I've noticed the exact same thing here on the subway in Boston. More PSPs than DSs. I always chalked it up to the fact that that special kind of selfish asshole who would choose to take up extra space on a crowded subway car trends more towards being a Sony customer./waits until he hops his shuttle to break out the DS.
No, it's pretty much just you against the twin forces of logic and reason there Don Quixote. Ya mind if a call you Don?
Alright there Don, let's look at your post. You state that the PS3 isn't worth it as a games machine, that you aren't banking on blu-ray(which you mispell, that doesn't speak too highly of your research into the subject there Don), but that the PS3 *is* worth it as a media center. Now, see, maybe in the bizzaro world that is your syphilis-addled brain this is true, but here in the real world, it's not, or rather not for any of the reasons you pulled out of the plaque-infested aether that is your head. Wireless audio? Well whoo-ie Don, here I was thinking that the PS3 lacks the capabilities of a reciever, or rather that while it can output in 5.1, 7.1 and the like that it don't have no built in decoder, and there isn't a software one that'd take advantage of them there SPEs and be able to really good and run with anything yet as them there Linux offerings for the platform are still immature, so sure, wireless speakers, if you like run of the mill stereo. And Don, non-crap regular DVD playback? You mean like a budget HTPC, a $100USD or less upconverting dvd-player(or a $40 special at wally-world if you don't care about upconversion), or hell, the XBox 360(either version)? Universal Plug and Play? Yea, most of the drivers for things, yea Don, they're mainly Windows, if you ever tried to setup a linux-based HTPC you'd know that, but of course you can't spell blu-ray and don't call it a BDROM either so... And DLNA? Yea, that's still largely a pipe-dream, it's way in the early stages Don, and newsflash, MS is a member as well. No HDD? Well, sure, on the budget 360, but every other option has one, and if you go the PC route Don, you have more options than the PS3 does. And the actual media-center features of the PS3? Well, it's not even an XMBC yet, but maybe it will be after a few updates.
So yea, you basically dismissed outright all the reasons why the PS3 might be a good purchase / value for someone, while inventing new ones seemingly out of whole cloth. I can only conclude that some moderator, in a manner much like picking up the ugly girl all alone at the bar at 2am, felt sorry for you because I was a bit mean, and decided to throw you an underrated and mod my flamebait as a troll as some kind of sympathy fuck. Poor dumb bastard, now he has all kinds of diseases.
Oh well, at least we know you're not a shill, shills are generally at least somewhat competant. So, way to go being nice to the AC. Here's a gold star.
Shrug, being a conglomerate does not excuse you from the bad actions of your subsidiaries. I hold Kraft responsible for Philip Morris, because I'm a sane individual that believes in corporate responsibility. You evidentally are not.
I will not own a PS3 until the price seriously drops and Sony makes right on their shennanigans over the past few years. Shutting down Bleem, Lik Sang, the rootkit, horrible QC on their hardware, etc. etc. Are you going to come up with something stupid like "Oh NO! That was SONY LEGAL who shut down Bleem and Lik Sang! Not SCE!" I bet you are. It's all the same company, and while next to Microsoft, no, Sony is not evil, next to Nintendo they certainly are.
Don't worry, I don't have a 360 either. I was thinking about one(Microcenter, Premium for $200 after rebates), since MS seemed to have changed over the past few years, then they changed their licensing and we had to do a freakin' company wide audit of what Windows systems are externally accessable, even though we have a global license. And the fact that their OS requires a reboot for a freakin' Time Zone change. BIG headaches. So fuck MS.
Anyway, is there anything on your Nintendo does bad list that's A. Actually bad for the customer, and B. not over 17 years old? Because I don't see anything.
Kids have been born who can now vote since Nintendo was monopolistic(and they were only abusive to third parties, not particularly to customers), and pulling out from the Sony and Phillips deals only ultimately hurt Nintendo and caused the creation of the Zelda games we don't talk about. It also created the Playstation, which you love. Nintendo censoring content led to the creation of the ESRB, which is pretty much *the* defense of the industry against the likes of Jack Thompson, and they haven't done it since the formation of the ratings board - Conker was more adult than most Playstation titles, the Gamecube version of BMX XXX was completely uncensored, and all subsequent versions of Mortal Kombat past the first had blood in them. The only people who call Nintendo "kiddie" are either uninformed or afraid of bright colors.
Localization of what? FF2-3 & 5? The SNES Dragon Quests? Seiken Densetsu 3? Hentai? I seem to recall most of the localization issues were either related to companies not wanting to spend the money on localization, or, back in the NES days, Nintendo's limits on how many titles a company could publish for the NES per year(which is why Contra is ULTRA), which was a sane business practice given the fact that consoles had effectively died just a few years prior. NoA was never anywhere near as bad as SEGA of America, who had an allergy to money. NoE was, but I'm not a European, and that was SEGA turf anyway.
