The last leaked document had this thing with a lot of non-gaming features, but at least all of them ahd some potential use in gaming - wireless for multiplayer, memory for savegames, etc.
But IM? I know some games have chat in them, but the game handles that itself, so there's only one connection to take care of; plus, that way it cleanly integrates into the game.
Plus, would you really NEED chat on a handheld gaming device? Could you even use it if it were provided? Couldn't you just yell at your friend (or even kick him in the shins to throw his game off far better than any trash talking) on the other side of the room instead of typing up a message while he basically has a few seconds to kill you with impunity?
I don't read them on my PC so much, but I currently have several books, several of which I downloaded from PG, on my PDA. I've always had a horrible time losing books, papers, notes, but I've not once lost an electronic device.
Ashen Empires (formerly known as Dransik)? The game's been around for four years, in beta for three of them, and has The. Whiniest. Community. Ever. Period. They bitch, they moan. When Asylumsoft went bankrupt, they whined that they weren't updated. When TKO bought Asylumsoft and started updating, they whined that they were changing it. When they moved the servers, they whined that lag was increased. When they fixed the lag, they whined that the game was going too fast without the lag. Under a thousand players per day, and they critcize the game (and the developers) more than SWG's 100,000.
I hadn't heard there was a Dune MMORPG in development, but I always thought it could work.
Dune is almost designed for an RPG incarnation, even. I've only read the first two books, but I can think of a dozen character classes you didn't mention (Mentat, Bene Tleilaxu, Sardukar, Guild steersman, whatever it was they called the imperial conditioning Yueh had), all with clearly defined skills and roles. How well they would translate into an MMORPG, I don't know, but the system certainly deserves a more comprehensive single-player RPG than what it got a long time ago.
Also, since it doesn't have an immense fanbase to the point that many of its ideas are common knowledge in society, it only needs to draw in a good number of people who haven't read the series who will pick a class because it sounds cool, not because Muad'dib was one (Although, a character class that adaquately describes him would be one of those serious game-unbalancing things - Fremen, Mentat, Bene Gesserit, prescient oracle, etc).
You're not missing the point. Well, you are, if you ask the people who develop games, and the bulk of the people who buy them, but if you ask me, you've hit all too close to the mark.
If you ask me, all the elements we see in FPS games to this day were present in them by 1995. Duke Nukem 3D and the other BUILD engine games, and Quake 1 pretty much wrote the book on everything in FPS games. Half Life added several important chapters, but I just haven't seen anything good since.
I held hope that Duke Nukem Forever might just get me back to what used to be my favorite genre, but at this point, even if it is the revolution in FPS games as a concept, it's been vaporware for too long to make a splash.
Hexen? I'll admit the game concept was interesting, but after the thrid hour or so stuck in the same area with nothing to kill because I missed some item hidden in a barrel behind a secret door that took me twenty minutes just trying to jump from undersized ledge to undersized ledge along a wall to get to, the novelty wore off.
I like RPGs, and I like FPS games, and I've found some first-person RPGs quite nice, but Hexen is the demon spawn of a very unholy union between genres, if you ask me.
It's a different kind of problem, though. This isn't just about expectations in gameplay and quality that hype builds up - this is expectations in the game design and content that years of reading books, watching movies or TV shows, and following an immense existing body of "knowledge" on how Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe or the Matrix works.
When we first heard about, say, the Elderscrolls games, or everquest, we had no preconcieved notions of how the world behind the games functions, because it's new to us.
With non-MMO games based on licenses, there's a step up. Fans of the previous works already have some knowledge of the game world, but a single player game is easily constrained in ways to make it work.
Now, the step up to a licensed MMO game. First, you can't constrain them, since the game world has to be functional. Second, you have to have a LOT more content in the game, and it still has to fit the existing concept of what the world is like. Star Wars is probably the worst of them, since the book series has set forth a storyline from before Episode I until several decades after Episode VI.
Plus, in these game worlds, the fans have always known them through the eyes of the Great Hero. That works good in a single player game, because it's ok if you have 50,000 players out there all playing as Legolas or Luke Skywalker in that case.
