It's not a bad idea, but most consoles nowadays have very low latency video RAM with tons of bandwidth going to it (the PS2 especially is like this, and it needs far more of a RAM upgrade than the other systems, which are still putting out games with amazing graphics). You probably couldn't do a video RAM upgrade very well (or cheaply) without having it integrated like they do now.
Sony is taking a huge loss on the PSP (set to be released in the US in March, out in Japan since late November or so). I personally see no reason why they won't do the same for the PS3 (especially if they end up needing to include a hard disk).
(The PS2 was also sold at a very slight initial loss in the US.)
It does compare well, and I think that's actually the problem. It will actually look worse on a TV because a standard television will have to use less resolution. The widescreen image could be a problem, too.
And like others pointed out, Sony doesn't really want to compete with the PS2/PS3.
Ok, apart from your opinion (which is very well thought out, but useless) does any PROOF of bias exist.
I think the real question is whether there is proof of Encarta not being biased. If so, it might just be the most significant achievement in writing ever created by humanity!
If there are points of view, I would expect them to be offset by opposing (and equally biased) opinions.
That works reasonably okay if there are only a couple different points of view on a subject. But how common is that really? Any event or significant object/place/person is going to be the result of unimaginably complex factors (many of them not adequetely translatable into language), and will have a similarly complex effect on everything around it (and this is ignoring the complicated feedback loops that are really at work). No book will ever be able to do more than summarize things like that, and you can't create a summary without a point of view of some kind.
But disregarding all my intellectual masturbation, here's probably what you wanted: an article by Bill Gates that goes out and admits that Encarta is biased (and more importantly, that it's not possible to create a work like Encarta without introducing bias). As Gates puts perfectly, "the facts depend on where you are coming from."
While you're definitely on the mark with regards to games getting horribly delayed for no good reason in the EU, it is getting slightly better. Some notable GBA titles recently have been released in the EU first or almost at the exact same time. The only one that comes to mind is Advance Wars 2, but I know it's not a one-time thing. Also, the EU got a better version of Metroid Prime, with voice feedback warnings, patched bugs, vocal story narration, and a cranked up difficulty level. You can read the GameFAQs FAQ about it here (Open in a new window, 3rd question in Section 4)
It is getting better for Nintendo releases in Europe, and that is great news. Still, it doesn't really change the years of terrible treatment just yet, does it?
(Your link didn't work, but I did find it myself.) That is good news for EU users. Sometimes Europe does get lucky with that kind of stuff (I know it got some cool bonus levels in ZOE2, for example), but it is still pretty debatable whether getting the game when the rest of the world gets it might be better - especially since downloadable game upgrades are getting more common. Looks like it will eventually shift to unified releases anyway, since it really cuts down on people downloading the games I would imagine...
And to correct you a bit - the reason Animal Crossing didn't come to the EU wasn't a matter of the usual silly reasons games don't make it to the EU - Nintendo really didn't want to localize the game for the EU market. It took long enough to convert all the text in the game to English - converting it to Spanish, French, and German, *and* accounting for holidays/events that don't exist in some of the destination countries (Thanksgiving? 4th Of July?) would have made it a huge pain.
It was equally ridiculous to expect an Australian release for that game.
It's not like Japan and the US have the same holidays, either. EU is a huge videogame market (bigger than Japan). I can understand Nintendo wanting to be lazy, but worse case scenario they could have just included some pages in the manual explaining American holidays. They don't play that huge of a role in the game after all.
Yeah, looks like it was finally released - more than two years after its US release, and almost three years past the original Japanese Gamecube release. (This is all ignoring that the game is essentially a port of an older N64 game, incidentally.) Still, its lack of even an announced release date in Europe was a perennial complaint for quite some time. Non-Europeans like myself can probably be forgiven for not realizing that Nintendo did finally release the PAL version of a 2001/2002 game a few months ago.:)
I didn't like Alpha Centauri because I disagree with most of the ideology that the game is based on. I don't personally believe in the Gaia hypothesis (i.e. the planet itself is alive) or that the ultimate goal of humanity is to leave our bodies and become one with some machine, and that the only way to keep order is through blatant mind control of "drones". It had an elitist feel about it that really left a bad taste in my mouth.