There are workable replacements for AD on linux, true, but why bother? If all you have is a few Windows machines for AD, Citrix, Exchange, maybe sharepoint, SQL server(if you're not an Oracle or small shop) and your wierd legacy crap that only runs on NT4 SP4, you're doing pretty well.
Basically, I see it like this: mixed shops are the way to go. Linux for most of your servers and whatever "thin clients" you can get away with, Windows for your desktops and the very few places it's better as a server.
Linux works beautifully in the enterprise, just don't expect a monoculture -> monoculture move to go smoothly. And don't expect it to be a Windows desktop(even if you run Debian for retards, err I mean Ubuntu[because apartheid was cool and the dark continent = tech, idiots])
No it really isn't a myth. There are a handful of decent designers, who work on a few projects at once, for years, and hundreds of games released a year. This means most games aren't that great. Seriously, w/o the aid of google or wikipedia start naming those designers.
You also have the fact that there are these things called budgets, which means every dollar you spend on graphics is a dollar you didn't spend on level design and game design. It's not an endless supply of cash and if you're shooting for those pretty screenshots on the box art, which, let's face it, describes about 95% of all games released in a given year, you're skimping on the design.
And don't come back to me with "story" or "mature themes" I can count the number of games you'll probably try to list that rose above B-movie in those departments w/o resorting to toes or non-opposable digits.
The very fact that you can't think of a game that had excellent gameplay and poor graphics(for the time even) shows you aren't qualified to speak on this matter. Here's 3 for starters: Nethack, Tetris, any given MUD. Two of those are text based, meaning no real graphics to speak of, and the third is just collections of 4 blocks. Your average MUD still beats the pants off the most modern MMOs in the gameplay department(god help us if some PVE-heavy MMO maker ever implements a "remort" system), no dungeon crawler compares to the depth Nethack has, and Tetris had and to some degree still retains so much universal appeal it broke up marriages.
Then we also have games that graphically, today, aren't so hot, but the gameplay is so solid it doesn't matter. Read some children's impressions of the original Legend of Zelda(there was an article here a while back on introducing kids to retro games). It, not so suprisingly, holds up. As do a ton of sprite-based SNES titles, Genesis games, and other classics. You will, however find, with the shift to the PS and it's emphasis on graphics(and FMV) that there coincidentally became less and less games like this made(Although I will still play Vagrant Story, FFVII, Intelligent Qube just to name a few on the PSX), games also became far easier with the switch to 3D but that's a different topic. However, to get away from consoles again, Planescape Torment and Fallout 1/2 are still pretty much unequaled in the CRPG department. Some may toss Baldur's Gate 1/2 in there as well, but I think that's because of "go for the eyes boo!" Lucasarts adventure games remain golden even though they're *incredibly* dated graphically. And yes, I've introduced them to people who *didn't* play them when they were released.
Or to use a more modern example, Wii Sports is *the* game of last year. Graphically, it's atrocious, but it can get a 75 year old family patriarch, a 50 year-old mother of 3, and a 26 year-old woman with no interest in games interested in and actively hunting down a copy of it and the console that it runs on. Gears of War had me and my brother and a few of my cousins playing in the basement. Wii Sports had the whole clan involved. Resistance was a no show because none of us are dumb enough to spend that kind of scratch on a toy. That's gameplay, if you have it, the graphics only really need to be servicable. Beyond that it's icing. Or, to use the old standby GAMEPLAY > GRAPHICS. Or, to extend my metaphor, you can't subsist on a cake that's 90% icing and 10% marked-down goods aisle budget angelfood cake, but a good chocolate cake with a thin layer of icing is perfect. More icing might make that cake even better, but nothing's saving that rock-hard moldy bit of angelfood.
To continue with the games that are great w/o high end graphics thought, and to use another modern example, popcap games are hugely popular, as are video card and board games. None of those are huge in the graphics department, wouldn't be helped by being huge in the graphics department(would you really want to play an updated version of freakin' Battle Chess?), and each one is quality. Graphics are ici
It's not a myth. There are very few designers in this world who can crank out a fun, deep and somewhat novel gameplay design almost every single time. There are, comparatively, thousands of programmers who can make something look nice with the right middleware and thousands of artists who can model nice 3D stuff. I hear you can get trained at tech schools for either these days. There aren't a whole lot of really really good AI guys(basically next to none) or multithreaded DSP guys, but there don't have to be, just enough for the middleware.
Those designers are worth a LOT, and you can probably name them by name, not by company. EA has one, Nintendo has one, etc. They're all proven guys too, so they actually have clout in their respective organizations. They're roped into franchises in at least an advisory capacity, sure, but all of those are pretty golden.