But an MMO game takes place through the eyes of a slightly above-average person for the most part. Who the fuck is this Wookie named Sheyan, and why is he dancing? Everybody wants to be the hero, they all want to be Jedi, but that's not the way MMORPGs work.
There was an old theorem on the distances of planets from the sun. Mercury to Saturn all match their orbits quite closely, and Uranus and Neptune are very close.
Pluto's about a billion miles off, has a highly eccentric comet-like orbit, is composed of the same material as all comets, has a very highly tilted orbit, and is in fact rivaled in size by at least tw other Kuiper objects - and our list of Kuiper comets is still pretty short.
It's a pretty damn big comet, but it exists in a region that we've increasingly found to be home to pretty damn big comets.
The object that struck Earth and helped to form the moon is estimated to have been almost as large as Mars. It's called an asteroid, though, because it didn't occupy one of the planetary orbits. It'd be a fucking huge asteroid, and it would probably set off a panic if one half that size popped in on us today, but it's still an asteroid.
The only exception to the orbital slot rule is the fifth slot, which is occupied by the asteroid belt. There's just too much crap in there to call any of it a planet.
It was proven a hoax, yes, but like you said: Proof doesn't prove anything to most people.
A lot of people still believed the alien autopsy was real, despite the mountains of conclusive counterevidence. Hell, even after Fox admitted they faked it and lied to sell it for $60 a copy, some people STILL believe it.
When the hoaxter admits they lied (can you say moontruth.com, who have been caught in multiple forgeries and forced to admit the truth - but are STILL considered a credible source of information by some), then at least it becomes infinitely easier to tell the believers of the hoax to STFU.
The article says they're glass, but they're probably pretty fine strands. Once they're in the concrete, even if the concrete doesn't stick well, just the friction along the length of the fiber optic strand would probably be more than their tensile strength, so if you tried to pull one out, it would snap.
As for air and water leakage, it's concrete. It's not exactly a great material for keeping water out. Just ask anybody who lives in Micighan or Louisiana and has a basement.
I think it would work in public restrooms. From the pictures, it seems to be translucent, not transparent. The picture of the person standing behind the wall only transmitted a shadow through. They already use a lot of frosted glass in restrooms. This stuff is basically frosted glass that can be load-bearing.
World wide, yes, but in the US, which is by far the Xbox's main market, it's got Nintendo beat. I think the last numbers I saw were 10 million to 5 million, but that's a few months old.
I personally hope they go with the different sized screens like you mentioned.
It'll probably be underused by games, but I can think of one major use for the second screen: Menus in RPGs. The text boxes in most console-style RPGs get in the way, and scrolling through the box for a spell usually blocks the action on-screen (which really sucks for those RPGs where the enemy keeps attacking while you're in the menu.
FF:CC uses the GBA screen for each character's menu in multiplayer, which aside from being a potentially prohibitive barrier to multiplayer, is a very good thing, since with some practice, you can move through the menus while still keeping track of the action on screen.
Other systems have gotten bad reviews and still suceeded in the long run. IIRC, the Xbox got mildly flamed on PA, and there was a lot of negative publicity around it before it came out. But look where it is now: It's beating Nintendo, which is a feat that should never be underestimated in the console market.
(yeah, yeah, I know, replying to myself)
All those non-gaming features could actually do things for games, unlike the stuff they put in the N-Gage for filler. I've never really thought much of multiplayer on gameboy systems, but now that I think of it, it wouldn't be half as bad as it is now if it were wireless.
Of course, this goes against another thing about Nintendo's history: They usually make you buy the add-ons, and if it has wireless, they can't sell you the $15 link cable.
I dunno. It kinda worries me. Sounds like they're shoving too much into it, which is what killed the appeal of the N-Gage for me. I'd just like a nice, small, cheap portable gaming system that I don't have to worry about dropping.
There's just so many non-gaming features included, it sounds fishy to me. Nintendo's historically been about making gaming hardware, not all-in-one, everything-but-sheep-shears media stations.
Most MMORPGs do everything important server-side now. They've learned a hard lesson from cheaters in UO and EQ's early days. I just posted this in another message, but here goes again:
Most MMORPG clients are basically just a rendering engine. You get the data of what goes where from the server, and you send input to the server. The server handles your stats and everything that you would want to hack.
