The word among developers is the 360 is underwhelming. Unless it's a smash hit many 3rd party studios may over look the 360.
Not your presumably fictional Bioware employee again... please, name several major 3rd party studios that are clearly ignoring the 360. Public statements only (or similar), please.
The max res the 360 even supports is 1080i, and you don't even hear MS talking much about games that'll utilize that - all the talk I've heard has been about 720p, and now we're hearing that even one of those games, from a great developer, won't even really make that res.
All Xbox360 games support 720p and 1080i (I can find you links that confirm this, but I feel lazy so hopefully you can just trust me). Presumably MS is focusing on talking about 720p because it generally looks better. The issue with PGR3 is just that it internally renders the game probably at a slightly lower resolution. It still outputs at 720p/1080i, and I imagine with the per-pixel motion blur it won't be a noticeable shortcut.
And I would find it far more likely that this is an issue of the devs getting their final dev kits more than a month late, rather than any hardware deficiency. They simply haven't had enough time to optimize for the final hardware, which is unfortunate.
It would be interesting to see what framegrabber Bungie used. I'm not really sure how you go about storing 720p content.
It's actually just via an analog capture card of some kind. Because the antialiasing and even apparently the resolution upgrade are done in the videochip's integrated 10 MB of RAM, it seems to be really hard (impossible?) to do a normal frame capture on a dev system. The real game should look significantly better than these screens, obviously. This incidentally is also part of the reason a lot of X360 shots have such poor antialiasing - the shots are actually taken pre-AA.
out of those, only 1 may move the console, and only if it turns out to be exactly what it promises. Basically their all sequel filelr that some people are excited about but most aren't.
PGR1 was the second best-selling launch title for the Xbox1. It was the second game to hit one million units, and its sequel also did tremendously good business. I think it's a pretty safe bet that PGR3 will sell consoles, especially with how amazing the graphics are. That kind of thing is very important for a system seller at launch, and it probably has the most positive hype out of any of the launch titles. Call of Duty 1 was also extremely popular, and the X360 demo for 2 is getting a lot of mostly positive attention. Gears of War isn't a sequel to anything so I am not sure what you are talking about (and it will seriously move systems once it eventually is released - a lot of people are already waiting for that game before they pick up the console). But I'm pretty sure the argument was about graphics anyway, not system selling potential...
I have a friend in Bioware. During this last generation they backed the Xbox because the PS2 was originally a nightmare to code for, and the xbox was the most powerful machine. When they got a dev kit for the 360 they are now considering developing for the PS3 because they are thoruoughly unimpressed witht he 360. His exact words were "like a 6 month video card upgrade on a Xbox".
Assuming you aren't lying (Bioware has already announced they are doing at least two exclusive X360 titles) your friend is apparently a bit of an idiot. He presumably isn't an actual developer at Bioware (janitor, maybe), but it probably should be pointed out that Bioware isn't really known for taking advantage of fancy hardware anyway. Their games have always sold on the strength of their gameplay and stories, never their usually average graphics. If you are seriously being honest please don't trust your friend about this kind of thing anymore. Plenty of big developers who are willing to give their actual names completely disagree with them (ex: Itagaki, Carmack, Cliffy B), and that's ignoring how absurd the comment is when you just think about it (no PC videocard out is up to the X360's GPU standard, it has 8 times the RAM of the Xbox1, three CPU cores that are each individually at least four times faster than the Xbox1 CPU, etc.).
Is there some good reason you are comparing (ingame) screenshots from two entirely different games? I suppose if you have a poor vision it makes sense why you would think Twilight Princess looks like a launch X360 game such as PGR3, Kameo, NBA2k6, Call of Duty 2, etc.
Of course you did trot out the absurd "every good Xbox game is available in a better form on the PC" troll (Ninja Gaiden, DOA3, PGR2, Forza, Halo 2, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Phantom Dust, Amped 2, Otogi series, Crimson Skies, Mechassault series, and literally dozens of other exclusives say otherwise), so the most probable answer is fairly obvious.