So, most of the industry rips off it's predecessors for the gameplay, maybe adds a very slight twist or two in a "wouldn't it be cool if" brainstorming session and passes it off to the grunts. You have to have *something* to differentiate your game, so you pump everything into graphics and if we're lucky style. The cost of doing this is so high that you can't take many if any risks on or with unproven designers, so they never get to prove themselves. In return, while your gameplay may very well be solid, it's either something a competitor did, or something that's straight lifted from the pre-2000.
Insomniac made a name for themselves continiously tweaking Mario 64 with guns, and now combining two FPS cliches into one. Blizzard gets by by being high polish. Jaffe's a goto guy for genre kings. None of this is bad, but it's not what I consider excellent gameplay any more so than I consider a typical summer blockbuster excellent film. Or rather, it's not new gameplay, it's good gameplay I've played before with a new coat of paint. The differentation is the graphics, level design, and presentation.
You also have the fact that if the gameplay is golden, you don't need the graphics. Just enough to represent what you need to represent and whatever else you want to pump into it. It only matters for the first 15 minutes anyway.
a. Reread it, I never claimed that. That would be silly to claim. If you ignore or amortize the up-front cost of the camera, digital is incredibly cheap compared to traditional film. What is it, almost a thousand bucks a reel all told? For 11 minutes @ 24fps. b. Name a non-imax film shot in the past 7 years entirely in 70mm. 70mm is mainly just used for effects shots atm. Because it *blends* better. c. whatever.
And dude, discs are slow, especially single discs, and especially 1xBD-ROM and 1xHD-DVD compared even to existing DVD media. If you want more bandwidth, you want on-demand streamed content over fiber. Something that's being rolled out *now* by both the telecos and cable cos with GB/sec capacity and upgradeable in the future. A good SAN connected via fiber channel into an HBA will deliver data throughput that makes your precious next-gen media look like a floppy. What makes you think you can talk about bandwidth of media when you obviously know nothing about it?
I'm aware of it, I just don't have a 360. I got an upscaling DVD player early this year to stave me off until some HD media wins, not being aware that the 360 will upconvert DVDs to 720p. So now it seems like kind of a waste to toss the thing and get a 360.
Oh and I don't really notice compression artifacts unless I look for them, then I notice nothing *but* the compression artifacts. Kinda like waves on my non-tensioned screen.
Shrug, the PS3's lineup isn't a whole lot better. You have resistance, and uhh, games available on other platforms that are better on those other platforms. The PS2's initial lineup was also, well mostly crap. And the gamecube had Rogue Squadron 2 and Melee(a little bit after launch, but eh). XBox had Halo. 360 had, well, nothing really. So, the launch window isn't a good indication of future 3rd party support. The good stuff started hitting the PS2 about a year in, so, we basically are in wait and see mode until November.
Also, you forgot Elebits and Trauma Center(Neither is everyone's cup of tea, but their quite good). And Red Steel is actually pretty fun, despite being extremely mediocre. Hopefully they release a solid title with the sequel, the potential is definately there, and that's what makes the actual game so very, very sad.
Well, a few reasons, others have covered most of them, but one that seems to be missed is that Nintendo has the development resources to pretty much support a console on their own. If you like Nintendo games, you're going to get a bunch over the life of one of their systems. In the case of the cube we got: Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, Fire Emblem, Pikmin 1/2, Metroid Prime 1/2, Super Mario Sunshine, Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Warioware, Super Smash Brothers Melee, F-Zero GX(technically sega, but a nintendo franchise), Geist, Donkey Konga 1/2, Mario Golf, Mario Strikers, Mario Baseball, Mario Tennis, Mario Kart, LoZ: Four Swords, and Animal Crossing. I'm actually missing a few in there, but you get the idea. A lot of those are long-standing franchises with established fanbases, and many of them are franchises that are the origins of their style of play. We have, covered there SRPG/TTS, RPG, RTS, Platformer, Action Adventure, First-person Adventure, First Person Shooter, Fighter, Arcade Racer, Non-game Sim, rhythm, Surreal Sports, dungeon crawler, Cart racer, and pure japanese wierdness. Each one an extremely high-quality title to boot.
Sony OTOH, does not have the resources or franchises. They released(quality titles): 3 Jaks, Shadow of the Collossus, Ico, God of War 1/2, and Gran Turismo 3/4. No "progenitor" franchises. Ico, while fantastic, sold like 50 copies, and SoC drops frames like nobody's business. God of War is a "polish" series, and Jaffe's an indy contracted designer anyway. Sony really can't sustain a platform by themselves unless you're mainly a GT fan or have gotten hooked on the Mario methadone that is the Jak series. The rest of their stuff, well, is mainly mediocre.
If every third party title that hit the PS2 had hit the gamecube instead... Well... what do *you* think would've happened last gen?
