I don't know why I am even taking time to reply yo this, but heck... Just droppin in to say that the Xbox Live Silver services does EVERYTHING the Gold service does *except* allow you to play your games only. So with Silver you can still access market place to buy cool little games that are a one time buy (like their store counterparts), you can actually chat in game with a friend while he is playing some other game, you can still plug-in a keyboard to type in a message to IM a friend. You can still download demos and trailers (especially this week since about every e3 trailer for the 360 are on Xbox live, plus a couple of demos including Lost Planet which looks awesome, downloading it as I type this.)
Seriously, I wouldn't consider myself a MS fanboy, nor would anyone who knows me. But the only thing I see the PS3 have over the 360 is the standard hard disk. Blu-Ray playback will probably be poor like PS2 playback was. And for motion sensing, I'll buy a Wii for that. Considering the Wii is probably going to launch at 250$, 360+Wii is 650$, a bit more than the PS3 but at least I get access to the best of both worlds instead of a me too console.
I think Sony is going after too many markets with this thing. First, obviously, it is going head to head with the 360 processing power-wise. They are also trying to convert people to Blu-Ray. Now they have a poor's man version of the Wii controller. They're playing catchup with Microsoft on the online front.
In the meantime, they are trying to compete with Nintendo in the handheld and are clearly losing. Latest figures show 17 million actually sold while Sony shipped 17 million units, and I can see PSPs sitting on the shelves right about anywhere.
So basically, Sony in the coming months will try to win people over to PSP, PS3 and Blu-Ray. Each technology at a higher price point than their competitors. I know of only one company who can do this, and it's Apple. And Sony sure isn't Apple when it comes to marketting.
Now, given that MS's base system is 299$ and Sony's is 499$, and Nintendo's probably 200$, I can see a lot of parents going for the 360 and the Wii instead of the PS3 at Christmas time.
Also, I bet there's a very good reason why Blu-Ray can ship at 500$ with the PS3 while a stand-alone player costs in the nine hundreds. It will have poor playback like the PS2 did.
I have a 360 right now, and from what I've seen from the conference Sony just did, I feel even better about my purchase. Looking forward to buy a Wii right after launch.:)
About that card game thing. One of my coworker came back from Japan on vacation last week and apparently these kind of games are really big in Japan. Basically what you do is you go to your regular card store when you buy cards and trade with friends and build your deck. Then you go to the arcade and use these cards which are recognized by the machine. Some sort of interactive card game where you actually manipulate the cards. I think he told me of some Romance of the Three Kingdoms-like game played that way. It looked really cool, but you had to read a big manual in order to play it. I suppose this is one kind of game that will probably not cross the pond.
They need to either lower the price of the prenium system to 300$ or bundle Gears of Wars (supposing it's a true killer app) with the console when the title comes out. That would hurt Sony like hell. Anyway, counter the PS3 launch maybe a month or two before it comes out with that. Japan will still buy PS3s like crazy, but the rest of the world will be buying 360s.
I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't try to convince Square to port FF13 to the 360, but then, Square are CG whores so I guess 9 gigs isn't enough for them.
The interresting thing tough is that this generation two of the three consoles will have inferior storage capacity. Since companies will probably want to make more and more crossplatform games to make sure they recoup their investment, I wonder if that won't render the Blu-Ray size advantage pretty much useles unless you are playig a Square game.
People are always complaining that Microsoft shouldn't be in the business. Before the N64 generation of consoles, there were two companies : Nintendo and Sega. When do I hear poeple complaining that Sony got into the business? Never. Is it different in Sony's case because they are not Microsoft, or is it because they got the most market share for the past two generations. (Probably both) What if Microsoft had taken number one by a good margin last generation, followed by Sony and then Nintendo. What would you be saying then?
More people bought Xboxes worlwide than Gamecubes last generation. They had also for quite a while the highest tie-in ratio (I don't know if that still holds tough). A lot of people seemed to agree that we needed a 3rd player.
So why not a third portable player? And hopefully by the time MS launches their Xbox portable, Sony will have left the portable market, since the PSP isn't going really anywhere.