It sounds like you got a little confused with the game's "ideology". Let me explain.
First of all, Alpha Centauri is not Earth/Sol. The planet isn't alive because of some application of the Gaia hypothesis (which I am not sure you actually understand, no offense), it's alive because there is a living fungal neural network covering the surface, under the seas, and buried within the crust (and there is more than a suggestion that the fungus was engineered by aliens for this purpose at least half a billion years ago). It's not an application of the Gaia hypothesis, it's a living alien creature of vast power...
The transcendence goal is merely one possible win situation - there are at least five of them. Plenty of them have no man-machine component whatsoever. One of them is to seize control over the world economy, for example, or to be elected head of all other factions. And it is important to note that even after transcendence, people are given the choice to keep their bodies and remain how they are. Nobody transcends because they are forced to - how could that possibly work?
The game itself is a little unclear over what drones are - they are basically just unhappy people and function as that ingame, but there are definitely techologies that create stuff like genejack drones that are slaves (usage of this tech is completely optional of course, and gives harsh penalties). But if you don't like drones, just don't let any of your people become unhappy (which is hardly impossible).
Even more important than all of the little details is the game's stance on all of this "ideology". The Alpha Centauri game itself is entirely a struggle over just what kind of ideology is most correct for humanity in the future. The game and its developers don't know the answers, and they completely realized that. Certain leaders you can play are utterly opposed to the trascendence goal, the planet being treated fairly because of its intelligence, or the usage of drones. There is an ambivalence about nearly every "advancement" the game features. All ideologies in the game have disadvantages of some kind. The game simply doesn't preach or force on the player some kind of ideology - it gives you choices to create the future how you believe it should be. The game is about exploring different future societies and how they would interact with each other.
It also just happens to be the best turn-based computer strategy game in existence. Nothing else beats its gameplay.
I actually have a slight problem with most 4X games and their (unspoken) ideology, and that's because they all seem to subscribe to the basic Taker mythology (essentially, the world is made for man alone). Alpha Centauri is more agreeable than most, though, because it is isn't about Earth, man needs to expand at least a little just to survive as a species, and the game does allow you to succeed without conquering the whole biosphere.
PS3 and Xbox2 developer kits are said to have already been shipped to some developers. Can you tell me what the final hardware setup is?/sarcasm
How the hell do you think launch games are made for consoles? Do developers make them in the 6-18 months time after a company announces the final hardware? Of course developers start working on their games on beta, unfinalized versions of hardware.
And of course the last few months of development are spent on real hardware, exactly like I stated. None of which really applies anyway to the DS or PSP, since both of them have been available to buy for at least a month!
As far as I know, the GC is doing better world wide then the xbox,
doing almost the same as the xbox in North America and is both makign money and havign a steady stream of hits.
(emphasis added)
Obviously I was responding to that part of this post.
USA is not the world. Nintendo is doing fine everywhere else.
And speaking of "USA is not the world", neither is Japan (where the GC is doing alright, though still being trounced by the PS2). What about Canada, Australia, or most of Europe, where the Xbox is all easily outselling the Cube as well?
I don't want to have to defend EA here, but do we really know if they're worse than the rest of the industry?
Yes, they are.
Sure, sometimes a small studio might fall into similar work habits and patterns, especially if they are spiraling into debt or massively behind schedule. But it's not some kind of mistake that EA is evil towards its lowly developers - it is completely intentional and institutionalized, and it is done on a truly massive scale that very few other companies could match. EA is hugely profitable, and they force this developmental death march not to make up for lost time (they apparently start it right when the game begins development!), but because they think it make's the games get done faster (it might, but the quality obviously suffers, and the developers suffer horribly for it). They don't pay that well either, so there isn't any reasonable monetary compensation for having your health destroyed.
Evidence is all over the place. It wasn't just the wife's blog - there are a lot of people (many of them giving their actual names) corroborating that the information was correct.
Of course the hardware is nailed down already. Both systems have been released to the public!
And yeah, they do have the final hardware ready months before launch. Otherwise developers can't make sure their games actually work on the real systems. Maybe even more importantly, they kind of need to start manufacturing the things!
