the PC, and everyone has played it already. FF/MGS aren't coming out this year. FF, you'll be lucky if it hits before 2009, and MGS you'll be lucky if it hits before Summer of next year AND stays exclusive. If we start comparing downloadable gam
Well, for RedHat, a critical vulnerability is any remotely exploitable vulnerability that an unauthorized user can exploit. This includes things like telnet, oddly, which no one enables.
Wow, that's not a great list, unless all you own is a PS3. Here are the PS3 exclusives: Heavenly Sword - God of war, with a chick. May be good, may be Genji-bad. Lair - Rogue Squadron w/o the Star Wars License. Hey, it moved gamecubes right? Warhawk - WTF is this game now? Ninja Gaiden Sigma - Made the PS3 leap a whole 700 units upon release in Japan. Not a factor. Super Stardust HD - A PSN game. Remake of an old Amiga classic. Might be decent.
Here are the Wii exclusives: Mario Strikers Charged - Arcade Soccer with the Mario franchise. Online play. Nothing too special. Metroid Prime 3 - It's metroid. Enormously huge franchise. Mercury Meltdown Revolution - Meh. Sequel to a PSP game. Pokemon Battle Revolution - My pokemons, let me show you them. Another enormously huge franchise. Boogie - Ugh.... Space Station Tycoon - This one actually looks oddly interesting. Like mid-90s PC golden era interesting for some reason. Dewy's Adventure - From the makers of Elebits. Could be good.
And here are the 360 exclusives: Blue Dragon - JRPG if that's your thing. Can Toriyama do anything that's not in that infernal DBZ style!? Eternal Sonata - Another JRPG. Mass Effect - RPG. Not too excited about this one, but some people are. And of course PC cross-ports like Bioshock, Two Worlds, Overlord, etc.
Uhh.. it was an unusual week for the XBox 360, but that wasn't a record LOW for the PS3. The PS3 was up 700-ish units from the week before. The low point for the PS3 is under 8k units IIRC.
This last week was the release of Ninja Gaiden Sigma(PS3), and Trusty Bell(360). Ninja Gaiden Sigma didn't move many PS3s, Trusty Bell did move some 360s. The 360 should go back to it's 2k a week on a good week numbers next week.
Not that any of that matters, Japan belongs to the Nintendo Wii, which has outsold both the 360 and PS3 combined LTD, and outsells both combined by 6:1 on a bad week. For either platform to recover it's at something like 3x the greatest market reversal ever at this point.
Nintendo already stated they won't allow AO content on their platforms. Sony has never licensed an AO game(well except San Andreas, which wasn't AO when they licensed it), and I'm pretty sure they don't license it either. So yes, we need to get them to even allow it to be published.
No, it's more because most reviewers are gaming-store reject neckbeards and have a poor attitude towards change. Thanks for playing though. I can't name a Wii game I own where the controls have truly detracted from the experience, and many where they have vastly improved it.
But hey, "ZELDA DOESN'T HAVE ORCHESTRATED MUSIC AND VOICE ACTING, -2 FROM THE SCORE!" "THIS PSP GAME IS A SHITTY VERSION OF A PS2 GAME, BUT IT LOOKS GOOD, 8/10!"
The Darkness - Cross platform, and not all that interesting. R6: Vegas - Cross-platform. Ninja Gaiden Sigma - No one cares, seriously, no one cares. Stranglehold - See Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Lair - Preferred this when it was called Rogue Squadron and had the Star Wars License. Warhawk - WTF is this now? An FPS, a shooter, an action game? Free download, pay download, retail box game? Singstar - Europe and 3 people outside Europe care. Heavenly Sword - Ok... It's like God of War, right, but with a girl, and it may or may not be better than Genji! Assassin's Creed - Cross-platform.
What a *great* list you have there. That definitely is competitive with Mario, Metroid, Smash, and Halo. Oh wait, no, it isn't.
A new video card only costs as much as a PS3 if you're going bleeding edge, like an 8800 GTX. The RSX in the PS3 is more comparable to a Nvidia 7800(a 7800GS w/256MB of RAM is about $170). A 320MB 8800 GTS, which you can get for $300, will spank it, much less a $600+ video card like an 8800 Ultra. The 7800 upper-end series cards still go for a ton of money for some reason, even though they're not state of the art anymore. You also have the option with all of those cards of plugging in another one and using SLI at a latter date. The G80 series will also push resolutions that make 1080p look like a joke.