I wrote cheap and dirty stat hacks for several MMORPGs to try and silence cheat acusations. I used one to set up my Dransik character with 250 in all stats (normally max at 100 each, and with only 225 stat points at level 100 (four stats)), and made my weapon do 250000 damage at speed 1 (the time between attacks= speed/5 seconds).
It all showed up properly, but when I actually attacked a balron with my 250,000 damage nonmagic daggar, I didn't make a dent in his 10000 hp. Worse, he hit me once for 900 damage and killed me, despite the fact that I had over 2 million HP.
It was all client-side display information. Hacking an MMORPG is usually like doctoring your checkbook: You may look richer to yourself, but you're bank isn't fooled.
FPS games do most of the work client-side, which is why its so easy to cheat in them (prevent it from detecting a collision between a bullet and a wall, and you can shoot right through them, change the rate that it updates your position, and you can move faster. Change the shot delay onn your weapon, and you can fire a rocket launcher five times a second).
Online casinos, and most MMO games do something else though. What you have on your end is basically just a graphics engine and input. The server takes your input, moves you around, handles projectiles, and then sends back what you're supposed to see, which your client program renders.
You could still wallhack, but that would usually require access to the server, and good luck getting the casino to let you run a few programs on their servers for a few minutes.
The main way to cheat in those kind of games is to macro. Some MMORPGs are suscptible to the same speedhack program people use in CS, which mucks with the computer's clocking instead of the program itself, but for the most part, there's nothing client side to hack.
I played Dransik Classic for a long time, and there were a lot of accusations of people hacking their stats. I wrote a program that could let you modify your stats, level, HP, and even the damage that you deal on attack.
The problem? It was all cosmetic. It may SAY you have 2.5 million HP, but somebody runs by and does 500 damage to you, and suddenly you only have 1500, because your REAL stats are on the server. Also, you can make it look like you're doing 50000 damage with your 15 gp daggar, but go out and hit a 10 HP Triddle, and it still takes two or three hits to kill.
The same thing would apply to an online casino (unless they're REALLY stupid). You may be able to make it look like you get ace-king-queen-jack-ten every hand, but the server knows you've really got nothing, and it's pair of threes beats you.
Well, just nice to see Sony still has a real lead in the industry, not only in sales but also in deciding what other hardware will look like.
This is something I've said before several times: Don't watch Microsoft, don't watch Nintendo. Watch Sony, and you'll see who'll come out on top. Console wars aren't won by superior games or superior hardware, but by the mistakes of the front runner in the last round.
Back before I played video games, I knew a few people who had Intellivisions and C64s and such, but they were all expensive and had all sorts of drawbacks in ease of use. A lot of people I knew wanted them, but they were just too expensive, and parents wouldn't buy them. They were slow in making them easier to use, and they didn't do much to lower the price. That was their screwup, and they got beat because of it.
Atari was cheap (by comparison, at least), and you could use it if you were completely braindead. Not long after it came out, my school had shifted from the previous stance (if you had a gaming system, you were a social elite) to the opposite extreme (if you didn't have an Atari, you were a social outcast - even if you had one of the much more powerful systems). There were other systems at the time, but the Atari was IT. Period.
Atari made a couple systems (two or three, I think. I have two), but really, they were the same old: Games with boxy graphics that look like they were programmed by monkies in their spare time. They didn't really improve the quality, they just kept cranking up the quantity. That was their screwup.
Nintendo beat them with the NES which had (at least by the current standards) infinitely better looking graphics. Mario may have had pixels as big as my fist back then, but still: When we walked, he (*gasp*) looked like he was walking - and he was directionally correct! The control was smoother, games were longer, and it was much more pleasing to the eye.
Sega made better systems than Nintendo: Genesis, Game Gear (except for the horridly short battery life, anyway), Sega CD, 32x... They were capable of much more than their Nintendo counterpart (I can't think of any game on the SNES that had smooth animation and good framerates at the breakneck speeds of Sonic the Hedgehog). But the NES, SNES, and GameBoy won at every turn because Nintendo kept putting them out first, and kept getting the big developers first.
