I wonder if the standard controls will be smaller too. I heard a lot of people complain that the size of the controller made it difficult to handle for people with small hands. My five year old prefers to put it on the carpet rather than hold it.
The standard controller on all current XBox systems is the S controller that MS released after the Japanese market rejected the original XBox controller. I had to buy the original XBox controller seperately because I like the bigger controller.
However, if you're looking for a smaller controller than the S controller, I think you're SOL, because there really isn't much chance of it getting any smaller.
See, I think that the people who grew up on Super Mario and are still gamers are, in a lot of cases, still interested in Mario.
I grew up on SMB (and SMB2, SMB3), and I'm definitely not interested in Mario. OTOH, I am interested in Zelda and Metroid, which always seemed to me to be at least a little higher up the evolutionary ladder than SMB anyway.
It's the next generation, currently in high school and middle school, who have never played the original Zelda that have no interest in Nintendo titles. And I don't think it's edginess that sells. Lord knows FF7 wasn't edgy
I wouldn't be so sure of that. My girlfriend's brother (about 8 yrs old) has a GameCube and a couple of different GameBoys (GB Color, GBA, GBA SP), and he definitely seems interested in the Mario stuff, and Zelda, and Metroid (plus the Pokemon stuff and a few other things). As for FF7, though it sold to many people that never played FF before, I still remember playing FF1 on the NES, and have bought every FF title available on the PS1/2. Edgy? Well, it was certainly different from what most people had seen before. Japanese rpgs were never selling like that in the US before.
I think what people miss is why a game really does well. GTA might be violent, and a lot of people might buy it for that reason, but it really wouldn't get much play if that was all it had. The game offers a lot more freedom than most people are used to seeing in a video game. Halo is just a really strong modern-day FPS, which is something that a console never really had before (though Red Faction may count as well, and I've heard the N64 had a couple). If Halo had been released on the PC at the same time as the XBox, MS probably would've sold a lot fewer XBoxes.
Currently I own a DreamCast, PS2, and XBox. I have about 10-20 titles for each (not counting the PS1 titles), and most of those titles are games that I enjoy a great deal. That's not going to prevent me from picking up a GameCube soon, though, because I can already see at least a half-dozen GC titles that I'd like to play. To me, that's enough to justify a $150 console, especially since I can get one of those titles free with the console, and already bought one of the titles for $20 (Metroid was on clearance at one of the local Blockbuster Videos, and yes, it was a new, not pre-rented game). Considering that I used to buy a video card for my PC every 6 months (only reason I don't now is because it's a waste of time & money because the games aren't keeping up), it's actually a lot cheaper to buy a console every once in a while (close to every 6 months, but not quite that often), and more games (with less bugs).
Actually, I'll have to retract that statement because, not only can I not find the statement, but I believe that it was a comment I read based on their release pricing (in other words, someone commented that they had basically admitted as much by pricing so much lower than the other consoles (~$100 originally)).
If you read the technical specs on the systems, Nintendo cites lower numbers than Sony or Microsoft -- that's because MS and Sony publish theoretical maximum performance and Nintendo publishes typical in-game performance , which is a huge distinction. However, mindless fanboys took these numbers with absolutely no understanding of what they meant and ran with them, creating the popular myth that the Gamecube is the least powerful (by no small margin) of the 3 systems. "Ha ha. Gaycube can only do 6 million polys/sec. Xbox does 125 million polys/sec!" Uhh, yeah, right.
The numbers I've seen show lit, textured polygons for the GameCube at 6-12 million. Sony quotes 16 million with 'effects such as lighting and curved surfaces'. XBox polygon specs have been quoted at so many different numbers (100-400M) that it's nearly impossible to say what they are.
Nintendo's initial press releases regarding performance stated that the PS2 was only seeing 3M/sec in current games (at that time, around 2-3 years ago). I think everyone would admit, though, that the cutting-edge games then don't look like the cutting-edge games now, at least one the PS2, which is probably due to the complaints most developers have about developing for Sony's hardware (in other words, as the developers get better with the hardware, they can get more performance out of it).
Frankly, when Miyamoto talks about the GameCube vs. other consoles, he sounds like someone that hasn't been paying attention to what's going on outside of Nintendo for the last 5-10 years. He likes stressing that CPU speeds aren't important because video and audio tasks are offloaded to the graphics and sound processors in the GameCube, but ignores the fact that the other consoles do this as well, and PCs have been for a while, too. He talks about how much texturing and lighting can knock off of the polygon rates for graphics processors, yet many graphics processors can do 1 or 2 textures lighting in 1 pass (as opposed to the 'half of half' the polygon rate he brings up, and some graphics chips can do more; I especially like how he takes 'half of half' to 1/10th, then says that means a system with 80M-100M/sec will actually get 5M-8M/sec (half of half of 80-100M is 20-25M, 1/10th of 80-100M is 8-10M) http://members.aol.com/mips36/shigeru_miyamoto.htm ).
Don't get me wrong, I like the GameCube, and I am going to buy one, but I'm not buying it for cutting-edge performance, I'm buying it for the games. If it turns out to be really impressive, I'll start buying those 2- or 3- platform titles for the GameCube, but at the moment it's the XBox, because in many cases there is a visible difference.
when I was shoping you could get a GCN with Mario Sunshine and mem card for $175, an Xbox with 1 controller and game for about $200 or a PS2 with no games for around $215. The market does change, but this is how it was when I purchased my console.