ATI has equivalents(and Crossfire SLI equivalent), and a price war is expected to begin by the end of the year.
That's just the GPU. Now, how much for 256MB of DDR2 RAM? No idea, can't seem to find any. A 512MB stick of high quality DDR2 800 RAM is only $36 though. So, let's say $36 to get twice what the PS3 has.
Only problem is the CPU. A core 2 extreme(quad) is overkill for a PS3 comparable machine, and something like a core 2 duo E6600 is stronger(for instance it has a ton more L2 and L1 cache) in some areas, but weaker in others. We'll assume an E6600 clocked to 3.2 GHz with a stock cooler is better for general computing tasks like Linux because well, it is. That's $220, and another $200 for a decent mainboard.
Toss in a case+power supply for let's say $100 so we can get a nice one, a DVD-ROM for $5, and a 60GB PATA HDD for $50 and we have a PS3 minus the BDROM(unless you want a burner? $400). We're at $780(Only $180 over the price of the PS3s you can actually buy). But hey, in the right line of work(or a student), and with the right usage pattern, you can deduct the price(well depreciation I believe, over 5 years) of the machine over time, within reason(check with your accountant, which you have if you're not a child and don't consider $600 for a console too much money).
This is how things stand now. BD burners and BD-ROMs will certainly drop in price, drastically, over time. RAM and other components get cheaper as time goes on as well. There is an expected price war between AMD and Intel, and NVidia and ATI within their mid->upper tier product spaces beginning this summer. The PS3 is not *that* much of a deal, especially as a general purpose computer. You can't upgrade it piecemeal over time, and it's not even that great of a value for that *right now*. And by the end of the year, PCs should pull well and truly ahead again.
The last thing I think I heard about Sam&Max on the Wii was that Telltale had hired a Wii programmer. Nintendo contacted them back in September, the blog post on it is here. I don't think a version of season 1, or what if anything they're doing with it has been confirmed yet though.
I went ahead and finished off season 1. Abe Lincoln must die was awesome. Reality 2.0 was great, and the ending credits for Bright Side of the Moon were great... but constantly having to go back to the same locations, with no real variety in there still kinda bothers me. I wish I could've revisted places like the White House, TV studio, and the Mafia-Free casino to solve some of the later puzzles would've been nice. Instead it's new location, location you started in in the first game, every episode. I got really tired of that same street.
Yea, that's definately a valid synopsis/complaint. I still have the last 3 to play through, I gave it a rest after the first three, because that was bothering me. I *loved* the first one. The second was great at the TV station, and the third one felt... well... meh. The casino kinda wore on me after a bit, it seemed like there was a ton of untapped potential.
It doesn't flow well from one game to another, the whole series(well up to 3, I haven't gone through the last 3 yet) doesn't work well as a single complete game, because there's a ton of reuse and repetition(particularly of the office, store, street out front and Sybill's). I really hope they fix that for the next season. Right now it's like bad anime filler episodic, where half the thing is a synopsis, and everything is reused. I get the feeling a big reason for that is that Bone was exactly a smashing success, and they didn't want to pump out a *ton* of new content every episode, or require older episodes to use new ones. So we got a new area. I'd rather it was designed as a single game, split into 6 parts, with revisiting of older areas a part of the game so there's more variety per episode.
There were also some odd engine glitches at times, like whole sections of polys going missing.
It's still enjoyable, definately worth the price of admission, and I'm definately on board with buying the next season, but yea, valid complaints, and I hope telltale fixes them. I think a few of them read slashdot, so, I hope they address that in the next season, and in the meantime, can't wait for my season 1 DVD. Oh, and a Wii release.
Slashdot Mirror
And why would you include Sigma in a comparitive list, but then not include the Wii RE4 port?
I agree that AAA exclusives are very important for a console. So let's look at the AAA exclusives for PS3: Resistance, Motorstorm, Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Now the AAA exclusives for PS3: Zelda, Wii Sports(!?!), Wario Ware (?????). Those last two are reaches in my opinion, especially Wii Sports which is fun but isn't a full-length game.
Motorstorm is garbage. Excite truck, for all its warts(learning curve for it's control scheme is why it's scored so low) is a better arcade racer, and it includes colors other than brown. I don't see how I can take you seriously when you left off Virtual Fighter 5 in a PS3 list(it's exclusive for now...), and included Motorstorm. Especially when you pop in Sigma and then leave off RE4.