Their mistake was in the early 90's. They wanted to make a SNES CD system to compete with the Sega CD. That was their mistake. After blowing it in parterships with Sony (to make an SNES CD add-on called, ironically, the PlayStation, which never got made) and Phillips (too make a Nintendo cartridge add-on to the Phillips CD-i, which never got made), they get blindsided when Sony brought out the PlayStation as a stand-alone system. I forgot my SNES within a week, and so did Nintendo - a lot of very SNES good games that probably would have been realeased in English weren't. They took too long getting the N64 to market after that, and even though the N64 was a more powerful system, it never had a chance.
Sega *almost* made it with the Dreamcast, but they pulled production and basically handed it off to the PS2.
Right now, Sony hasn't dropped the ball yet. They got the PS2 out early, they even made it backwards-compatible, so PS1 games still in development could be released as planned and not be set back while they're ported to the new hardware, plus sales of PS1 games could continue. Users also got the extra ease of use from not having to swap consoles to play their older games.
Now, it looks (to me anyway) like they're well in the lead for the next release. If they get to market first and don't end up doing something really dumb (like shipping the first 25,000 units without installing the power switch), it could very well be in the bag for Sony.
Microsoft is being tentative, which suggests to me they're not as ready as they want to sound. I've heard nothing substantiativ
The Playstation sales are falling because there's just so many PS2 units out there already, there's not many gamers who want one but don't already have one. Even with those slipping sales, they still outsold the GC and Xbox, and they'll probably have the PS3 on the market long before the Xbox catches up in sales to the PS2.
If the past three systems can be taken as an indication, Nintendo will very well be last to market yet again with their next system, so it'll be PS3 vs. Xbox 2 like it is now. Unless Infinium Labs surprises us all and pulls a console out of their hat sometime in the next year, in which case I'll be too busy eating all the disparaging words I said about the Phantom to play games anyway.
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Existing GBASP, plus two extra buttons (SNES style) on the controller=perfect.
Second screen and wireless multiplayer is one thing, but the IM, email, dayplanner, phone, canopener, nail file, and litter box cleaner they can keep.
I sure hope so, but it's looking doubtful.
The last leaked document had this thing with a lot of non-gaming features, but at least all of them ahd some potential use in gaming - wireless for multiplayer, memory for savegames, etc.
But IM? I know some games have chat in them, but the game handles that itself, so there's only one connection to take care of; plus, that way it cleanly integrates into the game.
Plus, would you really NEED chat on a handheld gaming device? Could you even use it if it were provided? Couldn't you just yell at your friend (or even kick him in the shins to throw his game off far better than any trash talking) on the other side of the room instead of typing up a message while he basically has a few seconds to kill you with impunity?
I don't read them on my PC so much, but I currently have several books, several of which I downloaded from PG, on my PDA. I've always had a horrible time losing books, papers, notes, but I've not once lost an electronic device.
Ashen Empires (formerly known as Dransik)? The game's been around for four years, in beta for three of them, and has The. Whiniest. Community. Ever. Period. They bitch, they moan. When Asylumsoft went bankrupt, they whined that they weren't updated. When TKO bought Asylumsoft and started updating, they whined that they were changing it. When they moved the servers, they whined that lag was increased. When they fixed the lag, they whined that the game was going too fast without the lag. Under a thousand players per day, and they critcize the game (and the developers) more than SWG's 100,000.
JA2!=FPS, turn based or otherwise.
I hadn't heard there was a Dune MMORPG in development, but I always thought it could work.
Dune is almost designed for an RPG incarnation, even. I've only read the first two books, but I can think of a dozen character classes you didn't mention (Mentat, Bene Tleilaxu, Sardukar, Guild steersman, whatever it was they called the imperial conditioning Yueh had), all with clearly defined skills and roles. How well they would translate into an MMORPG, I don't know, but the system certainly deserves a more comprehensive single-player RPG than what it got a long time ago.
Also, since it doesn't have an immense fanbase to the point that many of its ideas are common knowledge in society, it only needs to draw in a good number of people who haven't read the series who will pick a class because it sounds cool, not because Muad'dib was one (Although, a character class that adaquately describes him would be one of those serious game-unbalancing things - Fremen, Mentat, Bene Gesserit, prescient oracle, etc).