I don't know what market you're in, but in the US the XBox and PS2 have been at the same price point (for the console alone) since the release of the XBox.
As far as graphics go, if you think PS2 looks anywhere near as good as Gamecube and XBox you are smoking crack. PS2 has great games but the system is old technology.
The GameCube graphics technology is actually behind PS2, though not by much. Even Nintendo admitted on launch of the GameCube that their console was the least advanced of the systems, but they promised to have titles that they believed would better appeal to the market, and a lower price point. Of course, with the most recent price decreases, that price point is not nearly as low as it once was, though the GameBoy Player bundle should help a bit (since the Player will be ~$50 separately).
For a console to succeed in the United States, you need the American juggernaught EA to publish it's sports games for it. Frankly I find this sad, but whatever. In Japan you need RPG games to succeed (that would mean Square or Enix). Not only do you need one or two titles of these genres from first party or such, you need VARIETY. Sony will continue to dominate as long as they release the most software (despite the fact that most of it is garbage).
Actually, the console was doing ok in the US. It was the fact that it was developed by a Japanese company and was failing in Japan that it died. Sega's own sports and arcade titles have usually been enough to float the company's consoles in the US, even if it's rare that they get the #1 spot. Sega Japan just wasn't willing to support a system that wasn't doing well at home, or let Sega America off their leash to market it properly in the US to take advantage of it's lead-time against the PS2.
Well, first of all, there's an unfair comparision because there was no point in providing backward compatibility with Dreamcast. What could you possibly make Dreamcast backward compatible with?
Sega had planned on having software available for the dreamcast to run PS1 games (Bleem I believe it was). The way it would've been offered seemed like a waste of time to me, though, and it really only strengthened the Sony market.
The reason backward compatiblity is beneficial to PS2 is that the original Playstation had a huge software library, and development was still ongoing at PS2's launch. The same goes for GBA, backward compatibility is important because GB has a HUGE software library.
While the size of the library is important, I think it's also important to re-emphasize (and re-word) what you just said: PS1 (and GB) development continued after the launch of the new console. Part of it was simply that games continued to go into development for the older consoles after first-gen games for the new consoles started (hell, there are still PS1 games in development), but part of it was also knowing that the console would still be supported on the new platform. Otherwise, if a platform (such as GameCube) was due for replacement within a year, it's very likely that development could stop altogether if the new platform was not going to be compatible (note: this probably would not be the case with the most popular consoles, but development would stop quickly after the new release).
I agree with you that the success of the PS2's initial period was largely due to its backward compatibility, but it solely depends on the fact that Playstation was already #1 and has a huge library. It's an advantage unique to Sony at that time.
The advantage isn't truly a unique one, they were just the first to capitalize on it. Backwards compatibility is something that people have always wanted in consoles, and they were simply the first to do it out-of-the-box, without added cost from the end-user perspective.
If the next Nintendo console will indeed ship in 2005, that will mean GameCube will only have 3 years worth of a backcatalog. Having backward compatibility to this small catalog will probably makes little difference to the console's initial sales. Consider that the Genesis was backward compatible with the Sega Master System (via an adapter), yet it was Sonic that sold the Genesis by millions.
That last part is interesting to me, because I didn't know there was backwards compatibility for the Genesis, even though I owned one (and my step-brother had an SMS). However, I think it's more important for the consoles that are not #1 to have this, because it could cause people that never bought the first console to buy the new one, and pick up some older titles. After all, the only reason anyone really cared at launch that the PS2 could play PS1 games was so that they wouldn't have to keep their PS1 attached to the same TV as their PS2 (and so many old PS1 systems migrated to people's cars). Most of the people buying PS2 systems already had a PS1 and didn't absolutely need a PS2 to play PS1 titles, it just let them put an old console away. OTOH, someone that never bought a GameCube might like the option to try some GameCube titles if they bought the new system.
Moreover, backward compatibilty really does very little to a console's longetivity. After the first year or two, once there are enough native titles out, nobody (other than the really enthuaist) wants to play games from the last generation.
Perhaps it is just an enthusiast thing, but it's still nice to see new PS1 titles hit the shelf every once in a while. I know I'm certainly glad to have most of the Final Fantasy line playable on one console.
There are more important things to the success of a console's launch period, like price, launch titles, exclusives, brand loyalty, and most important of all, hype. Backward compatibility is relatively irrelevant when compared to a
IIRC PS2 got around this by using the PS1 cpu as its sound processor.
Actually, it's the I/O processor that acts as the PS1 system in the PS2. The processor was developed with another company (at least for the initial runs of the PS2), so it's not quite the original PS1 CPU (though it's probably the same chip used in the newer PSOne consoles).
From what I've read, Sony's gotten most of the functionality of the PS2 down to 3 or 4 chips (the PS1/I/O chip, the sound processor, and the original dual-chip layout for the graphics is now a single chip). It's usually not too hard to get a new sound chip that works with the old interfaces, so you're basically looking at 2 chips at the front end, and maybe they'll find an even better way to handle it before the PS3 comes around.
You know that Link to the Past was originally released for the SNES, right?
All the more reason for me to play it, since I never owned an SNES;p Good to know, though, since I pretty much ignored the series after the 2nd game (Adventures of Link?).
Just take a look at sales numbers for 'Enter the Matrix' -- despite getting lukewarm critics reviews and panned in most player reviews (the ones I've read, anyway), it sold over 1 million copies in a week.