If you look at the Wii library against the PS3 library you'll see the same number of great games, yet PS3 has a whole lot more okay to good games, and a whole lot more games period. So while people complain that the PS3 is lacking games, the Wii is starving for games. Yet people keep buying and praising the Wii, buyers don't seem to care.
23 Wii to 20 PS3 > 70% (Good->Great) for all games with over 20 reviews.
30 to 26 PS3 @ > 60% (OK), same criteria.
34 to 29 PS3 @ > 50% (Playable), same criteria.
I'll give the PS3 +1 for Sigma. So 23 to 21.
If we knock off all the sports games(many of which, like Madden, scored better with motion controls) from the PS3 lineup, we're left with 10 games. 3 of which are FPSes. 2 are arcade racers. 1 is a fighter. 1 is Oblivion. 1 is Sigma. And the other two are Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and an almost straight port with some minor enhancements of a PS2 GTA clone(which the wii version is better than).
The Wii genre coverage is RIDICULOUSLY superior(there are things in there that don't even traditionally classify, like Elebits and Trauma Center), and it has far more exclusives.
You are, quite simple, very, very wrong.
Don't forget Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters... etc. etc. etc. And PC ports, which is all the ID stuff. More recently Resistance: Fall of Man, Rainbow Sixes...
I'm still missing a ton of stuff I'm sure.
Sony's been in decline for a while. About the only thing really keeping them in good health was the release of a Spiderman movie, their gaming division, and oddly enough their financials/insurance division. Media divisions were being buyoed for a while, but I think they're in the black now.
They're getting kicked around in consumer electronics, computers, and more recently video games... and the media divisions aren't compensating for it.
The company isn't going to fold or anything, but I'd be interested in seeing the logic behind someone ranking their stock as a "BUY".
Would complain about the mass addition of new people into their hobby.
Sigh.
Hardcore gamers are killing the industry. Seriously. You people are fucking awful for it. Hang in there, I'll explain why. There's going to be a ton of film analogies in here, so bear with it. 99% of the 360 and PS3s lineup is a retread of a retread of a retread, with next to no refinement. The best of the best of a given years releases will incrementally improve something. Everything else is a graphics upgrade, maybe a setting that hasn't been used in a while, a character swap, some new guns, a new B-Movie level teen story. If you're really, really, really lucky, you might get a new good art direction style(but that's REALLY rare). It's all window dressing... it doesn't matter. That's fine, but it gets really old.
If you look at gaming, as a media, what you see is what basically amounts to what would happen if you took a summer action blockbuster schedule(quite popular with the 16-25 demo!) and rehashed it, year, after year, after year, only improving the CGI, and maybe the fight scenes. Anything fresh, withers and dies on the vine on the "hardcore" systems. Clover closed. Psychonauts was a commerical failure. Ico sold something like 10,000 copies. The success of anything remotely fresh is(perhaps was is better here?) a rarity, and quality has little impact on that. When something fresh IS successful, it quickly joins the rehash bandwagon. It's like 20 years of Naruto and knockoffs, 15 years of Terminator and Independence day sequels and knockoffs, with the past 5 years adding Pulp Fiction sequels and knockoffs.
The casual market, which is really better termed the mainstream market, which the Wii is reaching, has no expectations. Everything is novel to them, and judged with a completely fresh perspective. This is also why Halo is so popular incidentally, and older FPS gamers cringe at people calling it revolutionary. So yes, for a while, people will be willing to accept shovelware. This is partly(the rest being the novelty) because well, gaming media, and gaming criticism is an utterly pathetic puerile field. You don't see Roger Ebert knocking 2 stars off a film because it was made in Super 8 on a shoestring budget, because that's not the point to film, and you know what you're getting when you hear it was filmed in Super 8 on a shoestring budget. You see game critics do this all the time, and the bulk of their reviews are for an enthuisiast audience, which is an additional problem. When you give the games casual gamers like poor scores because of things they don't care about, you lose all of your credibility. Mainstream publications LOVE Wii sports, and the system has hit almost 10 million sold on the strength of largely that alone, it's doing blockbuster sales in Japan. Gaming publications scored it poorly(77%, resistence, which has had next to no market impact got an 87%). So you'll see in the growth of the industry into a casual market the emergence of a real, mainstream gaming media and review arm to cater to the mainstream. This, and time, will kill the shovelware, generate a real critical environment.