You're not missing the point. Well, you are, if you ask the people who develop games, and the bulk of the people who buy them, but if you ask me, you've hit all too close to the mark. If you ask me, all the elements we see in FPS games to this day were present in them by 1995. Duke Nukem 3D and the other BUILD engine games, and Quake 1 pretty much wrote the book on everything in FPS games. Half Life added several important chapters, but I just haven't seen anything good since. I held hope that Duke Nukem Forever might just get me back to what used to be my favorite genre, but at this point, even if it is the revolution in FPS games as a concept, it's been vaporware for too long to make a splash.
Hexen? I'll admit the game concept was interesting, but after the thrid hour or so stuck in the same area with nothing to kill because I missed some item hidden in a barrel behind a secret door that took me twenty minutes just trying to jump from undersized ledge to undersized ledge along a wall to get to, the novelty wore off. I like RPGs, and I like FPS games, and I've found some first-person RPGs quite nice, but Hexen is the demon spawn of a very unholy union between genres, if you ask me.
I think the idea of pre-order is that you've stated intent to purchase the game.
It's a different kind of problem, though. This isn't just about expectations in gameplay and quality that hype builds up - this is expectations in the game design and content that years of reading books, watching movies or TV shows, and following an immense existing body of "knowledge" on how Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe or the Matrix works.
When we first heard about, say, the Elderscrolls games, or everquest, we had no preconcieved notions of how the world behind the games functions, because it's new to us.
With non-MMO games based on licenses, there's a step up. Fans of the previous works already have some knowledge of the game world, but a single player game is easily constrained in ways to make it work.
Now, the step up to a licensed MMO game. First, you can't constrain them, since the game world has to be functional. Second, you have to have a LOT more content in the game, and it still has to fit the existing concept of what the world is like. Star Wars is probably the worst of them, since the book series has set forth a storyline from before Episode I until several decades after Episode VI.
Plus, in these game worlds, the fans have always known them through the eyes of the Great Hero. That works good in a single player game, because it's ok if you have 50,000 players out there all playing as Legolas or Luke Skywalker in that case.
But an MMO game takes place through the eyes of a slightly above-average person for the most part. Who the fuck is this Wookie named Sheyan, and why is he dancing? Everybody wants to be the hero, they all want to be Jedi, but that's not the way MMORPGs work.
There was an old theorem on the distances of planets from the sun. Mercury to Saturn all match their orbits quite closely, and Uranus and Neptune are very close.
Pluto's about a billion miles off, has a highly eccentric comet-like orbit, is composed of the same material as all comets, has a very highly tilted orbit, and is in fact rivaled in size by at least tw other Kuiper objects - and our list of Kuiper comets is still pretty short.
It's a pretty damn big comet, but it exists in a region that we've increasingly found to be home to pretty damn big comets.
The object that struck Earth and helped to form the moon is estimated to have been almost as large as Mars. It's called an asteroid, though, because it didn't occupy one of the planetary orbits. It'd be a fucking huge asteroid, and it would probably set off a panic if one half that size popped in on us today, but it's still an asteroid.
The only exception to the orbital slot rule is the fifth slot, which is occupied by the asteroid belt. There's just too much crap in there to call any of it a planet.
It was proven a hoax, yes, but like you said: Proof doesn't prove anything to most people.
A lot of people still believed the alien autopsy was real, despite the mountains of conclusive counterevidence. Hell, even after Fox admitted they faked it and lied to sell it for $60 a copy, some people STILL believe it.
When the hoaxter admits they lied (can you say moontruth.com, who have been caught in multiple forgeries and forced to admit the truth - but are STILL considered a credible source of information by some), then at least it becomes infinitely easier to tell the believers of the hoax to STFU.
The article says they're glass, but they're probably pretty fine strands. Once they're in the concrete, even if the concrete doesn't stick well, just the friction along the length of the fiber optic strand would probably be more than their tensile strength, so if you tried to pull one out, it would snap. As for air and water leakage, it's concrete. It's not exactly a great material for keeping water out. Just ask anybody who lives in Micighan or Louisiana and has a basement.