Consumers don't care about HD. They don't. If they did, the film industry wouldn't be using 35mm film and the equivalent of 1080p24(which is even *lower* resolution and speed than modern 35mm stocks) for digital when making movies in order to save on costs. There are, and have been film stocks with much higher resolution available for quite a long time, in fact 35mm all but completely replaced higher resolution stocks due to the savings in the early 90s. 70mm used to be a lot more common than it is now. 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, the special effects sequences for close encounters, to name three things, were all shot on 70mm. And of course, there's also IMAX. How many movies get shot on IMAX in a given year? 8, I think.
So yea, people may claim they want HD. But they don't. No one watches a DVD now and goes "damn, this sucks." Few went to the theatre for the new Star Wars films and bitched about the fact that the resolution was a fraction of traditional 35mm stocks. Even on my setup (720p native projector onto a 102" glass-beaded screen) which makes most people's "huge" HDTVs look positively tiny. I have *yet* to hear someone complain about DVDs on my setup, they're blown away by how theatre-like the setup is. Would a Blu-ray or an HD-DVD player improve that? Yea, probably, but it's not worth the frickin' money when no one complains about it now. Same logic the film industry uses in not using higher-resolution stocks and switching to digital. I think they know their stuff personally. Even if they are trying to market the opposite to the unwashed masses.
The fact is, neither HD format, or existing HD televisions can display the majority of the information contained on a theoretical pristine 35mm film print even from pre-WW2(and stock/grain quality has advanced a lot since then). So, if you really want quality, pick up a projector and some reels. The resolution blows everything else out of the water atm, and that's the only advantage it really has, and I mean money is no object when it comes to picture quality, right? DVDs offered a ton of convienance features over VHS tapes, no rewinding, start/stop, extra content in the form of multiple audio tracks, etc. The HD formats offer... resolution. At 10-20 times the price for a player, 2-4x the price per movie, and with a fraction of the selection. Man, what a frickin' deal! And this isn't even going into things like ideal view distance.
The future is downloaded / on the demand content because it offers substantive advantages over DVD.
Nevermind that Slashdot has long been a bastion of Nintendo(lots of mid-20s -> early 30s tech people), and people who *dared* to buy the gamecube and to a lesser extent, the N64, took endless levels of shit for it just about everywhere from the exact same types of people that post the limited amount of pro-sony stuff on the tech sites. Add in a couple enormous missteps by Sony, the fact that this is principally an American site and America loves underdogs(which sony is not) and falls from grace(current Sony), and there's not a lot of love to spare for the company outside the people who honestly don't care about the whole scene(and are just exhibiting the engineer trait of being contrary for the sake of being contrary), and the diehard idiots.
Sony, and their fanbase, really brought it on themselves. So either quit your bitching or uncheck the games section until the Summer, by which time it should have all completely burnt out(it already mostly has).
Only things I see on the 360 that I want are Dead Rising, Gears of War, and Saint's Row. *If* I had paid more attention and known it was an upscaling DVD player as well, I probably would've picked one up. But I *just* got an upscaling DVD player 6 months or so back and it seems a shame to chuck the thing in favor of a 360. Granted, it wasn't that expensive, but I only have one HD-capable set in the house, and I did pay a premium over a normal DVD player for it.
Durandal in Marathon. You might be eaten by a grue.
It's called tradition. Zelda has such a long-standing fanbase, which has been without voices for the characters for so long, that any voice acting added in at this point would be *certain* to disappoint.
As has now been said twice, insomniac is not owned by Sony. They have extremely close relations with the Sony second party Naughty Dog, and tend to be published by Sony on Sony platforms(I think they've made a game or three not on a Sony platform though), but they're indy.
Of course, they're so far up Sony's ass you'd have to dig in there with that drill made from unobtainium from that horrible movie "the core" to find them.
The Wii uses a system code. It's tied to the machine, not the game.
Which I *really* wish they'd done with the DS, as that's the only really annoying thing about friend codes. And since each DS game has it's own friend code, I don't think having those map to a Wii system code is going to be in the immediate future.
Would be really cool though, especially with an achievement system tacked on top.
Well, considering you could get all the way there using just urban areas supplemented by panels along the highway system, I don't see why you'd want to use deserts in the first place.
SCE were the guys that shut down Bleem. SCE were the guys that shut down lik sang. SCE registered a patent to prevent used game sales. SCE spouted off numerous incidents of FUD, lies, and sheer arrogance. SCE fucked EQ and SWG... etc. etc. Would you like me to continue on SCE?
And as to the rest, they're all Sony. If you care enough to have the rootkits and various other sins upset you, you care enough to boycott the company as a whole. Period.
And yea, I mean, who would blame the average SS rank and file for the holocaust, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed the exact same thing here on the subway in Boston. More PSPs than DSs. I always chalked it up to the fact that that special kind of selfish asshole who would choose to take up extra space on a crowded subway car trends more towards being a Sony customer. /waits until he hops his shuttle to break out the DS.
No, it's pretty much just you against the twin forces of logic and reason there Don Quixote. Ya mind if a call you Don?