The other thing about casual and new gamers. They're more willing to experiment, because they have no biases. The hardcore audience has proven themselves adverse to this. Even a change in art direction can bring calls of derision(see "Cellda!"). This is good for the long term health of the industry, because believe me, most people will eventually grow out of(kids, additional responsibilities, whatever) or get sick of the blockbuster model. It happened to me, and there are countless other ex-hardcore gamers on this very forum in the same boat. If they buy 5 games a year, it's more likely that those will be in 5 different genres than all in the same genre, until they transition into a genre enthuisiast, at which point, they're "hardcore" anyway. If you have one FPS to play through, you don't need 4 more. You're already seeing this with the Wii release schedule this year. The genre coverage is missing VERY few things, the 360 and PS3 are chock full of hol
Goldeneye. It's still the best selling console FPS of all time(8 million units), and I think it might even be the best selling FPS of all time(half-life might edge it out... not sure, PC sales are tough to track down reliably).
Videophiles maybe. Film buffs, no.
I agree on the 360 selection. I have one in my appt(one of my roommates has one)... so cost of entry isn't a concern. The only things really interesting to me there are Dead Rising, Viva Pinata, Eternal Sonata and Blue Dragon.
I tried Gears and Forza 2... no real interest there.
I think I'm getting old.
Multi-thousand? Try multi-hundred. It doesn't take a ton of processing power to push/decode 480p and 720p movies, value parts will more than cover you, and if you have spare stuff lying around you can probably build something that will suffice. The bulk of the cost of an HTPC is storage, since you want a ton of it, and even that isn't that pricey. I have a TB of Storage, Raid 5(granted, software, but this is more for redundancy than speed/performacne), in my HTPC, it was far cheaper to acquire that than a PS3(hell my desktop has half a TB of disk space, and that was $230). Do people not know what PC parts cost anymore?
Bullshit. Unless you either sit right up next to the screen like a fucking retard or have fucking fictional cybernetic eyesight out of a Gibson novel, there's no way you can notice an appreciable difference between 720p and 1080p on a 24" set from a normal view distance of 4-8 feet, unless your display's native res is 1080p and the scaler for multi-res display is pathetically awful. If you're talking PC monitor at PC view distances of inches, get a decent one and a PC that will ACTUALLY push even higher resolutions if the relatively miniscule difference between 720 and 1080 lines is really that noticeable, and image quality is really *THAT* important, because money is evidentally no object at that point. Even acquiring a 24" display capable of HD resolutions in a normal TV capacity seems silly to me, unless space constraints mean you have to have a flat panel.
This doesn't even begin to get into how horrible the HD media library is, compared to the SD and ED library. Everyone's HD content sucks at the moment. It's all fucking crap. Absolutely pathetic selection of shitty summer blockbusters with a few ho-hum things in there. Yea, I'll pass. Hell, the original star wars will NEVER see release at a resolution higher than 480p because everything but the laserdisc masters was mysteriously lost. The best we'll ever get for a ton of old TV shows, a bunch of MST3K for example, is VHS rips. The best HD content hitting is mostly broadcast, which you can rip with a relatively cheap tuner card or ignoring the legality at the moment, download. People who buy either media formats are either resolution whores, conspicious consumers, or idiots. Take your pick. The whole fucking scene is a cultural wasteland.
Streaming to a portable!? Who cares? Seriously. Who cares? Where are you going to watch it? Can't do it from the airport, because a residential connection and airport wi-fi doesn't have the bandwidth really. Can't do it during your commute because you're not covered the whole way normally, even on commuter rail. Dentist's office? Nope. Bar? Are you that much of a geek? And anyway, see airport. This is the definition of useless gimicky feature. It sounds cool, but it's completely impractical. Hell, I'm lucky to stream a whole 30 minute TV show to my laptop with the amount of interference from all of the other access points and other devices in range in my building. I long ago gave up on that, and if I want to watch something in bed, I synch it or plug my laptop into the network.
Now we get to the library. Resistance is a ho-hum ubercliche console shooter. Motorstorm is a brown arcade racer(and Excite Truck is scarily a BETTER arcade racer!). Neither is great, acceptable, since that's all you have of note, but not omg you must play this good. Home is still in closed beta, and basically just lets you have man dates in front of posters of Spiderman 3 with other people dumb enough to buy a PS3. Ninja Gaiden Sigma is a retread of an XBOX game, which was in turn a retread of another XBox game, with no core gameplay changes except a gimmick. It's selling for shit, and there's a reason for that. Oblivion is best on the PC, and everyone has played it already. FF/MGS aren't coming out this year. FF, you'll be lucky if it hits before 2009, and MGS you'll be lucky if it hits before Summer of next year AND stays exclusive. If we start comparing downloadable gam
Well, for RedHat, a critical vulnerability is any remotely exploitable vulnerability that an unauthorized user can exploit. This includes things like telnet, oddly, which no one enables.