You are totally right though that they should take a page from the Nintendo book on how to make cheap powerful hardware.
Well, digital projectors owners are certainly going to notice on a 100 inch diagonal piture the difference in quality between DVD and HDDVD. But this is the minority, not everybody's setup.
One gig for 720p an hour? Have you taken a look at the trailers size at apple.com, which are encoded in mpeg4? It's more like several gigs an hour. 150megs for 2 minutes or os That's 75 gigs a minute or rougly 4.5 gigs an hour. And if trailers on Apple.com are only in stereo, you can look at even bigger files for 5.1 and 6.1 surround and even worse if you are using DTS.
1 gig an hour is rougly NTSC resolution on mpeg 2 IIRC. About 6 times the resolution, better than stereo sound only 4 times the compression is not going to get you 1 gig for 720p.
Getting the demos and files directly (and in their intended format, not some shaky cam)to the consumer in an easy way is good publicity for the games. Especially the demos, which you traditionally had to buy a magazine in order to get. Free demos for 360s owners is a great thing. People can buy into the hype even earlier because they get early access to the games that are on the showfloor. This can only be good for the game makers and Microsoft. I will not accept less from Sony and Nintendo next year.
Apparently, all the 360 trailers released during E3 will be downloadable on your 360. Now that's great marketting. Plus, some of the E3 demos will actually be downloadable:) I can't wait for next week.
Let's pretend I can find a tower full of bad people in real-life. Let's also pretend for argument sake that I know hwow to actually cast a spell that sends a meteor on the tower in real life. How the hell do I not get arrested for murder, even though the punks clearly deserved it?
Hum... makes we wonder. Does't Blizzard get money from all these broadcasts of Starcraft on TV? I don't have a EULA for Startcraft, but movies on DVDs normally have a clause saying that you are not allowed to play them in public place unless you are licensed to.
Keep in mind that Microsoft is losing money with each console sold I bet Microsoft is not losing a single penny on the Core version of the console. Probably just break even. Then, the person either a) buys the HD and Microsofts makes a ton of profit off of it (100$ for a 20gig HD???) b) buys a memory card and Microsoft still makes a ton of profit (40$ for 64 megs of flash???)
On the other hand the premium edition is probably costing them quite a lot. But not as much as people would think. Maybe a an extra 100$?
I am pulling these out of my ass, obviously, but I can't see Microsoft losing money even on the core bundle.
Actually, a lot of current releases for the DS are at 49.99CAN$ right now, like the new Metroid Prime : Hunters game. Honestly, I think this is a bit too much pricy considering for 10CAN$ more I can get an xbox, gamecube or PS2 game. Don't even talk to me about PSP game prices.
It's quite simple really. According to today's exchange rate, the US dollar is woth 1.16 canadian dollar. So take the prenium price 400US$, multiply it by 1.16 and you get... 464CAN$ before taxes. We pay 500CAN$ before taxes. (And we pay quite a lot more taxes in Canada too, here it's 15%).
I suppose some of that extra cost fee is the exportation fee.
It's interresting to see this debate between 49.99$ games and 59.99$ games. I understand that since everything is priced towards the United States audience, you guys are seeing a price hike. But consider we're I live, Canada. The last generation of games cost 49.99US$ and those translated after the exchange rate to 69.99CAN$ over here. Now, since the Canadian dollar is worth more than before, those games now retails for 59.99CAN$, but this has only been fixed very recently. As for next-gen games (360 so far:p), guess how much they cost over here? 69.99CAN$! To us canadians, there hasn't been a price difference between next-gen and previous-gen games up until a few months ago. I doubt that people who used to pay 69.99CAN$ for years for new games are complaining right now (I bought a lot of Xbox1 games at 69.99CAN$!). I think this game price debate is mostly a United States's problem, because everything is priced based on your economy. But since the American dollar hasn't been doing so well recently, us folks from other countries are actually getting cheaper games considering the raise in development costs for the next generation! (except maybe for Revolution games, we'll see how much they costs to develop)
A note tough, an Xbox 360 still costs around 50CAN$ more than it should, once you apply the tax exchange rate. Microsoft is losing less money here than in the states. But games are rightly priced, and that's the most important part.