Alright there Don, let's look at your post. You state that the PS3 isn't worth it as a games machine, that you aren't banking on blu-ray(which you mispell, that doesn't speak too highly of your research into the subject there Don), but that the PS3 *is* worth it as a media center. Now, see, maybe in the bizzaro world that is your syphilis-addled brain this is true, but here in the real world, it's not, or rather not for any of the reasons you pulled out of the plaque-infested aether that is your head. Wireless audio? Well whoo-ie Don, here I was thinking that the PS3 lacks the capabilities of a reciever, or rather that while it can output in 5.1, 7.1 and the like that it don't have no built in decoder, and there isn't a software one that'd take advantage of them there SPEs and be able to really good and run with anything yet as them there Linux offerings for the platform are still immature, so sure, wireless speakers, if you like run of the mill stereo. And Don, non-crap regular DVD playback? You mean like a budget HTPC, a $100USD or less upconverting dvd-player(or a $40 special at wally-world if you don't care about upconversion), or hell, the XBox 360(either version)? Universal Plug and Play? Yea, most of the drivers for things, yea Don, they're mainly Windows, if you ever tried to setup a linux-based HTPC you'd know that, but of course you can't spell blu-ray and don't call it a BDROM either so... And DLNA? Yea, that's still largely a pipe-dream, it's way in the early stages Don, and newsflash, MS is a member as well. No HDD? Well, sure, on the budget 360, but every other option has one, and if you go the PC route Don, you have more options than the PS3 does. And the actual media-center features of the PS3? Well, it's not even an XMBC yet, but maybe it will be after a few updates.
So yea, you basically dismissed outright all the reasons why the PS3 might be a good purchase / value for someone, while inventing new ones seemingly out of whole cloth. I can only conclude that some moderator, in a manner much like picking up the ugly girl all alone at the bar at 2am, felt sorry for you because I was a bit mean, and decided to throw you an underrated and mod my flamebait as a troll as some kind of sympathy fuck. Poor dumb bastard, now he has all kinds of diseases.
Oh well, at least we know you're not a shill, shills are generally at least somewhat competant. So, way to go being nice to the AC. Here's a gold star.
PS. GNious, wow, you're a clever one, ain't ya?
When did square-enix announce kingdom hearts for the PS3?
Shrug, being a conglomerate does not excuse you from the bad actions of your subsidiaries. I hold Kraft responsible for Philip Morris, because I'm a sane individual that believes in corporate responsibility. You evidentally are not.
I will not own a PS3 until the price seriously drops and Sony makes right on their shennanigans over the past few years. Shutting down Bleem, Lik Sang, the rootkit, horrible QC on their hardware, etc. etc. Are you going to come up with something stupid like "Oh NO! That was SONY LEGAL who shut down Bleem and Lik Sang! Not SCE!" I bet you are. It's all the same company, and while next to Microsoft, no, Sony is not evil, next to Nintendo they certainly are.
Don't worry, I don't have a 360 either. I was thinking about one(Microcenter, Premium for $200 after rebates), since MS seemed to have changed over the past few years, then they changed their licensing and we had to do a freakin' company wide audit of what Windows systems are externally accessable, even though we have a global license. And the fact that their OS requires a reboot for a freakin' Time Zone change. BIG headaches. So fuck MS.
Anyway, is there anything on your Nintendo does bad list that's A. Actually bad for the customer, and B. not over 17 years old? Because I don't see anything.
Kids have been born who can now vote since Nintendo was monopolistic(and they were only abusive to third parties, not particularly to customers), and pulling out from the Sony and Phillips deals only ultimately hurt Nintendo and caused the creation of the Zelda games we don't talk about. It also created the Playstation, which you love. Nintendo censoring content led to the creation of the ESRB, which is pretty much *the* defense of the industry against the likes of Jack Thompson, and they haven't done it since the formation of the ratings board - Conker was more adult than most Playstation titles, the Gamecube version of BMX XXX was completely uncensored, and all subsequent versions of Mortal Kombat past the first had blood in them. The only people who call Nintendo "kiddie" are either uninformed or afraid of bright colors.
Localization of what? FF2-3 & 5? The SNES Dragon Quests? Seiken Densetsu 3? Hentai? I seem to recall most of the localization issues were either related to companies not wanting to spend the money on localization, or, back in the NES days, Nintendo's limits on how many titles a company could publish for the NES per year(which is why Contra is ULTRA), which was a sane business practice given the fact that consoles had effectively died just a few years prior. NoA was never anywhere near as bad as SEGA of America, who had an allergy to money. NoE was, but I'm not a European, and that was SEGA turf anyway.
Now that we've established that you're the village idiot, is there anything else you'd like to add to this conversation?
There are workable replacements for AD on linux, true, but why bother? If all you have is a few Windows machines for AD, Citrix, Exchange, maybe sharepoint, SQL server(if you're not an Oracle or small shop) and your wierd legacy crap that only runs on NT4 SP4, you're doing pretty well.