Of course, the fact that there even could be critic and player reviews in a week (in other words, to stop some of those people from buying the game) is perhaps a bit disturbing in itself. Then again, I really have no idea of how long the game is, either. If it's like Max Payne then I'd expect player reviews the day it's released and critic reviews in the normal print cycle (or online on the normal update schedule).
The 'Previews', of course, just added to the advertising to hype the game to no end.
Pen intefaces (touch sensitive or magnetic interfaces) are typically physically disctinct tranparent layer placed on top of the LCD. It isn't necessary to manufacture an LCD WITH touch sensitivity. You can simply add the touch layer on top of a regularly fabbed LCD.
I am aware of this, I just don't make the distinction very often. In my own work we've bought touch displays both as pre-built units and as individual parts, and, in fact, have shifted over to the vast majority of our systems using pre-built units, simply because of cost issues (the only reason not to use the pre-builts would be special form factors). Buying a display with the touch screen, LCD, and assorted interfaces/power supplies enclosed in a manufactured shell doesn't give much appreciation for how truly separate each of these items is, but when you have to buy each piece separately and find a place for them all in some weird case it brings a whole new appreciation for what laptop manufacturing must entail.
For instance, on most PocketPCs it is possible to replace the touch-screen (mildly costly) instead of the entire display (very expensive), see www.pocketpctechs.com for details.
As should be the case for most TabletPCs, I'm sure. Of course, the pen-based interface is, I believe, more costly than a touch-screen.
BTW, what would REALLY make a TabletPC rock is inclusion of Sony's Transflective LCD screen technology. I'm excited to see what they release in their forthcoming TabletPC models.
I'm really not up to date on LCD technology (short of occasionally getting myself up to date when we're pricing a technology change, I really don't use LCD screens outside of work and don't really care to keep up with it while the price for a true LCD replacement of my CRT is outrageous). I'll have to give it a look, though. I've been looking at the Wacom stuff mostly because a friend of mine was interested in buying a tablet (not a tablet PC) for his artwork, and I thought that if the technology they use on their TabletPC is reasonably close, that it would definitely be worth looking at.
If you are playing as spiderman and just effortlessly leap over buildings...that is not realistic...you don't believe that you are spiderman...therefore it is not a fun game...
umm I thought SpiderMan could just leap over buildings, at least to some extent...
Sometimes realistic physics is misconstrued. There's a reason SpiderMan can jump high and crawl up walls, and with a little work it can be done within the constraints of realistic physics. It's the idea that your character should not be limited to what real-world people would be able to do. Maybe you're a superhero (or supervillain), maybe you're just more powerful for some other reason, but as long as there's an explanation, it won't usually pull you out of the game. When you throw a grenade and run uphill to get away from it before it explodes, you don't expect the grenade to gleefully roll uphill (ala Half-life/TFC). THAT will pull you out of the game (and blow you up to boot).
You know, I never got this whole graphics engine thing. Why is the graphics quality of a game so limited by its engine? I know that nowadays we have fancier shading and lighting effects but shouldnt any decently-coded graphics engine be capable of, at the very least, accepting any kind of mesh or texture, no matter how low or high its resolution is?
The Quake engine had some severe hard-coded limitations. Now that it's open-source, there are a lot of people out there that have gone in and changed this, and added many other features from the Quake2 and Q3 engines, but overall it's still the same underlying engine. In many cases if the engine wasn't designed with particular things in mind, it just won't perform as well, even if those features are ported into it, as an engine designed with those things in mind.
Then again, most of my gaming time lately has been spent on Final Fantasy 2, which, although the Origins package has updated them quite a bit, has very dated graphics.
heh, guess I was wrong, though it will still be useless if you don't add some RAM to that machine (XP on 128MB, why not just kiss your day goodbye?);)
Of course, then you add the pen interface, which generally runs a good deal higher than a standard LCD (even touch-sensitive monitors are a good deal more expensive than plain LCD monitors).
Many of which sell for far more than the price point you've listed. Also, Wacom (one of the major manufacturers of drawing pads for the PC/Mac) has been marketing TabletPCs for a while now, with the 15" model at $1900 and the 18" model at $3500.
They also sell a Unix kit to use their tablets with Solaris or Irix, which also works with their TabletPCs.
A tablet PC, especially the kind that can unfold to into a laptop, is what I've been wanting for a very long time
I agree there, and considering that I have not seen a tablet PC in a store, yet, I'm not surprised to see that sales haven't been very good (htf am I supposed to buy one if I can't mess with them in the store?).
As for your complaints about price, I understand to a degree, but realistically a $1000 laptop would be a pretty useless machine by most standards.
And what about us people who don't know a bunch of other GBA owners to interact with? Zelda: Four Swords, looks pretty damned interesting (perhaps even "innovative"), but I'm not going to get it because I have nobody else to play it with.
You know Four Swords is just the multiplayer part of the game, and not the whole game, right? The whole 2 or 3 people I know that actually have the game have only played Four Swords a couple of times, and mostly just stick to the single-player stuff (which is a lot like an original Zelda remake, maybe it is entirely that for all I know).
All I have to say is that I have the current GBA and Gamecube Metroid titles (because I got really good prices on them), and don't have either platform yet (planning on the GBA next paycheck and the Gamecube after they start bundling the GBPlayer with it near the end of the month). Metroid and Zelda are simply the clearest memories of the NES I have (well, good memories anyway), and good titles for both are enough to sell the platform for me.