I think it would work in public restrooms. From the pictures, it seems to be translucent, not transparent. The picture of the person standing behind the wall only transmitted a shadow through. They already use a lot of frosted glass in restrooms. This stuff is basically frosted glass that can be load-bearing.
I take it you've never heard of automount, eh?
World wide, yes, but in the US, which is by far the Xbox's main market, it's got Nintendo beat. I think the last numbers I saw were 10 million to 5 million, but that's a few months old.
I personally hope they go with the different sized screens like you mentioned. It'll probably be underused by games, but I can think of one major use for the second screen: Menus in RPGs. The text boxes in most console-style RPGs get in the way, and scrolling through the box for a spell usually blocks the action on-screen (which really sucks for those RPGs where the enemy keeps attacking while you're in the menu. FF:CC uses the GBA screen for each character's menu in multiplayer, which aside from being a potentially prohibitive barrier to multiplayer, is a very good thing, since with some practice, you can move through the menus while still keeping track of the action on screen.
Other systems have gotten bad reviews and still suceeded in the long run. IIRC, the Xbox got mildly flamed on PA, and there was a lot of negative publicity around it before it came out. But look where it is now: It's beating Nintendo, which is a feat that should never be underestimated in the console market.
(yeah, yeah, I know, replying to myself) All those non-gaming features could actually do things for games, unlike the stuff they put in the N-Gage for filler. I've never really thought much of multiplayer on gameboy systems, but now that I think of it, it wouldn't be half as bad as it is now if it were wireless. Of course, this goes against another thing about Nintendo's history: They usually make you buy the add-ons, and if it has wireless, they can't sell you the $15 link cable.
I dunno. It kinda worries me. Sounds like they're shoving too much into it, which is what killed the appeal of the N-Gage for me. I'd just like a nice, small, cheap portable gaming system that I don't have to worry about dropping.
There's just so many non-gaming features included, it sounds fishy to me. Nintendo's historically been about making gaming hardware, not all-in-one, everything-but-sheep-shears media stations.
Even under schedule problems, they could release co-op in a patch. Heck, we're all used to patching PC games a dozen times over, for better or worse.
I have an Xbox, but still. I just don't like FPS games on a console controller, and co-op is fun.
Most MMORPGs do everything important server-side now. They've learned a hard lesson from cheaters in UO and EQ's early days. I just posted this in another message, but here goes again: Most MMORPG clients are basically just a rendering engine. You get the data of what goes where from the server, and you send input to the server. The server handles your stats and everything that you would want to hack. I wrote cheap and dirty stat hacks for several MMORPGs to try and silence cheat acusations. I used one to set up my Dransik character with 250 in all stats (normally max at 100 each, and with only 225 stat points at level 100 (four stats)), and made my weapon do 250000 damage at speed 1 (the time between attacks= speed/5 seconds). It all showed up properly, but when I actually attacked a balron with my 250,000 damage nonmagic daggar, I didn't make a dent in his 10000 hp. Worse, he hit me once for 900 damage and killed me, despite the fact that I had over 2 million HP. It was all client-side display information. Hacking an MMORPG is usually like doctoring your checkbook: You may look richer to yourself, but you're bank isn't fooled.
FPS games do most of the work client-side, which is why its so easy to cheat in them (prevent it from detecting a collision between a bullet and a wall, and you can shoot right through them, change the rate that it updates your position, and you can move faster. Change the shot delay onn your weapon, and you can fire a rocket launcher five times a second).
Online casinos, and most MMO games do something else though. What you have on your end is basically just a graphics engine and input. The server takes your input, moves you around, handles projectiles, and then sends back what you're supposed to see, which your client program renders.
You could still wallhack, but that would usually require access to the server, and good luck getting the casino to let you run a few programs on their servers for a few minutes.
The main way to cheat in those kind of games is to macro. Some MMORPGs are suscptible to the same speedhack program people use in CS, which mucks with the computer's clocking instead of the program itself, but for the most part, there's nothing client side to hack.
I played Dransik Classic for a long time, and there were a lot of accusations of people hacking their stats. I wrote a program that could let you modify your stats, level, HP, and even the damage that you deal on attack.