Basically, I see it like this: mixed shops are the way to go. Linux for most of your servers and whatever "thin clients" you can get away with, Windows for your desktops and the very few places it's better as a server.
Linux works beautifully in the enterprise, just don't expect a monoculture -> monoculture move to go smoothly. And don't expect it to be a Windows desktop(even if you run Debian for retards, err I mean Ubuntu[because apartheid was cool and the dark continent = tech, idiots])
No it really isn't a myth. There are a handful of decent designers, who work on a few projects at once, for years, and hundreds of games released a year. This means most games aren't that great. Seriously, w/o the aid of google or wikipedia start naming those designers.
You also have the fact that there are these things called budgets, which means every dollar you spend on graphics is a dollar you didn't spend on level design and game design. It's not an endless supply of cash and if you're shooting for those pretty screenshots on the box art, which, let's face it, describes about 95% of all games released in a given year, you're skimping on the design.
And don't come back to me with "story" or "mature themes" I can count the number of games you'll probably try to list that rose above B-movie in those departments w/o resorting to toes or non-opposable digits.
The very fact that you can't think of a game that had excellent gameplay and poor graphics(for the time even) shows you aren't qualified to speak on this matter. Here's 3 for starters: Nethack, Tetris, any given MUD. Two of those are text based, meaning no real graphics to speak of, and the third is just collections of 4 blocks. Your average MUD still beats the pants off the most modern MMOs in the gameplay department(god help us if some PVE-heavy MMO maker ever implements a "remort" system), no dungeon crawler compares to the depth Nethack has, and Tetris had and to some degree still retains so much universal appeal it broke up marriages.
Then we also have games that graphically, today, aren't so hot, but the gameplay is so solid it doesn't matter. Read some children's impressions of the original Legend of Zelda(there was an article here a while back on introducing kids to retro games). It, not so suprisingly, holds up. As do a ton of sprite-based SNES titles, Genesis games, and other classics. You will, however find, with the shift to the PS and it's emphasis on graphics(and FMV) that there coincidentally became less and less games like this made(Although I will still play Vagrant Story, FFVII, Intelligent Qube just to name a few on the PSX), games also became far easier with the switch to 3D but that's a different topic. However, to get away from consoles again, Planescape Torment and Fallout 1/2 are still pretty much unequaled in the CRPG department. Some may toss Baldur's Gate 1/2 in there as well, but I think that's because of "go for the eyes boo!" Lucasarts adventure games remain golden even though they're *incredibly* dated graphically. And yes, I've introduced them to people who *didn't* play them when they were released.
Or to use a more modern example, Wii Sports is *the* game of last year. Graphically, it's atrocious, but it can get a 75 year old family patriarch, a 50 year-old mother of 3, and a 26 year-old woman with no interest in games interested in and actively hunting down a copy of it and the console that it runs on. Gears of War had me and my brother and a few of my cousins playing in the basement. Wii Sports had the whole clan involved. Resistance was a no show because none of us are dumb enough to spend that kind of scratch on a toy. That's gameplay, if you have it, the graphics only really need to be servicable. Beyond that it's icing. Or, to use the old standby GAMEPLAY > GRAPHICS. Or, to extend my metaphor, you can't subsist on a cake that's 90% icing and 10% marked-down goods aisle budget angelfood cake, but a good chocolate cake with a thin layer of icing is perfect. More icing might make that cake even better, but nothing's saving that rock-hard moldy bit of angelfood.
To continue with the games that are great w/o high end graphics thought, and to use another modern example, popcap games are hugely popular, as are video card and board games. None of those are huge in the graphics department, wouldn't be helped by being huge in the graphics department(would you really want to play an updated version of freakin' Battle Chess?), and each one is quality. Graphics are ici
It's not a myth. There are very few designers in this world who can crank out a fun, deep and somewhat novel gameplay design almost every single time. There are, comparatively, thousands of programmers who can make something look nice with the right middleware and thousands of artists who can model nice 3D stuff. I hear you can get trained at tech schools for either these days. There aren't a whole lot of really really good AI guys(basically next to none) or multithreaded DSP guys, but there don't have to be, just enough for the middleware.
Those designers are worth a LOT, and you can probably name them by name, not by company. EA has one, Nintendo has one, etc. They're all proven guys too, so they actually have clout in their respective organizations. They're roped into franchises in at least an advisory capacity, sure, but all of those are pretty golden.
So, most of the industry rips off it's predecessors for the gameplay, maybe adds a very slight twist or two in a "wouldn't it be cool if" brainstorming session and passes it off to the grunts. You have to have *something* to differentiate your game, so you pump everything into graphics and if we're lucky style. The cost of doing this is so high that you can't take many if any risks on or with unproven designers, so they never get to prove themselves. In return, while your gameplay may very well be solid, it's either something a competitor did, or something that's straight lifted from the pre-2000.