I think the reason for the oldies remakes is fairly obvious, but I'll state it anyway: to make all of the games in the series available to the US audience (in English, broken as it may be at times), on one platform. I happen to like the fact that I can hope to play almost every FF game on my PS2 (and most of them on a PSOne (guess I'll have to start using that name or PS1 now that they announced a PSX, maybe the game stores will start changing their signs, too)). Especially as a fan that was never big on imports or the SNES in general, I never got to play any of the games besides FFI before VII anyway. I'm having a blast with FFII and really want III to come along so I can fill that hole in the line of PS1 CDs on my shelf.
hell, I don't even use anything but the D-pad unless a game forces me to do otherwise. I played FF1 on that damned rectangle with a D-pad and 2 red buttons (+2 black buttons), wtf would I need something different to play FFXXIV?
Just wanted to say hey to Buzz. You were an inspiration to me as a player and your cz site helped me immensely when I started playing on the CTSNet CZ server. From that point on I was hooked on a depth of gameplay that I had only previously gotten from Mechwarrior 2 and RPGs, and what I learned from that map and your site helped me a great deal to do everything I eventually did in TFC (despite the feelings of many in TF about TFC).
Last time I played Tetris, there was a window on the screen showing you the next block coming right up after the current, falling one.
OK, that's 2 items (the currently-falling block and the next block).
This allows you to decide the best place to put the current block so that the next one does not end up in an askward, and disadvantageous position.
Assuming that's even required to play the game well (I rarely pay attention to the next block, but then maybe I'm picking it up without paying attention).
Add to that the blocks already on the bottom of the pit and there is plenty to keep track of while making decisions. I don't see how that is all that much different than action games like GTA.
That's 3 items on screen, since you can usually reduce the blocks on the bottom to a basic pattern fairly quickly.
GTA (at least GTAVC), on the other hand (which wasn't in the study but at least I've played it, unlike MOH), could easily have 3+ cars on the screen, plus people walking on the sidewalks, and if you start to get in some trouble with the cops, a helicopter gunning for you and dropping more people. Not to mention the city you are driving/running through, as you might need to duck down a side street or make a run for the beach. Not to mention tracking things like your relative (or actual) position within the environment, possibly with the help of the on-screen compass, and paying attention to your health and armour (displayed on-screen), and possibly your points/money/etc. If you're like me, you also change the radio station periodically while driving down the road in GTA trying to keep track of the rest of these things.
Tetris is pretty well embedded in the minds of most 18-30 year old gamers. It's mostly reflex, and it's popularity goes well outside of the normal gaming population, so it's far more likely that it appeals to people that don't have the ability to play GTA or MOH well. I know my girlfriend will play Tetris for hours on end (or Pokemon games on the Gameboy for that matter), but she can't even walk down the street without running into a wall in GTAVC or figure out when and where to block and/or counter in Tekken. I'm still trying to get her there, though, because she at least shows some interest, though she's often frustrated.
Of course I don't have any proof for this but it seems that everyone I know who likes and is good at RPGs are pretty good at solving problems but not all of these people are what would normally be considered smart.
As someone else already pointed out, it's often impossible to tell which is the cause and which is the effect. I believe that people who are natural (or learned) problem solvers and enjoy such activity are more likely to enjoy games that challenge them in this way. This is also why I tend to get bored with FPS games that aren't primarily run&gun affairs. The puzzles in even the most complex FPS games seem to be quite mundane compared to adventure games and RPGs (FedEx quests aside). I've always played FPS, fighting, and driving games for twitch/skill reasons, and RPGs for thinking things through. When games try to mix the skills required, it's often novel, and occasionally fun (for a while), but rarely effective. Maybe with time we'll really find a way to blend RPG and FPS without making the game fall short of the top end of either genre.
Ever seen the cash registers that dispense the change for the cashiers and only let them touch the bills? The basic assumption is that most customers tend to give the cashier less than $5 more than the cost of their order, and that they can count to 4.
All the following projects have been canceled: - Windows/Mips - Windows/PowerPC - Windows/Alpha
These are a bit of a chicken & the egg type of thing. How many of these platforms are doing any better without Windows than they were with it?
- "HomeR" Project - Modular Windows
I'm not sure which HomeR you're talking about, because I would hope MS still has a stress tool for IIS sites... As for Modular Windows, I thought that's what PocketPC, XBox, etc were all using...
- "Otto" Project (SW for cars; 1992) - MMOSA (Set-Top-boxes Operating System - WebTV
Software for cars is something MS is still working on, unless this was cancelled in the last 2 months. WebTV and MMOSA are pretty much the same thing, but MMOSA could be considered part of either XBox or WebTV, and WebTV has been rebranded to take the MSN name (they're advertising MSN set-top internet access on TV here in VA).
- Blackbird/Internet Studio (1995) - proprietary MSN (Microsoft should have become the sole ISP, remember?) - COOl (C++ Object Orientated Language)
The first two items are pretty much the same thing, while COOL is C#, which is doing exceptionally well.
- PenWindows - Microsoft Bob
Given, this was how long ago?
- Ultimate TV
http://www.ultimatetv.com/index.asp Spring 2003 Service Upgrades available...
- Hailstorm (2001 - 2002)
And we all know that Hailstorm was so popular that they'd have no reason to rename it (.Net My Services) and then just bury it until it's ready.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the standard controls will be smaller too. I heard a lot of people complain that the size of the controller made it difficult to handle for people with small hands. My five year old prefers to put it on the carpet rather than hold it.