Actually, it's Nintendo that hates the English (and the rest of Europe to boot). They are infamous for their poor PAL conversions, late release dates (waiting more than six months for a huge game like Metroid Prime is not unusual), ridiculously high prices, just not bothering to release certain big games (Animal Crossing for example), and even (recent) masssive price fixing that has pissed off multiple governments. It's no wonder Europeans favor non-Nintendo companies like Sony and MS! (Which both incidentally also work with a far higher amount of European developers, too. Much of the PS1's huge success was due to European games like Wipeout, and Xbox has had large success with games like PGR2 and Rallisport Challenge.)
A flamebait mod certainly wasn't fair. More like overrated, since he apparently can't keep up with the whole last year or more of console sales in the USA if he thinks the Cube is doing almost as good as the Xbox...
I guess I just can't think of any Nintendo platformers this generation that are worth anything (and this is coming from a huge Super Mario 64 fan). Beyond Super Mario Sunshine, what other true platformers have they even released? (That new Donkey Kong one does look very, very cool though.) Rare made most of the popular platformers for the N64, and the impact of their loss seems pretty obvious - Nintendo just can't make enough games fast enough.
I like the Ratchet & Clank series (especially the sequels, since they are a lot better), but they certainly aren't must-play platforming games (such as Rayman 2 or Super Mario 64 are). The first one starts a little slow, but as it goes on it gets pretty addictive. The fact you don't do that much collecting is great. I love the variety of worlds you visit, along with their art styles.
Sly Cooper (at least the first one, which is the only one I have played) is a great, massively fun game. One of the most polished platformers around, with a great sense of humor to boot. If you like platformers at all, make sure you at least rent it sometime.
A lot of people seem to really dig the Jak & Dexter series, too, but I admit the character designs are almost as big a turn-off for me as Mario is...
Though the bongos are similar to Samba de Amigo, it's really more of a clone of Namco's insanely successful taiko drum arcade games (that were also ported to the PS2). That's why Nintendo had Namco make the game, too.
Metroid wasn't a clone of Castlevania, it is the other way around. The first Castlevania (coming out roughly the same time as Metroid back in 1986) was a side-scrolling action game, vaguely similar to something like Contra. And all of the early Metroid games were developed by Nintendo's R&D1 group - hardly a small indie company! (Gunpei Yokoi was the primary creator of the series - he also created the D-pad and the original Gameboy, among lots of other things.)
Pretty sure that Nintendo created Wario, too. He is just a twisted Mario clone, so I don't see how other companies could have created him... and his first appearance was in Super Mario Land 2. Unless you have some interesting evidence for this claim, you are completely wrong here...
Nintendo has also created Kirby (done by HAL Laboratories, a Nintendo sub-group), Fire Emblem, Star Fox (with the assistence of Argonaut), the Wars series (starting back with Famicom Wars by Intelligent Systems, also a Nintendo sub-group), and probably plenty of other stuff I am forgetting (Kid Icarus by Gunpei, Battleclash series by Intelligent Systems, etc.).
I don't disagree that Nintendo's tendency to "innovate" is massively overrated by its fanboy community, but let's at least criticize them for the right things (like recycling the same insipid and vaguely racist character designs for decades just because they have built-in marketing appeal, as an obvious example).
Analog sticks were more of a Sega thing actually. Mario64 was initially prototyped using the Saturn analog gamepad! IIRC there was also a console back in the 80s that had analog controllers, but the name escapes me (it was obscure, and the analog tech was different than modern console usage). And of course this is all ignoring that analog controls have been in arcades for decades...
Touchscreen in a portable isn't new either. Ignoring all of the PDAs that have featured it for years (including their games), the dedicated gaming handheld Game.com had a touchscreen.
64DD was just a fancy disk drive that no one purchased (in fact, you could only get it by renting it essentially!). Hell, Nintendo had a disk drive back for the original Famicom/NES! (The Legend of Zelda was originally released only for that peripheral, actually.)
Rumble packs were probably a Nintendo innovation (though it was kind of obvious, being basic arcade technology again). But nobody actually uses that specific technology anymore really (I guess some GBA games do maybe)...