... in a pre-world premiere. Here's my take on it. If you don't enjoy theater, LOTR and haven't read the books, don't go see it. There are so many shortcuts that the story can only make sense if you've read the book.
The shortcuts they took are bold and interresting. They didn't change the story for the sake of changing like Jackson did. I though the changes were interresting.
The first act is amazing and covers the beginning of the book to the end of Moria (the Balrog was cleverly done and the end of that act if the strongest scene in the play, with Helm's Deep and the Prancing Pony). I don't remember how the second act ended, but they do have the scourging of the shire, which I thought was nice.
The problem with the play comes in the 3rd act when events are a bit rushed. The scene at Mount Doom between Frodo, Sam and Golum is confusing and definitely not as epic as in the book or the movie. There are some weird art direction in the third act that I didn't like at all, but that's me.
As for the music, I enjoyed it. I'm not a native english speaker (french from Quebec), so singing is difficult for me to follow somehow. Speaking was no problem though, go figure. Anyway, the point was, even though I didn't understand most of the singing, it did sound nice and fit musically with the emotion that needed to be conveyed. This is not a Chicago or The Producers type of musical. It's classical music with lyrics basically. Not opera (that would have been wicked!), but definitely listenable. I'm definitely getting the score when it comes out.
But the best thing about the play is that it didn't try to immitate the movies, it was it's own thing. The music, costumes and acting were all different from the movie. And the actor's rendition of Gollum was really good. Gandalf felt weak tough, as if he were an winy old man, not a leading figure like he was in the movie.
I'd say that if the show was as good in the 2nd and 3rd act as in the first one, then I would have had gotten way more than what I paid for (125$). But the seriously lacking 3rd act wasn't worth the money I paid. I can't put a price on what it should have been, but hey, those were like 15th row tickets (as expensive as front row IIRC), I really enjoyed it and I didn't feel robbed. When it starts touring worldwide and comes to Montreal, I'll definitely go and see it with friends again.
Acutally, last week, from Wednesday to Friday, I've seen the supply of Premium 360s go from in stock (about 70 units) to out of stock twice on futureshop.com (bestbuy in the states). It seems they are getting new units almost everyday now. I simply walked in two stores also, one Futureshop and one local store and both had them in stock. Quite a few I might add.
I get your point, and I haven't seen the news release to that effect, but if they are phrased something like: "Apparently, a chinese blogger was shut down by the chinese government later this week. Bla bla bla... The chinese government denies the fact. The company hosting the website wasn't available for comments" would be a totally ok way to do it. But just asserting that it was shutdown without even contacting anyone, that would be plain dumb. And from what I got from the story to far, this is what happened.
There was a scandal in Quebec (Canada) a few months ago. One guy who was taking part in a leadership race in a major political party had to confirm, after enquiry from the press, that he had taken cocaine years ago while he was resposible for the environment ministry. We learned later on that there was actually quite a lot of fact checking done and people interviewed before publishing the news, as it obviously was damaging. It turned out to be true, but the journalists did their work before publishing the information.
It's not because in some places the journalism standards are so low in published or TV news that it is right for journalists not to care about the veracity of a piece of information. Journalist have a moral responsability because the news they are publishing can have devastating effect on the people or the community if it turns out to be false.
Think Irak. Or think a falsely accused child-abuser.
I don't agree. Reporting news is a serious issue and the facts should have been checked first, which clearly wasn't done. They made a very valid point.
Maybe, but I doubt that a Cisco router even draws that much power. Which is my point. Why buy an unproven and possibly more costly in the long run solution when Cisco works and probably makes more economic sense in the long run? You do realise that if you bought a real router your power bill would be less?
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I don't know why I am even taking time to reply yo this, but heck...