The standard controller on all current XBox systems is the S controller that MS released after the Japanese market rejected the original XBox controller. I had to buy the original XBox controller seperately because I like the bigger controller.
However, if you're looking for a smaller controller than the S controller, I think you're SOL, because there really isn't much chance of it getting any smaller.
See, I think that the people who grew up on Super Mario and are still gamers are, in a lot of cases, still interested in Mario.
I grew up on SMB (and SMB2, SMB3), and I'm definitely not interested in Mario. OTOH, I am interested in Zelda and Metroid, which always seemed to me to be at least a little higher up the evolutionary ladder than SMB anyway.
It's the next generation, currently in high school and middle school, who have never played the original Zelda that have no interest in Nintendo titles. And I don't think it's edginess that sells. Lord knows FF7 wasn't edgy
I wouldn't be so sure of that. My girlfriend's brother (about 8 yrs old) has a GameCube and a couple of different GameBoys (GB Color, GBA, GBA SP), and he definitely seems interested in the Mario stuff, and Zelda, and Metroid (plus the Pokemon stuff and a few other things). As for FF7, though it sold to many people that never played FF before, I still remember playing FF1 on the NES, and have bought every FF title available on the PS1/2. Edgy? Well, it was certainly different from what most people had seen before. Japanese rpgs were never selling like that in the US before.
I think what people miss is why a game really does well. GTA might be violent, and a lot of people might buy it for that reason, but it really wouldn't get much play if that was all it had. The game offers a lot more freedom than most people are used to seeing in a video game. Halo is just a really strong modern-day FPS, which is something that a console never really had before (though Red Faction may count as well, and I've heard the N64 had a couple). If Halo had been released on the PC at the same time as the XBox, MS probably would've sold a lot fewer XBoxes.
Currently I own a DreamCast, PS2, and XBox. I have about 10-20 titles for each (not counting the PS1 titles), and most of those titles are games that I enjoy a great deal. That's not going to prevent me from picking up a GameCube soon, though, because I can already see at least a half-dozen GC titles that I'd like to play. To me, that's enough to justify a $150 console, especially since I can get one of those titles free with the console, and already bought one of the titles for $20 (Metroid was on clearance at one of the local Blockbuster Videos, and yes, it was a new, not pre-rented game). Considering that I used to buy a video card for my PC every 6 months (only reason I don't now is because it's a waste of time & money because the games aren't keeping up), it's actually a lot cheaper to buy a console every once in a while (close to every 6 months, but not quite that often), and more games (with less bugs).
Actually, I'll have to retract that statement because, not only can I not find the statement, but I believe that it was a comment I read based on their release pricing (in other words, someone commented that they had basically admitted as much by pricing so much lower than the other consoles (~$100 originally)).
m ).
If you read the technical specs on the systems, Nintendo cites lower numbers than Sony or Microsoft -- that's because MS and Sony publish theoretical maximum performance and Nintendo publishes typical in-game performance , which is a huge distinction. However, mindless fanboys took these numbers with absolutely no understanding of what they meant and ran with them, creating the popular myth that the Gamecube is the least powerful (by no small margin) of the 3 systems. "Ha ha. Gaycube can only do 6 million polys/sec. Xbox does 125 million polys/sec!" Uhh, yeah, right.
The numbers I've seen show lit, textured polygons for the GameCube at 6-12 million. Sony quotes 16 million with 'effects such as lighting and curved surfaces'. XBox polygon specs have been quoted at so many different numbers (100-400M) that it's nearly impossible to say what they are.
Nintendo's initial press releases regarding performance stated that the PS2 was only seeing 3M/sec in current games (at that time, around 2-3 years ago). I think everyone would admit, though, that the cutting-edge games then don't look like the cutting-edge games now, at least one the PS2, which is probably due to the complaints most developers have about developing for Sony's hardware (in other words, as the developers get better with the hardware, they can get more performance out of it).
Frankly, when Miyamoto talks about the GameCube vs. other consoles, he sounds like someone that hasn't been paying attention to what's going on outside of Nintendo for the last 5-10 years. He likes stressing that CPU speeds aren't important because video and audio tasks are offloaded to the graphics and sound processors in the GameCube, but ignores the fact that the other consoles do this as well, and PCs have been for a while, too. He talks about how much texturing and lighting can knock off of the polygon rates for graphics processors, yet many graphics processors can do 1 or 2 textures lighting in 1 pass (as opposed to the 'half of half' the polygon rate he brings up, and some graphics chips can do more; I especially like how he takes 'half of half' to 1/10th, then says that means a system with 80M-100M/sec will actually get 5M-8M/sec (half of half of 80-100M is 20-25M, 1/10th of 80-100M is 8-10M) http://members.aol.com/mips36/shigeru_miyamoto.ht
Don't get me wrong, I like the GameCube, and I am going to buy one, but I'm not buying it for cutting-edge performance, I'm buying it for the games. If it turns out to be really impressive, I'll start buying those 2- or 3- platform titles for the GameCube, but at the moment it's the XBox, because in many cases there is a visible difference.
when I was shoping you could get a GCN with Mario Sunshine and mem card for $175, an Xbox with 1 controller and game for about $200 or a PS2 with no games for around $215. The market does change, but this is how it was when I purchased my console.
I don't know what market you're in, but in the US the XBox and PS2 have been at the same price point (for the console alone) since the release of the XBox.