Not sure if they had the first console with 4 controller ports. Most earlier systems at least had add-on hardware that allowed the same (or better). But they certainly popularized it!
All that said, innovation is overrated in comparison to taking an existing idea and making it work really well. Nintendo has done plenty of that...
Really the PS2 is the platformer console of choice this generation. Sly Cooper series, Ratchet & Clank series, all of the multiplatform platformers... pretty much every non-Nintendo platformer is on it.
The Xbox actually has some great exclusive platformers on it, too. Voodoo Vince, the upcoming Conker, etc. Nothing to compare with the PS2's library, but not to be overlooked...
Money. Everything costs more in Japan, hardware, software, accessories.
That doesn't change the fact that videogames (including consoles) still make several billion dollars more in the US every year. Japanese game sales peaked at an impressive $7 billion back in 1997, but have declined heavily and consistently since then ($4.1 billion back in 2003). Japan hasn't been #1 in videogame sales for at least four years now (essentially this whole console generation) - so what were you saying about "cultural blindness" again?
The "valid grounds" part is just how low quality 'reality television' is. For every half-decent or entertaining 'reality show' (ex: I thought Surreal Life Season 2 was kind of entertaining, especially because of how unbelievably positive and life-affirming it all was) you have just piles and piles of crap (Survivor, American Idol, Amazing Race, Apprentice, Real World, Big Brother...). The crap ratio goes way beyond Sturgeon's Law.
Ratchet & Clank 1's levels had about 500k polygons total in each (reference found here, free login required). Assuming you see about a third of those polygons at all times (which is ridiculously over-the-top, especially since the game used an advanced Level of Detail system), and that maybe enemies double that polygon number (again, no way is that a realistic number), you still only get around 15 million polygons a second. Impressive, but a far cry from what Sony promised! (And more realistically, it is probably closer to half of that.)
I don't think things were particularly bumped up for the sequels, either. If anything, the LoD system was probably optimized further than anything else, decreasing polycounts. There is only so much optimization you can do in one year of development!
I think the Ratchet & Clank games do look great, don't misunderstand me here... But Sony lied about the PS2 hardware's capabilities, big-time.
The "interact realistically" part is the problem. That kind of AI would be hard even if you had hardware 10 times the power of the PS2. They really were pushing the PS2 as being capable of film-quality visuals, too. None of this is really possible yet, especially with a nonlinear storyline.
(I don't disagree with you about what videogame storylines need more of - it just isn't easy, and that still wouldn't put us where Sony promised.)
Actually the N64 was the most famous console that passed off prerendered CG as ingame graphics. The unreleased Robotech: Crystal Dreams is a great example of this widespread practice. You can find some early screenshots here. Some of those 'gameplay shots' are pretty nice looking, even by current game standards! What the game actually looked like can be seen here. It's especially funny because these graphics might have been possible on the PSX or Saturn as prerendered movies - the cartridges of the N64 really didn't allow that though. You simply couldn't possibly get that kind of graphics out of the N64.
(Nintendo even released two arcade games before the console launch, supposedly using the actual "Ultra 64" hardware. The real N64 was never able to even get close to the graphics they featured...)
The Amped1 screenshots at least approximated what the final game looked like. You had real environments, textures, etc. Just some fake concept art models and lensflares were added. The real game actually ended up looking better... (And Amped2 just destroyed both the concept art and Amped1!)
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It's not a bad idea, but most consoles nowadays have very low latency video RAM with tons of bandwidth going to it (the PS2 especially is like this, and it needs far more of a RAM upgrade than the other systems, which are still putting out games with amazing graphics). You probably couldn't do a video RAM upgrade very well (or cheaply) without having it integrated like they do now.
Sony is taking a huge loss on the PSP (set to be released in the US in March, out in Japan since late November or so). I personally see no reason why they won't do the same for the PS3 (especially if they end up needing to include a hard disk).
(The PS2 was also sold at a very slight initial loss in the US.)
especially when Apple dominates the Japanese computer market
Seriously? When did this happen?
And turning them into harder criminals (which is what prison does in that case) would just be a punishment to the public. That was the point.