Just droppin in to say that the Xbox Live Silver services does EVERYTHING the Gold service does *except* allow you to play your games only. So with Silver you can still access market place to buy cool little games that are a one time buy (like their store counterparts), you can actually chat in game with a friend while he is playing some other game, you can still plug-in a keyboard to type in a message to IM a friend. You can still download demos and trailers (especially this week since about every e3 trailer for the 360 are on Xbox live, plus a couple of demos including Lost Planet which looks awesome, downloading it as I type this.)
Seriously, I wouldn't consider myself a MS fanboy, nor would anyone who knows me. But the only thing I see the PS3 have over the 360 is the standard hard disk. Blu-Ray playback will probably be poor like PS2 playback was. And for motion sensing, I'll buy a Wii for that. Considering the Wii is probably going to launch at 250$, 360+Wii is 650$, a bit more than the PS3 but at least I get access to the best of both worlds instead of a me too console.
I think Sony is going after too many markets with this thing. First, obviously, it is going head to head with the 360 processing power-wise. They are also trying to convert people to Blu-Ray. Now they have a poor's man version of the Wii controller. They're playing catchup with Microsoft on the online front.
:)
In the meantime, they are trying to compete with Nintendo in the handheld and are clearly losing. Latest figures show 17 million actually sold while Sony shipped 17 million units, and I can see PSPs sitting on the shelves right about anywhere.
So basically, Sony in the coming months will try to win people over to PSP, PS3 and Blu-Ray. Each technology at a higher price point than their competitors. I know of only one company who can do this, and it's Apple. And Sony sure isn't Apple when it comes to marketting.
Now, given that MS's base system is 299$ and Sony's is 499$, and Nintendo's probably 200$, I can see a lot of parents going for the 360 and the Wii instead of the PS3 at Christmas time.
Also, I bet there's a very good reason why Blu-Ray can ship at 500$ with the PS3 while a stand-alone player costs in the nine hundreds. It will have poor playback like the PS2 did.
I have a 360 right now, and from what I've seen from the conference Sony just did, I feel even better about my purchase. Looking forward to buy a Wii right after launch.
About that card game thing. One of my coworker came back from Japan on vacation last week and apparently these kind of games are really big in Japan. Basically what you do is you go to your regular card store when you buy cards and trade with friends and build your deck. Then you go to the arcade and use these cards which are recognized by the machine. Some sort of interactive card game where you actually manipulate the cards. I think he told me of some Romance of the Three Kingdoms-like game played that way. It looked really cool, but you had to read a big manual in order to play it. I suppose this is one kind of game that will probably not cross the pond.
They need to either lower the price of the prenium system to 300$ or bundle Gears of Wars (supposing it's a true killer app) with the console when the title comes out. That would hurt Sony like hell. Anyway, counter the PS3 launch maybe a month or two before it comes out with that. Japan will still buy PS3s like crazy, but the rest of the world will be buying 360s.
I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't try to convince Square to port FF13 to the 360, but then, Square are CG whores so I guess 9 gigs isn't enough for them.
The interresting thing tough is that this generation two of the three consoles will have inferior storage capacity. Since companies will probably want to make more and more crossplatform games to make sure they recoup their investment, I wonder if that won't render the Blu-Ray size advantage pretty much useles unless you are playig a Square game.
People are always complaining that Microsoft shouldn't be in the business. Before the N64 generation of consoles, there were two companies : Nintendo and Sega. When do I hear poeple complaining that Sony got into the business? Never. Is it different in Sony's case because they are not Microsoft, or is it because they got the most market share for the past two generations. (Probably both) What if Microsoft had taken number one by a good margin last generation, followed by Sony and then Nintendo. What would you be saying then?
More people bought Xboxes worlwide than Gamecubes last generation. They had also for quite a while the highest tie-in ratio (I don't know if that still holds tough). A lot of people seemed to agree that we needed a 3rd player.
So why not a third portable player? And hopefully by the time MS launches their Xbox portable, Sony will have left the portable market, since the PSP isn't going really anywhere.
You are totally right though that they should take a page from the Nintendo book on how to make cheap powerful hardware.