Insomniac made a name for themselves continiously tweaking Mario 64 with guns, and now combining two FPS cliches into one. Blizzard gets by by being high polish. Jaffe's a goto guy for genre kings. None of this is bad, but it's not what I consider excellent gameplay any more so than I consider a typical summer blockbuster excellent film. Or rather, it's not new gameplay, it's good gameplay I've played before with a new coat of paint. The differentation is the graphics, level design, and presentation.
You also have the fact that if the gameplay is golden, you don't need the graphics. Just enough to represent what you need to represent and whatever else you want to pump into it. It only matters for the first 15 minutes anyway.
a. Reread it, I never claimed that. That would be silly to claim. If you ignore or amortize the up-front cost of the camera, digital is incredibly cheap compared to traditional film. What is it, almost a thousand bucks a reel all told? For 11 minutes @ 24fps.
b. Name a non-imax film shot in the past 7 years entirely in 70mm. 70mm is mainly just used for effects shots atm. Because it *blends* better.
c. whatever.
And dude, discs are slow, especially single discs, and especially 1xBD-ROM and 1xHD-DVD compared even to existing DVD media. If you want more bandwidth, you want on-demand streamed content over fiber. Something that's being rolled out *now* by both the telecos and cable cos with GB/sec capacity and upgradeable in the future. A good SAN connected via fiber channel into an HBA will deliver data throughput that makes your precious next-gen media look like a floppy. What makes you think you can talk about bandwidth of media when you obviously know nothing about it?
Cheers.
I'm aware of it, I just don't have a 360. I got an upscaling DVD player early this year to stave me off until some HD media wins, not being aware that the 360 will upconvert DVDs to 720p. So now it seems like kind of a waste to toss the thing and get a 360.
Oh and I don't really notice compression artifacts unless I look for them, then I notice nothing *but* the compression artifacts. Kinda like waves on my non-tensioned screen.
Shrug, the PS3's lineup isn't a whole lot better. You have resistance, and uhh, games available on other platforms that are better on those other platforms. The PS2's initial lineup was also, well mostly crap. And the gamecube had Rogue Squadron 2 and Melee(a little bit after launch, but eh). XBox had Halo. 360 had, well, nothing really. So, the launch window isn't a good indication of future 3rd party support. The good stuff started hitting the PS2 about a year in, so, we basically are in wait and see mode until November.
Also, you forgot Elebits and Trauma Center(Neither is everyone's cup of tea, but their quite good). And Red Steel is actually pretty fun, despite being extremely mediocre. Hopefully they release a solid title with the sequel, the potential is definately there, and that's what makes the actual game so very, very sad.
Well, a few reasons, others have covered most of them, but one that seems to be missed is that Nintendo has the development resources to pretty much support a console on their own. If you like Nintendo games, you're going to get a bunch over the life of one of their systems. In the case of the cube we got: Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, Fire Emblem, Pikmin 1/2, Metroid Prime 1/2, Super Mario Sunshine, Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Warioware, Super Smash Brothers Melee, F-Zero GX(technically sega, but a nintendo franchise), Geist, Donkey Konga 1/2, Mario Golf, Mario Strikers, Mario Baseball, Mario Tennis, Mario Kart, LoZ: Four Swords, and Animal Crossing. I'm actually missing a few in there, but you get the idea. A lot of those are long-standing franchises with established fanbases, and many of them are franchises that are the origins of their style of play. We have, covered there SRPG/TTS, RPG, RTS, Platformer, Action Adventure, First-person Adventure, First Person Shooter, Fighter, Arcade Racer, Non-game Sim, rhythm, Surreal Sports, dungeon crawler, Cart racer, and pure japanese wierdness. Each one an extremely high-quality title to boot.
Sony OTOH, does not have the resources or franchises. They released(quality titles): 3 Jaks, Shadow of the Collossus, Ico, God of War 1/2, and Gran Turismo 3/4. No "progenitor" franchises. Ico, while fantastic, sold like 50 copies, and SoC drops frames like nobody's business. God of War is a "polish" series, and Jaffe's an indy contracted designer anyway. Sony really can't sustain a platform by themselves unless you're mainly a GT fan or have gotten hooked on the Mario methadone that is the Jak series. The rest of their stuff, well, is mainly mediocre.
If every third party title that hit the PS2 had hit the gamecube instead... Well... what do *you* think would've happened last gen?
Consumers don't care about HD. They don't. If they did, the film industry wouldn't be using 35mm film and the equivalent of 1080p24(which is even *lower* resolution and speed than modern 35mm stocks) for digital when making movies in order to save on costs. There are, and have been film stocks with much higher resolution available for quite a long time, in fact 35mm all but completely replaced higher resolution stocks due to the savings in the early 90s. 70mm used to be a lot more common than it is now. 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, the special effects sequences for close encounters, to name three things, were all shot on 70mm. And of course, there's also IMAX. How many movies get shot on IMAX in a given year? 8, I think.