It does compare well, and I think that's actually the problem. It will actually look worse on a TV because a standard television will have to use less resolution. The widescreen image could be a problem, too.
And like others pointed out, Sony doesn't really want to compete with the PS2/PS3.
But disregarding all my intellectual masturbation, here's probably what you wanted: an article by Bill Gates that goes out and admits that Encarta is biased (and more importantly, that it's not possible to create a work like Encarta without introducing bias). As Gates puts perfectly, "the facts depend on where you are coming from."
(Your link didn't work, but I did find it myself.) That is good news for EU users. Sometimes Europe does get lucky with that kind of stuff (I know it got some cool bonus levels in ZOE2, for example), but it is still pretty debatable whether getting the game when the rest of the world gets it might be better - especially since downloadable game upgrades are getting more common. Looks like it will eventually shift to unified releases anyway, since it really cuts down on people downloading the games I would imagine...
It's not like Japan and the US have the same holidays, either. EU is a huge videogame market (bigger than Japan). I can understand Nintendo wanting to be lazy, but worse case scenario they could have just included some pages in the manual explaining American holidays. They don't play that huge of a role in the game after all.
Yeah, looks like it was finally released - more than two years after its US release, and almost three years past the original Japanese Gamecube release. (This is all ignoring that the game is essentially a port of an older N64 game, incidentally.) Still, its lack of even an announced release date in Europe was a perennial complaint for quite some time. Non-Europeans like myself can probably be forgiven for not realizing that Nintendo did finally release the PAL version of a 2001/2002 game a few months ago. :)
First of all, Alpha Centauri is not Earth/Sol. The planet isn't alive because of some application of the Gaia hypothesis (which I am not sure you actually understand, no offense), it's alive because there is a living fungal neural network covering the surface, under the seas, and buried within the crust (and there is more than a suggestion that the fungus was engineered by aliens for this purpose at least half a billion years ago). It's not an application of the Gaia hypothesis, it's a living alien creature of vast power...
The transcendence goal is merely one possible win situation - there are at least five of them. Plenty of them have no man-machine component whatsoever. One of them is to seize control over the world economy, for example, or to be elected head of all other factions. And it is important to note that even after transcendence, people are given the choice to keep their bodies and remain how they are. Nobody transcends because they are forced to - how could that possibly work?
The game itself is a little unclear over what drones are - they are basically just unhappy people and function as that ingame, but there are definitely techologies that create stuff like genejack drones that are slaves (usage of this tech is completely optional of course, and gives harsh penalties). But if you don't like drones, just don't let any of your people become unhappy (which is hardly impossible).
Even more important than all of the little details is the game's stance on all of this "ideology". The Alpha Centauri game itself is entirely a struggle over just what kind of ideology is most correct for humanity in the future. The game and its developers don't know the answers, and they completely realized that. Certain leaders you can play are utterly opposed to the trascendence goal, the planet being treated fairly because of its intelligence, or the usage of drones. There is an ambivalence about nearly every "advancement" the game features. All ideologies in the game have disadvantages of some kind. The game simply doesn't preach or force on the player some kind of ideology - it gives you choices to create the future how you believe it should be. The game is about exploring different future societies and how they would interact with each other.
It also just happens to be the best turn-based computer strategy game in existence. Nothing else beats its gameplay.
I actually have a slight problem with most 4X games and their (unspoken) ideology, and that's because they all seem to subscribe to the basic Taker mythology (essentially, the world is made for man alone). Alpha Centauri is more agreeable than most, though, because it is isn't about Earth, man needs to expand at least a little just to survive as a species, and the game does allow you to succeed without conquering the whole biosphere.
Obviously I was responding to that part of this post.
And speaking of "USA is not the world", neither is Japan (where the GC is doing alright, though still being trounced by the PS2). What about Canada, Australia, or most of Europe, where the Xbox is all easily outselling the Cube as well?
I don't want to have to defend EA here, but do we really know if they're worse than the rest of the industry?
Yes, they are.