And there I thought they were talking about Al Gore's wife.
Maybe for non videophiles, but I'm surprised someone with such a big screen who is obviously a videophile doesn't really care. ;)
Well, digital projectors owners are certainly going to notice on a 100 inch diagonal piture the difference in quality between DVD and HDDVD. But this is the minority, not everybody's setup.
One gig for 720p an hour? Have you taken a look at the trailers size at apple.com, which are encoded in mpeg4? It's more like several gigs an hour. 150megs for 2 minutes or os That's 75 gigs a minute or rougly 4.5 gigs an hour. And if trailers on Apple.com are only in stereo, you can look at even bigger files for 5.1 and 6.1 surround and even worse if you are using DTS.
1 gig an hour is rougly NTSC resolution on mpeg 2 IIRC. About 6 times the resolution, better than stereo sound only 4 times the compression is not going to get you 1 gig for 720p.
Getting the demos and files directly (and in their intended format, not some shaky cam)to the consumer in an easy way is good publicity for the games. Especially the demos, which you traditionally had to buy a magazine in order to get. Free demos for 360s owners is a great thing. People can buy into the hype even earlier because they get early access to the games that are on the showfloor. This can only be good for the game makers and Microsoft. I will not accept less from Sony and Nintendo next year.
Apparently, all the 360 trailers released during E3 will be downloadable on your 360. Now that's great marketting. Plus, some of the E3 demos will actually be downloadable :) I can't wait for next week.
Let's pretend I can find a tower full of bad people in real-life. Let's also pretend for argument sake that I know hwow to actually cast a spell that sends a meteor on the tower in real life. How the hell do I not get arrested for murder, even though the punks clearly deserved it?
I'll stick to more realistic games.
Hum... makes we wonder. Does't Blizzard get money from all these broadcasts of Starcraft on TV? I don't have a EULA for Startcraft, but movies on DVDs normally have a clause saying that you are not allowed to play them in public place unless you are licensed to.
Keep in mind that Microsoft is losing money with each console sold
I bet Microsoft is not losing a single penny on the Core version of the console. Probably just break even. Then, the person either
a) buys the HD and Microsofts makes a ton of profit off of it (100$ for a 20gig HD???)
b) buys a memory card and Microsoft still makes a ton of profit (40$ for 64 megs of flash???)
On the other hand the premium edition is probably costing them quite a lot. But not as much as people would think. Maybe a an extra 100$?
I am pulling these out of my ass, obviously, but I can't see Microsoft losing money even on the core bundle.
a pink square can
Great, now all we are missing are ponies.
Actually, a lot of current releases for the DS are at 49.99CAN$ right now, like the new Metroid Prime : Hunters game. Honestly, I think this is a bit too much pricy considering for 10CAN$ more I can get an xbox, gamecube or PS2 game. Don't even talk to me about PSP game prices.
It's quite simple really. According to today's exchange rate, the US dollar is woth 1.16 canadian dollar.
So take the prenium price 400US$, multiply it by 1.16 and you get... 464CAN$ before taxes. We pay 500CAN$ before taxes. (And we pay quite a lot more taxes in Canada too, here it's 15%).
I suppose some of that extra cost fee is the exportation fee.
It's interresting to see this debate between 49.99$ games and 59.99$ games. I understand that since everything is priced towards the United States audience, you guys are seeing a price hike. But consider we're I live, Canada. The last generation of games cost 49.99US$ and those translated after the exchange rate to 69.99CAN$ over here. Now, since the Canadian dollar is worth more than before, those games now retails for 59.99CAN$, but this has only been fixed very recently. As for next-gen games (360 so far :p), guess how much they cost over here? 69.99CAN$! To us canadians, there hasn't been a price difference between next-gen and previous-gen games up until a few months ago. I doubt that people who used to pay 69.99CAN$ for years for new games are complaining right now (I bought a lot of Xbox1 games at 69.99CAN$!). I think this game price debate is mostly a United States's problem, because everything is priced based on your economy. But since the American dollar hasn't been doing so well recently, us folks from other countries are actually getting cheaper games considering the raise in development costs for the next generation! (except maybe for Revolution games, we'll see how much they costs to develop)
A note tough, an Xbox 360 still costs around 50CAN$ more than it should, once you apply the tax exchange rate. Microsoft is losing less money here than in the states. But games are rightly priced, and that's the most important part.