The problem? It was all cosmetic. It may SAY you have 2.5 million HP, but somebody runs by and does 500 damage to you, and suddenly you only have 1500, because your REAL stats are on the server. Also, you can make it look like you're doing 50000 damage with your 15 gp daggar, but go out and hit a 10 HP Triddle, and it still takes two or three hits to kill.
The same thing would apply to an online casino (unless they're REALLY stupid). You may be able to make it look like you get ace-king-queen-jack-ten every hand, but the server knows you've really got nothing, and it's pair of threes beats you.
Well, just nice to see Sony still has a real lead in the industry, not only in sales but also in deciding what other hardware will look like.
This is something I've said before several times: Don't watch Microsoft, don't watch Nintendo. Watch Sony, and you'll see who'll come out on top. Console wars aren't won by superior games or superior hardware, but by the mistakes of the front runner in the last round.
Back before I played video games, I knew a few people who had Intellivisions and C64s and such, but they were all expensive and had all sorts of drawbacks in ease of use. A lot of people I knew wanted them, but they were just too expensive, and parents wouldn't buy them. They were slow in making them easier to use, and they didn't do much to lower the price. That was their screwup, and they got beat because of it.
Atari was cheap (by comparison, at least), and you could use it if you were completely braindead. Not long after it came out, my school had shifted from the previous stance (if you had a gaming system, you were a social elite) to the opposite extreme (if you didn't have an Atari, you were a social outcast - even if you had one of the much more powerful systems). There were other systems at the time, but the Atari was IT. Period.
Atari made a couple systems (two or three, I think. I have two), but really, they were the same old: Games with boxy graphics that look like they were programmed by monkies in their spare time. They didn't really improve the quality, they just kept cranking up the quantity. That was their screwup.
Nintendo beat them with the NES which had (at least by the current standards) infinitely better looking graphics. Mario may have had pixels as big as my fist back then, but still: When we walked, he (*gasp*) looked like he was walking - and he was directionally correct! The control was smoother, games were longer, and it was much more pleasing to the eye.
Sega made better systems than Nintendo: Genesis, Game Gear (except for the horridly short battery life, anyway), Sega CD, 32x... They were capable of much more than their Nintendo counterpart (I can't think of any game on the SNES that had smooth animation and good framerates at the breakneck speeds of Sonic the Hedgehog). But the NES, SNES, and GameBoy won at every turn because Nintendo kept putting them out first, and kept getting the big developers first.
Their mistake was in the early 90's. They wanted to make a SNES CD system to compete with the Sega CD. That was their mistake. After blowing it in parterships with Sony (to make an SNES CD add-on called, ironically, the PlayStation, which never got made) and Phillips (too make a Nintendo cartridge add-on to the Phillips CD-i, which never got made), they get blindsided when Sony brought out the PlayStation as a stand-alone system. I forgot my SNES within a week, and so did Nintendo - a lot of very SNES good games that probably would have been realeased in English weren't. They took too long getting the N64 to market after that, and even though the N64 was a more powerful system, it never had a chance.
Sega *almost* made it with the Dreamcast, but they pulled production and basically handed it off to the PS2.
Right now, Sony hasn't dropped the ball yet. They got the PS2 out early, they even made it backwards-compatible, so PS1 games still in development could be released as planned and not be set back while they're ported to the new hardware, plus sales of PS1 games could continue. Users also got the extra ease of use from not having to swap consoles to play their older games.
Now, it looks (to me anyway) like they're well in the lead for the next release. If they get to market first and don't end up doing something really dumb (like shipping the first 25,000 units without installing the power switch), it could very well be in the bag for Sony.
Microsoft is being tentative, which suggests to me they're not as ready as they want to sound. I've heard nothing substantiativ
The Playstation sales are falling because there's just so many PS2 units out there already, there's not many gamers who want one but don't already have one. Even with those slipping sales, they still outsold the GC and Xbox, and they'll probably have the PS3 on the market long before the Xbox catches up in sales to the PS2. If the past three systems can be taken as an indication, Nintendo will very well be last to market yet again with their next system, so it'll be PS3 vs. Xbox 2 like it is now. Unless Infinium Labs surprises us all and pulls a console out of their hat sometime in the next year, in which case I'll be too busy eating all the disparaging words I said about the Phantom to play games anyway.