Why should I care whether or not people run Linux, or Windows, or *BSD, or Mac OSX, or Novell, or freakin' Amigas? At home.
Run whatever the fuck you want.
Wow, that's not a great list, unless all you own is a PS3. Here are the PS3 exclusives:
Heavenly Sword - God of war, with a chick. May be good, may be Genji-bad.
Lair - Rogue Squadron w/o the Star Wars License. Hey, it moved gamecubes right?
Warhawk - WTF is this game now?
Ninja Gaiden Sigma - Made the PS3 leap a whole 700 units upon release in Japan. Not a factor.
Super Stardust HD - A PSN game. Remake of an old Amiga classic. Might be decent.
Here are the Wii exclusives:
Mario Strikers Charged - Arcade Soccer with the Mario franchise. Online play. Nothing too special.
Metroid Prime 3 - It's metroid. Enormously huge franchise.
Mercury Meltdown Revolution - Meh. Sequel to a PSP game.
Pokemon Battle Revolution - My pokemons, let me show you them. Another enormously huge franchise.
Boogie - Ugh....
Space Station Tycoon - This one actually looks oddly interesting. Like mid-90s PC golden era interesting for some reason.
Dewy's Adventure - From the makers of Elebits. Could be good.
And here are the 360 exclusives:
Blue Dragon - JRPG if that's your thing. Can Toriyama do anything that's not in that infernal DBZ style!?
Eternal Sonata - Another JRPG.
Mass Effect - RPG. Not too excited about this one, but some people are.
And of course PC cross-ports like Bioshock, Two Worlds, Overlord, etc.
Uhh.. it was an unusual week for the XBox 360, but that wasn't a record LOW for the PS3. The PS3 was up 700-ish units from the week before. The low point for the PS3 is under 8k units IIRC.
This last week was the release of Ninja Gaiden Sigma(PS3), and Trusty Bell(360). Ninja Gaiden Sigma didn't move many PS3s, Trusty Bell did move some 360s. The 360 should go back to it's 2k a week on a good week numbers next week.
Not that any of that matters, Japan belongs to the Nintendo Wii, which has outsold both the 360 and PS3 combined LTD, and outsells both combined by 6:1 on a bad week. For either platform to recover it's at something like 3x the greatest market reversal ever at this point.
Nintendo already stated they won't allow AO content on their platforms. Sony has never licensed an AO game(well except San Andreas, which wasn't AO when they licensed it), and I'm pretty sure they don't license it either. So yes, we need to get them to even allow it to be published.
Uhh, yea, the puritans were really, really assexual. I mean hell, look at bundling. And yes, the puritans did that.
No it won't. Neither Sony nor Nintendo will generally license an AO game.
AO also means neither Sony nor Nintendo will allow the game on their consoles.
The ONLY AO game to ever be released on a console is GTA: San Andreas, and that doesn't really count.
If you talk to "people on the street" then HD media isn't going anywhere either. It's still all DVD in man-on-the-street land.
Oh, and everyone knows about getting stuff via your cable box. "On-demand" downloadable content is the future.
No, it's more because most reviewers are gaming-store reject neckbeards and have a poor attitude towards change. Thanks for playing though. I can't name a Wii game I own where the controls have truly detracted from the experience, and many where they have vastly improved it.
But hey, "ZELDA DOESN'T HAVE ORCHESTRATED MUSIC AND VOICE ACTING, -2 FROM THE SCORE!"
"THIS PSP GAME IS A SHITTY VERSION OF A PS2 GAME, BUT IT LOOKS GOOD, 8/10!"
That's your list? That's hilarious.
The Darkness - Cross platform, and not all that interesting.
R6: Vegas - Cross-platform.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma - No one cares, seriously, no one cares.
Stranglehold - See Ninja Gaiden Sigma.
Lair - Preferred this when it was called Rogue Squadron and had the Star Wars License.
Warhawk - WTF is this now? An FPS, a shooter, an action game? Free download, pay download, retail box game?
Singstar - Europe and 3 people outside Europe care.
Heavenly Sword - Ok... It's like God of War, right, but with a girl, and it may or may not be better than Genji!
Assassin's Creed - Cross-platform.