It's great you are a Nintendo fanboy and can admit that, but it's a shame Nintendo doesn't release enough games to keep that subculture busy. Their incessant trolling online is extremely annoying. [/flame]
I imagine they were referring to the near-mythical "clueless relative buying a console at launch for a young child" scenario. But if the kid already has Xbox1 titles, they obviously have an Xbox1. If they don't, why would this clueless relative buy them Xbox1 games? That's straining any credulity to the breaking point. It's like complaining "What if they bought the kid PS2 games for their X360?"
Yeah, I read that article earlier... the thing is, the new PS2 hardware (which I presume is being integrated into the PS3) only breaks at most a couple dozen older games.
Eh, not really. Just one of the major exceptions is Tekken 5, a smash hit on PS2 that was just released this year.
The Xbox on the other hand, will only WORK with a couple dozen games, and those will only work if you have the hard drive for storing the emulators/patches that make thos specific games run properly.
Do you have any evidence of those numbers? Do you sincerely think that MS will build an Xbox emulator for X360 and only get it working for a couple dozen games? I won't be surprised if at launch the X360 supports more Xbox games than that.
And that isn't why a hard drive is needed, though it is a perk to store a constantly updated emulator (there is only one emulator, BTW) on. The original Xbox has a hard drive, many games for it tend to make usage of it, and there's no satisfactory way to fake that without a hard drive in the X360.
Yeah like how MS is fully supportive of 2D games, so North America at last got a console release of the superlative Metal Slug 3. They also let indie devs sell 2D (and 3D!) games on Xbox Live Arcade and the X360 comes with a 2D game (Hexic HD) as a pack-in title. But Sony of America is vehemently anti-2D and wouldn't allow MS3's release because of that, and this attitude helped practically destroy the whole 'genre' in the 32-bit era (really all they would let in is the major 2D fighters and 2D bundles). That is a definite sign that "Choice has arguably been dimished somewhat recently as it is" and those bastards at MS are clearly to blame! [/sarcasm]
It's a safe bet that if MS became some kind of console monopoly there would be a limitation of choice. But there is no sign of that happening anytime soon with two major competitors, we saw the same thing happen when Sony and Nintendo were the champs, and Windows is still a much more open platform than any console that has been released. At the very least shouldn't we be willing to reward MS when they do play nicely with others? You know, some kind of positive feedback?
Maybe more importantly the argument doesn't even make sense. How many PC games can output to four different screens for four different players using a single computer? You would pretty much always need four computers, too - and LAN play has been a practically standard feature on Xbox multiplayer games since launch.
Platform games, you mean? Yeah...we're really missing out, not being exposed to those.;-) There are also the endless SF2/MK knockoffs, and crap like BloodRayne. Admittedly a lot of the stuff in the RPG space would be nice to have, but I don't lament the PC's absence of movie/TV tie-ins either, to be honest...although I'm reasonably sure the LOTR games came out on the PC anywayz.
So again, "you can use your pc for gaming, if all your gaming interests are MMORPG, FPS and RTSs". Just because you have very little interest in diverse genres in gaming (along with very little knowledge, apparently) doesn't mean that is true for the rest of the gaming world. Most gamers go where the most new high quality games are, and that hasn't been the PC for a long time.
Anywayz, this is purely a company decision...it doesn't have anything to do with the hardware.
It's obviously a platform issue. Otherwise some company would step in and make a killing in the PC market with game genres that easily sell millions of copies a year on the consoles. Are you honestly suggesting there is some kind of gaming cartel that is choosing not to do this for political reasons?
No, a lot of this is a hardware issue. The vast majority of PC owners don't have gamepads of any kind. Then out of the few that do there is no real standard capabilities, though this is gradually improving. This is the same reason flight sim (and similar) games just don't sell very well on the PC anymore. Personally I saw the utter bombing of Freespace 2 (one of the best games ever made and an excellent sequel to a popular predecessor) as the mark that demonstrated the beginning of the end of genre variety in PC gaming.
There is also the problem of hardware standardization. Far too many PCs are still sold with terrible GPUs. This makes the realistic market for a PC 3D platformer or racing game (another genre that is pretty much dead on the PC when it used to be strong) much smaller than you would think. Especially when you have 20+ million PS2 owners you can sell to...