... in a pre-world premiere. Here's my take on it.
If you don't enjoy theater, LOTR and haven't read the books, don't go see it. There are so many shortcuts that the story can only make sense if you've read the book.
The shortcuts they took are bold and interresting. They didn't change the story for the sake of changing like Jackson did. I though the changes were interresting.
The first act is amazing and covers the beginning of the book to the end of Moria (the Balrog was cleverly done and the end of that act if the strongest scene in the play, with Helm's Deep and the Prancing Pony). I don't remember how the second act ended, but they do have the scourging of the shire, which I thought was nice.
The problem with the play comes in the 3rd act when events are a bit rushed. The scene at Mount Doom between Frodo, Sam and Golum is confusing and definitely not as epic as in the book or the movie. There are some weird art direction in the third act that I didn't like at all, but that's me.
As for the music, I enjoyed it. I'm not a native english speaker (french from Quebec), so singing is difficult for me to follow somehow. Speaking was no problem though, go figure. Anyway, the point was, even though I didn't understand most of the singing, it did sound nice and fit musically with the emotion that needed to be conveyed. This is not a Chicago or The Producers type of musical. It's classical music with lyrics basically. Not opera (that would have been wicked!), but definitely listenable. I'm definitely getting the score when it comes out.
But the best thing about the play is that it didn't try to immitate the movies, it was it's own thing. The music, costumes and acting were all different from the movie. And the actor's rendition of Gollum was really good. Gandalf felt weak tough, as if he were an winy old man, not a leading figure like he was in the movie.
I'd say that if the show was as good in the 2nd and 3rd act as in the first one, then I would have had gotten way more than what I paid for (125$). But the seriously lacking 3rd act wasn't worth the money I paid. I can't put a price on what it should have been, but hey, those were like 15th row tickets (as expensive as front row IIRC), I really enjoyed it and I didn't feel robbed. When it starts touring worldwide and comes to Montreal, I'll definitely go and see it with friends again.
Acutally, last week, from Wednesday to Friday, I've seen the supply of Premium 360s go from in stock (about 70 units) to out of stock twice on futureshop.com (bestbuy in the states). It seems they are getting new units almost everyday now. I simply walked in two stores also, one Futureshop and one local store and both had them in stock. Quite a few I might add.
Pride maybe?
I get your point, and I haven't seen the news release to that effect, but if they are phrased something like:
"Apparently, a chinese blogger was shut down by the chinese government later this week. Bla bla bla... The chinese government denies the fact. The company hosting the website wasn't available for comments" would be a totally ok way to do it. But just asserting that it was shutdown without even contacting anyone, that would be plain dumb. And from what I got from the story to far, this is what happened.
There was a scandal in Quebec (Canada) a few months ago. One guy who was taking part in a leadership race in a major political party had to confirm, after enquiry from the press, that he had taken cocaine years ago while he was resposible for the environment ministry. We learned later on that there was actually quite a lot of fact checking done and people interviewed before publishing the news, as it obviously was damaging. It turned out to be true, but the journalists did their work before publishing the information.
It's not because in some places the journalism standards are so low in published or TV news that it is right for journalists not to care about the veracity of a piece of information. Journalist have a moral responsability because the news they are publishing can have devastating effect on the people or the community if it turns out to be false.
Think Irak. Or think a falsely accused child-abuser.
I don't agree. Reporting news is a serious issue and the facts should have been checked first, which clearly wasn't done. They made a very valid point.
Maybe, but I doubt that a Cisco router even draws that much power. Which is my point. Why buy an unproven and possibly more costly in the long run solution when Cisco works and probably makes more economic sense in the long run? You do realise that if you bought a real router your power bill would be less?