As far as graphics go, if you think PS2 looks anywhere near as good as Gamecube and XBox you are smoking crack. PS2 has great games but the system is old technology.
The GameCube graphics technology is actually behind PS2, though not by much. Even Nintendo admitted on launch of the GameCube that their console was the least advanced of the systems, but they promised to have titles that they believed would better appeal to the market, and a lower price point. Of course, with the most recent price decreases, that price point is not nearly as low as it once was, though the GameBoy Player bundle should help a bit (since the Player will be ~$50 separately).
For a console to succeed in the United States, you need the American juggernaught EA to publish it's sports games for it. Frankly I find this sad, but whatever. In Japan you need RPG games to succeed (that would mean Square or Enix). Not only do you need one or two titles of these genres from first party or such, you need VARIETY. Sony will continue to dominate as long as they release the most software (despite the fact that most of it is garbage).
Actually, the console was doing ok in the US. It was the fact that it was developed by a Japanese company and was failing in Japan that it died. Sega's own sports and arcade titles have usually been enough to float the company's consoles in the US, even if it's rare that they get the #1 spot. Sega Japan just wasn't willing to support a system that wasn't doing well at home, or let Sega America off their leash to market it properly in the US to take advantage of it's lead-time against the PS2.
Well, first of all, there's an unfair comparision because there was no point in providing backward compatibility with Dreamcast. What could you possibly make Dreamcast backward compatible with?
Sega had planned on having software available for the dreamcast to run PS1 games (Bleem I believe it was). The way it would've been offered seemed like a waste of time to me, though, and it really only strengthened the Sony market.
The reason backward compatiblity is beneficial to PS2 is that the original Playstation had a huge software library, and development was still ongoing at PS2's launch. The same goes for GBA, backward compatibility is important because GB has a HUGE software library.
While the size of the library is important, I think it's also important to re-emphasize (and re-word) what you just said: PS1 (and GB) development continued after the launch of the new console. Part of it was simply that games continued to go into development for the older consoles after first-gen games for the new consoles started (hell, there are still PS1 games in development), but part of it was also knowing that the console would still be supported on the new platform. Otherwise, if a platform (such as GameCube) was due for replacement within a year, it's very likely that development could stop altogether if the new platform was not going to be compatible (note: this probably would not be the case with the most popular consoles, but development would stop quickly after the new release).
I agree with you that the success of the PS2's initial period was largely due to its backward compatibility, but it solely depends on the fact that Playstation was already #1 and has a huge library. It's an advantage unique to Sony at that time.
The advantage isn't truly a unique one, they were just the first to capitalize on it. Backwards compatibility is something that people have always wanted in consoles, and they were simply the first to do it out-of-the-box, without added cost from the end-user perspective.
If the next Nintendo console will indeed ship in 2005, that will mean GameCube will only have 3 years worth of a backcatalog. Having backward compatibility to this small catalog will probably makes little difference to the console's initial sales. Consider that the Genesis was backward compatible with the Sega Master System (via an adapter), yet it was Sonic that sold the Genesis by millions.
That last part is interesting to me, because I didn't know there was backwards compatibility for the Genesis, even though I owned one (and my step-brother had an SMS). However, I think it's more important for the consoles that are not #1 to have this, because it could cause people that never bought the first console to buy the new one, and pick up some older titles. After all, the only reason anyone really cared at launch that the PS2 could play PS1 games was so that they wouldn't have to keep their PS1 attached to the same TV as their PS2 (and so many old PS1 systems migrated to people's cars). Most of the people buying PS2 systems already had a PS1 and didn't absolutely need a PS2 to play PS1 titles, it just let them put an old console away. OTOH, someone that never bought a GameCube might like the option to try some GameCube titles if they bought the new system.
Moreover, backward compatibilty really does very little to a console's longetivity. After the first year or two, once there are enough native titles out, nobody (other than the really enthuaist) wants to play games from the last generation.
Perhaps it is just an enthusiast thing, but it's still nice to see new PS1 titles hit the shelf every once in a while. I know I'm certainly glad to have most of the Final Fantasy line playable on one console.
There are more important things to the success of a console's launch period, like price, launch titles, exclusives, brand loyalty, and most important of all, hype. Backward compatibility is relatively irrelevant when compared to a
IIRC PS2 got around this by using the PS1 cpu as its sound processor.
Actually, it's the I/O processor that acts as the PS1 system in the PS2. The processor was developed with another company (at least for the initial runs of the PS2), so it's not quite the original PS1 CPU (though it's probably the same chip used in the newer PSOne consoles).
From what I've read, Sony's gotten most of the functionality of the PS2 down to 3 or 4 chips (the PS1/I/O chip, the sound processor, and the original dual-chip layout for the graphics is now a single chip). It's usually not too hard to get a new sound chip that works with the old interfaces, so you're basically looking at 2 chips at the front end, and maybe they'll find an even better way to handle it before the PS3 comes around.
You know that Link to the Past was originally released for the SNES, right?
;p Good to know, though, since I pretty much ignored the series after the 2nd game (Adventures of Link?).
All the more reason for me to play it, since I never owned an SNES
Just take a look at sales numbers for 'Enter the Matrix' -- despite getting lukewarm critics reviews and panned in most player reviews (the ones I've read, anyway), it sold over 1 million copies in a week.