The Genesis made Sega a lot of money. The 16 bit generation essentially ended with a tie. And though outside of Japan the Saturn did poorly, in Japan it was actually fairly successful (certainly moreso than the N64 was). Sometimes first to market is an advantage, and Sega is the proof of that.
Everytime I've seen Live it looks like nothing more than a glorified chat room that acts as a gaming hub. The single sign-in for all games is a nice features but Sony and Nintendo will have something simiular. Past interviews with Nintendo have mentioned it, and you can be sure Sony is researching it.
Other than that Live is a pretty big let done when compared to what even the PS2's online mode in Japan can do. You can download movies, music, pictures, and short games/demos and watch, listen, view, or play them. I also already interfaces with Sony cameras for viewing pictures so nothing really big there.
You're misunderstanding what Live offers. You know, you could always try it out for a while and see why so many people (including those that were into PC online gaming back in the Doom 1 days, like myself) love it. You're also ignoring the major upgrades MS is adding to Live for X360 - Sony and Nintendo will be competing against the second generation of Live, not what the Xbox1 offered.
The things you mention the PS2 doing in Japan is a big clue that you don't understand the appeal of Live. How does downloading pictures, movies, or music help make the games play better online (especially since you can't use custom soundtracks on the PS2)? And of course Xbox Live has had Live Arcade for more than a year now, where you can download demos and then purchase short games. (And X360 launches with a better version of it, featuring honest to god indie games...)
As for talking to developers I spoke in person with a friend who is currently doing testing for Activision (I won't say his exact position because they are only a handful of them) but he's not a beta tester. His comments where than it doesn't look any better than a high-end PC.
Why would that be damning? All Activision is releasing for the X360 launch is ports from the PC and other consoles. Tony Hawk and Gun on the X360 are a joke visually, Quake IV apparently runs like unoptimized garbage (and is a PC port, obviously), and Call of Duty 2 is just a well tuned PC port (the solid 60 framerate is admittedly nice, but it's not really a looker on the PC, either). They have clearly the least next-gen lineup of any major X360 publisher. Even EA seems to have done a better job with this. You can't judge a console's performance on games that weren't actually written for the hardware. Stuff like PGR3 and Gears of War are clearly superior visually to anything released on the PC.
Only somebody who is completely unfamiliar with Xbox Live could suggest such a thing. Years after its release Xbox Live still offers plenty of features I can't get in PC games (ex: unified ingame friend's list, universal voice chat, and the feedback system). And you're ignoring the point that this is on the consoles, not PCs anyway.
How would that possibly even work? When you run PGR3 or DOA4 or whatever it takes total control of the console. It's not like a PC where you can have something running in the background. The game will monopolize the processor. It's possible this isn't true for Xbox Arcade games, but is there any kind of valuable info even available? And that is assuming MS even allows this info to get back to WildTangent, since it would be running on MS' servers.
Neither sounds particularly approachable. The only thing that would make the Revolution more approachable is ridiculously simple games (like the fly swatting one shown in the video). Otherwise you still have to learn buttons, you still have to remember certain motions, you still have to deal with an onscreen interface, you still have to deal with some kind of 'moving scenery'. The Gamecube controller wasn't particularly intimidating, but that didn't seem to make it any more accessible to traditional nongamers (ie people who don't like games). What really gets nongamers into gaming is the same thing that always has: a gamer they are close to pushing them into it.
I don't know, that doesn't sound like the title of an astroturfing effort to me.
There's definitely probably a little astroturfing going on by MS. But it's also pretty likely that we see a lot of Xbox360 news because there is a lot of Xbox360 news right now. Most gaming forums I visit have a lot of discussion about it because of the inpending launch, so it doesn't seem weird to me that you would have a lot of focus on it on Slashdot. You can only have so many articles about the PS3 and especially Revolution so far, just because there is very little info still available (not that that stops a huge portion of Revolution articles, but is it astroturfing when Nintendo fanboys do it out of religious obligation?).
nVidia probably backed off SoundStorm because of either implicit or obvious threats from Creative.