Sure, sometimes a small studio might fall into similar work habits and patterns, especially if they are spiraling into debt or massively behind schedule. But it's not some kind of mistake that EA is evil towards its lowly developers - it is completely intentional and institutionalized, and it is done on a truly massive scale that very few other companies could match. EA is hugely profitable, and they force this developmental death march not to make up for lost time (they apparently start it right when the game begins development!), but because they think it make's the games get done faster (it might, but the quality obviously suffers, and the developers suffer horribly for it). They don't pay that well either, so there isn't any reasonable monetary compensation for having your health destroyed.
Evidence is all over the place. It wasn't just the wife's blog - there are a lot of people (many of them giving their actual names) corroborating that the information was correct.
Of course the hardware is nailed down already. Both systems have been released to the public!
And yeah, they do have the final hardware ready months before launch. Otherwise developers can't make sure their games actually work on the real systems. Maybe even more importantly, they kind of need to start manufacturing the things!
Actually, it's Nintendo that hates the English (and the rest of Europe to boot). They are infamous for their poor PAL conversions, late release dates (waiting more than six months for a huge game like Metroid Prime is not unusual), ridiculously high prices, just not bothering to release certain big games (Animal Crossing for example), and even (recent) masssive price fixing that has pissed off multiple governments. It's no wonder Europeans favor non-Nintendo companies like Sony and MS! (Which both incidentally also work with a far higher amount of European developers, too. Much of the PS1's huge success was due to European games like Wipeout, and Xbox has had large success with games like PGR2 and Rallisport Challenge.)
A flamebait mod certainly wasn't fair. More like overrated, since he apparently can't keep up with the whole last year or more of console sales in the USA if he thinks the Cube is doing almost as good as the Xbox...
I guess I just can't think of any Nintendo platformers this generation that are worth anything (and this is coming from a huge Super Mario 64 fan). Beyond Super Mario Sunshine, what other true platformers have they even released? (That new Donkey Kong one does look very, very cool though.) Rare made most of the popular platformers for the N64, and the impact of their loss seems pretty obvious - Nintendo just can't make enough games fast enough.
I like the Ratchet & Clank series (especially the sequels, since they are a lot better), but they certainly aren't must-play platforming games (such as Rayman 2 or Super Mario 64 are). The first one starts a little slow, but as it goes on it gets pretty addictive. The fact you don't do that much collecting is great. I love the variety of worlds you visit, along with their art styles.
Sly Cooper (at least the first one, which is the only one I have played) is a great, massively fun game. One of the most polished platformers around, with a great sense of humor to boot. If you like platformers at all, make sure you at least rent it sometime.
A lot of people seem to really dig the Jak & Dexter series, too, but I admit the character designs are almost as big a turn-off for me as Mario is...
Though the bongos are similar to Samba de Amigo, it's really more of a clone of Namco's insanely successful taiko drum arcade games (that were also ported to the PS2). That's why Nintendo had Namco make the game, too.
Metroid wasn't a clone of Castlevania, it is the other way around. The first Castlevania (coming out roughly the same time as Metroid back in 1986) was a side-scrolling action game, vaguely similar to something like Contra. And all of the early Metroid games were developed by Nintendo's R&D1 group - hardly a small indie company! (Gunpei Yokoi was the primary creator of the series - he also created the D-pad and the original Gameboy, among lots of other things.)
Pretty sure that Nintendo created Wario, too. He is just a twisted Mario clone, so I don't see how other companies could have created him... and his first appearance was in Super Mario Land 2. Unless you have some interesting evidence for this claim, you are completely wrong here...
Nintendo has also created Kirby (done by HAL Laboratories, a Nintendo sub-group), Fire Emblem, Star Fox (with the assistence of Argonaut), the Wars series (starting back with Famicom Wars by Intelligent Systems, also a Nintendo sub-group), and probably plenty of other stuff I am forgetting (Kid Icarus by Gunpei, Battleclash series by Intelligent Systems, etc.).
I don't disagree that Nintendo's tendency to "innovate" is massively overrated by its fanboy community, but let's at least criticize them for the right things (like recycling the same insipid and vaguely racist character designs for decades just because they have built-in marketing appeal, as an obvious example).
Analog sticks were more of a Sega thing actually. Mario64 was initially prototyped using the Saturn analog gamepad! IIRC there was also a console back in the 80s that had analog controllers, but the name escapes me (it was obscure, and the analog tech was different than modern console usage). And of course this is all ignoring that analog controls have been in arcades for decades...