Of course, the fact that there even could be critic and player reviews in a week (in other words, to stop some of those people from buying the game) is perhaps a bit disturbing in itself. Then again, I really have no idea of how long the game is, either. If it's like Max Payne then I'd expect player reviews the day it's released and critic reviews in the normal print cycle (or online on the normal update schedule).
The 'Previews', of course, just added to the advertising to hype the game to no end.
Pen intefaces (touch sensitive or magnetic interfaces) are typically physically disctinct tranparent layer placed on top of the LCD. It isn't necessary to manufacture an LCD WITH touch sensitivity. You can simply add the touch layer on top of a regularly fabbed LCD.
I am aware of this, I just don't make the distinction very often. In my own work we've bought touch displays both as pre-built units and as individual parts, and, in fact, have shifted over to the vast majority of our systems using pre-built units, simply because of cost issues (the only reason not to use the pre-builts would be special form factors). Buying a display with the touch screen, LCD, and assorted interfaces/power supplies enclosed in a manufactured shell doesn't give much appreciation for how truly separate each of these items is, but when you have to buy each piece separately and find a place for them all in some weird case it brings a whole new appreciation for what laptop manufacturing must entail.
For instance, on most PocketPCs it is possible to replace the touch-screen (mildly costly) instead of the entire display (very expensive), see www.pocketpctechs.com for details.
As should be the case for most TabletPCs, I'm sure. Of course, the pen-based interface is, I believe, more costly than a touch-screen.
BTW, what would REALLY make a TabletPC rock is inclusion of Sony's Transflective LCD screen technology. I'm excited to see what they release in their forthcoming TabletPC models.
I'm really not up to date on LCD technology (short of occasionally getting myself up to date when we're pricing a technology change, I really don't use LCD screens outside of work and don't really care to keep up with it while the price for a true LCD replacement of my CRT is outrageous). I'll have to give it a look, though. I've been looking at the Wacom stuff mostly because a friend of mine was interested in buying a tablet (not a tablet PC) for his artwork, and I thought that if the technology they use on their TabletPC is reasonably close, that it would definitely be worth looking at.
If you are playing as spiderman and just effortlessly leap over buildings...that is not realistic...you don't believe that you are spiderman...therefore it is not a fun game...
umm I thought SpiderMan could just leap over buildings, at least to some extent...
Sometimes realistic physics is misconstrued. There's a reason SpiderMan can jump high and crawl up walls, and with a little work it can be done within the constraints of realistic physics. It's the idea that your character should not be limited to what real-world people would be able to do. Maybe you're a superhero (or supervillain), maybe you're just more powerful for some other reason, but as long as there's an explanation, it won't usually pull you out of the game. When you throw a grenade and run uphill to get away from it before it explodes, you don't expect the grenade to gleefully roll uphill (ala Half-life/TFC). THAT will pull you out of the game (and blow you up to boot).
You know, I never got this whole graphics engine thing. Why is the graphics quality of a game so limited by its engine?
I know that nowadays we have fancier shading and lighting effects but shouldnt any decently-coded graphics engine be capable of, at the very least, accepting any kind of mesh or texture, no matter how low or high its resolution is?
The Quake engine had some severe hard-coded limitations. Now that it's open-source, there are a lot of people out there that have gone in and changed this, and added many other features from the Quake2 and Q3 engines, but overall it's still the same underlying engine. In many cases if the engine wasn't designed with particular things in mind, it just won't perform as well, even if those features are ported into it, as an engine designed with those things in mind.
Then again, most of my gaming time lately has been spent on Final Fantasy 2, which, although the Origins package has updated them quite a bit, has very dated graphics.
heh, guess I was wrong, though it will still be useless if you don't add some RAM to that machine (XP on 128MB, why not just kiss your day goodbye?) ;)
Of course, then you add the pen interface, which generally runs a good deal higher than a standard LCD (even touch-sensitive monitors are a good deal more expensive than plain LCD monitors).
The focus then becomes an artists drawing pad.
Many of which sell for far more than the price point you've listed. Also, Wacom (one of the major manufacturers of drawing pads for the PC/Mac) has been marketing TabletPCs for a while now, with the 15" model at $1900 and the 18" model at $3500.
They also sell a Unix kit to use their tablets with Solaris or Irix, which also works with their TabletPCs.
A tablet PC, especially the kind that can unfold to into a laptop, is what I've been wanting for a very long time
I agree there, and considering that I have not seen a tablet PC in a store, yet, I'm not surprised to see that sales haven't been very good (htf am I supposed to buy one if I can't mess with them in the store?).
As for your complaints about price, I understand to a degree, but realistically a $1000 laptop would be a pretty useless machine by most standards.
And what about us people who don't know a bunch of other GBA owners to interact with? Zelda: Four Swords, looks pretty damned interesting (perhaps even "innovative"), but I'm not going to get it because I have nobody else to play it with.
You know Four Swords is just the multiplayer part of the game, and not the whole game, right? The whole 2 or 3 people I know that actually have the game have only played Four Swords a couple of times, and mostly just stick to the single-player stuff (which is a lot like an original Zelda remake, maybe it is entirely that for all I know).
All I have to say is that I have the current GBA and Gamecube Metroid titles (because I got really good prices on them), and don't have either platform yet (planning on the GBA next paycheck and the Gamecube after they start bundling the GBPlayer with it near the end of the month). Metroid and Zelda are simply the clearest memories of the NES I have (well, good memories anyway), and good titles for both are enough to sell the platform for me.