My understanding is that Creative actually (surprise surprise) owns some of the patents or even software used inside the Soundstorm. In particular they bought Sensaura, which provided the software for the Soundstorm's DSP. Apparently they then jacked up the prices so it didn't make sense for nVidia to continue with it (especially since it unfortunately never took off on the PCs - though obviously it did well on the Xbox).
(Though apparently there are credible rumors now that the PS3 may feature some form of next-gen Soundstorm.)
Yeah, that's true, but there are mitigating factors to consider. First of all, as far as I know, Nintendo hasn't used any actual copy prevention technology (of the sort the DMCA would be concerned about), but instead "merely" relies on proprietary media.
This is categorily untrue. The Gamecube discs are actually just minidvds with a modified file system. Read up on what the various Gamecube modchips have to accomplish to actually make copies of these discs work. Also Nintendo has already mentioned in interviews about the Revolution that they will have to feature heavy security to prevent users running 'downloaded' games they haven't paid for. You might also want to read up on the various copy protection tricks Nintendo has tried over the years, like the famous 10NES.
Nintendo is harmless, because all they care about is making good games (and getting enough profit to continue to do so). Sony and Microsoft want to take over the world.
You have a very bizarre sense of Nintendo and their history.
The New York Times has had its problems, but their reporters are some of the best in the business, and while there is an editorial slant, it isn't extreme.
Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense? We've had so many amazing journalistic failures during the past eight years, even from the Times, that it is really hard to believe that the journalists anywhere are doing their job correctly enough. Especially with the lack of any real public accountability for these mistakes, which is just galling. That's exactly what the grandparent post was referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
Not your presumably fictional Bioware employee again... please, name several major 3rd party studios that are clearly ignoring the 360. Public statements only (or similar), please.
All Xbox360 games support 720p and 1080i (I can find you links that confirm this, but I feel lazy so hopefully you can just trust me). Presumably MS is focusing on talking about 720p because it generally looks better. The issue with PGR3 is just that it internally renders the game probably at a slightly lower resolution. It still outputs at 720p/1080i, and I imagine with the per-pixel motion blur it won't be a noticeable shortcut.
And I would find it far more likely that this is an issue of the devs getting their final dev kits more than a month late, rather than any hardware deficiency. They simply haven't had enough time to optimize for the final hardware, which is unfortunate.
It's actually just via an analog capture card of some kind. Because the antialiasing and even apparently the resolution upgrade are done in the videochip's integrated 10 MB of RAM, it seems to be really hard (impossible?) to do a normal frame capture on a dev system. The real game should look significantly better than these screens, obviously. This incidentally is also part of the reason a lot of X360 shots have such poor antialiasing - the shots are actually taken pre-AA.
PGR1 was the second best-selling launch title for the Xbox1. It was the second game to hit one million units, and its sequel also did tremendously good business. I think it's a pretty safe bet that PGR3 will sell consoles, especially with how amazing the graphics are. That kind of thing is very important for a system seller at launch, and it probably has the most positive hype out of any of the launch titles. Call of Duty 1 was also extremely popular, and the X360 demo for 2 is getting a lot of mostly positive attention. Gears of War isn't a sequel to anything so I am not sure what you are talking about (and it will seriously move systems once it eventually is released - a lot of people are already waiting for that game before they pick up the console). But I'm pretty sure the argument was about graphics anyway, not system selling potential...
Assuming you aren't lying (Bioware has already announced they are doing at least two exclusive X360 titles) your friend is apparently a bit of an idiot. He presumably isn't an actual developer at Bioware (janitor, maybe), but it probably should be pointed out that Bioware isn't really known for taking advantage of fancy hardware anyway. Their games have always sold on the strength of their gameplay and stories, never their usually average graphics. If you are seriously being honest please don't trust your friend about this kind of thing anymore. Plenty of big developers who are willing to give their actual names completely disagree with them (ex: Itagaki, Carmack, Cliffy B), and that's ignoring how absurd the comment is when you just think about it (no PC videocard out is up to the X360's GPU standard, it has 8 times the RAM of the Xbox1, three CPU cores that are each individually at least four times faster than the Xbox1 CPU, etc.).