So yea, people may claim they want HD. But they don't. No one watches a DVD now and goes "damn, this sucks." Few went to the theatre for the new Star Wars films and bitched about the fact that the resolution was a fraction of traditional 35mm stocks. Even on my setup (720p native projector onto a 102" glass-beaded screen) which makes most people's "huge" HDTVs look positively tiny. I have *yet* to hear someone complain about DVDs on my setup, they're blown away by how theatre-like the setup is. Would a Blu-ray or an HD-DVD player improve that? Yea, probably, but it's not worth the frickin' money when no one complains about it now. Same logic the film industry uses in not using higher-resolution stocks and switching to digital. I think they know their stuff personally. Even if they are trying to market the opposite to the unwashed masses.
The fact is, neither HD format, or existing HD televisions can display the majority of the information contained on a theoretical pristine 35mm film print even from pre-WW2(and stock/grain quality has advanced a lot since then). So, if you really want quality, pick up a projector and some reels. The resolution blows everything else out of the water atm, and that's the only advantage it really has, and I mean money is no object when it comes to picture quality, right? DVDs offered a ton of convienance features over VHS tapes, no rewinding, start/stop, extra content in the form of multiple audio tracks, etc. The HD formats offer... resolution. At 10-20 times the price for a player, 2-4x the price per movie, and with a fraction of the selection. Man, what a frickin' deal! And this isn't even going into things like ideal view distance.
The future is downloaded / on the demand content because it offers substantive advantages over DVD.
Yea, those mean mean Sony haters.
Nevermind that Slashdot has long been a bastion of Nintendo(lots of mid-20s -> early 30s tech people), and people who *dared* to buy the gamecube and to a lesser extent, the N64, took endless levels of shit for it just about everywhere from the exact same types of people that post the limited amount of pro-sony stuff on the tech sites. Add in a couple enormous missteps by Sony, the fact that this is principally an American site and America loves underdogs(which sony is not) and falls from grace(current Sony), and there's not a lot of love to spare for the company outside the people who honestly don't care about the whole scene(and are just exhibiting the engineer trait of being contrary for the sake of being contrary), and the diehard idiots.
Sony, and their fanbase, really brought it on themselves. So either quit your bitching or uncheck the games section until the Summer, by which time it should have all completely burnt out(it already mostly has).
Only things I see on the 360 that I want are Dead Rising, Gears of War, and Saint's Row. *If* I had paid more attention and known it was an upscaling DVD player as well, I probably would've picked one up. But I *just* got an upscaling DVD player 6 months or so back and it seems a shame to chuck the thing in favor of a 360. Granted, it wasn't that expensive, but I only have one HD-capable set in the house, and I did pay a premium over a normal DVD player for it.
Isn't that how they played originally?
I was under the impression that the virtual console was going for a completely authentic experience.
Durandal in Marathon. You might be eaten by a grue.
It's called tradition. Zelda has such a long-standing fanbase, which has been without voices for the characters for so long, that any voice acting added in at this point would be *certain* to disappoint.
As has now been said twice, insomniac is not owned by Sony. They have extremely close relations with the Sony second party Naughty Dog, and tend to be published by Sony on Sony platforms(I think they've made a game or three not on a Sony platform though), but they're indy.
Of course, they're so far up Sony's ass you'd have to dig in there with that drill made from unobtainium from that horrible movie "the core" to find them.
The Wii uses a system code. It's tied to the machine, not the game.
Which I *really* wish they'd done with the DS, as that's the only really annoying thing about friend codes. And since each DS game has it's own friend code, I don't think having those map to a Wii system code is going to be in the immediate future.
Would be really cool though, especially with an achievement system tacked on top.
Well, considering you could get all the way there using just urban areas supplemented by panels along the highway system, I don't see why you'd want to use deserts in the first place.
Even the nuclear stuff is solar. Big matter crushing solar explosions of doomy doom.
Way to drop NYC in there, you're a regular cultural barometer. Here's a gold star for your anecdotal evidence. Mine differs, woop de doo.
SCE were the guys that shut down Bleem. SCE were the guys that shut down lik sang. SCE registered a patent to prevent used game sales. SCE spouted off numerous incidents of FUD, lies, and sheer arrogance. SCE fucked EQ and SWG... etc. etc. Would you like me to continue on SCE?
And as to the rest, they're all Sony. If you care enough to have the rootkits and various other sins upset you, you care enough to boycott the company as a whole. Period.
And yea, I mean, who would blame the average SS rank and file for the holocaust, right?
I have in my posession, right now, 40 gamecube games, and 70 PS2 games.
Maybe 10 of those were bought new.
I hear the population of elephants has tripled in the past 6 months.