What a *great* list you have there. That definitely is competitive with Mario, Metroid, Smash, and Halo. Oh wait, no, it isn't.
Unfair comparison. Reviewers are far harsher on the Wii and DS then they are on the PS3/PSP/360.
Probably because outside graphics and sound, they can't *actually* critique something, because the gaming media sucks.
A new video card only costs as much as a PS3 if you're going bleeding edge, like an 8800 GTX. The RSX in the PS3 is more comparable to a Nvidia 7800(a 7800GS w/256MB of RAM is about $170). A 320MB 8800 GTS, which you can get for $300, will spank it, much less a $600+ video card like an 8800 Ultra. The 7800 upper-end series cards still go for a ton of money for some reason, even though they're not state of the art anymore. You also have the option with all of those cards of plugging in another one and using SLI at a latter date. The G80 series will also push resolutions that make 1080p look like a joke.
ATI has equivalents(and Crossfire SLI equivalent), and a price war is expected to begin by the end of the year.
That's just the GPU. Now, how much for 256MB of DDR2 RAM? No idea, can't seem to find any. A 512MB stick of high quality DDR2 800 RAM is only $36 though. So, let's say $36 to get twice what the PS3 has.
Only problem is the CPU. A core 2 extreme(quad) is overkill for a PS3 comparable machine, and something like a core 2 duo E6600 is stronger(for instance it has a ton more L2 and L1 cache) in some areas, but weaker in others. We'll assume an E6600 clocked to 3.2 GHz with a stock cooler is better for general computing tasks like Linux because well, it is. That's $220, and another $200 for a decent mainboard.
Toss in a case+power supply for let's say $100 so we can get a nice one, a DVD-ROM for $5, and a 60GB PATA HDD for $50 and we have a PS3 minus the BDROM(unless you want a burner? $400). We're at $780(Only $180 over the price of the PS3s you can actually buy). But hey, in the right line of work(or a student), and with the right usage pattern, you can deduct the price(well depreciation I believe, over 5 years) of the machine over time, within reason(check with your accountant, which you have if you're not a child and don't consider $600 for a console too much money).
This is how things stand now. BD burners and BD-ROMs will certainly drop in price, drastically, over time. RAM and other components get cheaper as time goes on as well. There is an expected price war between AMD and Intel, and NVidia and ATI within their mid->upper tier product spaces beginning this summer. The PS3 is not *that* much of a deal, especially as a general purpose computer. You can't upgrade it piecemeal over time, and it's not even that great of a value for that *right now*. And by the end of the year, PCs should pull well and truly ahead again.
The last thing I think I heard about Sam&Max on the Wii was that Telltale had hired a Wii programmer. Nintendo contacted them back in September, the blog post on it is here. I don't think a version of season 1, or what if anything they're doing with it has been confirmed yet though.
I went ahead and finished off season 1. Abe Lincoln must die was awesome. Reality 2.0 was great, and the ending credits for Bright Side of the Moon were great... but constantly having to go back to the same locations, with no real variety in there still kinda bothers me. I wish I could've revisted places like the White House, TV studio, and the Mafia-Free casino to solve some of the later puzzles would've been nice. Instead it's new location, location you started in in the first game, every episode. I got really tired of that same street.
Yea, that's definately a valid synopsis/complaint. I still have the last 3 to play through, I gave it a rest after the first three, because that was bothering me. I *loved* the first one. The second was great at the TV station, and the third one felt... well... meh. The casino kinda wore on me after a bit, it seemed like there was a ton of untapped potential.
It doesn't flow well from one game to another, the whole series(well up to 3, I haven't gone through the last 3 yet) doesn't work well as a single complete game, because there's a ton of reuse and repetition(particularly of the office, store, street out front and Sybill's). I really hope they fix that for the next season. Right now it's like bad anime filler episodic, where half the thing is a synopsis, and everything is reused. I get the feeling a big reason for that is that Bone was exactly a smashing success, and they didn't want to pump out a *ton* of new content every episode, or require older episodes to use new ones. So we got a new area. I'd rather it was designed as a single game, split into 6 parts, with revisiting of older areas a part of the game so there's more variety per episode.
There were also some odd engine glitches at times, like whole sections of polys going missing.
It's still enjoyable, definately worth the price of admission, and I'm definately on board with buying the next season, but yea, valid complaints, and I hope telltale fixes them. I think a few of them read slashdot, so, I hope they address that in the next season, and in the meantime, can't wait for my season 1 DVD. Oh, and a Wii release.