Of course you did trot out the absurd "every good Xbox game is available in a better form on the PC" troll (Ninja Gaiden, DOA3, PGR2, Forza, Halo 2, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Phantom Dust, Amped 2, Otogi series, Crimson Skies, Mechassault series, and literally dozens of other exclusives say otherwise), so the most probable answer is fairly obvious.
It's great you are a Nintendo fanboy and can admit that, but it's a shame Nintendo doesn't release enough games to keep that subculture busy. Their incessant trolling online is extremely annoying. [/flame]
I imagine they were referring to the near-mythical "clueless relative buying a console at launch for a young child" scenario. But if the kid already has Xbox1 titles, they obviously have an Xbox1. If they don't, why would this clueless relative buy them Xbox1 games? That's straining any credulity to the breaking point. It's like complaining "What if they bought the kid PS2 games for their X360?"
The comment was pretty clear on what "free" meant in the context. Do you a good reason to be critical or are you just trolling?
What games?
He's just referring to the size of the content in a PC context (ie a hard disk). It's been confirmed for a while to work on the core X360 system.
Is your worldview really so twisted that you can't see how people would find throwing terms like "niconazi" around to be flamebait? Grow up.
And that isn't why a hard drive is needed, though it is a perk to store a constantly updated emulator (there is only one emulator, BTW) on. The original Xbox has a hard drive, many games for it tend to make usage of it, and there's no satisfactory way to fake that without a hard drive in the X360.
Yeah like how MS is fully supportive of 2D games, so North America at last got a console release of the superlative Metal Slug 3. They also let indie devs sell 2D (and 3D!) games on Xbox Live Arcade and the X360 comes with a 2D game (Hexic HD) as a pack-in title. But Sony of America is vehemently anti-2D and wouldn't allow MS3's release because of that, and this attitude helped practically destroy the whole 'genre' in the 32-bit era (really all they would let in is the major 2D fighters and 2D bundles). That is a definite sign that "Choice has arguably been dimished somewhat recently as it is" and those bastards at MS are clearly to blame!
[/sarcasm]
It's a safe bet that if MS became some kind of console monopoly there would be a limitation of choice. But there is no sign of that happening anytime soon with two major competitors, we saw the same thing happen when Sony and Nintendo were the champs, and Windows is still a much more open platform than any console that has been released. At the very least shouldn't we be willing to reward MS when they do play nicely with others? You know, some kind of positive feedback?
Maybe more importantly the argument doesn't even make sense. How many PC games can output to four different screens for four different players using a single computer? You would pretty much always need four computers, too - and LAN play has been a practically standard feature on Xbox multiplayer games since launch.
It's obviously a platform issue. Otherwise some company would step in and make a killing in the PC market with game genres that easily sell millions of copies a year on the consoles. Are you honestly suggesting there is some kind of gaming cartel that is choosing not to do this for political reasons?
No, a lot of this is a hardware issue. The vast majority of PC owners don't have gamepads of any kind. Then out of the few that do there is no real standard capabilities, though this is gradually improving. This is the same reason flight sim (and similar) games just don't sell very well on the PC anymore. Personally I saw the utter bombing of Freespace 2 (one of the best games ever made and an excellent sequel to a popular predecessor) as the mark that demonstrated the beginning of the end of genre variety in PC gaming.
There is also the problem of hardware standardization. Far too many PCs are still sold with terrible GPUs. This makes the realistic market for a PC 3D platformer or racing game (another genre that is pretty much dead on the PC when it used to be strong) much smaller than you would think. Especially when you have 20+ million PS2 owners you can sell to...
The Genesis made Sega a lot of money. The 16 bit generation essentially ended with a tie. And though outside of Japan the Saturn did poorly, in Japan it was actually fairly successful (certainly moreso than the N64 was). Sometimes first to market is an advantage, and Sega is the proof of that.
You're misunderstanding what Live offers. You know, you could always try it out for a while and see why so many people (including those that were into PC online gaming back in the Doom 1 days, like myself) love it. You're also ignoring the major upgrades MS is adding to Live for X360 - Sony and Nintendo will be competing against the second generation of Live, not what the Xbox1 offered.