I think the reason for the oldies remakes is fairly obvious, but I'll state it anyway:
to make all of the games in the series available to the US audience (in English, broken as it may be at times), on one platform. I happen to like the fact that I can hope to play almost every FF game on my PS2 (and most of them on a PSOne (guess I'll have to start using that name or PS1 now that they announced a PSX, maybe the game stores will start changing their signs, too)). Especially as a fan that was never big on imports or the SNES in general, I never got to play any of the games besides FFI before VII anyway. I'm having a blast with FFII and really want III to come along so I can fill that hole in the line of PS1 CDs on my shelf.
hell, I don't even use anything but the D-pad unless a game forces me to do otherwise. I played FF1 on that damned rectangle with a D-pad and 2 red buttons (+2 black buttons), wtf would I need something different to play FFXXIV?
Just wanted to say hey to Buzz. You were an inspiration to me as a player and your cz site helped me immensely when I started playing on the CTSNet CZ server. From that point on I was hooked on a depth of gameplay that I had only previously gotten from Mechwarrior 2 and RPGs, and what I learned from that map and your site helped me a great deal to do everything I eventually did in TFC (despite the feelings of many in TF about TFC).
Last time I played Tetris, there was a window on the screen showing you the next block coming right up after the current, falling one.
OK, that's 2 items (the currently-falling block and the next block).
This allows you to decide the best place to put the current block so that the next one does not end up in an askward, and disadvantageous position.
Assuming that's even required to play the game well (I rarely pay attention to the next block, but then maybe I'm picking it up without paying attention).
Add to that the blocks already on the bottom of the pit and there is plenty to keep track of while making decisions. I don't see how that is all that much different than action games like GTA.
That's 3 items on screen, since you can usually reduce the blocks on the bottom to a basic pattern fairly quickly.
GTA (at least GTAVC), on the other hand (which wasn't in the study but at least I've played it, unlike MOH), could easily have 3+ cars on the screen, plus people walking on the sidewalks, and if you start to get in some trouble with the cops, a helicopter gunning for you and dropping more people. Not to mention the city you are driving/running through, as you might need to duck down a side street or make a run for the beach. Not to mention tracking things like your relative (or actual) position within the environment, possibly with the help of the on-screen compass, and paying attention to your health and armour (displayed on-screen), and possibly your points/money/etc. If you're like me, you also change the radio station periodically while driving down the road in GTA trying to keep track of the rest of these things.
Tetris is pretty well embedded in the minds of most 18-30 year old gamers. It's mostly reflex, and it's popularity goes well outside of the normal gaming population, so it's far more likely that it appeals to people that don't have the ability to play GTA or MOH well. I know my girlfriend will play Tetris for hours on end (or Pokemon games on the Gameboy for that matter), but she can't even walk down the street without running into a wall in GTAVC or figure out when and where to block and/or counter in Tekken. I'm still trying to get her there, though, because she at least shows some interest, though she's often frustrated.
Of course I don't have any proof for this but it seems that everyone I know who likes and is good at RPGs are pretty good at solving problems but not all of these people are what would normally be considered smart.
As someone else already pointed out, it's often impossible to tell which is the cause and which is the effect. I believe that people who are natural (or learned) problem solvers and enjoy such activity are more likely to enjoy games that challenge them in this way. This is also why I tend to get bored with FPS games that aren't primarily run&gun affairs. The puzzles in even the most complex FPS games seem to be quite mundane compared to adventure games and RPGs (FedEx quests aside). I've always played FPS, fighting, and driving games for twitch/skill reasons, and RPGs for thinking things through. When games try to mix the skills required, it's often novel, and occasionally fun (for a while), but rarely effective. Maybe with time we'll really find a way to blend RPG and FPS without making the game fall short of the top end of either genre.
I saw the Roomba on the Home Shopping Network a couple of nites ago when I was flipping channels, so yeah, I'd say it's widely available.
Ever seen the cash registers that dispense the change for the cashiers and only let them touch the bills? The basic assumption is that most customers tend to give the cashier less than $5 more than the cost of their order, and that they can count to 4.
All the following projects have been canceled:
- Windows/Mips
- Windows/PowerPC
- Windows/Alpha
These are a bit of a chicken & the egg type of thing. How many of these platforms are doing any better without Windows than they were with it?
- "HomeR" Project
- Modular Windows
I'm not sure which HomeR you're talking about, because I would hope MS still has a stress tool for IIS sites... As for Modular Windows, I thought that's what PocketPC, XBox, etc were all using...
- "Otto" Project (SW for cars; 1992)
- MMOSA (Set-Top-boxes Operating System
- WebTV
Software for cars is something MS is still working on, unless this was cancelled in the last 2 months. WebTV and MMOSA are pretty much the same thing, but MMOSA could be considered part of either XBox or WebTV, and WebTV has been rebranded to take the MSN name (they're advertising MSN set-top internet access on TV here in VA).
- Blackbird/Internet Studio (1995)
- proprietary MSN (Microsoft should have become the sole ISP, remember?)
- COOl (C++ Object Orientated Language)
The first two items are pretty much the same thing, while COOL is C#, which is doing exceptionally well.
- PenWindows
- Microsoft Bob
Given, this was how long ago?
- Ultimate TV
http://www.ultimatetv.com/index.asp
Spring 2003 Service Upgrades available...
- Hailstorm (2001 - 2002)
And we all know that Hailstorm was so popular that they'd have no reason to rename it (.Net My Services) and then just bury it until it's ready.