Touchscreen in a portable isn't new either. Ignoring all of the PDAs that have featured it for years (including their games), the dedicated gaming handheld Game.com had a touchscreen.
64DD was just a fancy disk drive that no one purchased (in fact, you could only get it by renting it essentially!). Hell, Nintendo had a disk drive back for the original Famicom/NES! (The Legend of Zelda was originally released only for that peripheral, actually.)
Rumble packs were probably a Nintendo innovation (though it was kind of obvious, being basic arcade technology again). But nobody actually uses that specific technology anymore really (I guess some GBA games do maybe)...
Not sure if they had the first console with 4 controller ports. Most earlier systems at least had add-on hardware that allowed the same (or better). But they certainly popularized it!
All that said, innovation is overrated in comparison to taking an existing idea and making it work really well. Nintendo has done plenty of that...
Really the PS2 is the platformer console of choice this generation. Sly Cooper series, Ratchet & Clank series, all of the multiplatform platformers... pretty much every non-Nintendo platformer is on it.
The Xbox actually has some great exclusive platformers on it, too. Voodoo Vince, the upcoming Conker, etc. Nothing to compare with the PS2's library, but not to be overlooked...
That doesn't change the fact that videogames (including consoles) still make several billion dollars more in the US every year. Japanese game sales peaked at an impressive $7 billion back in 1997, but have declined heavily and consistently since then ($4.1 billion back in 2003). Japan hasn't been #1 in videogame sales for at least four years now (essentially this whole console generation) - so what were you saying about "cultural blindness" again?
The "valid grounds" part is just how low quality 'reality television' is. For every half-decent or entertaining 'reality show' (ex: I thought Surreal Life Season 2 was kind of entertaining, especially because of how unbelievably positive and life-affirming it all was) you have just piles and piles of crap (Survivor, American Idol, Amazing Race, Apprentice, Real World, Big Brother...). The crap ratio goes way beyond Sturgeon's Law.
Ratchet & Clank 1's levels had about 500k polygons total in each (reference found here, free login required). Assuming you see about a third of those polygons at all times (which is ridiculously over-the-top, especially since the game used an advanced Level of Detail system), and that maybe enemies double that polygon number (again, no way is that a realistic number), you still only get around 15 million polygons a second. Impressive, but a far cry from what Sony promised! (And more realistically, it is probably closer to half of that.)
I don't think things were particularly bumped up for the sequels, either. If anything, the LoD system was probably optimized further than anything else, decreasing polycounts. There is only so much optimization you can do in one year of development!
I think the Ratchet & Clank games do look great, don't misunderstand me here... But Sony lied about the PS2 hardware's capabilities, big-time.
The "interact realistically" part is the problem. That kind of AI would be hard even if you had hardware 10 times the power of the PS2. They really were pushing the PS2 as being capable of film-quality visuals, too. None of this is really possible yet, especially with a nonlinear storyline.
(I don't disagree with you about what videogame storylines need more of - it just isn't easy, and that still wouldn't put us where Sony promised.)
Actually the N64 was the most famous console that passed off prerendered CG as ingame graphics. The unreleased Robotech: Crystal Dreams is a great example of this widespread practice. You can find some early screenshots here. Some of those 'gameplay shots' are pretty nice looking, even by current game standards! What the game actually looked like can be seen here. It's especially funny because these graphics might have been possible on the PSX or Saturn as prerendered movies - the cartridges of the N64 really didn't allow that though. You simply couldn't possibly get that kind of graphics out of the N64.
(Nintendo even released two arcade games before the console launch, supposedly using the actual "Ultra 64" hardware. The real N64 was never able to even get close to the graphics they featured...)
The Amped1 screenshots at least approximated what the final game looked like. You had real environments, textures, etc. Just some fake concept art models and lensflares were added. The real game actually ended up looking better... (And Amped2 just destroyed both the concept art and Amped1!)
You have a very...individualistic perspective on gaming quality there. I take it you only like a few different gaming genres?
(And how soon we forget the PS2 launch!)