The things you mention the PS2 doing in Japan is a big clue that you don't understand the appeal of Live. How does downloading pictures, movies, or music help make the games play better online (especially since you can't use custom soundtracks on the PS2)? And of course Xbox Live has had Live Arcade for more than a year now, where you can download demos and then purchase short games. (And X360 launches with a better version of it, featuring honest to god indie games...)
Why would that be damning? All Activision is releasing for the X360 launch is ports from the PC and other consoles. Tony Hawk and Gun on the X360 are a joke visually, Quake IV apparently runs like unoptimized garbage (and is a PC port, obviously), and Call of Duty 2 is just a well tuned PC port (the solid 60 framerate is admittedly nice, but it's not really a looker on the PC, either). They have clearly the least next-gen lineup of any major X360 publisher. Even EA seems to have done a better job with this. You can't judge a console's performance on games that weren't actually written for the hardware. Stuff like PGR3 and Gears of War are clearly superior visually to anything released on the PC.
Only somebody who is completely unfamiliar with Xbox Live could suggest such a thing. Years after its release Xbox Live still offers plenty of features I can't get in PC games (ex: unified ingame friend's list, universal voice chat, and the feedback system). And you're ignoring the point that this is on the consoles, not PCs anyway.
How would that possibly even work? When you run PGR3 or DOA4 or whatever it takes total control of the console. It's not like a PC where you can have something running in the background. The game will monopolize the processor. It's possible this isn't true for Xbox Arcade games, but is there any kind of valuable info even available? And that is assuming MS even allows this info to get back to WildTangent, since it would be running on MS' servers.
Neither sounds particularly approachable. The only thing that would make the Revolution more approachable is ridiculously simple games (like the fly swatting one shown in the video). Otherwise you still have to learn buttons, you still have to remember certain motions, you still have to deal with an onscreen interface, you still have to deal with some kind of 'moving scenery'. The Gamecube controller wasn't particularly intimidating, but that didn't seem to make it any more accessible to traditional nongamers (ie people who don't like games). What really gets nongamers into gaming is the same thing that always has: a gamer they are close to pushing them into it.
I don't know, that doesn't sound like the title of an astroturfing effort to me.
There's definitely probably a little astroturfing going on by MS. But it's also pretty likely that we see a lot of Xbox360 news because there is a lot of Xbox360 news right now. Most gaming forums I visit have a lot of discussion about it because of the inpending launch, so it doesn't seem weird to me that you would have a lot of focus on it on Slashdot. You can only have so many articles about the PS3 and especially Revolution so far, just because there is very little info still available (not that that stops a huge portion of Revolution articles, but is it astroturfing when Nintendo fanboys do it out of religious obligation?).
My understanding is that Creative actually (surprise surprise) owns some of the patents or even software used inside the Soundstorm. In particular they bought Sensaura, which provided the software for the Soundstorm's DSP. Apparently they then jacked up the prices so it didn't make sense for nVidia to continue with it (especially since it unfortunately never took off on the PCs - though obviously it did well on the Xbox).
(Though apparently there are credible rumors now that the PS3 may feature some form of next-gen Soundstorm.)
This is categorily untrue. The Gamecube discs are actually just minidvds with a modified file system. Read up on what the various Gamecube modchips have to accomplish to actually make copies of these discs work. Also Nintendo has already mentioned in interviews about the Revolution that they will have to feature heavy security to prevent users running 'downloaded' games they haven't paid for. You might also want to read up on the various copy protection tricks Nintendo has tried over the years, like the famous 10NES.
You have a very bizarre sense of Nintendo and their history.
Maybe it was because the GC controller is easily the least suited for SCII? That is arguably a technology problem, BTW.
Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense? We've had so many amazing journalistic failures during the past eight years, even from the Times, that it is really hard to believe that the journalists anywhere are doing their job correctly enough. Especially with the lack of any real public accountability for these mistakes, which is just galling. That's exactly what the grandparent post was referring to.